Get your brain in motion

Author: fracalde (Page 7 of 14)

10 Websites to Learn Something New in 30 Minutes a Day

Learning something new is always an exciting endeavour to commence. The problem is that most of us get wrapped up in busy distractions throughout the day that we can never find the time to learn the new skill we want.

Instead of using our time to sit through long lectures and lengthy video courses, we can take advantage of all the websites that can help us learn something new in 30 minutes or less.

This article provides a list of 10 learning websites for different categories of subjects:

1. Lynda : Over 1,000 courses with a 10-day free trial to develop your skills in business, photoshop, software, and much more.

2. Skillshare: Ten dollars per month gets you access to on-demand courses taught by leading experts.

3. Hackaday: Tips to make your life better and more productive. Just 5 minutes a day is all you need to learn new life hacks to improve your lifestyle.

4. Codeacademy: Helps anyone build a website through an interactive learning method. Learn any programming language from HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and more.

5. 7-min: In just 7 minutes, this website will go through dozens of routines to get you in shape and ready for the day ahead.

6. Calm: Different types of meditation whit a teacher to guide you step-by-step through the process, even if it’s your first time trying meditation.

7. Highbrow: Bite-sized email courses delivered to your inbox every morning to learn everything from film history, marketing, business, and more.

8. Big Think: Learn from the world’s experts about scientific breakthroughs, revolutionary business concepts, and more in short, chunk-sized videos.

9. Khan Academy: Salman Khan breaks down complicated subjects into simplified concepts to help you understand them in minutes.

10. Rype: Unlimited 1-on-1 private language lessons with professional teachers around the world. Each lesson is just 30 minutes, allowing you to fit learning a language into your busy lifestyle.

Image Source: Pixabay

Build a Better Future

A massive generation of young people is about to inherit the world, and it’s the duty of everyone to give them a fighting chance for their futures, says UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore.

In this TED talk, she explores the crises facing them and details an ambitious new global initiative, Generation Unlimited, which aims to ensure every young person is in school, training or employed by 2030.

10 Tips for Enjoying the Holidays

Holidays can cause us to feel happy, sad or ambivalent. The holidays can also cause stress.

No matter how you feel, the following tips from this article by Johns Hopkins University, can help you enjoy the holidays as much as possible:

  1. Reflect on what is important to you during the holidays.
  2. Make a plan as early as possible about what you will do during the holidays.
  3. Communicate clearly how others can assist or support you.
  4. Realize the holiday season is a marathon, not a sprint.
  5. Maintain a healthy lifestyle.
  6. Manage your spending.
  7. Monitor alcohol and medications – individually and together.
  8. Manage your expectations for family gatherings.
  9. Think ahead about stories or observations from the past as a family that you’d like to share.
  10. Reflect on what went well this holiday season and improvements you would like to make for next year.

Image source: Pixabay

5 ways to successfully negotiate

There is very little that happens in our day that doesn’t require some sort of negotiation. Those who study or even actively think about negotiation have a distinct advantage over those who enter in ignorance.

Here you’ll find some tips to better negotiate in everyday situations:

1. Know when to shut up: The most powerful tool in negotiation is silence. The important thing is to know when to use it. Ironically, the more you stay silent, the more likely your adversaries will expose themselves and give you the advantage.

2. Think of the long term: Always think about how what you say and do can help establish a long-term business relationship. A long-term relationship not only makes negotiating easier the next time, it also makes your business world a better place.

3. Say no: Many of us want to be agreeable and positive and say yes whenever we can, but that’s not the way to get what you want in a negotiation. You first have to know what you want out of the negotiation, and then if you don’t get it, just say no until you do.

4. Look at what’s good for all concerned: During negotiations, remain emotionally detached from the outcome, and rather than focusing on exactly what you want, focus on a result that is in the best interest for all concerned. You’ll either walk away with a great deal in hand or walk toward something even greater.

5. Be ready to walk away: If you feel frustrated, threaten to walk away from the negotiations. Nine times out of 10 the other party then will make concessions. This confirms the long understood negotiation reality that the person willing to walk away is in control.

Image: PixabayGeralt

10 Ways to Stay Calm

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance.

The tricky thing about stress is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress.

If the stress isn’t prolonged, it’s harmless. However, as soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells. Besides increasing your risk of heart disease, depression, and obesity, prolonged stress also decreases your cognitive performance.

That is why top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under stressful circumstances. This lowers their stress levels regardless of what’s happening in their environment, ensuring that the stress they experience is intermittent and not prolonged.

Here are 10 of the best practice to cope with stress:

  1. Appreciate What You Have: Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%.
  2. Avoid Asking “What If?”: “What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control.
  3. Stay Positive: Positive thoughts help make stress intermittent by focusing your brain’s attention onto something that is completely stress-free. You have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can’t think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week.
  4. Disconnect: Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress under control. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even turning off your phone gives your body a break from a constant source of stress.
  5. Limit Your Caffeine Intake: Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior.
  6. Sleep: When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present.
  7. Squash Negative Self-Talk: The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just thoughts, not facts. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity.
  8. Reframe Your Perspective: Stress and worry are fueled by our own skewed perception of events. It’s easy to think that unrealistic deadlines, unforgiving bosses, and out-of-control traffic are the reasons we’re so stressed all the time. You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them.
  9. Breathe: The easiest way to make stress intermittent lies in something that you have to do everyday anyway: breathing. The practice of being in the moment with your breathing will begin to train your brain to focus solely on the task at hand and get the stress monkey off your back. When you’re feeling stressed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing.
  10. Use Your Support System: To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation.

Image: PixabayKalhh

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