Get your brain in motion

Month: March 2023

Success or Happiness?

Do you want to be successful or happy?

Are you successful so you feel happy? Our society leads us to think that success and happiness are the same things. But are we sure that success is the way for happiness? You can be a very sucessful person without being happy and you can also be happy although you have not attained any position, honor or power yet.

Stuff and status can be not enough to feel happy. If you are looking for your personal fullfillment success might not be the right answer.

According to Sarah Vermut how you personally define success and how you personally define happiness is entirely up to you. But you must recognize the difference!

Read more on Enterpreneur 

Success or happiness

Image source: Flickr – Anton Aymemì (CC – BY – NC – ND – 2.0)

Five tips to improve public speaking

One of the common mistakes in public speaking is that we often underestimate the importance of the form in the message we try to convey.

Unlike written pages, oral communications are a bloom of conscious and unconscious signals coming out from our body, like voice tone and modulation, gesticulating, glances with the public, dialogue speed and so on.

Each of these signals carries a different value that can alter the substance of the message, even in an unsuccessful way.

As diplomacy is essentially communication, a good deal can be reached only after smart negotiations and persuasive talks.

Hence, creating the right empathy with our listeners could add further value on the outcome of our agreements.

In an article published on the popular magazine Mental Floss, the American journalist Cindy Fisher Crawford has tried to summarize 5 effective steps to becoming a better public speaker from “Toastmasters International” and other public speaking experts:

1. MAKE YOUR SPEECH CONVERSATIONAL

As tempting as it may be to type up a speech and read it word for word, refrain from doing so.

Audiences listen better when the speaker talks to them instead of reads to them.

2. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

A great way to ensure your speech goes smoothly is to rehearse what you’re going to say.

3. CONNECT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

If they’re yawning, you need to infuse a spark in the conversation.

4. DELIVER YOUR SPEECH WITH PASSION

The best way to get your audience to care about what you’re saying is to show how much you care about the topic.

5. TAKE YOUR TIME

Your presentation is not a race. Take your time as you interact with the audience and slow down if you make a mistake.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2456/3914858504_831952e460_z.jpg?zz=1

Image source: FLICKR JohnDiew0107

(CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

Be resilient

We often have to deal with changes, trasformation and adversities both in our daily life and in our career. That is why the concept of resilience – broadly defined as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt to change, and keep going despite adversities – offers significant suggestions with regard to our behaviour. The importance of being resilient is clearly highlighted in this article which examines some elements essential to resilience.

Here are some significant tips to follow:

  • be always able to cope with change, stress and adversity;
  • consider both setbacks and successes as positive learning experiences;
  • view difficulties and challenges as opportunities to grow and evolve;
  • be able to adapt – and partially adjust – yourself but be ready, at the same time, to return to your original status;
  • be able to absorb energy when “elastically deformed” and later release and use that energy;
  • be able to absorb or avoid damage, without suffering complete failure;
  • be able to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of problems and challenges to normal operation.

Resilience

Image source: Flickr – Askew View Photo (CC-BY-ND 2.0)

Trusting men

The Diplo calendar 2023 realized by Stefano Baldi contains some quotes of well-known and less known Italian women and men of 19th and 20th century that can inspire us in our daily life.

Here is the selected quotation for the month of February:

The man who trusts men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810 – 1861)