Leon Frățilă

Leon Frățilă is a physicist and martial arts instructor, working in the Aviation & Aerospace field in Romania. He is a MENSA Romania Member. Starting with 2010 he has been teaching Thinking lessons to gifted children based on De Bono’s CoRT Thinking lessons, and also, a self-made course called “Surviving by Thinking”.
Each of us has experienced less pleasant events throughout life and often the answer we gave to the challenges life has presented, was not the best. Some of us were stuck in the elevator, some got lost;  we were attacked by some animals and perhaps we all have suffered from hot or cold more or less. If we imagined the path of life like a car driving on a street, there were times when the car was very close to the border (left or right) or just went with the wheels on the curb and often there were intersections (life’s changing courses where we should apply a technique in thinking called– Plus – Minus-Interesting – PMI) in which we left the main road and we got off the side. We all would like our students or children not to approach the borders, go straight and smoothly though they may meet a hole … or a dog … or they could get rid of all this trouble with a paid driver (in this case –we would call it “thinking by paying”).

The best thing would be for them to fend for themselves, to think for themselves what to do or what to make. That would be the greatest satisfaction of the parent and the teacher.

If in the previous century there were strong slogans as “information is power” (See also some films that had the theme of this slogan) at the moment the information is everywhere (we connect to the internet in seconds and find almost everything you want even if search time is 40% of total time spent on the net) and is available to everyone, not only insiders or insiders (or even the Securitate :)), thus losing the strength slogan in favor of management information – ie the thinking!

I would question how many of us have learnt to think in school (i.e. where there are minimal risks: “it’s nothing, it’s just a paper work!”) and how many of us have learnt to think in the “school of life” (where risks are high and especially real) ? Very few not to say none.

“Surviving by thinking” does not aim to give you recipes for survival on the tray so that you forget them until the next week, but rather, to make you think on your own and at the end of the lesson to discover for yourself the results to various extreme challenges as they are presented in various textbooks survival data.

The course uses mainly brand strategies and techniques developed by Edward de Bono, and other sources.

Why did I choose survival as a field of experimentation for teaching techniques in thinking? Because in this area more than any other, there is no other option than to have the winning attitude.
Thus, this program will develop critical and lateral thinking, creativity and self-confidence, self-control and control of situations and will also develop attitudes of winners (the most important attitude in surviving) and leadership skills that often we need when we work in teams. These skills will create prerequisites for the emergence of the survivor behaviour.

The course consists of 1 (introduction lesson) + 9 lessons and will be managed as a process. In each lesson, through games, and the exercises we perform we will develop self-confidence, identify strengths, make a plan and act.

By exercising, we create patterns of thinking that will be applied when we face a situation like this in real life