To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Month: August 2019
The mind’s capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous.
However there are Always ways to improve our memory capacity and our abilities to recall information.
This article provides 8 stategies to rember better:
- Become interested in what you’re learning. We’re all better remembering what interests us. If you’re not intrinsically interested in what you’re learning or trying to remember, you must find a way to become so.
- Find a way to leverage your visual memory. It requires mental effort to do this, but if you practice you’ll be surprised how quickly you can come up with creative ways to generate images. Remember: Memory for humans is predominantly visual.
- Create a mental memory tree. If you’re trying to memorize a large number of facts, find a way to relate them in your mind visually with a memory tree. Construct big branches first, then leaves. Branches and leaves should carry labels that are personally meaningful to you in some way, and the organization of the facts (“leaves”) should be logical.
- Associate what you’re trying to learn with what you already know. It seems the more mental connections we have to a piece of information, the more successful we’ll be in remembering it. This is why using mnemonics actually improves recall.
- Write out the items to be memorized over and over and over. Writing out facts in lists improves recall if you make yourself learn the lists actively instead of passively. In other words, don’t just copy the list of facts you’re trying to learn but actively recall each item you wish to learn and then write it down again and again and again. This method has the added benefit of immediately showing you exactly which facts haven’t made it into your long-term memory so you can focus more attention on learning them rather than wasting time reinforcing facts you already know.
- When reading for retention, summarize each paragraph in the margin. This requires you to think about what you’re reading, recycle it, and teach it to yourself again. Even take the concepts you’re learning and reason forward with them; apply them to imagined novel situations, which creates more neural connections to reinforce the memory.
- Do most of your studying in the afternoon. Though you may identify yourself as a “morning person” or “evening person” some studies suggest your ability to memorize isn’t influenced as much by what time of day you perceive yourself to be most alert but by the time of day you actually study—afternoon appearing to be the best.
- Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you’ve studied but the day before you study as well.
In our everyday life, we have to get in touch with negative people. Those people have one thing in common: boundless negative energy that ends up affecting everyone around them. How can we interact with those negative or difficult people? People who seem chronically critical, belligerent, indignant, angry, or just plain rude. How to maintain a sense of compassion without getting sucked into their doom? And how to act in a way that doesn’t reinforce their negativity–and maybe even helps them?
This article provides 10 simple tips to deal with those difficult people:
1. Resist the urge to judge or assume.
It’s hard to offer someone compassion when you assume you have them pegged. Even if it seems unlikely someone will wake up one day and act differently, we have to remember it is possible. Try coming at them with the positive mindset you wish they had. Expect the best in them.
2. Dig deeper, but stay out of the hole.
If you show negative people you support their choice to behave badly, you give them no real incentive to make a change. It may help to repeat this in your head when you deal with them: “I understand your pain. But I’m most helpful if I don’t feed into it.”
3. Maintain a positive boundary.
Dealing with them, try to do two things, in this order of importance:
- Protect the positive space around you. When their negativity is too strong to protect it, walk away.
- Help them feel more positive, not act more positive.
4. Disarm their negativity, even if just for now.
Listen compassionately for a short while and then help them focus on something positive right now, in this moment. Don’t try to solve or fix them. Just aim to help them now.
5. Temper your emotional response.
Negative people often gravitate toward others who react strongly–people who easily offer compassion or get outraged or offended. People remember and learn from what you do more than what you say. If you feed into the situation with emotions, you’ll teach them they can depend on you for a reaction. It’s tough not to react because we’re human, but it’s worth practicing. Once you’ve offered a compassionate ear for as long as you can, respond as calmly as possible with a simple line of fact.
6. Question what you’re getting out of it.
We often get something out of relationships with negative people. You can’t make someone think, feel, or act differently. You can be as kind as possible or as combative as possible, and still not change reality for someone else. All you can control is what you think and do–and then do your best to help them without hurting yourself.
7. Remember the numbers.
Research shows that people with negative attitudes have significantly higher rates of stress and disease. Someone’s mental state plays a huge role in their physical health. If someone’s making life difficult for people around them, you can be sure they’re doing worse for themselves. When you remember how much a difficult person is suffering, it’s easier to stay focused on minimizing negativity.
8. Don’t take it personally, but know that sometimes it is personal.
Conventional wisdom suggests that you should never take things personally when you deal with a negative person. Accept that you don’t deserve the excessive emotions in someone’s tone, but weigh their ideas with a willingness to learn.
9. Act instead of just reacting.
If you know someone who seems to deal with difficult thoughts or feelings often (as demonstrated in their behavior), don’t wait for a situation to help them create positive feelings. You’re more apt to want to boost them up when they haven’t brought you down. This may help mitigate that later and also give them a little relief from their pain.
10. Maintain the right relationship based on reality as it is.
The best you can do is accept them as they are, let them know you believe in their ability to be happy, and then give them space to make their choices.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Most people today spend too much time tied to desks, buried in emails. Our modern lives have been engineered so that we can spend most of it sitting down. Unfortunately, sitting is literally killing us.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 3.2 million deaths can be attributed to lack of physical activity. Our sedentary lifestyles are responsible for increasing our risk of diabetes and heart disease as well as a loss of muscle and bone strength. Perhaps even more alarming is that people who exercise regularly are probably still not getting enough movement in their lives to counteract the deleterious effects of sitting too much.
According to this article, with a little more activity throughout the day, we can actually reverse the inevitable weight gain associated with such a sedentary existence.
There are countless ways to sneak more activity into our day, aka exercise hacks. There are exercises to do at our desk, such as chair exercises and stretches we can incorporate into our daily routine.
Here are 10 stretches you can do at your desk:
1. Rubber Neck – Sit up tall and drop your right ear down towards your right shoulder (you don’t have to touch it!) and hold for a few seconds and repeat for the left side.
2. Reach for the Stars – Interlace your fingers and reach up towards the sky, as high as you can … keeping your palms facing up towards the ceiling.
3. Look Around – Turn your head the left and try and look over your shoulder and hold for a few seconds … repeat on the right.
4. Bobblehead – Drop your chin down towards your chest and GENTLY roll your head from side to side.
5. Shrugs – Raise both shoulders up towards your ears and hold for a few seconds and release. Repeat a few times for good measure.
6. Chest Opener – Bring your hands behind your back, press your palms together, sit up tall and hold for 5–10 seconds.
7. Seated Toy Soldier – Sit up tall and extend your right arm all the way up towards the ceiling. Straighten your left leg out and raise it up as you bring your right arm down and try to touch your left foot.
8. Knee Hugger – With a bent knee, lift your right leg up and grab it with your arms and pull it in as close to your chest as you can. Hold for 5–10 seconds and make sure and do it on the left side, too.
9. Reach and Bend- Extend your right arm over your head and reach out as far as you can to the left and gently bend over. Hold for a few seconds and do it the other way.
10. Knee Press – With your right ankle on your left knee, gently press against the right knee a few times. Of course, after you’re done with the right side, be sure and give the left side some love, too.
“There is more to life than making a living. Do not work more than you live.”
Mokhonoana Proverb
Image: Pixabay – MoneyForCoffee (CC0 Creative Commons)
The Diplo calendar 2019 realized by Stefano Baldi presents a selection of quotes for better living and better working.
All the quotes are about animals and their behaviours, their instincts and the complexity of their social dynamics.
Here is the selected quotation for the month of August
Why fly like a hen when you can soar like an eagle?
Recent Comments