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.
How to Be Charismatic: 7 Powerful Tips from the Mentalist Image by CielChen (license). My favourite new TV-show is The Mentalist. One of my favourite little interests over the last year or so has been to try to figure out why some people stand out, why they are charismatic. Now, if you have seen the Mentalist – a show about a former fake psychic who’s really good at reading people and helps the police out with solving a weekly murder case – then you have probably seen how charismatic Simon Baker is in the lead role. And even if you haven’t, this article just draws some inspiration that show. Also, I think being charismatic is about being a better you and bringing out more of yourself with less self-censoring. Find your own variation by exploring yourself. 1. Yes, this sounds really obvious. Charismatic people often seem to smile a whole lot. And, even if you don’t always feel like smiling do it from time to time anyway (not all the time though of course, that’s just weird). 2. Here’s a classic tip from Dale Carnegie: 3. Focus on your breathing.
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…
Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance. It sometimes feels like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam. This internal battle can be anything from the attempt to suppress an occasional minor irritation (did I turn off the cooker?) The classic response to this mental wrangling — whether relatively trivial or deadly serious — is to try and forget about it, push it to the back of our minds or some other variation on the theme. Thought rebound In the study that kicked off research in this area Professor Daniel Wegner and colleagues investigated the effects of thought suppression (Wegner et al., 1987). Participants who first tried to suppress their thoughts rang the bell almost twice as often as participants in a control group. Suppressing emotions
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.
60 Small Ways to Improve Your Life in the Next 100 Days Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make drastic changes in order to notice an improvement in the quality of your life. At the same time, you don’t need to wait a long time in order to see the measurable results that come from taking positive action. All you have to do is take small steps, and take them consistently, for a period of 100 days. Below you’ll find 60 small ways to improve all areas of your life in the next 100 days. Home 1. Day 1: Declutter MagazinesDay 2: Declutter DVD’sDay 3: Declutter booksDay 4: Declutter kitchen appliances 2. If you take it out, put it back.If you open it, close it.If you throw it down, pick it up.If you take it off, hang it up. 3. A burnt light bulb that needs to be changed.A button that’s missing on your favorite shirt.The fact that every time you open your top kitchen cabinet all of the plastic food containers fall out. Happiness 4. 5. 6. How many times do you beat yourself up during the day? 7. Learning/Personal Development 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
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. 1. 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. Raptitude.com Daily Transformations 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.