The SmartLife System Explained — Innovative Design, Revolutionary Achievement
The SmartLife System is a revolutionary self-help system created by family therapist Abe Kass. It includes written, audio, and visual material.
You should spend about 8 minutes daily focused on the topic you are currently learning. If you feel particularly inspired on any given day, you can certainly learn beyond your daily eight minutes.
Learning for about 8 minutes daily is based on the most recent discoveries and how to be an effective learner. The strategy is known as Spaced Learning.
Relationships are difficult, and this is normal
Everyone’s life has ongoing challenges, especially when it comes to intimate relationships. When you respond in a functional and intelligent way, you increase the likelihood of building a healthy, happy, and long-lasting marriage or committed relationship. When you respond to relationship problems in a clumsy or wrong way, you create stress, unhappiness, and conflict, and for many people, this all ends in divorce. And when the family has children, it will be an ongoing hardship, emotional injuries, and countless challenges for many years.
There are solutions to relationship problems
You don’t need money, privilege, or fame to be in a happy relationship. What you do need is an effective and accessible way to respond to relationship challenges. For less money than the cost of a daily cup of coffee (many lessons are free) and in less time than it takes to drink it, you can give yourself a “smart relationship life.”
The ‘perfect life’ is not possible. But when you respond to life’s challenges effectively, you immeasurably reduce stress, unhappiness, and relationship breakdown. When you know how you can have a satisfying and long-lasting relationship.
The Traditional Self-help Market
The traditional self-help industry has not provided users the means to achieve their goals easily and quickly.
Self-help products are more often than not made by self-proclaimed gurus, successful business people, get-rich-quick schemers, motivational speakers, dog trainers, and professional wannabees.
Personal change products are safe only when designed by a certified, ethically accountable, and professionally trained clinician. SmartLife System is here to fill this need.
What GoSmartLife Publishers Has Achieved!
A new system for self-improvement was needed. The SmartLife System was born to fill this need. Guided from its infancy to its fulfillment by seasoned family therapist Abe Kass, MA RSW RMFT.
Over the past forty years, there has been a significant advancement in psychotherapy and education (based on the seminal work of Milton H. Erickson and the discovery that “Spaced Learning” is superior to “massed learning.”) Yet the majority of self-help producers have ignored these recent discoveries.
A self-help approach that utilizes this latest research was needed. Thanks to GoSmartLife Publishers, this has been achieved using the latest advancements in psychological and educational technology.
The Seven Learning Technologies in Each SmartLife System Lesson and Course*
1. 8-minutes-a-day lessons
Our written books are easy to read without psychobabble or complex theories. Thus, it is easy to stop and start in comfortable increments. As well, our books use simple analogies and stories to engage your imagination and emotional mind. It is easy to focus on each topic for about eight minutes daily. Our audio programs have built-in eight-minute lessons.
Traditional learning has been based on the assumption that the longer a person learns, the more information he or she remembers. However, research on how memory works has shown that short lessons, known as “Spaced Learning,” are more efficient and effective.
Educators at Arizona State University, supported by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, have determined that eight-minute learning modules are the optimal time for maximizing information retention.
Benefiting from this latest research, SmartLife System is designed to use 8-minute-a-day learning modules that make learning life skills quick, easy, and effective.
Traditional learning is based on the intense cramming of information. Science has proven that this leads to forgetting. Research into how our memory works has demonstrated the best way to learn is with short lessons spaced out over time.
Research and publications:
More than 100 years of distributed practice research have demonstrated that learning is powerfully affected by the temporal distribution of study time. More specifically, spaced (vs. massed) learning of items consistently shows benefits, regardless of retention interval, and learning benefits increase with increased time lags between learning presentations. Distributing learning across different days (instead of grouping learning episodes within a single day) greatly improves the amount of material retained for sizable periods of time; the literature suggests that distributing practice in this way is likely to markedly improve students’ retention of course material. (1)
The idea (space learning) is based on scientific breakthroughs that suggest a gene in the brain, the Creb (corr) gene, can be developed with short lessons followed by periods of brain inactivity. (2)
People have only about an eight-minute attention span. We know that after eight minutes, minds wander. Yet we’ve continued lecturing to glassy-eyed students simply because that’s the way we were taught. (3)
The North Tyneside school is thought to be the first to adopt the pioneering method called space learning, based on research published in the U. S. two years ago. Headteacher Dr. Paul Kelly said half a year’s worth of lessons is condensed into eight minutes, giving pupils a sweeping overview of the subject. (4)
…behavior is changed, and performance improvement begins, usually in just eight minutes. (5)
Pulling this all together [referring to their teaching model] . . . you get a significant, observable performance improvement in about 4-8 minutes. (6)
SmartLife System courses, both written and audio, utilize these scientific breakthroughs. Now, you can maximize your happiness and personal success by learning one eight-minute daily lesson.
Additional information and sources:
1. Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis. By Nicholas J. Cepeda, University of California, San Diego, and University of Colorado at Boulder, Harold Pashler, Edward Vul, and John T. Wixted, University of California, San Diego, and Doug Rohrer, University of South Florida. Psychological Bulletin, 2006, Vol. 132. No. 3, 334-380. The American Psychological Association. Comment: The authors performed a meta-analysis of the distributed practice effect to illuminate the effects of temporal variables neglected in previous reviews. This review found 839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments located in 184 articles.
2. Eight-minute lessons are key to grades. By Dan Warburton, The Journal, Oct 8, 2007. www.journallive.co.uk.
3. Arizona State University Research. Grabbing Science. By Lindsey Michaels. ASU Research E-Magazine, Winter 1997. www.researchmag.asu.edu. Comment: Educators at Arizona State University, supported by a 5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, have determined that eight-minute learning modules are the optimal time for maximizing information retention.
4. Schools Cram Four Months of Learning into Just Eight Minutes Lessons. By Paul Sims. Daily Mail, October 8, 2007. www.dailymail.co.uk.
5. Eight Minutes to Performance Improvement, by William Seidman and Michael McCuley, Performance Improvement, Volume 42, Number 6, Wiley Periodicals, Inc., a Wiley Company.
6. Personal correspondence. William Seidman, Ph. D. February 29, 2008.
2. Interactive educational techniques
Research shows that interacting with the subject learned enhances information retention. SmartLife System self-improvement courses involve you in the learning process, asking you to think, imagine, practice, and succeed in real life.
It is impossible to learn how to swim or drive a car from reading a book alone.
You need to get out there and actually do it. Our self-improvement programs make it easy to go from learning to doing.
Research and publications:
At the University of Chicago and elsewhere, in the past fifteen years, a group of colleagues and I have been studying some questions that most psychotherapists don’t like to ask out loud. Why doesn’t therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real difference in people’s lives?…. What is this crucial difference. . . The difference is how they [the therapists] talk. And that is only an outward sign of the real difference [which is]: what the successful patients do inside themselves. . . [T]his uncommon skill, this internal act, not only is useful in a psychotherapist’s office, it is a way of approaching any problem or situation. (1)
[M]y main function is to help them [clients] change and that I do not have any solid, scientific evidence to believe that talk, leading to insight, necessarily produces change. . . Often in traditional therapy, when years of talk, supposedly leading to insight in order to produce change, have not accomplished this, the prescription is more of the same. And clients, strangely enough, buy this wholeheartedly. When these experienced clients are exposed to the New Hypnosis [which is based on personal discovery and interaction with the problem], they need some time to diminish the talking and increase the experiencing during the therapy session [this leads to positive change]. (2)
In every attempt at psychotherapy, there is always the need to utilize the common experiences and understandings that permeate the pattern of daily living and to adapt such utilization to the unique needs of the individual patient. (3)
[T]he subjects [the person experiencing the process of change] point of view, hypnosis could be viewed as a state of focused awareness on whatever is immediately relevant, in which previously unrecognized psychological and physiological potentials are accessed to some avolitional [something just happens] extent. (4) Comment: When a person is engaged in the process of change in an unexpected way, merely through the focusing of his or her mind on that which is important, the desired change occurs.
How people learn in education systems is dominated by a very restricted approach from a neurological perspective: literally a medieval approach to learning, emphasizing the exposition of knowledge as a set of facts, subjects, and formal rules knowledge that should be remembered and declared. Taught this way, it is easier to measure but arguably less important than other ways humans learn. For example, procedural memory (loosely speaking skills) is often neglected. Such skills are sometimes difficult to state as facts or to assess with a grade or mark, but that does not stop them from being extremely powerful learning mechanisms. (5)
When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination, many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance. (6)
Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. (7)
SmartLife System self-improvement programs are unlike other self-help products. Your positive change comes through self-growth. Our programs don’t always entertain, but they work.
Additional information and sources:
1. Focusing. By Eugiene T. Gendiling, Ph. D, University of Chicago. Bantam Books. 1981. Page 3.
2. The New Hypnosis. By Daniel L. Aroaz. Bruner/Mazel Publishers. 1985. Page 81.
3. Innovate Hypnotherapy. The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis. Volume IV. By Milton H. Erickson. Irvington Publishers, Inc. 1980. Pager 397.
4. Developing Ericksonian Therapy. State Of The Art. Edited by Jeffrey K. Zeig and Stephen R Lankton. Bruner/Mazel Publishers. 1988. Page 356.
5. Making Minds. What’s wrong with education and what should we do about it? By Paul Kelley. Routledge. 2008. Page 46.
6. The Brain That Changes Itself. Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Norman Doidge, M. D. Penguin Books. 2007. Page 203.
7. The Brain That Changes Itself. Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Norman Doidge, M. D. Penguin Books. 2007. Page 221.
3. Full-mind learning
We all have two minds: The intellectual mind and the emotional mind. SmartLife System courses educate both minds and synchronize them so they work together. This makes achieving your goal easier and long-lasting.
Scientists have identified two types of learning that are critical to the successful acquisition of information. They know the “left/conscious” side of the brain understands logic, and the “right/subconscious” side creates feelings and attitudes. Smart Life System lessons and courses engage both sides of the brain, making the achievement of your goal easy and long-lasting.
Research and publications:
Following the pioneering split-brain research of Roger Sperry and others, it is now widely accepted that one (usually the left) hemisphere of the human neocortex specialized in higher-order symbolic processes (language, mathematics, and analytic logic), while the other (usually the right) hemisphere is more adept at space-time relationships (rhythm, form, and synthetic operations). . . What is particularly fascinating is the fact that the two hemispheres appear to function as independent higher brains with very different styles of operation. (1)
[T]heir [referring to individuals that learn primarily with their emotional mind] time sense is primarily the present; past, present, and future are telescoped into now. The major premises in their life (myth-belief constellation) tend to value affect [emotion] rather than cold logic. They are relatively prone to accept control from others and to trust others, to suspend critical judgment as they affiliate with new information; and to have rich imagination. . . On the other hand [referring to individuals that learn primarily with their intellectual mind] tend to value brain over heart. . . . They prefer to control others; are less prone to trust; constantly utilizing critical judgment in the assimilation of new information. . . They value their sense of responsibility and tend to stick to commitments once they make them. . . The mid-range group. . . have personality features that represent a mixture of the less extreme attributes. . . (2)
Comment: All people use both learning styles: intellectual and emotional. However, learning with the ’emotional mind’ is of particular importance. In fact, learning with the “emotional mind” (the part of the mind linked to imagination) can actually change the way the brain functions. Some scientists suggest imagining the doing of an act affects the brain as if the act was behaviorally performed.
[Based on research] One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. (3)
Smart Life self-improvement programs educate your full mind, the intellectual mind, and the emotional mind, transforming emotional pain and relationship conflict into happiness and relationship harmony. You learn easily, and the positive results are long-lasting.
Additional information and sources:
1. Human Change Process. The Scientific Foundations of Psychotherapy. By Michael J. Mahoney. Basic Books, a division of Harper Collins Publishers.1991. Page 433. Comment: This book is a monumental work and one of the most important scholastic contributions to understanding human behavior and applied psychology in this century.
2. Trance and Treatment. The Clinical Uses of Hypnosis. Herbert Spiegel. M. D., and By David Spiegel, M. D. American Psychiatric Press, Inc. 1978. Page 329. Comment: This book is a classic in hypnosis and learning that leads to personal change.
3. The Brain That Changes Itself. Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Norman Doidge, M. D. Penguin Books. 2007. Page 203.
4. Wisdom
Have you ever wondered why some people always seem to know what to do, and when they take action, the results are positive? The reason: These individuals have a special ingredient in their lives called “wisdom.” Each course provides you with the “wisdom” needed to solve your problem successfully and live a healthy and happy life.
Every civilized society has absolute standards that guide and judge the behavior of its citizens. These standards include not killing or injuring others, not stealing, honoring parents, and caring for the needy. These absolute standards, and others, are recognized as universal principles. Wisdom is living in harmony with these universal principles.
Research and publications:
Now for my call to inaction [addressing fellow scientists editors note]: most scientists will concede that as powerful as science is, it can teach us nothing about values, ethics, morals or, for that matter, God,” according to Eric Cornell, Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 2001. Don’t go about pretending otherwise. (1) Comment: Universal principles tell us how to use that which science has discovered and invented. Living with material abundance is one thing. Knowing how to use it correctly leads to health and happiness. This is called wisdom.
More people are learning in more institutions, secular and religious, than ever before but the quest seems to be for skills, facts, at the very best, knowledge. Who would not be embarrassed to say that his or her ultimate quest was for wisdom, for something more profound, more challenging, more engaging than mere facts can provide? Our society is gleefully self-satisfied and complacent. . . Science and technology have yielded enormous benefits to society. We are healthier, live longer, are better informed, and communicate more easily over greater distances. Now, we only have to figure out what it all means. And that will require wisdom. (2)
No one is an isolated being standing alone in the center of his own universe; there is always some interaction between that person and the outside world. The quality of the relationships which are established in this interaction determines that person’s well-being. . . If a person takes into account his own interests as well as the interests of the other and, in that way, establishes an equilibrium of mutual interests, he earns merit and is entitled to the acknowledgment of the other. (3)
Comment: The author of the above, Ivan Boszormentyi-Nagy, was a towering figure in the early years of family therapy. At the heart of his work was incorporating ethical principles to govern relationships. According to him, when individuals behave in responsible and trustworthy ways, they earn the merit needed to succeed in relationships.
When your life is based on wisdom, you live in sync with this great universe and it’s a good feeling. Wise individuals are happier, healthier, and better prepared for everything that comes their way.
Additional information and sources:
1. What Was God Thinking? Science Can’t Tell. By Nobel Prize Winner Eric Cornell See, Time Magazine, November 2005.
2. Why We Need Wisdom. By Professor Paul Socken, University of Waterloo, Canada. Canadian Jewish Tribune.]
3. Balance in Motion. Ivan Boszormentyi-Nagy and His Vision of individual and family Therapy. By Ammy van Heusden and ElseMarie van den Eerenbeemt. Bruner/Mazel Publishers. 1987. Page 43.
5. Targeted solutions
SmartLife System courses go right to the heart of what you seek. Don’t waste your precious time digging through mountains of information trying to mine the 5% or 10% that is relevant to you (and perhaps getting lost along the way). Precision targeting makes achieving your goal naturally easy.
When you learn only that which you need to achieve your goal, the entire educational process is made significantly easier. When learning is easy, you learn more about what you need to. . . and with much less effort.
Research and publications:
The first logical outcome would be that being concise is best for learning that learners are presented with what is essential. This relates to learning quickly, but has the advantage of removing elements that could be distracting. . . This tallies with most people’s experience of good teachers, books, and online content: they are very clear and make even intricate things seem simple. (1)
When writing the curriculum for each Smart Life self-improvement program, as much attention has been given to what not to include as to what to include. When learning is easy, it’s quick and successful.
Additional information and sources:
1. Making Minds. What’s wrong with education, and what should we do about it? By Paul Kelley. Routledge. 2008. Page 163.
6. Practical skills
You want health, happiness, peace, and less stress and conflict. SmartLife System courses give you the practical tools to achieve your goal. It’s that simple!
Knowing what to do is key to achieving the outcome you seek. In the end, success is measured by your daily attitude and behavior. Each Smart Life System lesson or course gives you the tools and skills to guide your thinking and behavior toward your chosen goal.
Research and publications:
RET (Rational Emotive Therapists) therapists accept clients as fallible humans without necessarily giving personal warmth. They may use a variety of impersonal therapeutic methods, including didactic discussion, behavioral modification, bibliotherapy, audiovisual aids, and activity-oriented homework assignments. (1)
Additional information and sources:
1. Current Psychotherapies. Raymond J. Corsini and Contributors. F. E. Peacock Publishers, INC. 1984. Third edition. Page 197.
7. Independent learning
You are busy. . . we all are. SmartLife System lessons and courses are short; you can learn when and where you want. Many serious problems can be successfully solved without the need to attend professional counseling or other types of self-improvement programs.
Personal improvement is a very “personal” endeavor. And for us at Smart Life the starting point is recognizing your resources. Most people do not have the time, money, or patience to seek professional counseling or other forms of complicated self-improvement. However, you likely have around a dollar a day, plus eight minutes, to increase your happiness and success. This is all that is required using our programs. This is the very reason Smart Life exists.
Research and publications:
Utilization (of. . . ): The therapist/hypnotist uses the person’s usual mental habits, resistance, symptoms, behavior, delusions, or any other aspect of the person’s internal or external behavior in service of treatment or trance induction. (1)
Additional information and sources:
1. An Uncommon Casebook. The Complete Clinical Work of Milton H. Ericson, M. D. William Hudson O’Hanlon and Angela L. Hexum. W. W. Norton & Company. 1990. Page 335.
Conclusion
Relationship harmony and love will have a greater impact on the quality of your life than anything else that happens to you or that you do (except for extreme health challenges). Get our relationship-enhancing lessons and build your best life.
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* Some of the references have been lightly edited for clarity.