Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed. Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble.
Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. Consider the status quo as just another alternative. 3. Be OK with making mistakes. 4. 5. 90% of All Self Help Books.
How To Focus In The Face Of Distractions | Spirituality and Self Help. This is a guest post by Colleen Ludgate. Colleen is the editor of fun advice As a child, I was mesmerized with the extraordinary ability my mother had to simply “tune things out”. As she sat, nose in book, with the telephone resonating it’s urgent message, demanding to be picked up, and the dog barking through the window at the cat across the street, I often wondered if her quiet mastery was somehow related to a hearing problem. It wasn’t. I spent my years in quiet frustration as a student, trying to study with the distraction of my two sisters arguing, and the washing machine spinning, secretly envious of my mother’s special power and wishing I had inherited it. I would eventually learn that the art of tuning out was a skill, long years in development with the requirement of specialized equipment – namely, children.
As I sit, typing away at my latest epiphany of a novel, I hear them asking me…something. My mother had balance. This is Why Self Improvement Programs Fail and Here’s Exactly How You Can ACTUALLY Use Them to Make Your Life Better. If you’ve been trying to improve your life with the help of ‘self improvement information’ and have gotten little to no results, you’re not alone… In fact, most people who try self improvement resources fail to get the promised results. (I’m talking about self help/ development/ improvement books, audio programs, seminars and so on, from weight loss tips to ‘success skills’ to relationship advice and anything in between). I’ve been there myself for many years, until I’ve finally ‘found the solution’, and I would like to share it with you… I’m going to give you one important step and a few simple rules to follow, in order to finally use self help resources to greatly improve your life.
But first – why does this happen… You read a book that promises to improve your life in some way (or transform it altogether). Nothing’s changed and you either give up on ‘self improvement’, or move on to the next thing – another book, another recording or another seminar. First, you must take this crucial step… How Journaling Improves Your Emotional Life | Spirituality and Self Help. This is a guest post by Chaundra McGill. Chaundra is the owner of writing reflections and the author of the new free e-book, $1 Therapy: Achieving Emotional Well-Being Through Reflective Writing Therapy.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of keeping a journal? If the image of a teenage girl divulging her first crush on the pages of a padlocked diary springs to mind, I encourage you to reevaluate your notions of journaling. For most of my life, I always heard that it was good to keep a journal, primarily from people who never kept a journal. As an English major in college, a few professors required journaling as a part of the curriculum and factored these forced logs into our final grades.
Needless to say, I did not find the musing of required classical readings helpful. Let’s face it, we all need an outlet. The physical act of writing my thoughts was similar to the release I felt jogging three miles on a treadmill. Automatic Writing One-word Association Who am I? Use Side 'Procrastination Projects' to Become More Productive. Daily Transformations. Five Things You Need to Know About Effective Habit Change | zen habits. Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ian Newby-Clark, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada who studies habit change. As a psychology professor who has studied habit change for several years, I have some advice about effective habit change.
My advice is general. It applies to any habit that you would like to change. My advice is based on my research and that of my colleagues. 1. Work on One Habit at a Time. If you work on changing more than one habit at a time you run a serious risk of overwhelming yourself and changing no habits at all. 2. 4. Jim must mini-plan. 5. So, there you have it: Five things you need to know about effective habit change. Read more about habits by Professor Ian Newby-Clark at his blog, Bad Habits. If you liked this article, please bookmark it on del.icio.us or vote for it on Digg. Required Reading: On Showing Up, Changing Your Life & Limited Goals. Every month we share upwards of 150 thought-provoking articles with you via our Twitter feed @99U. For this Required Reading column, I distill those tweets down to the top 5 pieces that made us stop in our tracks, think about something a little differently, and maybe even change the way we work. I’ve excerpted my favorite moments below, but all of these articles are worth a read in full, so get your Instapaper ready. 1.
Ten Things I Have Learned (from Milton Glaser) Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser – the mastermind behind the “I ♥ NY” design – shares ten life lessons in this blog post recapping an AIGA talk he gave back in 2001. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. 2. My roommate was trying to get in shape. 3. 4. 5. 1. 3. 4. 5. 7 Little Known Ways to Drastically Improve Your Learning. “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live.” - Mortimer Adler Note: This guest post was written by personal development blogger Scott Young. You can check out his website here.
Whether you’re heading into exams or haven’t seen the inside of a textbook in years, how you learn is going to have a big impact on your life. 1. I wrote a popular article entitled, How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying, where I detailed a process I call holistic learning. 2. You need to make the information you learn visceral. 3. If you have difficulty translating an idea into your senses, take out a pad of paper and try to draw out how the ideas fit together. 4. Another way to interlink ideas holistically and form mental pictures is to use a metaphor. 5. You can test your knowledge by using it to solve problems. 6. Teaching your knowledge to someone else is about the best way to learn it yourself. 7. Similar Posts “Diamonds are forever. Covey’s habit 3: Put first things first — be an original.