August Overview - If you missed it!

August has been our busiest month so far, almost doubling the traffic of the blogs previous busiest month. All thanks to you, the readers.

So here's an overview of the month of August just in case you missed something or don't really feel like reading everything.

* In Learning, are you? I discussed how we often forget to keep learning as we get older and immersed in our work and daily routines. Learning is not easy but should not be dismissed from our lives.

* I talked about the need to take a leap of faith if we really want to achieve our goals. We'll have to lose sight of our comfort zone to get to new heights, so well depicted by Christopher Columbus's quote. This little penguin also shows what it is to take a leap of faith!

"Inspiration always arrives unannounced"

- Vanna Bonta

* On the 8th, I shared my thoughts on Converting Hate in Motivation by sharing a personal experience from when I was in University and found it hard to find passion in courses which I found boring at the time.

* When you meet someone for the first time look for the features and traits to which you can link their names to. Remembering people's name is not an easy task for the brain but there are a few tricks which can help you.

* Remember to always Challenge yourself to do things in better ways. If you are conscious about what you are doing, you'll learn and improve every time making you more and more efficient in everyday tasks. Also you'll find it more motivating when you see improvements.

* Finally, I showed you a video on The Power of Affirmation using NLP principals.

I hope you enjoyed reading the month of August's posts as much I enjoyed writing them. Keep coming for September, I have a lot of interesting topics to discuss and more ideas are always popping in my mind as I experience life.

Go for your dreams.

Video: The Power of Affirmations

I've always been a believer of the power of words on your mood and even beyond that. The following video is a good demonstration of the power of inner speech. Listen carefully at about 2:10, that's the message which should be remembered in this video.

The video is part of an NLP trainning. NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It's a field of psychology which deals in part with language and the way it affects the brain. There is a lot of material covered by NLP which are great for personal improvement. I have a few NLP topics I'm preparing for this blog so stay tuned to learn more.

If you desperately can't wait, Introducing NLP by Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour is a great place to start.

Enjoy the video!

Quick Thoughts: Challenge Yourself

Just a very short blog today to share a thought I just had.

Often when I find myself lacking the motivation to do chores I like to challenge myself. See how fast I can do something or how much I can do before a certain time. Always trying to be efficient. It's worthless to do something fast and all wrong. It makes things more fun and rewarding. So today, at lunch I had about 10-15 minutes to spare before getting back to work. In staid of lazying it out (I thought I was inventing a word but the auto-correct seams to like the word lazying, perhaps it just being lazy!) I tried to do as much house chores as I could.  10 minutes later and nothing broken I felt much more energized and happy with myself than if I'd passed those 10 minutes sitting on my butt.

 Have a good day!

Quote - Christopher Columbus - Crossing The Ocean

Continuing on the leap of faith topic from the beginning of the month. Here's one of my latest favorite quotes. Christopher did something amazing back in the days, and this quote is true to what he did. Now it is to everyone to apply it to our lives if we wish to accomplish anything great.

"You can never cross the ocean if you don't have to courage to lose sight of the shore."

- Christopher Columbus

What's your name?

In a recent post about learning I said I had a bad memory. One thing I've always had a hard time with is remembering people's name. Turns out, just like my onion problem, there is a solution.

I've found out why not too long ago. Without going into details, first I don't know them all and secondo memory is way too complex to discuss in a small blog like this. What we need to know is that our brain likes to memorize things using connections.

You know how sometimes you'll smell an odor and a memory instantly comes to mind. Freshly cooked apple pie could remind you of your mother doing some when you where only a child. The music of your first kiss. Those are strong connections. But just go through your memory and you'll see that everything is connected, it can be to an image, a sound, a smell or a feeling.

So what does that has to do with remembering people's names? The exact same thing happens with people's name. The first time you encounter someone, your brain identify that person to a "human being" possibly a male or a female. As you interact with that "human being" some features starts to come out. You notice its dark hair, its posture, its blue eyes etc. The more details you see the more that "human being" starts to be an individual in your head. At one point, some features will differentiate that "human being" from other "human beings" you know. Only once it's singled out from your general perception of a "human being" can your brain starts to make those connections which will enable you to connect a name, car, home and anything you want to link to that person.

Since the name of a person is usually given at a very early stage of an encounter at a time when that person is still seen as a general "human being" in your brain. Then the link to it's name is lost because it could not be connected to anything tangible in your brain.

So being able to memorize names has nothing to do with memory but a lot to do with observation. From the first sight to the "Hi, my name's Henry" handshake you must observe, Henry in this case, and single out some features which will make sure you'll remember Henry for Henry. A blue shirt would not work since John can also wear a blue shirt and there are good chances Henry have shirts of other colors. It must be something specific to that person, a trait

I know I'm not the only one having problems with people's name, if you are one of those I hope this is going to help you in the future.

If a tree fall in the forest?

Here's a funny bit from thedoghousediaries.com a friend sent me earlier this week. It somewhat relates to one of my earlier posts in which I questioned if we were really smarter in this new age of Information.

Anyhow, this one is funny but still not that far from reality either.

Enjoy and visit their website for more comics.

 

If it's too small to read you can view the original here.

Unannounced Quote and News

Here's today's quote.

"Inspiration always arrives unannounced."

Vanna Bonta in Rewards of Passion 

I agree, sometimes when you seek inspiration the best thing  is to forget about it and it'll often come when you least expect it. You just have to be ready for when it knocks at your door.

Some unannounced news:

As you know we've hit a 1000 views a few weeks back. Since then, the site traffic as been soaring. With the starting success the site has had so far, I have more plans for it down the road. I'm keeping them a surprise for now, until I iron out the details.

One thing I'm going to say and give you the opportunity to participate in if you like. BlissOdyssey will change name for reasons that have to do with my future plans. If you have any ideas please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Hope you are as excited as me for what's to come!

Have a great day!

Convert Hate to Motivation

Human beings are strongly opinionated individuals and even more strongly opinionated in groups. We may love art and hate sports. Maybe you enjoy reading, hopefully you do since you are reading my blog, but find watching movies boring. You might like mathematics and dislike history classes. Everyone is entitled to like and dislike what they want.

All this is subjective and should stay like that.

But sometimes matters we are not very fond of are forced on us. For example, if you are on a bus tour and a movie is playing, it's hare to ignore it even if it's a genre you don't find pleasure in watching. Same goes at university you'll have classes that doesn't interest you. The context you're in doesn't matter, if you start of with the thought that you will hate your experience, you will.

That's why you have to make a conscious effort to change your mindset prior to engaging yourself in an experience you apprehend. One thing you must know is that all disciplines have people who are passionate about it. It may not be your "thing" but it is somebody else's "thing". And if someone has found passion in it, then without a doubt there must be something of value in that discipline. So instead of blindly walk through your experience being miserable because you want to hate it, make it a personal challenge to find what adepts value in it.
      
When I was in university, I had to take a Sociology class. I thought the subject was boring from the start. Not once was I anticipating to get to that class. I had an attitude for failure from day one. What happened was, I failed. The only class that I ever failed. I took the class again the next year with the intention of finding what values it had. There are Masters in Sociology, there must be something interesting in it that some people spent their lives studying it. The second time around, I actually liked the class and passed it easily.

 Don't let your own thoughts bring you down. All experiences are worth living even if it is one that we won't want to go through again. Appreciate the value in all things and see it as a challenge to yourself instead of starting with an attitude guaranteeing failure and unhappiness.

Cheers

Penguin Leap of Faith

Sometimes, you just need to take your courage and jump.

Simply look at the following example...



If a penguin can do it, so can we all!

"To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem" 

- Nathaniel Branden 

Learning. Are you?

"Life is a learning adventure"

We've heard this, or something vaguely similar, over and over. Or even something like:

"We learn something new everyday"

Yes, those two statements are true. Yesterday, I learned that ground ivy actually crawled on the ground. I thought each leafy thing had it's own roots. See I learned something! Cool. But that's forced learning, I'm not really interested in ground ivies, I actually want to get rid of them on my lawn and tried to rip them off the ground to find out, to my amazement, that they came in bunches.

Not very long ago, I realized that I have a bad memory. I've never been able to remember names easily, phone numbers don't even ask me and historical dates are things of the past in my head. I'm not saying I'm dumb. I know a lot of things, but usually general concepts. Everything logic, I'm your man, I'm the king of coherence, rational and deduction but I don't know your name.

So what? That's me, I was made like that.

Thing is. That's not true, the true statement would read like this instead: That's me, I AM like that. I have a bad memory because I never put any effort in remembering thing, that is up to this day. It is impossible to be perfect after your childhood but for some reason, a lot of people think that because they did not acquire a particular skill when they were young that it's not them and they can't learn it anymore. Here are some phrases you hear often:

"I'd like to make good meals but I can't cook."

"Wow, you're lucky, you can play the guitar. I wish I could but my parent didn't play any instruments when I was young."

Blaming your parents or your childhood for not being able to do something today won't help you. The idea of being magically able to master something in an instant and without effort all crosses our minds, but it's far from the reality. Whatever age you are you can learn and master something. The secret behind it is practice, practice, practice and the will to learn.

Think back about a time when you were deeply passionate about something. How much space it took, in your mind and in your life. Have you spent days trying to do something as stupid as it was? I devoted days trying to be a ninja. It didn't work in the end but I was passionate about it. I learned how to tie a ninja mask with a piece of cloth... but I forgot. Darn memory! If only I could tap into that passion today.

Sure, with adult responsibilities it's not easy to try to master the guitar for countless hours. It takes discipline and passion. And a lot less TV and Facebook.

Back to my memory problem. It's funny how clueless I was when memorizing stuff. I've started some lessons and read a bit about it. I almost gave up at the first exercise after reading the techniques. I had to remember 24 completely random words without the use of pen and paper then write them down in order they were written. I can't even remember a phone number. I thought that was crazy, I almost burnt the whole thing. But after much debate I decided to give it a try...

Phone, Cupboard, TV, Cup, Plate, Dog, Fridge, Can, Helmet, Wallpaper, Leaves, Sweater, Shoulder strap, Cake, Lemon, Bike, Handkerchief, Tea, Program, Tape Recorder, Tap, Window, Sugar

Ok, that's only 23, but it was last week that I did the exercise. I've just barely put a few hours effort so far and it's already paying off.

Yes life is about learning, but it's up to you to make it about learning things YOU want to learn and improve.