Best of April | Getting Ready for the New Day
How to Free Yourself of Irrational Guilt & Unwanted Shame
A proven scientific method to stop beating yourself up over what wasn’t your fault.
You’ve had a rough day.
It started on the morning commute. You had to slam on your brakes, and poured coffee all over yourself.
Your boss gave you contradictory instructions, then he got mad when you couldn’t read his mind. The printer jammed, and you wasted half an hour trying to tease your printout free of it. When you finally got it out, it looked like your kid’s homework after the dog chewed on it.
On the way home, you take a detour past Krispy Kreme. You deserve some hot, sugary comfort food!
It lifts your mood, briefly. But then the guilt sets in.
You’ve destroyed your diet.
Since you can’t stay on a diet anyway, you may as well forget about the healthy salad you were planning for dinner. Order a burger and fries, and maybe a shake while you’re at it. You can eat it in your car, and no one needs to know.
But you know.
And you hate yourself.
That’s the cycle of guilt. We’re all familiar with it.
Your willpower is low, and you do something you shouldn’t. In the moment, you feel better. But then guilt, regret, and shame pile on. And that just leads to doing even more things you shouldn’t.
5 Top Tips to Boost Your Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is believing in your capabilities. No matter what curveball life throws at them, self-confident people can handle it.
What is self-confidence?
Self-confidence is not swagger or boasting. It’s not telling other people how great you are, or how victorious you will be. That’s arrogance.
Self-confidence is believing in your capabilities.
It’s knowing that even though you might not win this particular battle, you have the skills, knowledge, and fortitude to win the war. If you don’t have the right skills or abilities now, you can get them.
Self-confidence is believing that no one can beat you until you choose to quit. That what looks like defeat to other people, is merely a setback showing you the weakness of your current position. A weakness that you are able and willing to fix, in pursuit of your ultimate goals.
Think You’re Horrible at Math?
You've been taught math badly. Everyone has the capacity to enjoy math -- really!
I hear it all the time.
“I’m bad at math.”
“I just don’t get math.”
“I’m no good at math.”
“I can’t understand basic math. Does that mean I’m stupid?”
No. It means stupid decisions were made about how to best teach math to children, and you paid the price for it.
Four Tips to Help You Stand up for Yourself Successfully
Getting what you deserve can be a good thing.
My husband spent a fruitless half hour on the phone with customer support. His new computer monitor had worked briefly, then gone black.
Customer support offered helpful suggestions such as buying an HDMI converter. Except this particular monitor didn’t have an HDMI input port.
It was clear that the customer support representative had no clue.
I walked into his office. A glance at the power strip confirmed it was sending power to the monitor. I looked at the wires on the back of the monitor, and pushed one further in.
“It’s on!” my husband shouted. “No, it’s off again.”
How to Challenge Yourself to Learn Your Capability for Excellence
25 challenges to improve your personal and professional life.
When we get a new job, move to a new city, or do anything else novel, we have a flurry of excitement. There’s so much to do! So much to learn! So many new and interesting ways we can screw things up!
But soon, we achieve competence in our new job. We can find our favorite locations in our new city, and have made some friends. We become complacent.
Can we restore that excitement and productivity, without uprooting ourselves? Is it possible to do more, without taking on too much?
The answer is, “Yes!”
A new job or move to a new city is an externally-imposed challenge. But you can create your own internally-imposed challenges. Those force you to do more than you normally would, or do different things than ordinary.
The trick is not to challenge yourself to do something you’re likely to fail at.
Getting Ready for the New Day
How to Become a World Champion in Any Field Key points from The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin You may think that world champion athletes have trained in their chosen sport since they were children. Yet Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who was the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, only discovered the martial art of Tai Chi Chuan after he retired from competitive chess. In only a few short years, he was able to become a World Champion in the sport. The secret is that, instead...
Your Memories Are Lies For a long time, it was believed that memories were encoded in your brain as perfect, crystalline moments in time, preserved forever. As you aged, you might have more trouble finding a particular memory. But once you found it, it was as pristine and pure as ever. Then research started coming out about created memories. Ask a child enough leading questions, and they’ll build a memory of being abused. Show enough images of an event on television, and people will remember...