Senia.com Positive Psychology Coaching

First month of blogging! Thanks, guys! This has been very, very fun! So great to read your thoughts - in the questions section, and all over!!! Merci! The parts of the blog from this month that I’ve liked the most have been the topics about the brain, the answers that you guys put down to the questions, and the stories. Highlights from July:

The Brain Write Like a Map! - super interesting comments to this post! You Are What You Say Thinking Styles: “You Talkin’ to Me?!” This is the section I’m most psyched about this month. I started off writing about Positive Psychology, and went toward the brain and expertise.

Positive Psychology James and James: SNAP Habit Training (habits) In a Bad Mood? Pretend You’re Giving Advice to Your Friend Introducing … ASSESSMENTS!

Intuition & Fun Three Components of Intuition Tanabata - Make a Wish Today! - see the stupendous streamers Dave made for Tanabata!

Stories (Tuesdays) Wasn’t Your ‘Maybe’ a ‘Yes’? by Senia The Girl Who Became a Flower by Senia Vito’s Treasure by Vito (a guest author for this blog’s stories!) Warm Fuzzies by Claude Steiner

Quotes (Thursdays) The past just-over-a-month includes quotes on courage, action, details, self-knowledge, the universe, and freedom.

Questions (Fridays+) What actions have you spend the most TIME developing? How do you become an expert? - super interesting comments! Why? - beautiful answers Which is your favorite room in your house? Who are you happiest around? What’s the best thing in the world? - gorgeous answers

Picture of the Month

More to come especially about the Brain, Expertise, and Intuition. Mucho thank you!

:) S.

I’ve been reading about expertise lately, and Ericsson (of Florida State University) says that expertise is developed in 10,000 hours of effort at something. I was wondering, what have I spent the most time on training myself to do? (more…)

“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” ~ Thomas A. Edison

This is like the the third little pig! I am a fan of the industrious, diligent, go-get-’em third little pig. Always have been. :)

If you tend to describe a friend by saying, “she’s nice, but a real gossip,” then people may start to associate “gossip” with you. If you call someone dumb, people may start to associate dumbness with you. If you decribe how beautiful your friend is, then people may think of you as beautiful.

So shows the research by Mae, Carlston, and Skowronski (1998). David Myers summarizes the Mae et. al. research as a particular tendency that people have “when hearing someone say something good or bad about another, to associate the good or bad trait with the speaker.” Furthermore, Myers points out that this could mean that bearers of bad news get disliked, as do strangers that may remind someone of a disliked person.

This is part of a set of research called “spontaneous trait inference,” which includes infering something about a person based on how you may hear that person describe others. (Also within this field, researchers study the effects of describing, for example, a sad event while drinking coffee, and then the trait of sadness being spontaneously from that point on associated unconsciously with coffee).

One study in this field by Mae, Carlston, Skowronski, and Crawford (1999) works like this: participants are asked to memorize some photo and text pairings, such as a photo of a woman and a description about her character, and then later participants are asked to rank the woman on her character. In the same study, another group is asked to memorize pairings of a photo of a woman and a quote that she uses to describe a friend of hers, and then later participants are asked to rank the woman on her character, and the conclusions drawn about the speaker’s character are the same as if she had been describing herself and not her friend.

Even when in a different study, participants are told that pairings of photos and text are random, participants still describe (when asked two days later) the person in the photo as “cruel” or “kind” depending on the random text that had been written next to the photo. Another study in the Mae et. al. (1999) paper is when participants watch a videotape of actors pretending to be college students that describe their friends. Again, people tranfer those descriptions of friends onto the “college students” themselves.

Here is a cute article in Self-Help Magazine about being careful with gosssip. In the Mae et. al. (1999) study, the authors end the paper with their thoughts, “This has significant practical and theoretical implications. It suggests that gossip and other forms of social discourse may have rather surprising, and often unintended, implications for a communicator. Thus, it supports the cliche that if one cannot say something nice about someone, one ought not to say anything at all. It also indicates that self-presenters may achieve desired trait attributions merely by talking about others who have the desired traits.”

Here, here, and here are some additional articles in this field. Could it then be that you are what you say?

There was a boy named Meredith and a girl named Hunter. They were best friends and they were eight years old. They were always together. When people met them for the first time, they always asked, “Who’s Meredith? And who’s Hunter?” Meredith really liked being a boy with a unique name: his friends called him Dodo (which supposedly is short for Dith in Meredith). Hunter really liked being a tomboy: she loved it that teachers taking roll-call on the first day of class always expected her to be a boy. Hunter could run faster than most boys and could lift heavier items than most boys. Meredith was an exception.
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If you’re at a loud party and someone says your name from across the room, you will usually turn. There are things that your mind pays attention to, and things it doesn’t pay attention to. And this is different for different people. So if you “wanna be talkin’ to me,” for each particular person, it can help to know how that person thinks best.

Lila mentioned in her comments here that different people have different ways of remember things. For example, she said, for best retention, some people need to see a list of items while others need to hear them. True that, double true.

I was thinking, “What are the different dimensions along which people learn and think differently?” When you search for “learning styles,” the two main topics that you’ll find are Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic and MBTI, but there are so many others. Today, we check out some of the dimensions along which people think differently!

MOST WELL-KNOWN CATEGORIES OF THINKING STYLES

* Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic You may have heard this when you were in college: some people absorb information best when it is seen (visual), heard (auditory), or touched/sensed/experienced (kinesthetic). The typical examples are the equation that is written on the board, the equation that is repeatedly spoken in the classroom, and the lab experiment that you perform. Here and here are summaries of the three different styles. Here is a quick assessment you can take to determine your style among the three.

* Myers-Briggs dimensions I was surprised that there is a lot written about teaching to the four different dimensions of the MBTI type. I was introduced to the MBTI in a business context, and so I’ve never thought of it as a thinking styles assessment, but more as an overall personality assessment - especially for the business context. However there are some sites out there that particularly discuss the learning styles of the MBTI: here and here. (more…)

Here is the whole story: “The Girl Who Became a Flower!” Part I - The Girl Goes into the Woods Part II - Meeting Ms. Peony Part III - The Tulips and Viola Twins

————————————————————— Thank you for reading this three-part story! Story by Senia. Images by IconBazaar.

The first part of this short story is here and the second part is here.

“…Worried?” asked the peony. “Well, your mother and father shouldn’t be worried.”

“I wish I could get out of here,” said the sad little girl-flower. And, SHOO, straight with those words, she was picked up by a wave of wind and dropped into another spot on the ground. What? Where? How had the wind moved her completely? She tried to bend the bright orange part of her flower toward the ground, as if touching her toes - if she had had toes. She could bend towards the ground, and she saw that she was standing in a new spot. (more…)

Hi guys, happy Friday! Clarification: not “how would you become an expert?” but “how DO YOU become an expert?”

How have you become an expert on any topic?
What did you do? What was the most effective part of what you did?

Here are my items in which I’ve become an expert (I guess answering this question kind of makes you brag): * How to run a start-up company * How to do accounting for a company * How to rock climb * How to ballroom dance

“Expert” is a person’s own definition, but when you’re commenting here, please just brag! :) Don’t hold back. Let it all out. I’m a fan of bragging among friends! One of the ways that I define expert is that I could teach an intro class in any of those above topics, and that’s my personal indication of expertise.

How do I become an expert? * Practice something diligently - e.g.: rockclimbing 3x per week * Do it a long time, for many years - e.g.: running a company and accounting * Take classes! - I love taking classes and learning from experts - rock climbing, dance, going to hear CEO’s speak * Form my own opinions on the topic, OWN the topic - be able to teach rockclimbing, implement company decisions, take a position on the correct way to do something in business. * Read or watch videos or go live to see more of the topic.

Welcome to Friday questions! Look forward to reading your answers. :)

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” ~ Marie Curie (She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and she recevied TWO of them in her life! There is a book by a Harvard classmate of mine, Sarah Dry, about Marie Curie.)

“Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.” ~ Ruth Gordon

“Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.” ~ Jack Lemmon

“Do not fear mistakes, there are none.” ~ Miles Davis