Diplo Learning Corner

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Category: Training (Page 2 of 40)

10 Websites to Learn Something New in 30 Minutes a Day

19/08/2020 /

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

5 ways to successfully negotiate

27/05/2020 /

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: Pixabay – Geralt

10 ways to improve your Brain Fitness

06/05/2020 /

Our brain, in order to work at 100% of its possibility, needs to be exercised and trained. Brain fitness has basic principles: variety and curiosity. When anything you do becomes second nature, you need to make a change. Curiosity about the world around you, how it works and how you can understand it will keep your brain working fast and efficiently.

Here are some tips to help attain your quest for mental fitness:

  1. Play Games: Suduko, crosswords and electronic games can all improve your brain’s speed and memory. You’ll get benefit more by doing these games a little bit every day. Spend 15 minutes or so, not hours.
  2. Meditation :  By creating a different mental state, you engage your brain in new and interesting ways while increasing your brain fitness.
  3. Eat for Your Brain:  Focus on fish oils from wild salmon, nuts such as walnuts, seeds such as flax seed and olive oil.
  4. Tell Good Stories: Practice telling your stories, both new and old, so that they are interesting, compelling and fun. 
  5. Turn Off Your Television: Turn off your TV and spend more time living and exercising your mind and body.
  6. Exercise Your Body: By moving your body, your brain has to learn new muscle skills, estimate distance and practice balance. 
  7. Read Something Different: Not only will your brain get a workout by imagining different time periods, cultures and peoples, you will also have interesting stories to tell about your reading.
  8. Learn a New Skill: Your memory comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things differently.
  9. Make Simple Changes: To really help your brain stay young, challenge it. Change routes to the grocery store, use your opposite hand to open doors and eat dessert first.
  10. Train Your Brain: The basic principles are memory, visualization, and reasoning. Work on these three concepts every day and your brain will be ready for anything.

Image: Pixabay – Mohamed_Hassan

5 tips to boost Creativity

20/11/2019 /

Creativity is an inborn talent of all human beings and it can also be developed. When youace challenges which you ot able to solve in a conventional way, it’s time to get creative. he World Economic Forum says creativity is one of the top 10 skills required for the future workplace. It’s is a useful tool to explore new and innovative ways of doing things, but there’s an added benefit to your mental health, since we being creative, your brain releases dopamine, which is a natural antidepressant.

Keeping your creative juices flowing can help you embracing and feel more in control. Expressing your innate creativity will help keep you motivated about the future.

This article provides 5 useful tips to boost your creativity:

1. Use your imagination: Creating space where you can disconnect and shut out external stimulation and impulses can help you to dream up all sorts of ideas.

2. Identify your creative time: Keeping a log and working out what time you are at your best for coming up with new ideas is very helpful in knowing when you will produce your most creative work.

3. Commit to continual learning: Adopt a lifelong learning mentality and cultivate a growth mindset. Open your mind and seek out new ways to test yourself.

4. Avoid energy drains: Energy is fundamental to creativity. When you are in a creative mode, it’s important to avoid anything that drains your energy.

5. Plan to do things differently: Seeing new things can help to spark new ideas. Messing up your routine and consciously seeking out ways to do things differently by exploring new environments, taking different routes and challenging your daily habits will help fuel your creativity.

Image: Pixabay – ElisaRiva (CC Creative Commons)

8 ways to remember anything

28/08/2019 /

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you’ve studied but the day before you study as well.

Imagine: Pixabay – Geralt

Get fit at work – 10 Exercises to Do at Your Desk

14/08/2019 /

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.

Image: Pixabay – Geralt

Top Productivity Secrets – Master Class

26/06/2019 /

Productivity is probably one of the most commonly used words today.

All of us are looking for ways to improve, increase, hack or boost our productivity, whether that may be in the workplace or overall lives.

Articles are constantly being published and appearing on our newsfeeds on the latest secret to increasing our productivity.

Yet in all this mayhem we can end up feeling overwhelmed, not knowing which tips to implement. And we end up not doing anything at all.

In this free Masterclass, Niklas Goeke provides actionable tips that we can adopt in our everyday lives to improve our productivity without having to turn everything upside down. It’s all about small steps!

Click here to sign up to the Master Class (did I mention it is free?): Master Productivity – 14 Day Course

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Image: Pixabay (CC0 – Creative Commons)

7 Tips for the Best Sleep Ever

15/05/2019 /

The fact the good sleep is a key factor for an healthy life, while a chronic lack of sleep  ups your odds of diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, even weight gain is well known.

If you have tried everything without effective results, try these unexpected tweaks, and wake up feeling incredibly well-rested!

  1. Avoid caffeine and similar substances after 2pm
  2. Choose snooze-friendly foods for dinner
  3. Avoid alchoolic drinks after 10pm
  4. Avoid hot bath/shower right before going to bed
  5. Try a little gentle, restorative yoga before going to bed
  6. Install low-watt lamps in your bedroom
  7. Turn off your smartphone one hour before going to bed

Here you will find the full article.

Image: Flickr – Domenico Salvagnin   (CC BY 2.0) 

The 4 A’s for stress relief

28/11/2018 /

Happy events, such as a wedding, as well as unhappy events, such as overwork, can cause stress. When your stress level exceeds your ability to cope, you need to restore the balance by reducing the stressors or increasing your ability to cope or both.

In this article are described the following four A’s to cope or reduce stress:

1 Avoid

You can simply avoid a lot of stress. Plan ahead, rearrange your surroundings and reap the benefits of a lighter load. In particular, try to avoid people who bother you, learn to say no and clearly define your priorities

However, some problems can’t be avoided. For those situations, here are the other A’s.

2 Alter Take inventory and attempt to change the situation for the better.  In particular you can respectfully ask others to change their behavior, communicate your feelings openly, manage your time in a more efficient way and state limits in advance.

3 Accept

Sometimes you may have no choice but to accept things the way they are. For those times try to talk with someone, forgive (it takes energy to be angry), practice positive self-talk and learn from your mistakes.

4 Adapt

Sometimes adapting can be the most helpful and only available solution. In particular in those situations stop gloomy thoughts and adopt a mantra, try to reframe the issue and recall all of the things that bring you joy in life.

In general, you should adjust your standards and stop striving for perfection and always try to look at the big picture.

Stress

Image: Flickr – Jesper Sehested (CC BY 2.0)

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