FORTITUDE
ACADEMY
More impact. Less burnout.
Master emotion regulation skills.
Being a founder, bringing your idea into the world, is not the easy path.
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People from the outside don’t see the daily challenges, the immense pressure, the failures and all those punches to the gut. The stakes are high. You face countless moments of doubt, at every step questioning your choices, your path and even yourself. Family, friends and even sleep might start to seem like a luxury. Life can feel like it’s closing in on you, and like you might have to give up or burn yourself to the ground.
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This is why to succeed at creating something extraordinary you need
strong emotion regulation skills.
Emotion regulation is about Fortitude: the ability to stay focused, stay sane, stay passionate while not letting your passion become your curse.
Emotion regulation skills are like a bridge that helps you walk the path between where you are today and the future you want to create, without getting lost or falling to burnout.
Do you often find yourself:
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Emotionally overwhelmed
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Having sleep problems
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Being on your phone when you didn't intend to
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Doubting you'll be able to withstand this level of pressure long-term
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Going through emotional ups-and-downs
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Having a hard time making decisions
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Emotionally cold and detached
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Stuck in a "fixer" or "problem solver" mindset that ends up creating more problem than it actually solves
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Judgmental, inadvertently hurting others including the people you care the most about
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Short-tempered - which is odd because in general you're a patient person
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Having a sense of emptiness, of being out of touch with yourself and others
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Intensely self-critical and perfectionistic
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Lonely
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Having a hard being flexible
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Having a hard time with change
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Acting impulsively and doing things you later regret
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Having a hard time accepting negative feedback - and often even positive ones!
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At times being flooded with empathy and other times being strangely insensitive
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Having intense feeling of shame and anxiety that get in the way of your bold vision
If any of this sounds familiar, training emotion regulation can make a huge difference in your life and in your mission.
You are here because:
Here's how we can help:
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
This morning I jumped out of bed, so excited to get going with the strategies and systems we put so very carefully in place over the weekend. I have not felt this energized, alive and joyful since Covid began, a full ten months ago! I am so happy and grateful I decided to attend this course and have promised myself this invaluable gift every year, as long as you offer it! Your gentleness, patience yet firmness in guiding us, with encouragement, humor and incredibly precise language offer a solid, grounded foundation from which we can take flight. I have never felt this kind of elation and excitement when committing to a goal and knowing with unequivocal certainty that it will be realized, since success is guaranteed. I am in awe and overflowing with gratitude and joy. Thank you Nicolo and the entire group, looking forward to the weekly check-ins! I encourage everyone to experience this class and make sure you tell your friends. 2031.... I am on my way!"
Lisa Marcovici
"Interesting, but how is this emotion stuff
related to my business?"
Read on...
The 9 ways in which emotion regulation drives business results:
Meet the founder:
Nicolò F. Bernardi, PhD, ACC
I've coached over a thousand individuals in building emotional skills to cope well in high-stress and high-stakes situations. Of those, several hundreds were top performers with high emotion sensitivity (curious what that is? More about that below). My understanding of the science of emotions comes from 15 years in the trenches conducting cognitive neuroscience experiments on the neural mechanisms of learning and brain-body interactions, as well as training in the gold-standard approach for addressing emotion dysregulation, the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills.
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But first and foremost, I am myself a person with big emotions who used to shut them down, disconnect from my body and try to logic my way through life. Remember those bullet points at beginning about the person who often struggles with overwhelm? That was me.
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Toughening up and shutting down my feelings worked to some extent. For some time I had success in pretty much anything I put my heart to. Until I didn't. My body broke down first. Then important relationships fell apart. Finally my career.
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I'm grateful for every piece of that journey of deconstruction. It lead me to discover what Fortitude is. It lead me to become an entrepreneur and to wake up the the reality of the global challenges we live in. I had to learn and practice myself every single skill that I'm going to teach you. Those skills actually worked. Today I feel healthy and strong. I'm married with two wonderful children. I have a loving connection with my family and friends - which doesn't mean we always agree. I do what I love for a living and I look forward to continue doing it for the next 80 years.
It took me a couple of decades to get here. I can help you get there a lot faster.
"Wait! What is this being highly sensitive all about?"
Keep on reading...
"I'm having five emotions at the same time!"
Or: "Emotions? Nope. I don't do them".
The Emotion Sensitivity Piece
Since you can remember, you have experienced emotions more strongly than most people.
For example...
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Have you every noticed that you process events more deeply than others, noticing details and layers that others seem to be oblivious to?
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Do you intuitively pick up subtle emotion cues in the environment that others miss?
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Does it ever happen to you that your emotions come out of the blue and hit you like a ton of bricks?
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Me too. And we're not alone. In the scientific literature this is referred to as Sensory Processing Sensitivity, and in pop culture it has become known as being "a highly sensitive person" (HSP). It's a personality trait, not a disease or something esoteric. To a large extent, you were born like this. It's partly in our genes. It's a characteristic that shows up on a continuum with approximately 20% of the population being on the higher end of the spectrum.
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Let me be clear on one thing:
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It's a gift.
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It's a huge part of what prompted you to become an entrepreneur, because you feel stronger empathy, you see problems more deeply and you can see opportunities where others see limitations. Understanding your sensitivity, owning it and using it to your advantage is going to be instrumental to the positive impact you want to have in the world.
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However, the path to a thriving life looks different for a HSP compared to the remaining 80% of the population.
These are the two key ingredients you need:​
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Understanding what it means and accepting that this is part of who you are;
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Training emotion skills, stronger and more flexible compared to people who are relatively less sensitive.
And this takes us to the next chapter in the story of how we got here...
The Mismatch Piece
Instead of acceptance and strong emotion skills, important people in your life may have given you the message that your feelings are wrong, weird, bad or "too much".
They may have ignored, punished or reinforced your emotional reactions without providing you with effective coaching. They may have frequently resorted to shame and emotional detachment instead (alternatively, they may have showered you with unconditional love but have no idea about how to teach you effective emotion regulation skills!). The default culture that assumes entrepreneurs to overwork themselves while shutting their emotions down has likely doubled down on all of this.
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We're going to leave judgment and blame out of this. These people in your life were doing the best they could and likely they did every bit of it from love. What matters right now is: it happened, it left a gap and that gap is the cause of lots of your troubles. Most importantly, if you leave this gap unaddressed it's going to stay with you and your business as a massive liability, threatening to precipitate you into burnout at any point in the near future. You probably already had a taste of some of that, am I right?
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The great news is: You can totally fill that gap.
Emotion regulation is not magic. It's a learnable skill. It's going to take some work, but it's going to be exhilarating, healing, radically empowering.
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Here is something for you to take to heart: strong and flexible emotion regulation skills are very useful to anybody but they are necessary if you are part of the 20% of people with the highly sensitive trait. This is due to the sheer intensity of the emotional, mental and sensory overwhelm, and how little all of that is understood by most people around you. For us, it's not only a matter of high performance, it goes way deeper than that. For some it can be a matter of life and death, and I mean that literally.