Monthly Archive for January, 2008

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Champion a Cause

Published on January 22, 2008 in Mental and Self-Improvement. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

One of the most powerful phrases I’ve ever read is displayed in the pavilion at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. It said, “Those who work for the good are as those who do the good.” Think about that for a minute because it’s truly powerful! There are few people in this world like Danny Thomas who founded St. Jude’s but there are millions around the world who can help the cause. What do you do to give to your community?

Zig Ziglar once said that the reason nothing can live in the Dead Sea is because it accepts water from rivers flowing into it but never lets anything out. Wealth works in much the same way. If you’re only interested in acquiring wealth and never give to the less fortunate you can bet that either the money will stop coming to you or all meaning will begin to drain from your life. Ziglar put it best when he said, “You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” But what can you do? How can you make a difference?

The “I’m just one person” excuse is a common one. The truth is, one person can make a world of difference! Take St. Jude’s for example. It takes over $1.2 million dollars a day to run that children’s hospital! How is the majority of that money raised? It’s raised when someone goes to Chili’s and pays a dollar to color in a chili pepper or when someone goes to Target and says yes when the cashier asks for a donation. Millions of people who are only one person give what they can and the seemingly impossible gets accomplished.

What will your contribution be? What are you passionate about? Do you want to improve education levels? Feed the hungry? House the homeless? Whatever your cause is, go out and find an organization that champions it and join! If you’re too busy to give your time, think of how you can integrate that cause into your business. If you’re in sales, donate a portion of your commission to your cause. You could host a fundraiser in conjunction with your business. What a great PR opportunity that would be! Think of all the free press it could generate!

Even if you simply help your organization raise money it will make a world of difference. Do you think the doctors and scientists at St. Jude’s would be able to make medical breakthroughs and save lives if there was no one out there raising money for them? No way! Remember, when you work for the good you are as those who do the good. You may just see one of the most curious laws of life; the more you give, the more you seem to get.

Positive Thinking and Self Talk

Published on January 4, 2008 in Self-Improvement. 0 Comments

Most of us have this ability to reduce ourself. This “ability” may not be that useful for many reason and primarly because there’s no point in doing it because what we tell ourselves is simply false.

Positive thinking is the ability to always see the positive option of everything. It doesn’t mean that you don’t even want to consider the bad options but that you’ve analysed them enough to know that they aren’t a big deal and aren’t worth your time.

What you want to be able to do is to find what is positive to your life and make it even better. Life is to be lived once and you must make sure to enhance it by any means. Would you ever consider living your whole life under pressure because of works and peers? That would be a nightmare. But everyone does it… Why? Because most people don’t live their life, their life lives them (they do not decide what they want in life).

Positive thinking is an healthy habit to maintain. It’s not lying to yourself, it’s simply going for what you want, maybe failing, but not over-analysing the situation which leads to action-paralysis. Once you get into the habit of seeing the positive in what could be accomplished, you won’t care if you fail because the end result will generally be better than your false conception of WHAT COULD OF happen… Yea, like it would happen, 100% sure…

Self talk. This is an interesting subject. You know, when you’re talking to yourself in your head? That’s self talk. The idea here is to simply provide you tools which will allow you to DO what you want instead of freezing up in front of situations which could lead to a win situation for you.

First, I must say that I’m not in the favor of what is called affirmations, those little sentences you tell yourself and supposely do magic. The problem with those and why it doesn’t work for most who try them out is that they aren’t authentic. They don’t come from a place of true belief and purpose. What is better is actual affirmation, in the moment. Say you are about to go do a presentation in front of a huge crowd. You start feeling not really good, but you’ve done this before. At least once.

You’ve done it once, and here we are again. What can happen now? The worst? People laughing at you, you getting unconcious, etc? Now that you’ve imagine what could happen, think about what you just imagined. Yes, it’s exagerate, fun, near impossible. Now, remember the last time, it was FINE! You did well, maybe even better than you expected. It’s going to be the same now.

The best self talk you can give yourself is from a place of confidence. If you feel like you king of the world, it will show in your actions. Confidence is gained by acting confident in inconfident situations.

I would suggest you try this: If you happen to feel stressed or unconfident in yourself at a certain point in your day, especially if you’re going to do something like speaking in front of an audience, asking a girl out, asking for a raise, etc., to tell yourself to FEEL confident and able to do the task, EASILY. We are the only person who can control our internal system, and if we decide we want to act confident, we must tell ourself to become confident.

The point of this is for you to realise, AFTER it’s been done, that the task wasn’t as huge as you IMAGINED it. Huh? Imagination again? Yes. It is the only thing that stops us from acting upon our needs and feelings.

Positive thinking with self talk will be great tools to you, if you use them, because, like knives, they need to be sharpened before they can work perfectly.

Logic or skills?

Published on January 4, 2008 in Educational and Mental. 0 Comments

Yet, I fall again in the questionning. Let see what we’ve got now:

Have you ever wondered why some students in your class (now or when you were in college) are/were getting high grade doing almost no exercices, if not at all? Well, I have an hypothesis for that: their logic supports them.

When those “talented” people were younger, they developped their own sense of logic until it reached a level where others are not at yet. Understanding faster, grading better. That’s how it works. But how about those who are hard workers and do exercises after exercises until they start to get it, is that a good way to learn? I wouldn’t say yes, but that’s a solution. I think it would be a better idea to improve your logical skills instead. This way you’ll improve yourself generally at school instead of only one specific topic.

So would logic be only the fact that makes the high graded student better? If so, a simple logical training would improve your skills and grades at school. Being logic implies you actually know what you’re doing. Actually, let me start all over.

What those people are good at is “simplifying” the complex. You may have heard of what is called a mind-map. Well, those people, having developped logic skills over the years, are able to produce logical connection in their head about various subjects, like a mind-map. They hear their teacher speaking about nucleus and they start connecting everything they already know to it: neutron, proton. Then they expand to physics, science, etc. The idea here is that they can relate what’s being taught to already learned concept.

They can generalise what they’re learning.

Over the years, I’ve come to realise that understanding a subject isn’t about understanding every small problem you’re asked to do. No. The idea is to understand HOW IT WORKS. Say for example that you are following a course, Calculus 1. You first begin the course with trouble remembering how to apply formulas and such. It’s not going really well. Over the course of the next few weeks, you go to class just to look at the teacher say stuff and write on the board. You copy what’s written, then proceed to NOT understand further. The problem at this moment is that you don’t see the RELATIONS.

What I’d suggest here is to make a simple mind-map of the subject. Put Calculus 1 in the center, then start relating concepts to it. After maybe 30 minutes, you’ll have a map that sums up what you’ve seen in the course, and you’ll realise something really interesting: the course isn’t that complicated. In fact, there’s almost nothing new. It’s just 3 or 4 method to do basically the same thing. But in class, since you had no idea, every time the teacher did an example, it was looking like a whole new subject.

With that in mind, I’d suggest that in order to learn, you grasp the general concepts. If you can do that, you won’t have any problem mastering the subject.

But remember, if you are to learn something new, you must already understand (and possibly master) the requirements. If you’re having trouble in university, don’t expect things to get better as you progress.

Conclusion? Understanding concepts and relating previous knowledge to it equals easier understanding.