Educational Guides

7 Body Language Tips that will help you when you’re interacting. Leave a lasting positive impression.

1- Always look at someone directly in their eyes when they are
     speaking to you. This may seem difficult at first but it’s definitely
     the #1 body language ingredient to make you successful when
     interacting with others. Note: Do not ever stare at someone.

2- Always stand up straight. You never want to slouch. Not only
does this make you appear shorter but it projects an image of
someone who has low self-esteem.

3- Smile. Smiling is your most powerful body language signal.
     Though it is not recommended to smile constantly (people will be
     under the impression you are searching for approval), you should
     still make an effort to appear happy and optimistic.

4- Do not make repeated, nervous like gestures. When speaking to
     someone it’s important to use body movements but never fast
     and repetitive ones (picture someone who is nervous while public
     speaking; this is exactly what you're NOT aiming for).

5- Create your own personal space. Make sure you let others know
     you have your own personal space and do not let them walk all
     over you. Note: you never want to invade someone else’s
      personal space.

6- Dedicate all of your attention to the person you are speaking with.
Do not constantly look around as if you are uncomfortable or not
interested.

7- Make sure to emphasize all of these tips when you meet someone
new. First impressions count for a lot. You want to make the best
impression you can.

Climbing the corporate ladder requires hard work, good timing and a little bit of luck. It would be great if your academic credentials, job skills and performance reviews would magically open the doors to the executive suite, but life's not like that. You need to create and execute your own plan.

1- Master your current job
Even if you're not interested in making your present position your life's work, give it your very best. Keep track of your accomplishments. Find ways to increase productivity. Offer well-researched suggestions that will reduce costs. Accept constructive criticism. Always be prepared to deal with any situation without becoming defensive, blaming others or blowing your professional image.

2- Volunteer to take on (valuable) extra tasks
Plan your strategy. Sometimes it's better to take on a series of smaller tasks instead of a flashy major project in addition to your regular work. While others are vying for the more visible responsibilities, you'll be proving your worth and value by efficiently taking care of the less coveted ones.

3- Make your boss look good
Even if you do not particularly like your current manager, make it your goal to ensure the department is successful. When your boss gets promoted, someone has to take his place. Why shouldn't it be you? When you're seen as knowledgeable, skilled and interested, you'll be considered promotable. Just don't be a brownnoser or tie yourself too closely to your boss. If he's fired for incompetence, you don't want to be guilty by association.

4- Stay in close contact with the HR department
Making friends with people in personnel will help you find out quickly about upcoming openings. Your human resources department can also advise you of available training opportunities. Let it be known that you have long-term goals with the company. When decisions are being made for career development opportunities, you want to be on the HR short list.

5- Maintain positive relationships with the staff
You're not going to like everyone you work with, but no one else needs to know it. Be polite, considerate and courteous at all times. Be a team player and share accolades with others. By acknowledging the efforts of other employees, you'll earn their trust and respect. And watch your reputation. Keep your personal relationships private and don't do or say anything you might regret in the office, on business trips or at company functions.

6- Let your leadership skills shine
Every rung on the corporate ladder requires a strong image as a natural leader. Offer encouragement to others in the office, recognize special achievements and, on occasion, organize office outings. Getting the staff together for a beer after work is a great team-building tool.

7- Groom a successor
If you're the only one who can do your job, guess what? You'll be doing it forever. Share your knowledge and skills. When you're going on vacation, ask other people to handle aspects of your job and teach them how to do them well.

8- Get a mentor
Find someone you trust, preferably a senior manager or director with a lot of experience and a large network. Ask for advice. Discuss your career goals with him and plan your strategy. Sometimes you need to take a lateral transfer to gain a different type of skills in order to return to your preferred area in a higher position of authority.

9- Take additional training
No matter what your educational background is, there's always more you could learn. Look into night courses, seminars and workshops, and ask your mentor and your boss if they would add value to the company. Read business publications and books. Sign up for online informational newsletters. Stay up to date on your industry, not just your job.

10- Look presentable at all times
It's difficult to see vice president potential in someone who constantly dresses down. If khakis and polo shirts are the standard in your office, make sure yours are clean, well-pressed and of good quality. Have a sports jacket handy in case you're called to an important meeting in the executive offices. Keep your hair stylish and your shoes polished.

11- Perfect your elevator pitch
You never know when opportunity will knock. If you meet the CEO, introduce yourself in a way that will leave him wanting to learn more about you. When networking or meeting clients, you want them to remember you for the right reasons. Never brag and don't be pushy. Ambition is an admirable trait unless you're perceived as being an egotistical showoff.

12- Watch your timing
It's usually better not to ask for a promotion. Avoid bringing this up when your boss is obviously stressed and on deadline. Choose the time wisely and let it be known that you feel ready to take on additional responsibilities. Try not to show you are in a rush for a raise and a new title. Be patient.

You cannot expect to be offered a promotion based solely on merit, potential or seniority, and there will be times when someone seemingly less qualified is offered a position you feel you deserve. Don't quit in a childish huff or you'll prove that you weren't the right person for the job. Hang in there and continue following these tips. An even better position may become available or the incumbent will fail miserably and you'll be promoted to replace him.

Remain focused on your long-term career goals. Maintain your integrity, your confidence and your efforts, and you'll get yourself promoted

Eight-year-old Jennifer listened carefully as the teacher said, "After you are done with your math worksheet, get out your reading book and finish answering the questions on page fifteen, at the bottom of the page." Other children quickly went to work but Jennifer timidly raised her hand and asked the teacher to repeat the directions. Even though she is a bright child, routine oral directions such as this are hard for Jennifer to follow. Was Jennifer having trouble paying attention or did she simply forget what was said? The fact is that Jennifer is a bright child who has problems with working memory. This makes routine tasks, such as following lengthy oral directions, complicated and frustrating.

Is working memory different from short- or long-term memory? How does it affect language and reading ability in children? In the 1980s, two English researchers named Baddeley and Hitch coined the term "working memory" for the ability to hold several facts or thoughts in memory temporarily while solving a problem or performing a task. Baddeley's research also showed that there is a "central executive" or neural system in the frontal portion of the brain responsible for processing information in the "working memory." He coined the term "articulatory loop" for the process of rapid verbal repetition of the to-be-remembered information, which greatly helps maintain it in working memory.

For an example of working memory, consider the following. Imagine you are lost while driving to a meeting. You stop at a service station and the attendant says, "Make a right at the first red light. Go three blocks until you see a stop sign and make a left turn onto Willow Street. Then look for a large green sign about two and a half blocks down Willow, and enter the parking lot." Even as you read this, some of you are imagining repeating the directions over and over, under your breath, as you drive to your destination, using your own "articulatory loop". The type of memory needed to hold such information in one's mind while working on it is called working memory. Short-term memory holds information in mind for only a few seconds as it is processed. Long-term memory is where such processed information is permanently stored. Working memory is an intermediary and active memory system in the information processing area of the brain. It is an important memory system and one that most of us use every day.

Working memory weaknesses, however, plague many school-aged children and adults. Working memory is required to understand spoken language; to comprehend what is read; to write sentences, paragraphs, and stories; to do problem-solving tasks, and perform some math operations. Research on children with language delays, that is children who develop language much later than the norm but who have normal nonverbal intelligence, shows that they have working memory problems. They are referred to as having specific language impairment (SLI) and are at risk for having reading disabilities. Research has also shown that children between the ages of 4 and 6 with SLI and limited working memory capacity, have delays in vocabulary development.

The syntactic development of children is affected by working memory. Syntax refers to the order of words in sentences that contributes to meaning. The difference between the following sentences, "The dog bit the boy", and "The boy bit the dog" is due to the order of the words, or the syntax, in each. Research with school-aged children who have reading problems shows that they also have syntactic comprehension problems linked to working memory capacity. In the classroom, students with limited working memory capacity may become lost listening to lectures that introduce new concepts and vocabulary. In the adolescent and college student population, many studies have traced problems with note taking and reading comprehension to limitations in working memory. Studies on adults with reading disability also identified them as having working memory deficits.

Working memory plays an important role in math also. When a child does a page of simple single-digit math, with alternating rows of addition and subtraction problems, it is working memory that helps the child remember to add or subtract the entire row. Children use a form of working memory, called serial memory, to count the number of cookies on a plate when figuring out how many are left for lunch the next day. Remembering not to count any cookie more than once is also a function of serial memory. Adults use working memory when keeping the total price of groceries in a cart in mind, as each new item is added, so as not to exceed a predetermined amount.

Sentence comprehension relies heavily on adequate working memory. For example, working memory is required to comprehend sentences that are complex in structure such as, "The clown that is hugging the boy is kissing the girl." It helps us interpret sentences that are lengthy, "Do every other problem on page fifteen and all of the problems on page sixteen before checking your answers in the back of the book." We use working memory when preservation of word order (syntax) is important to correctly understand a sentence like; "It was the boy's ball and not the girl's, that was dirty." Working memory permits the listener to hold verbal information in mind long enough to make sense of the sequence of words, process them for long-term storage, and to perform verbal problem-solving tasks.

With repeated and extensive practice at processing information some tasks require less effort and become more automatic. Examples are learning the alphabet letter names, the addition facts or multiplication tables, and sight word vocabularies. When such skills become automatic, the brain is relieved of having to process individual units of information. This permits the brain to perform more complex processing and problem solving tasks. It also improves the efficiency of the working memory system. Some research has suggested that increased processing and working memory ability in an adult's brain is a result of greater automaticity. For children with auditory processing problems, working memory abilities often suffer. Understanding spoken language for these children is not fully automatic. They must spend so much energy processing each word sound-by-sound that language comprehension suffers.

Reading comprehension is highly dependent on working memory ability. Children who have reading comprehension problems are of concern to parents and educators. Some children have comprehension problems because they struggle when sounding out words, syllable-by-syllable, from one page to the next. Others may not have developed an adequate sight word vocabulary. Children with weak vocabulary development are also at risk for having reading comprehension problems. Yet there are many children and adults who can sound out words accurately, have well developed vocabularies, and can read sentences fluently, but who do not remember or comprehend what they read. For them it is a limitation in working memory capacity that prohibits print from becoming meaningful.

How do working memory problems interfere with reading comprehension? Reading is a complex skill that requires the simultaneous activation of many different brain processes. When reading a word, the reader must recognize the visual configuration of letters, the letter order, and must engage in segmentation (breaking the word into individual sounds). Then, while being held in working memory, the phonemes (letter sounds) must be synthesized and blended, to form recognizable words.

To comprehend sentences, several more skills are necessary. The reader must not only decode the words, but also comprehend the syntax, retain the sequence of words, use contextual cues, and have adequate vocabulary knowledge. This must be done simultaneously in order for sentences to be understood. At the same time, sentences must be held in working memory and integrated with one another. Each sentence is read, understood, associated and integrated with the previous one and so on. Eventually the entire paragraph is read and the reader continues on. By the end of the chapter both details and main idea need to be retained in working memory. Otherwise, the reader may have retained isolated facts but may not know the sequence of events nor understand the main idea.

Most of us take working memory ability for granted. We use this important memory function throughout the day when speaking, listening and particularly when reading. For the many children and adults who have working memory difficulties, reading may be something that they avoid. These are often the children in school who can read, but who don't like to read. They have difficulty retelling a story in their own words. Even some very bright children may experience school failure or be struggling to keep up, due to limitations in working memory. For them, reading is a necessary activity but certainly not one that they readily engage in. This is, in part, why they choose short stories for book reports and prefer to watch the video of classic books rather than read them.

The above problems may not be so obvious. So what are other indications of problems with working memory? How would a parent or teacher even begin to suspect that such problems exist? Some of the following "red flags" could indicate the presence of working memory problems: a) trouble following lengthy directions, b) problems understanding long spoken sentences, c) difficulty staying on topic in conversations, d) difficulty with multistep math problems, e) problems with reading comprehension, or f) memory problems. If an individual is suspected of having memory problems, there are several tests that can be used to distinguish between weakness with working memory and other difficulties. It is important to determine if there are working memory limitations so that appropriate intervention can be implemented.

Building Self-Confidence
Prepare yourself for success!

From the quietly confident doctor whose advice we rely on, to the star-quality confidence of an inspiring speaker, self-confident people have qualities that everyone admires. Jack Welch once said: “Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible” (Capitalism Magazine, 2002). This powerfully conveys the importance of self-confidence in achieving greater success in whatever you do.

Self-confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of our lives, yet so many people struggle to find it. Sadly, this can be a vicious circle: People who lack self-confidence can find it difficult to become successful.

After all, would you want to buy a product from a sales person who was shy, insecure, not able to meet your eyes, and unsure about the product he/she was selling? And would you instinctively want to back a project that was being pitched by someone who was nervous, fumbling and overly apologetic?

On the other hand, you might be persuaded by someone who spoke clearly, who held their head high, who answered questions assuredly, and who readily admitted when he/she did not know something.

Self-confident people instill confidence in others: Their audience, their peers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends and family. Gaining the confidence of others is one of the key ways in which a self-confident person finds success.

The good news is that self-confidence really can be learned and built on. And, whether you’re working on your own self-confidence or building the confidence of people around you, it’s well-worth the effort! All other things being equal, self-confidence is often the single ingredient that distinguishes a successful person from someone less successful.

Your level of self-confidence can show in many ways: your behavior, your body language, how you speak, what you say, and so on. Look at the following comparisons of common confident behavior with behavior associated with low self-confidence. Which thoughts or actions do you recognize in yourself and people around you?

As you can see from these examples, low self-confidence can be self-destructive, and it often manifests itself as negativity. Self-confident people are generally more positive – they believe in themselves and their abilities, and they also believe in the wonders of living life to the full. They tend to be popular and enjoyable to be around. Their self-confidence makes them attractive, and their attractiveness is part of what attracts success.

So, self-confidence needs to be founded on reality: realistic expectations, your skills and experience, and the effort and preparation that you are willing to put in to reach your goal.

So how do you build this sense of balanced self-confidence, founded on a firm appreciation of reality?

The good news is that building self-confidence is readily achievable, just as long as you have the focus and determination to carry things through. And what’s even better is that the things you’ll do will build success – after all, you’re confidence will come from real, solid achievement. No-one can take this away from you!

So here are our three steps to self-confidence, for which we’ll use the metaphor of starting an important journey: Preparing for your journey; setting out; and accelerating towards success.

The first step involves getting yourself ready for your journey to self-confidence. You need to take stock of where you are, think about where you want to go, get yourself in the right mindset for your journey, and commit yourself to starting it and staying with it.

Relive your life so far, and list the ten best things you’ve achieved in an “Achievement Log.” Perhaps you came top in an important test or exam, played a key role in an important team, produced the best sales figures in a period, did something that made a key difference in someone else’s life, or delivered a project that meant a lot for your business.

Put these into a professionally formatted document, which you can look at often. And then spend a few minutes each week enjoying the success you’ve already had!

Use a technique like SWOT Analysis to take a look at who and where you are. Perhaps reflecting on the list you prepared above and reflecting on your recent life, think about what your friends consider to be your strengths and weaknesses. From these, think about the opportunities and threats you face.

Then challenge these as objectively as you can, looking for evidence which supports what you think.

Setting and achieving goals is a key part of building self-confidence. To do this effectively, you need the big picture of where you want to go in life. See our article on goal setting for one approach to this, or look at our Design Your Life program to see how you can do this in a really fundamental way.

Inform your goal setting with your SWOT Analysis. Set goals that exploit your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, realize your opportunities, and control the threats you face.

And having set the major goals in your life, identify the first step in each. A tip: Make sure it’s a very small step, perhaps taking no more than an hour to complete!

Start managing your mind:
At this stage, you need to start managing your mind. Learn to pick up and defeat the negative self-talk which can destroy your confidence (see the “Real Positive Thinking” article in our 25 July 06 newsletter).

And learn how to use imagery to create strong mental images of what you’ll feel and experience as you achieve your major goals – there’s something about doing this that makes even major goals seem achievable

The final part of preparing for the journey is to make a clear and unequivocal promise to yourself that you are absolutely committed to your journey, and that you will do all in your power to achieve it

If as you’re doing it, you find doubts starting to surface, write them down and challenge them calmly and rationally. If they dissolve under scrutiny, that’s great. However if they’re risks, make sure you set additional goals to manage them appropriately.

Here you start, ever so slowly, moving towards your goal. By doing the right things, and starting with small, easy wins, you’ll put yourself on the path to success – and the self-confidence that comes with it.

Looking at your goals, identify the skills you’ll need to achieve them. And then look at how you can acquire these skills confidently and well. Don’t just accept a sketchy, just-good-enough solution – look for a solution, a program or a course that fully equips you to achieve what you want to achieve, and ideally gives you a certificate you can be proud of.

When you’re starting, don’t try to do anything clever or elaborate. And don’t reach for perfection – just enjoy doing simple things successfully and well.

Starting with the very small goals you identified in step 1, get in the habit of setting goals, achieving them, and celebrating that achievement. Don’t make goals particularly challenging at this stage, just get into the habit of achieving them and celebrating them. And little by little, start piling up the successes!

Keep managing your mind:
Stay on top of that positive thinking, keep celebrating and enjoying success, and keep those mental images strong. Perhaps use a technique like Treasure Mapping to make the visualization even stronger!

And on the other side, learn to handle failure. Accept that mistakes happen when you’re trying something new. In fact, if you get into the habit of treating mistakes as learning experiences, you can (almost) start to see them in a positive light. After all, there’s a lot to be said for the slogan “if it doesn’t kill me, it makes me stronger!”

By this stage, you’ll feel your self-confidence building. You’ll have completed some of the courses you started in step 2, and you’ll have plenty of success to celebrate!

Now’s the time to start stretching yourself. Make the goals a bit bigger, and the challenges a bit tougher. Increase the size of your commitment. And extend the skills you’ve proven into new, but closely related arenas.

As long as you keep on stretching yourself enough, but not too much, you’ll find your self-confidence building apace. What’s more, you’ll have earned your self-confidence - because you’ll have put in the hard graft necessary to be… successful.

Affinity Diagrams
Organizing Ideas Into Common Themes

Is it ever a bad thing to have too many ideas? Probably not, but if you’ve ever experienced information overload or struggled to know where to begin with a wealth of data you’ve been given, you may have wondered how you can use all of these ideas effectively.

When there’s lots of “stuff” coming at you, it is hard to sort through everything and organize the information in a way that makes sense and helps you make decisions. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, trying to solve a problem or analyzing a situation, when you are dealing with lots of information from a variety of sources, you can end up spending a huge amount of time trying to assimilate all the little bits and pieces. Rather than letting the disjointed information get the better of you, you can use an affinity diagram to help you organize it.

Also called the KJ method, after its developer Kawakita Jiro (a Japanese anthropologist) an affinity diagram helps to synthesize large amounts of data by finding relationships between ideas. The information is then gradually structured from the bottom up into meaningful groups. From there you can clearly “see” what you have, and then begin your analysis or come to a decision.

Because many decision-making exercises begin with brainstorming, this is one of the most common applications of affinity diagrams. After a brainstorming session there are usually pages of ideas. These won’t have been censored or edited in any way, many of them will be very similar, and many will also be closely related to others in a variety of ways. What an affinity diagram does is start to group the ideas into themes.

From the chaos of the randomly generated ideas comes an insight into the common threads that link groups of them together. From there the solution or best idea often emerges quite naturally. This is why affinity diagrams are so powerful and why the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers consider them one of the “seven management tools.”

Affinity diagrams are not the domain of brainstorming alone though. They can be used in any situation where:

Here is a step-by-step guide to using affinity diagrams along with a simple example to show how the process works.

2. Generate ideas by brainstorming. Write each idea on a separate sticky note and put these on a wall or flip chart. Remember to:

6. Continue to group the themes/headers until you have reached the broadest, but still meaningful, categories possible

Affinity diagrams are great tools for assimilating and understanding large amounts of information. When you work through the process of creating relationships and working backward from detailed information to broad themes, you get an insight you would not otherwise find. The next time you are confronting a large amount of information or number of ideas and you feel overwhelmed at first glance, use the affinity diagram approach to discover all the hidden linkages. When you cannot see the forest for the trees, an affinity diagram may be exactly what you need to get back in focus.

Zero Defects Get it right first time

How much do quality failures cost your company?

Quality defects have significant costs associated with them – some of the most obvious being money, time, resources, and lost reputation. And programs to eliminate quality defects can be expensive and time consuming. Do you insist on eliminating defects entirely no matter the cost? Or, do you accept that a certain, albeit very small, percentage of defects is acceptable, and just accept the costs and learn to live with them?

One of the most influential ideas about this was the notion of “zero defects.” This phrase was coined by Philip Crosby in his 1979 book titled, “Quality is Free.”

His position was that where there are zero defects, there are no costs associated with issues of poor quality; and hence, quality becomes free.

Explaining the Ide
Zero defects is a way of thinking and doing that reinforces the notion that defects are not acceptable, and that everyone should “do things right the first time”. The idea here is that with a philosophy of zero defects, you can increase profits both by eliminating the cost of failure and increasing revenues through increased customer satisfaction.

“Zero defects” is referred to as a philosophy, a mentality or a movement. It’s not a program, nor does it have distinct steps to follow or rules to abide by. This is perhaps why zero defects can be so effective, because it means it’s adaptable to any situation, business, profession or industry.

The question that often comes up when zero defects is discussed, is whether or not zero defects is ever attainable. Essentially, does adopting a zero defect environment only set users up for failure?

Zero defects is NOT about being perfect. Zero defects is about changing your perspective. It does this by demanding that you:

Zero defects is a standard. It is a measure against which any system, process, action, or outcome can be analyzed. When zero defects is the goal, every aspect of the business is subject to scrutiny in terms of whether it measures up.

When you think about it, we expect zero defects when we are talking about items or services that we use. If you buy a fancy new plasma TV and your pixels start burning by the thousands, you demand satisfaction. When you take the car in for brake service, you expect that the mechanic will install the parts exactly as the manufacturer prescribes. No defect is an acceptable defect when it affects you personally.

So why then, is it so easy to accept that “defects happen” when you are the one producing the product or providing the service? This is the interesting dichotomy that presents itself. Zero defects is one of the best ways to resolve the discord between what we expect for ourselves and what we can accept for others.

Tip:
Be very careful about where you apply zero defects. If what you’re doing contributes towards a mission critical or complex goal, you’d better adopt a zero defects approach, or things could quickly unravel.

However, if you fanatically follow a zero defects approach in areas which don’t need it, you’ll most likely be wasting resources. One of the most important of these resources is time, and this is where people are accused of time-destroying “perfectionism.”

Adopting Zero Defect
There are no step-by-step instructions for achieving zero defects, and there is no magic combination of elements that will result in them. There are, however, some guidelines and techniques to use when you decide you are ready to embrace the zero defects concept.

Management must commit to zero defects. Zero defects requires a top down approach: The best-intentioned employees cannot provide zero defects if they are not given the tools to do so.

· When you decide that zero defects is the approach you want to take, recognize that it likely represents a significant change to the way people do things. Manage the introduction using the principles of change management.

Does your heart sink a little when you are asked to prepare a written document or present information to an audience? If so, you’re not alone! Many people struggle with putting their ideas and thoughts on paper and delivering a message. It’s a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. And unless you’re fresh out of school, your writing skills, in particular, may be a little rusty.

Yet with the increase of email and working with people in remote places, delivering clear and persuasive communication is becoming more and more important. The trend is away from direct, one-on-one communication because people do not have to be face-to-face any more when they work together.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this is that when you write, you often don’t get a second chance to make your point in a different way. You get one shot, and if you lose your reader, it is difficult to get them back. This is why you need to pick and choose your words carefully, and present your points in a style, manner and sequence that best suits the message you are sending.

The Rhetorical Triangle is a useful way of formulating your thoughts and presenting your position. Here we look at how you can use it to improve your writing.

Understanding the Tool: Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the ancient art of using language to persuade. If you use it well, your audience will easily understand what you're saying, and will be influenced by your message.

By taking the time to understand how rhetorical arguments are structured and presented, you can vastly improve your own writing, and make your points clearly, efficiently and effectively.

Applying the principles of rhetoric helps you structure an argument so the truth becomes immediately apparent to your audience. With the Rhetorical Triangle approach, we focus on the three things that have the greatest impact on an argument:

According to this approach, these three factors determine the persuasiveness of your argument. Your writing – and any other form of communication – needs to take all three into consideration.

The Writer

Whether consciously or sub-consciously, your audience wants to know what your motives are for your communication. If you don’t make it clear why you are presenting information, some people will assume that you are not being totally candid, or that you are hiding something. Members of your audience may ask themselves:

The way in which the identity of the writer (or speaker) affects the argument is known as ethos. The audience wants to know who they are dealing with. So make sure you clarify:

Your audience will also be trying to figure out what your motives are and what you believe, value, and assume. This information helps them determine your credibility and decide whether you are being sincere.

The Audience

When you communicate, in writing or verbally, you need to understand your audience. Knowing who you're speaking to helps you avoid using technical terms when speaking to lay people, or “dumbing down” the content if your message is intended for professionals. Things to consider here include:

This part of the triangle is concerned with appealing to the emotions of the audience, which is known as pathos. The audience needs to be moved by what you are saying. Ask yourself:

Connecting with your audience through pathos is a strong means of gaining support.

The Context

Finally, your audience analyzes the content and circumstances of your communication.

Here the emphasis is on logic and reason, or logos (pronounced log-oss). Your audience needs to be able to follow what you are saying for it to be believable. Ask yourself:

To be fully effective and persuasive, your communication must appeal to all three of the elements of the Rhetorical Triangle. An argument that is purely based on emotion won’t last for very long. Likewise, if all you do is present facts and figures, you will lose your audience’s interest and they won’t be able to relate to what you are saying. Finally, you can be the most credible person going, but if you don’t make sense, or your arguments aren’t logical, you won’t be considered credible for very long.

Using the Rhetorical Triangle

When preparing a written document, speech or presentation you should first consider the three elements required for effective persuasion. If your communication is lacking in any of the three areas, then you'll decrease the overall impact your message will have on your audience.

Step One: Fully consider the impact your credibility has on the message. Failing to do so risks leaving your audience unconvinced. Answer the audience’s question, “Is the source credible?”

Step Two: Fully consider your audience; otherwise they may feel disconnected and the message will be lost. Appeal to their emotions where this is appropriate and honest. And answer the audience’s hidden question, “Is this person trying to manipulate me?”

Step Three: Fully consider the context of your message. And make sure you deliver it with a solid appeal to reason. Answer the audience’s question, “Is the presentation logical?”

Key Points

Making persuasive arguments is not easy. By applying the principles of rhetoric to your initial planning, you can significantly increase the success of your communication.

Your audience wants to know that you are credible, they want to know that you understand them, and they want the argument to be logical. These are the three cornerstones of the Rhetorical Triangle, and they must all be addressed in order for your argument to be effective.

Make sure you keep your message balanced between these points. That way you will ensure your message will be clearly understood and received with the correct intention. When you seek to understand how your message will be perceived in this way, you're in the perfect position to address your audience’s concerns before they even have a chance to surface.

Poor Self-Esteem vs. Healthy Self-Esteem

People with poor self-esteem often rely on how they are doing in the present to determine how they feel about themselves. They need positive external experiences to counteract the negative feelings and thoughts that constantly plague them. Even then, the good feeling (from a good grade, etc.) can be temporary.

Healthy self-esteem is based on our ability to assess ourselves accurately (know ourselves) and still be able to accept and to value ourselves unconditionally. This means being able to realistically acknowledge our strengths and limitations (which is part of being human) and at the same time accepting ourselves as worthy and worthwhile without conditions or reservations.

Where Does Self-Esteem Come From?

Our self-esteem develops and evolves throughout our lives as we build an image of ourselves through our experiences with different people and activities. Experiences during our childhood play a particularly large role in the shaping of our basic self-esteem. When we were growing up, our successes (and failures) and how we were treated by the members of our immediate family, by our teachers, coaches, religious authorities, and by our peers, all contributed to the creation of our basic self-esteem.

Self-esteem is largely developed during childhood.

THREE Faces of Low Self-Esteem

Most of us have an image of what low self-esteem looks like, but it is not always so easy to recognize. Here are three common faces that low self-esteem may wear:

The Impostor: acts happy and successful, but is really terrified of failure. Lives with the constant fear that she or he will be "found out." Needs continuous successes to maintain the mask of positive self-esteem, which may lead to problems with perfectionism, procrastination, competition, and burn-out.

The Rebel: acts like the opinions or good will of others - especially people who are important or powerful - don't matter. Lives with constant anger about not feeling "good enough." Continuously needs to prove that others' judgments and criticisms don't hurt, which may lead to problems like blaming others excessively, breaking rules or laws, or fighting authority.

The Loser: acts helpless and unable to cope with the world and waits for someone to come to the rescue. Uses self-pity or indifference as a shield against fear of taking responsibility for changing his or her life. Looks constantly to others for guidance, which can lead to such problems as lacking assertiveness skills, under-achievement, and excessive reliance on others in relationships.

Three Steps to Better Self-Esteem

Before you can begin to improve your self-esteem you must first believe that you can change it. Change doesn't necessarily happen quickly or easily, but it can happen. You are not powerless! Once you have accepted, or are at least willing to entertain the possibility that you are not powerless, there are three steps you can take to begin to change your self-esteem:

Step 1: Rebut the Inner Critic
Step 2: Practice Self-Nurturing
Step 3: Get Help from Others

Step 1: Rebut the Inner Critic

The first important step in improving self-esteem is to begin to challenge the negative messages of the critical inner voice. Here are some typical examples of the inner critic's voice and how you can "rebut" that voice.

The Inner Critic's Voice:	Your Rebuttals:
Is Unfairly Harsh: "People said they liked my presentation, but it was nowhere near as good as it should have been. I can't believe no-one noticed all the places I messed up. I'm such an impostor."	Be Reassuring: "Wow, they really liked it! Maybe it wasn't perfect, but I worked hard on that presentation and did a good job. I'm proud of myself. This was a great success."
Generalizes Unrealistically: "I got an F on the test. I don't understand anything in this class. I'm such an idiot. Who am I fooling? I shouldn't be taking this class. I'm stupid and I don't belong in college."	Be Specific: "I did poorly on this one test, but I've done O.K. on all the homework. There are some things here that I don't understand as well as I thought I did, but I can do the material-I've done fine in other classes that were just as tough.
Makes Leaps of Illogic: "He is frowning. He didn't say anything, but I know it means that he doesn't like me!"	Challenge Illogic: "O.K., he's frowning, but I don't know why. It could have nothing to do with me. Maybe I should ask."
Catastrophizes: "She turned me down for a date! I'm so embarrassed and humiliated. No one likes or cares about me. I'll never find a girlfriend. I'll always be alone."	Be Objective: "Ouch! That hurt. Well, she doesn't want to go out with me. That doesn't mean no one does. I know I'm an attractive and nice person. I'll find someone."

Step 2: Practice Self-Nurturing

Rebutting your critical inner voice is an important first step, but it is not enough. Since our self-esteem is in part due to how others have treated us in the past, the second step to more healthy self-esteem is to begin to treat yourself as a worthwhile person.

Start to challenge past negative experiences or messages by nurturing and caring for yourself in ways that show that you are valuable, competent, deserving and lovable. There are several components to self-nurturing:

Practice Basic Self-Care

Get enough sleep, eat in a healthy fashion, get regular exercise, practice good hygiene, and so forth.

Plan Fun & Relaxing Things For Yourself

You could go to a movie, take a nap, get a massage, plant a garden, buy a pet, learn to meditate-whatever you enjoy.

Reward Yourself For Your Accomplishments

You could take the night off to celebrate good grades, spend time with a friend, or compliment yourself for making that hard phone call.

Remind Yourself of Your Strengths & Achievements

One way is to make a list of things you like about yourself. Or keep a 'success' file of awards, certificates and positive letters or citations. Keep momentos of accomplishments you are proud of where you can see them.

Forgive Yourself When You Don't Do All You'd Hoped

Self-nurturing can be surprisingly hard if you are not used to doing it. Don't be critical of yourself-remember that inner voice!-when you don't do it just right.

Self-Nurture Even When You Don't Feel You Deserve It

"Fake it" until you can "make it." When you treat yourself like you deserve to feel good and be nurtured, slowly you'll come to believe it.

Step 3: Get Help from Others

Getting help from others is often the most important step a person can take to improve his or her self-esteem, but it can also be the most difficult. People with low self-esteem often don't ask for help because they feel they don't deserve it. But since low self-esteem is often caused by how other people treated you in the past, you may need the help of other people in the present to challenge the critical messages that come from negative past experiences. Here are some ways to get help from others:

Ask for Support from Friends

Ask friends to tell you what they like about you or think you do well.
Ask someone who cares about you to just listen to you "vent" for a little while without trying to "fix" things.
Ask for a hug.
Ask someone who loves you to remind you that they do.

Get Help from Teachers & Other Helpers

Go to professors or advisors or tutors to ask for help in classes if this is a problem for you. Remember: They are there to help you learn!
If you lack self-confidence in certain areas, take classes or try out new activities to increase your sense of competence (for example, take a math class, join a dance club, take swimming lessons, etc.)

Talk to a Therapist or Counselor

Sometimes low self-esteem can feel so painful or difficult to overcome that the professional help of a therapist or counselor is needed.

Talking to a counselor is a good way to learn more about your self-esteem issues and begin to improve your self-esteem.

©1999 CMHC
This brochure was designed and produced originally in a print version for
The Counseling & Mental Health Center
The University of Texas at Austin
100 West Dean Keeton St.
1 University Station A3500
Austin, Texas 78712-1052
512/471-3515

STUDENT TIME MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES

As a student, there are some basic Principles of Time Management that you can apply.

1. Identify "Best Time" for Studying: Everyone has high and low periods of attention and concentration. Are you a "morning person" or a "night person". Use your power times to study; use the down times for routines such as laundry and errands.

2. Study Difficult Subjects First: When you are fresh, you can process information more quickly and save time as a result.

3. Use Distributed Learning and Practice: Study in shorter time blocks with short breaks between. This keeps you from getting fatigued and "wasting time." This type of studying is efficient because while you are taking a break, the brain is still processing the information.

4. Make Sure the Surroundings are Conducive to Studying: This will allow you to reduce distractions which can "waste time." If there are times in the residence halls or your apartment when you know there will be noise and commotion, use that time for mindless tasks.

5. Make Room for Entertainment and Relaxation: College is more than studying. You need to have a social life, yet, you need to have a balance in your life.

6. Make Sure you Have Time to Sleep and Eat Properly: Sleep is often an activity (or lack of activity) that students use as their time management "bank." When they need a few extra hours for studying or socializing, they withdraw a few hours of sleep. Doing this makes the time they spend studying less effective because they will need a couple hours of clock time to get an hour of productive time. This is not a good way to manage yourself in relation to time.

7. Try to Combine Activities: Use the "Twofer" concept. If you are spending time at the laundromat, bring your psychology notes to study. If you are waiting in line for tickets to the REM concert, bring your biology flashcards to memorize.

These are some ideas to get you started. You can read more about time management in one of the books in the bibliography. You can also learn more at time management workshops. In addition, you should know that college students aren't the only ones who have become more efficient workers. Get a headstart and learn how to manage yourself in respect to time NOW.

Three girls are sitting on some steps in the middle of the University Union. One takes a brown bag bulging with goodies out of her backpack. The next girl pulls out her plastic bagful of lunch.

The third girl sitting a few feet away on the cold cement step leans over to ignore the hunger pain shooting through her stomach. She didn't have any money for lunch since her phone bill for the month was a little bigger then expected. Now, she has to deal with the consequence until payday. It's not that the two girls with a lunch have any more money then the other. In fact, if their incomes were all compared, they would come to about even. The thing that separates the three is that two of them know how to live on a "student budget."

Living efficiently on a student budget starts with knowing the town. I remember my freshman year when the number of times I went into the actual town part of San Luis Obispo, where I go to school, was only about once a month. By the end of the year this number increased as I got more and more familiar with my surroundings, but for a while, living in the dorms kept me pretty isolated.

I found that getting over the fear of living in a new place is the first and most important step in living efficiently on a student budget. After this fear is mastered, here are eight tips on how to eat cheaply.

There are lots of people around college campuses. They are found in classes, walking around, or in extra curricular activities. Many students have jobs at places that are located around town. Usually, the people who work like to help out their friends giving their friends the same benefits they receive for working there. A certain pizza place in San Luis Obispo is a good example. Normally, a single slice of mushroom pizza is $1.50. If a friend or acquaintance happens to be working at that particular time, the price will most likely be $0. The point is, that when meeting new people, students should make sure to find out; 1) if that person has a job and 2) where the job is and when they work.

Many places are happy to let their customers try their products, but the customers just don't know it. Trader Joes is a great example of this "hidden benefit." When I was walking down the power bar isle, one day, I decided to try something other then my usual choice of chocolate flavored POWERBAR. I stood in front of the 50 flavors of energy bars for what must have been at least ten minutes. I was trying to decide between the lemon zest LUNA bar and the honey peanut BALANCE bar, when over my shoulder, I heard someone say, "why don't you just sample one." I turned around and saw a man about 24 years of age wearing a blue shirt with the words "Trader Joes" on it. This Trader Joes worker explained about their customer satisfaction policy, which encourages customers to not be afraid to ask and try something. Now, my roommate and I are so good at practicing this policy that every time we go shopping at Trader Joes, they ask us, "what is it you want to try today?" Other places that enjoy giving samples include; ice cream and frozen yogurt shops, Starbucks, supermarkets, bread shops, candy stores, bagel shops and much more. Be sure to get permission first, though!

Not every town has a farmers market, but a good number of them do. For the towns that do, local farmers pick one day of the week to meet in a designated spot and sell their produce and anything else that people will buy. Farmers market day should be taken with precaution for students on a budget. Depending on what time of the day the market is held, it is not a good idea to eat for at least three hours before. The reason for this is to make sure full advantage can be taken of the samples sitting on the tables near the produce or other edible goods. Saturday mornings at 9 a.m. is a popular time for farmers market to be held. This is good because it opens just in time for breakfast and a student can go and fill up for free. In San Luis Obispo, farmers market is held on Thursday evening starting at 6 p.m. I'll never forget when I skipped lunch one Thursday, in preparation for the samples at farmers market. Being on a "student budget," of course I only had about $1.00 in my possession, so I couldn't afford any lunch anyway. When a friend and I arrived at farmers market, samples never tasted so good. We started at the peach and nectarine table where we sampled about two of each. From the peaches we went on to grapes then to carrots and last corn and by the time farmers market was over, we had taken full advantage of about every sample that was given out. I ended up going home filled up and it was all healthy food.

Students should be happy if the area where they live has the right kind of terrain for fruits and vegetables to grow. Too many people don't realize the hidden benefits of the orange tree down the street, or the tomato plant growing in the backyard at their rental house. For a low budget student, plants such as these are as good as gold. I wanted to test this hypothesis to see just how much food it could obtain for me. I did my experiment around the college town of San Luis Obispo where I live. Setting aside only about two hours, I rode my bike around to various neighborhoods filling my backpack with anything I could find. Asking permission from the owner first, is a good idea to avoid conflicts that could be expensive and time consuming. After getting permission, I got back to my experiment.I found oranges most and picked so many that I had to give some away to a homeless person to make room in my backpack for more of a variety of produce. I also found apples, avocado (which are expensive in stores), and some little, round, reddish-yellow "mystery fruit." When coming across mystery fruit or vegetables, it is important to make sure it is not poisonous because doctor bills are especially expensive.

Most people don't get enough water. Students are the same. Time, money, or lack of resources, are a few of the reasons why students don't drink water. Another common excuse is the all familiar, "I'm not thirsty," excuse. Whatever the reason, most people don't realize that they really are thirsty. Besides the fact that the human body is made up of 2/3 water, water can also satisfy hunger. When I have only about $0.50 in my purse and I need it to print out a five page report, taking a few gulps of water from the drinking fountain to hold me over until farmers market can be a good idea. This makes or breaks the difference between an "A" or a "B" grade on my report because I saved money to print out my work. Beer may seem like quite the opposite from water, but it has some of the hidden advantages that water does. Beer is known to contain lots of carbohydrates and calories. For some, this may be bad, but for the average student living on a budget this is a blessing in disguise. Carbohydrates and calories give people and students energy they need to function. Beer is most likely found at parties and is free (especially for girls), meaning less money I have to spend. One student, who wishes to remain anonymous for some reason, believes a person can survive weeks solely on beer. There are not any known facts or studies to prove this, but the source seems to be certain this works. As special note, if a student's main source of calories comes from beer, try to remember what has been said about water and how it is so important to stay hydrated since beer dehydrates.

$200 per month in dues, treats for a "big brother," not to mention the thousands of dollars spent on alcohol, are just some of the fees associated with being involved with "The Greeks." Even if a student isn't in a fraternity or sorority, they can still take full advantage of some of the perks Sigma Chi, Alpha Pi, or other Greek clubs offer. Sometimes smoke from the huge BBQ pits can be seen towering high above the trees at Cal Poly, SLO where I go to school. Steaks, chicken and veggie burgers (for the vegetarians) cook on the pit as Greeks professionally turn them until they are light brown. Fraternity guys with broad shoulders and even bigger pecks surround the fire like it is a place of worship. Sorority girls in pink shirts and light hair also crowd around in order to be the first to get their veggie burger. This may intimidate regular students, however, it is surprising how friendly these "Greeks" can be, especially if they don't want to waste food. This plan to "just ask" isn't 100% effective and no matter how friendly a frat. boy or sorority girl may be they may turn a student down because they don't belong. For this scenario, the best thing to do, is to try my approach of acting like it is the most normal thing in the world for me to be there. I can compare this scenario to a speaker who doesn't know much about a subject that he/she is talking about. If this speaker is a talented one and acts like he knows more about the certain subject then, the speech sounds good. If a student acts like he/she belongs at a "Greek" BBQ, then no questions will be asked.

Some of the best things come when I "Just ask." A friend and I were in the main part of our quaint college town, and we decided we were hungry. We decided to just ask a cashier at a wraps eatery if we could have one of their wraps. Sure enough, he told us to wait right there and seconds later came back with a chicken and rice wrap. When people working are approached by students who try to get something free or for a discounted price, they can only do two things; 1) they are probably so surprised with the question that they are happy to fulfill that students wishes, or 2) they get annoyed and give a lecture on how customers need to pay in order for them to get paid. Whatever the outcome, it should be noted that "just asking" is a hard thing to do because it could end up in great embarrassment or harassment.

Many students don't try and use their surroundings to the fullest advantage because they feel a sense of guilt. Sometimes I used to go in to visit a friend working at a sandwich shop and he would make me a free sandwich. When he didn't charge me I would feel kind of guilty because I didn't want him to get in trouble. The more I thought about this, the less guilty I felt. I remembered what he had told me about not doing it if he thought he was gong to get in trouble, so I realized if he didn't feel guilty neither should I. I like to believe that things are meant to be. If it is meant to be that I get a good deal on something one day and may not be as lucky the next, I try and accept it and go with the flow. The best thing I feel I can do, is be aware there are many great deals that are out there for students like me, who live on a smaller budget. Within my sense of guilt, however, I try not to get my friends in trouble. Favors from friends may have consequences within the criminal justice system, commonly known as theft and embezzlement. Always operate within your moral parameters and society's legal parameters, as the next article I may be writing will be an interview of a student in the county jail!

Many of you would like to get better grades but aren't sure exactly what will help raise your marks. You may have trouble focusing or you may get bored easily. You may think it takes too much effort to get better grades. That isn't necessarily the case. There are some very simple techniques that can help you to focus so that you'll remember things better, make your studying more efficient, get more studying done in less time, retain more information and to actually get better grades.

This technique is often overlooked. Some students might have trouble waking-up in the morning. Others may skip class to go shopping. For most students skipping an hour of class will require several hours of catching-up.

We know sitting in the front of the class makes it harder to play footsie with the person next to you. But sitting in the front will help you to focus and pay attention while helping you to retain more information. It will also help the professor to get to know your face, which may lead to more charitable feelings when grading time comes. Professors are sometimes more lenient on students they know than the faceless students in the back of the class.

Not only does this get more attention from the instructor, but also it helps to keep you from getting bored or falling asleep. The added benefit is that some Instructors give you extra credit for class participation whether they tell you so or not.

This often proves to be difficult due to conflicts with other classes, work and your social life. Students who manage to read their assignments on time retain longer and require less studying for exams. We know of a few students who kept up with all of the assignments and were able to skip cramming for final exams, much to the dismay of their fellow students. We're not saying this is easy.

Of course if you like a class and find it interesting, you're more likely to pay attention without getting bored. You are more likely to remember the lectures and the readings. Choose to take classes with interesting lecturers, who help interest and motivate you.

It's much easier to study a little bit every day than trying to get all of your studying done in one 10-hour study session each week. You may find that you have more free time to do other things without feeling guilty about a big pile of work waiting for you at home.

People vary in how they respond to various types of testing. Some do best at essays, while others do better with multiple choice or short answers. If you are given a choice of testing types choose the ones in which you excel. If you have a weakness in one of these areas, we suggest you learn what it takes to do better. Also make sure you clearly understand what criteria your professor uses in grading.

When you have classes that involve complicated materials or have large volumes of reading, you should consider forming a study group with your peers. Quiz each other and explain things to each other. If there is a large amount of material you may want divide up the research and report back to each other. If you find that you are the one person in the group who knows much more than the others, You may still gain much from the study session. You will be practicing formulating your ideas. So even if you help bring your classmates from a C to a B, you may bring yourself from a B to an A. However, if the tests are highly competitive and graded on a curve, then you need to weigh the value of your study group. Make sure you leave yourself time to study on your own.

Figure out how much work you need to do and how long it will take to do it. Set yourself the goal of completing a certain amount of work and then taking a study break. When you are studying, be very focused on studying. When you take your breaks, get up, walk around, get the blood flowing in your body and brain. If you are studying with a friend, hang out, talk, and socialize. Its harder to take breaks if you leave all of your studying to the last minute hand find yourself cramming like crazy in a 7 hour study session, but it still helps to clear your head. Measured study with break gets the most done without burning you out.

Do all your reading, writing and studying at a table, sitting upright in chair. Be sure to have good lighting, fresh air and fluids nearby. This is the number one most important technique to getting more out of studying and getting better grades. So many people lay on the floor to study, sit on a bed to study or recline on the sofa to study. If you are lying down, chances are, you'll get sleepy and fall asleep. When you are lounging, your mind drifts out of focus. When you are sitting upright, in a well-lit room, your studying will be the most focused. Every hour of studying this way could be worth two hours of studying on the bed or sofa. That means more time for fun.

Good Luck. People we know with good study habits are less stressed and require less cramming before exams. They tend to get better grades too.

As the person who shares such close quarters with you, your roommate is a very important part of college life... More

Medical science has shown that teenagers need a lot of sleep, but college may not be the best place to get it. More

Noise and Other Distractions

The noise in a college dorm doesn't just keep you awake, it can also be a detriment to studying. More

Alcohol and Cigarettes

Some students choose a dorm that is alcohol and drug free. They've made a choice before they get to college... More

Some people resort to drugs to "enhance" their sex life in some way. More

Food Issues

While overeating does have potentially serious health consequences, so can dieting, when it goes to the extremes of anorexia and bulimia. More

For anyone who does not like the thought of sharing their dorm with members of the opposite sex, almost every college has dorms where you really won't have such problems. More

Dorm Alternatives

On most college campuses, the administration wants freshmen to live in a dorm. More

Work Life

With college tuitions as high as they are, more and more students are working while they attend classes. More

Your Residential Advisor

It might be natural to look at the RA of your floor, as well as any other residential staff, as replacement of parental authorities...

Is talent something you're born with or can practice really make you perfect? Experts on expertise -- who've studied the minds of experts in fields from sports to medicine -- have the answer. As this ScienCentral News video explains, they're applying it to life or death situations.

In the Human Performance Laboratory at Florida State University's Center for Expert Performance Research, a nursing student is told to care for a simulated patient admitted for chest pain. The dummy patient's vital signs, as well as his voice, are controlled by a nursing professor behind a two-way mirror. When the "patient" suddenly can't breathe, the student gets to experience a novice nurse's nightmare -- a life-or-death situation with no one to take over and rescue the patient, or coach her what to do.

Putting both experts and novices through critical scenarios like this, cognitive psychology researchers K. Anders Ericsson and Paul Ward don't just observe the differences in subjects' performance. They also use interviewing techniques they've developed to understand the differences in their minds.

"We’re looking at how people think and how that thinking affects how they perform," says Ward.

Before a novice or expert participates in the simulation, Ward prepares them for how they will be debriefed afterward. He teaches them how to give a "think-aloud" report of their performance, in which they simply recount what they were thinking throughout the scenario without trying to evaluate or explain it.

"That’s when we uncover the expert superiority: their ability to perceive more information, and also, after the fact, remember more of the thought processes than the novices," says Ericsson.

"Some key differences would be the way in which they pick up information from the environment," Ward says, "and the way in which they comprehend that information such that they could then use it to good effect."

In fact, even in sports, where we tend to think that successful athletes have not only natural abilities, but also superior physical skills, Ward's research on top soccer players has shown that mental processes are a much better predictor of performance than physical attributes. Elite players not only make better decisions than less-skilled players, they do it by more accurately perceiving and analyzing cues around them and anticipating consequences of their actions. "These are skills that are intangible," says Ward, "because you can’t touch or feel them but they result in a difference in your performance."

Ericsson and Ward have used techniques like this to compare thousands of experts with novices in fields from music, sports, medicine and law enforcement. They've found no evidence that experts are born with any more natural "talent" than other people. "We have yet to find any compelling evidence that any talent matters," says Ericsson.

Instead, the key to dramatic improvement in any field is -- that's right -- practice. But, it has to be what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice."

"A lot of people like to do things that they’re already good at, but what deliberate practice says is you need to find those things that you are weak at and that there’s room for improvement and that’s the activity you should focus on," Ericsson says.

"The interesting finding is that experts in any domain seem to share very, very similar attributes," he says, "and they are acquired through extended practices, not just mere experience. They actually are doing a lot of thinking work that would allow them now to acquire the skills that are necessary for superior performance."

Ericsson and Ward say their findings suggest that any novice can become an expert with enough of the right kind of training. "It suggests that anyone with the right kind of practice will be able to dramatically improve their performance and it looks like they would be able to become experts with sufficient practice," Ericsson says.

They suspect that what many people think of as "talent" may just be the motivation and commitment to continually challenge yourself.

Future research is focusing on healthy people who fail to reach expert levels, exploring the idea of individual limits. They're looking at individuals who prematurely stopped practicing and don't know how far they would've reached at a particular skill. "We are actively searching for people who can help us find those kinds of individual limits that would not allow somebody to become proficient in a language or proficient in some profession," Ericsson says. "If we could understand that, it would allow us to help a lot of individuals hopefully reach much higher levels of performance."

Have you ever wondered why most of the people you know (and probably your elected representatives) insist on making dumb decisions when they are so clearly wrong? Below are ten reasons that they act like idiots without even knowing it. And as they say in poker, if you can't spot the sucker at the table, then it's probably you...

10. We’ve come this far… (sunk cost bias) - We all know that the past is past and we can’t get back money or time that we already spent. But many people irrationally take sunk costs, time, money, or other resources which have already been spent and can't be recovered, into their decision making. Barry Schwartz from Swarthmore College, author of The Paradox of Choice, in an LA Times op-ed piece highlights examples of sunk costs used in decision making, such as how much you spent to get your car fixed last time, how long you have been dating someone, how much you invested in a stock, or how many troops have been lost in Iraq so far.

9. Me me me! (egocentric bias) - Putting yourself in another person’s shoes is harder than it sounds for most people. Consider the example from an op-ed piece in the NY Times by Daniel Gilbert from Harvard, author of Stumbling on Happiness. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were connected to a device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers. The researcher began by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger, and so on. Although volunteers tried to respond with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. Is this why parties in a conflict invariably think they are both "right"?

8. That just proves my point. (confirmation bias) - Isn't it a coincidence that no matter what happens in the world, politicians can spin it to show why that confirms their opinions? A cynical explanation is that politicians twist the truth to get what they want. But a more subtle explanation is that our brains tend to search for and interpret information in ways that support our pre-exisiting opinions. As explained in a Scientific American article by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic, a study before the 2004 presidential election had 30 participants view statements by Kerry and Bush in which both men clearly contradicted themselves. The 15 of the participants who were strong Republicans were critical of Kerry but let Bush off the hook, and vice-versa. In addition, neuroimaging results showed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was inactive. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex (processing of emotions), the anterior cingulate (conflict resolution), the posterior cingulate (making judgments about moral accountability), and the ventral striatum (reward and pleasure).

7. That’s easy. (overconfidence) - According to a famous survey of drivers conducted by Ole Svenson in 1981, 80% of respondents rated themselves in the top 30% of all drivers. And anyone who doesn't see that as a strange finding probably rated themselves in the top 30% in math also. While overconfidence is definitely a good thing in many situations, it probably means people don't work on their weaknesses as much as they should. Do overconfident drivers practice safe driving given their lack of abilities? Do overconfident doctors, discussed in this HealthDay article, get the proper training? Do overconfident public officials realize when they are making bad foreign policy decisions?

6. I’m #1! I’m #1! (dysfunctional competition) - Have mixed feelings when you find out your co-workers get a promotion that you weren't even interested in? You're not alone. People's happiness is often a function of what they have relative to others. Your co-workers might be just as happy with you getting a pay cut as they would with getting a raise themselves. In a Q&A with Max Bazerman from Harvard, "When I ask people whether they would prefer a) $7 for themselves and for another person or b) $8 for themselves and $10 for the other person, people choose "b." However, when people are simply given "a" or "b," "a" makes them happier."

5. Mine mine mine! (endowment effect) - Why is it so hard for people to throw, give away or sell things that are past their prime? One theory is that people tend to place a higher value on objects they own relative to objects they do not. As explained on behaviouralfinance.net, an experiment by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler found that randomly assigned owners of a mug needed to be paid around $7 for it, while randomly assigned buyers were only willing to pay around $3. So it's likely that your neighbor values things they already have more than they would if they didn't already own them. If you have ever tried executing a trade in fantasy football right after the draft, you understand this irrationality well.

4. Watch out for sharks. (availability bias) - People are suckers for recent and memorable events. So much so, that they think these types of events are more likely to happen than they actually are. An article in Wired Magazine by Ryan Singel ranked the odds of someone dying over the past 10 years from various causes, from terrorism to a hernia to accidental poisoning. Despite the focus that terrorism has gotten in the past several years, the risk of dying from terrorism is very low compared to much more mundane ways to die such as driving off the road (80 times more likely to kill you) or even a hernia (5 times more likely to kill you). A Motley Fool article even explains how misleading vividness can cause major errors in investing (all my friends have a Treo .... I should invest in Palm!). How much of a problem is this? Well, if the world has limited resources to invest, where do you think people are going to want to spend it? Stopping the slow and steady march of global warming that won't affect any of us during our lifetimes? Or more graphic threats like terrorism?

3. If everybody else think so… (conformity) - People make decisions based on what they think and not what everyone else thinks, right? Well, a famous experiment by Solomon Asch, explained on Answers.com, had one participant and several experimenters in disguise were asked to announce their judgement about the length of several lines (such as which line was longer then the other, etc.) The experimenters in disguise were instructed to give incorrect answers to these easy questions. Surprisingly, a third of respondents gave wrong answers because of the pressure of their peers. Are these types of pressures enough to get people to do things that they know are wrong (shoplifting, accounting fraud, genocide...)?

2. Lets go hard 8! (illusion of control) - We all know that there’s no difference between my chances in craps if I have the dice or someone else at the table does, right? As explained in Wikipedia, Ellen Langer from Harvard famously showed that people rolling the dice in craps threw harder on average when going for high numbers and softer when going for low numbers. And they tended to bet more when they were rolling relative to others. This may be one reason that people know gambling doesn't pay on average, yet gladly gamble their own money. It should also cause you to question the confidence of your co-workers who know they will hit an aggressive deadline even though there are many factors out of their control.

1. He's just a moron. (attribution error) - Is the driver that cut you off a jerk? Or is he a good guy who didn't see you because he's distracted by something else going on in his life. Judging by the finger that you chose to hold up, you think he's a jerk. That's about par for the course, as most people tend to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for the actions of others. A NewYorker article by James Surowiecki discusses a classic experiement where "subjects shown a person shooting a basketball in a gym with poor lighting and another person shooting a basketball in a gym with excellent lighting assume that the second person hit more shots because he was a better player." So maybe it's better to withhold judgement about a person until you've actually talked to them. Even if they did cut in front of you in line at McDonalds.

When we speak of learning, of discovery and of the seeking of wisdom, we speak of the Hawaiian value of ‘Ike loa. Literally translated, ‘Ike is the word for knowledge. Loa means long, or extensive; thus when applied to learning, those three simple letters, loa, mean comprehensive and consequential, thoughtful and thought-provoking, constant and continuous. Taken together, in Managing with Aloha I have translated the value of ‘Ike loa as To know well; to seek knowledge and wisdom in all its wondrous forms.

When we embark on the journey of self-discovery, it is through learning that we discover our four-fold capacity; there is boundless capacity for us

How fortunate we are to have been born into the human race! We are capable of so much more than any other species on the planet, and fortunately, we have the awareness that we are.

When we believe in the value of ‘Ike loa, we believe that by virtue of our birth, we are also born with a responsibility to explore our gifts and the talents which are innate to us. We have a responsibility to live in thankfulness for them (another complementary value, that of Mahalo) by exploring them until we arrive at a place of knowing —just knowing—who we are, and who we are destined to be.

I have described Aloha for you before, as a concept of living from the inside out, alo+ha, where your alo, your outside demeanor and face presented to the world, is an authentic match for your ha, the good-and-only-good breath of life inside you, giving you a very unique identity, and thus, a very unique capacity and destiny. When we speak of our individual journey of self-discovery, we are seeking the full definition of our uniqueness so we can deliver our worth to others by using it completely. Another way to say this, is that we seek the starring role in life we were meant to play, and play as no one else possibly can, and ever could.

It can sound somewhat selfish at first, this self-absorption I describe and advocate. And admittedly it is, if you end up applying what you learn about yourself to nothing more than your own celebration of ego. However I have a much more optimistic view than that. One of the things I happen to believe in, is that as you make your self-discoveries, inevitably you also learn how to use your newfound knowledge in the very rewarding acts of using your talents in service to others.

Can I prove this? I can tell you some heart-warming stories, and I can give you some magnificent examples. In fact, you already know of them; think of any person you may consider noble in their respect for the human condition. Queen Kapi‘olani. Father Damian. Terry Fox. Martin Luther King. Mother Teresa... If they could, I believe they would all tell you they lived a charmed life despite the hardships they faced, for on the journey they ended up learning about that which they believed they were destined to do.

All it requires is that you keep yourself open to the possibilities by learning about yourself and your capacity. Allow ‘Imi ola, the diligent focus of creating good form for life to guide you. Cultivate your personal mantra of form and function. Be careful not to get caught in the rushing current of life’s other influences and rabbit trails, influences which might describe success in pretty words, but not the words you’d necessarily choose for yourself.

That can be easier said than done, and selfishness —when defined as the focus on your own capacity for lifelong learning— can serve you well in staying the course of self-discovery.

Belief, and the ability to believe with self-assured confidence can help you too. However, what I have learned on my own journey, is that the ability to believe takes some practice.

As human beings who crave social acceptance and who need to “fit in,” we thrive on achieving a healthy sense of belonging. We often experience an exceptionally strong pull in the opposite direction of self-fulfillment, in which we strive to make other people happy so they will like us, and accept us on their terms. As a consequence, our own journey of self-discovery can take the wrong fork in the road.

Believing in ourselves, and in the rightness of our own destiny, takes a sort of growing into our own skin, and feeling okay in the nakedness of it.

At this very point in time, I can tell you with raw and vulnerable truth in my own belief, that I am committed to the mission of Managing with Aloha heart and soul; that this IS my calling, to reinvent the very nature of work as we have known it with the coaching I do to bring nobility and dignity to the profession of management.

And yet… not a day goes by that I do not wonder, Did I end up to be who I am, doing what I am doing as my mission because it IS my calling, and it IS my innate talent, or because I ENDED up believing it is? Am I at a place of knowing, or of way TOO practiced believing? Could this MWA journey actually be just another chapter for me, and do I still need to do some self-discovery myself? What will be that BHAG I’m pretty sure I still want to come up with?

I haven’t decided yet, I haven’t arrived yet, and I don’t want to. I like believing that happiness is more about the journey than about the destination. The journey has always been more appealing to me.

While I speak of and coach ‘Imi ola, seeking one’s best possible life, I can’t honestly tell you I expect to ever get there myself. Personally, I kind of hope I never arrive at perfect. Learning to arrive at a place of knowing and practiced belief helps me stay humble, helps me feel very human, and keeps me engaged in the incessant learning I have fallen in love with doing.

My deepest, most fervent prayer is that my children, and all who I coach, can arrive here too. A Place of Knowing. Practiced Believing. Self-Discovery of the Innate. Lifelong, Insatiable Learning. They make for a very good life.

Joyful, Jubilant Learning

Are you ready for this? It’s unbelievably dazzling. The powerful synergy of a learning community, of you. This is what you’ve taught me about Lifelong Learning this month.

These are in no particular order; the numbers are the links to the articles these tasty morsels came from. Click through and savor the feast. Learning is food for mind, heart, and soul.

(1.) Learn from people.
(2.) Take the complex and simplify it.
(3.) Learn that being a learner is a pre-requisite for being a leader.
(4.) Engage in adult learning experiences.
(5.) Understand that observing is learning.
(6.) Grow younger as you learn.
(7.) Give in to wanting something.
(8.) Say yes to more than you normally do.
(9.) Learn mastery.
(10.) Take a leap of faith.
(11.) Learn without the pressure to become expert.
(12.) Understand it is never too late.

(13.) Start a Learning List.
(14.) Show up.
(15.) Reach out: ask for help when you need it.
(16.) Dig in: do everything you can to help yourself.
(17.) Follow your passions, they're all relevant.
(18.) Cultivate your curiosity.
(19.) Never start reading or trying something you feel indifferent about.
(20.) If you think it will probably be a cool thing to learn, it will be.
(21.) Find a mentor.
(22.) Learn to love the plateaus.
(23.) Learn the importance of context.
(24.) Be flexible and adaptable.
(25.) Learn for the desire to know more.
(26.) Learn to test things.
(27.) Learn to ask Great Questions.
(28.) Learn to ask, “What if?”
(29.) Learn about true empowerment.
(30.) Put your attention where it matters.
(31.) Have a beginner’s mindset.
(32.) Never feel worried by intellectual barriers.
(33.) Learn affirmation language.
(34.) Learn there is power in admitting to mistakes.
(35.) Learn to be bigger than your surroundings.
(36.) Learning isn't what you have to do, it's what you want to do.
(37.) Ask broad, open questions.
(38.) Learn through inquiry.
(39.) Learn to define yourself your way.
(40.) Learn what to listen FOR.
(41.) Surround yourself with other learners.
(42.) Learn to reinvent yourself .
(43.) Don't let being "smart" only define what you know.
(44.) Stop the cliches.
(45.) Be open to learning. Be ready for it.
(46.) Learning is about the potential of who you can become.
(47.) Remember "wait time."
(48.) Learn from your children.
(49.) Step into the unknown.
(50.) Reduce the risk.
(51.) Learn to change your mind.
(52.) Learn how others know what they know.
(53.) Learn the new tricks.
(54.) Recognize your learning.
(55.) Make connections in your learning.
(56.) The best learning doesn't always come to you, you need to go looking for it.
(57.) Withhold judgment.
(58.) Go back to school - by choice.
(59.) Learn by pushing through fear.
(60.) Learn by doing.
(61.) Focus on individually directed learning.
(62.) Make lifestyle choices in your learning.
(63.) Learn to be happy.
(64.) Succumb to learning serenity.
(65.) Learning is aimed to foster transformation. Period.

(1. to 65.) Learning is food for mind, heart, and soul.
(66.) The world changed for me that day; it grew exponentially. That day allowed me to question, to probe. It allowed me to become comfortable with uncertainty. It gave me permission to change my mind, to not always know absolute truth. Blaine Collins
(67.) The best way to learn a skill or lesson is to teach it. The best way to honor your teacher is to live it. The trick for both of these things is to do it well; the magic is when it works. Toni Howard
(68.) When students modify their MySpace profiles on their own or look up the stats on the newest models of motor bikes, they're learning. They're learning what they want, on their own terms, in a manner that makes sense to them. Rebecca Thomas
(69.) In the process of writing, I quickly learned that even fictional characters have a way of determining their own fates, and my carefully planned plot ended up developing a life of its own. Dan Ward
(70.) Ignorance is the only fit state for anyone who is committed to learning. Learning does not exist to replace ignorance. It is there to add to it. Adrian Savage
(71.) I immediately saw the connection between the assumptions we make the decisions we make. Accepting something to be true without proof is dangerous. Greg Balanko-Dickson
(72.) My attitude about learning began to change from a casual pursuit to an intense need to survive that Mid-Term. Fear of failure is wonderful motivator, and it was working wonders for me. Terry Starbucker
(73.) I have managed to create an incredible life by learning from, and paying attention to, letting the outside in. And this, my friends, has been the method to my gladness for years. Andrea Learned
(74.) If you’re a leader, and you’re not staying ahead of the times by learning new things in new ways, you’re soon to be an extinct leader. And if you’re extinct, you’re dead. Phil Gerbyshak
(75.) Remarkable leaders are learners because they want to be better leaders and because they want to be better people. Kevin Eikenberry
(76.) Technology is not just a conversation in itself but it is also creating conversations, person-to-person, person-to-business and business-to-business. Leah Maclean
(77.) I didn't recognize it at the time but as a result of my writing and the passion it brought me I was beginning to view life differently. I felt much more positive about myself and I began seeking the experiences that once caused me to pull back. Tim Draayer
(78.) I've been wanting to apply these basic truths to our educational system. This wisdom has been around forever; we've just never really applied it on a societal level. And I think it's high time we did. EM Sky
(79.) Picture yourself as a farmer. Imagine that each connection is a seed planted. Suppose that perodic contact with those connections is a sunshine and water injection into fertile soil. Dave Rothacker
(80.) There were a whole bunch of subjects in school that I really felt were a huge waste of time. For example: Typing. . . Now, I type every day of my life. Dwayne Melancon
(81.) Adults, as we all know, tend to learn best experientially. Sometimes though, thanks to old habits and complacency, we don’t realise what a potential for wisdom and learning we have, in the people we see and experience every day of our lives. Chris Owen
(82.) I discovered a powerful learning tool earlier this year in the form of Audio books. I find I can learn while driving, walking, and exercising. John Richardson
(83.) What better way to show what I learned from the conference than to review the conference via a podcast. Script drafted, I sat to record. Steve Sherlock
(84.) The challenge for employers, of course, is that it’s easy to look at a college degree and make some assumptions about what someone knows or doesn’t. I sympathize. Wayne Turmel
(85.) Learning occurs when the trainee actively seeks and acquires knowledge and is then motivated to use it. Lisa Haneberg
(86.) There’s a time and place to be a follower, but in order to get far in life, one needs to be a leader. Maria Palma
(87.) Being content doesn't come naturally, it's not simply a matter of genetic disposition. One must learn to be content. Tim Milburn
(88.) As convinced as I am that this spark shows up, I'm even more convinced that most people walk through life unaware of it, or with only the most fleeting notice of it. I can't do that. Stacy Brice
(89.) The lessons from characters ranging from Hamlet to Huckleberry Finn to Elizabeth Bennett are vital to our lives today. While the settings may change, the nature of people does not. Knowing about people, and their myriad of actions and motives, is a powerful gift. Wayne Hurlbert
(90.) I have learned, from Lee and others, that being a leader is about achievement. It's founded in accomplishment. Yvonne DiVita
(91.) Learning 3.0 is made possible by recent technological improvements in connectivity, which make location largely a non-factor, and by unrestricted access to knowledge. Blaine Collins
(92.) I learned to think about learning - the process, the mechanics, the patterns. I learned to analyze and constructively critique my own thoughts and learning methods. Easton Ellsworth
(93.) Helping others pays off. When the light goes on in someone’s eyes because they really get what I am saying and it begins to manifest great things in their lives, there is no better feeling than knowing I have helped turn that light on. Ken Partain
(94.) In my mana‘o, books are for learning connections. The learning gets magnified in some very extraordinary ways when books are annotated, that is, when they are written in by the person who reads them. Managing with Aloha
(95.) The Old School approach to teaching expects that all students are willing to learn. You show this by embracing the humility and respect required to honor the teacher and the lesson. Toni Howard
(96.) To learn only for the sake of learning misses the best. But to learn for the purpose of passing it on and giving back, it one of the most satifying experiences I have ever had. Gary Bourgeault
(97.) Too often, one looks for a mentor. I believe that we should have many mentors. One person will not be able to teach us everything, but many people will be able to teach us something. Tim Milburn
(98.) Someone once pointed out that the root of the english word educate comes from a latin term that means "to draw out," but in our schools these days we often act as if it means "to stuff in." Dan Ward
(99.) The willingness to admit we know nothing and to come from a state of ignorance can be more readily done if we clear excess from our minds. So many of us are suffering from information overload we dont think we have room for anything more. Karen Wallace
(100.) I often find that I'm so destination minded...that I want to find the answers. But the true joy of the journey is in realizing that there are more questions...and that there will always be more questions. Tim Milburn
(101.) My dream is that as many are spurred into action it will have a ripple effect and impact the lives of those we love amd those we do not yet know. Greg Balanko-Dickson
(102.) The thing that struck me about all this was that this was the first class in my scholastic career where I was being treated as a responsible adult, and in a very “business-like” manner. Terry Starbucker
(103.) I have found that I learn by living on the other side of any more common boundary. Force an 8 to 5 schedule on me, and I’ll squirm and gasp for air – resenting it all the way. Andrea Learned
(104.) I came to a point in my life that I wanted to get all my knowledge (inside) out by writing, speaking and coaching. Until, I got out of the corporate box, I could not expalin my restlessness and constant frustration working for others. Greg Balanko-Dickson
(105.) It's easy to find out interesting things when we first meet someone. As time goes on, those who make a habit of trying new things, learning, and sharing that learning, are like magnets who attract and keep our attention. Blaine Collins
(106.) In order to be an effective leader, we must be an effective learner. And, learning and curiosity do help us stay young - also keeps the neural pathways in the brain alive and active. Kirsten Harrell
(107.) The ones who stay in their rooms and those that get out and socialize is a matter of choice - a choice to give up and die or a choice to live and thrive. Greg Balanko-Dickson
(108.) It really is critical to have a mentor. They can teach you many things and hold you up when the times are rough but as great as they might be, you still have to make the decision to either live and learn OR be swept away by life. Tim Draayer
(109.) I had to force myself to “put it out there” and then invite/risk feedback from someone way outside my usual realm - and I had to get used to taking in criticism and learn how to funnel it back into my work effectively. Andrea Learned
(110.) Excel has tormented me like an abscessed tooth. Maybe learning a bit about it was like having the tooth pulled... Dave Rothacker
(112.) You might not get a degree….heck I’m not planning to get one, but the skills…… the knowledge…… the experience…. Those things are gettable. And you learn better when motivated. Wayne Turmel
(113.) We are better when we operate out of a sense of belonging to something worthwhile. Tim Milburn
(114.) In fact, for me, it isn't folly to choose serendipitous learning, but it would be folly, at this point, to push myself to learn. Stacy Brice
(115.) To fashion prose like F. Scott Fitzgerald or economize on words like Ernest Hemingway is the mark of a fine writer. Learning to think, and to create letters and articles in a strong prose style, sets one apart from the crowd. Wayne Hurlbert
(116.) Connected behavior is a more empathic approach that accepts subjectivity, trying to listen and ask questions in an effort to understand the other point of view. A healthy amount of connected behavior within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting deeper reflection and re-examination of their existing beliefs. Blaine Collins shares the philosophy behind Moodle.
(117.) I learned to reach higher. No matter how much I learned, there was more. No matter how good I was to others, I knew I could become better. Easton Ellsworth
(118.) Continuous learning pays off. As long as I am open to new ideas and new ways to market and promote, I can be of service to my clients. If I stop learning they will turn to someone else to take them on down the road. Ken Partain
(119.) Like so much in life, its hard to appreciate what you have without experiencing the opposite. Winning/losing, close relationships/loneliness, wealth/poverty, joy/sadness, and success/failure. Blaine Collins
(120.) I learned to treasure new knowledge. I discovered that application is the fulfillment of learning. I clutched new truth close to my intellectual bosom and shared it willingly with others. Easton Ellsworth

Very often, when perusing materials relating to improving your speed reading skills, you'll see comments to the effect that vocalization is the biggest hurdle in speed reading. Moreover, if you do happen to be one of those people who vocalize when you read, you'll need to overcome this practice if you want to significantly increase your reading speed.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that those of us who vocalize our words when we speed read have not perfected our speed reading skills. Having said that, what is vocalization - and why is it seen as being one of the biggest hurdles in speed reading?

'Vocalization', or subvocalization as it is sometimes also known, is the practice of pronouncing/speaking words out aloud, albeit under your breath or even in your head, as you read materials. The argument goes that this is a common flaw in most people's reading skills as it is a habit adopted from our formative years, when we were encouraged, by our teachers, peers and parents, to speak-out the words we were reading.

The net result of all this is that we place a limit on our ability to speed read if we vocalize the words as we read. This is because part of our brain needed to vocalize the words being read has to be activated. Vocalization - the cons

The overwhelming reason why vocalization is seen as negative is the fact that it inhibits your ability to speed read - it slows you down! Here, empirical observation seems to suggest that those who vocalize are unable to read more than 300 words per minute - and are likely unable to exceed 250 words per minute. Although reading at a rate of between 250 and 300 words per minute would make you an average reader, speed reading techniques should help you to reach at least 500 words per minute.

Furthermore, opponents of vocalization argue that rather than helping a reader to comprehend the text being read, vocalization is a barrier to such comprehension; therefore, vocalization is a hurdle not only to speed reading, but also comprehending what is being read

Proponents of vocalization who argue that vocalization is actually a good thing, base their counter-argument on two principles. First, they argue that most people are able to speak faster than they can read. Vocalization, where you speak as you read, therefore enables us to read faster - not slower.

Second, vocalization is a process that involves repeating what one has just read. Thus, by repeating something we have just read we are far more likely to be able to retain that information in our brain than would be the case if we merely only read the material.

Both of these are strong arguments: they both lead to a logical and persuasive argument that vocalization equals a better understanding of the text that we are reading.

And finally, another argument in favor of vocalization harps back to the very reason why we may vocalize in the first place: because vocalization of text helps us in our skills of verbally pronouncing the word being read.

Nonetheless, there are undoubtedly HUGE flaws with vocalization. One of these is the need to re-read material that we have only just read, which is another commonly cited limitation on one's ability to speed read.

No tried and tested method of curing vocalization has come to the forefront of speed reading techniques. Rather, what is often cited is the need to cure the problem through disciplining yourself not to speak out (vocalize) the words that you are reading as you read them. However, if you have been reading for some time, re-training yourself so that you don't vocalize words can be exhausting and time consuming!

In this regard, one method that has become popular is to read using a marker. The argument goes that if you drag the marker along the page as you read, you are less likely to vocalize your words and more like to be able to read faster.

Another method of avoiding vocalization is to readjust the focus of your eyes. Adjusting the focus of your eyes by zooming in on a word and then adjusting your eye focus outwards to see the broader picture of a whole paragraph enables you to read faster as it increases the number of words your eyes can focus on at any one time!

Melvin Ng teaches speed reading through his 16-Minute Speed Reading Audio Program. This breakthrough technique Guarantees to Double your reading speed in just 16 minutes!

So You Know What You Want... Now What?

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you,
till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then,
for it is just the place and time that the tide will turn." --Harriet Beecher Stowe

Most of my clients hire me because they want to answer the question "What's next?" They feel dissatisfied with their current job or life situation, but aren't sure what would satisfy them.

They make lots of wonderful and necessary internal changes - reshape their belief systems, overcome obstacles, gain clarity and craft a vision for the future. Then they hit "The Threshold" - that formidable mental canyon that appears once you've identified what you want and blocks you from taking those first steps toward making your dreams real.

Once you know what you want, you must cross The Threshold by taking action. For many people, this is an onerous stumbling block. A new host of fears rush in, making getting started about as easy as taking the first step onto a rickety swing bridge high above your mental canyon. It's common to experience:

Here's a hint: Dreams and ideas come to fruition through pragmatic action. It's true. You can envision, manifest, pray and meditate on the state of your cuticles until the cows come home. In fact, feel free to do this, but don't expect your dream to come true.

How, then, do you take action in the face of fear and resistance? Here are some concrete steps to take you through the mechanics of moving forward.

A - Acknowledge fear and take action anyway. Action is one of the best antidotes for fear and anxiety. Many people decide that feeling fear indicates an incorrect course of action. Nope - not true. (Note: At the threshold, it's not uncommon for you to feel attached to a specific outcome. Take action and stay unattached to the outcome. We can't predict the results of our actions; results may be immediate or may not trickle down to you until two months or two years later.)

C - Create a community of support. Support is critical. If I counted every time I've told a client "nobody who's successful and accomplished has done it alone," I'd be a very rich woman. If you don't have a supportive community, build one. Find online communities in your field or areas of interest, visit or join professional organizations, and take a look at your friends and family. Who could you reach out to and ask for support ? I recall a time when I needed extra support as I crossed that precarious mental swing bridge between one career and the next. So I asked for it. I identified two people who had room in their lives to give me extra support and I called them and asked for it. They were my lifeline during the few months I needed an extra boost.

T - Take charge. Be a leader in your own life. Set goals. Make decisions. Get clear about what you're trying to accomplish. Can't stand bookkeeping? Hire someone else to do it. Plan. Organize your time. You are the only person who can get yourself where you want to go.

I - Interview and research. If you're at the threshold, chances are you have a thirst for more information whether it's about your career transition into marine biology or your move to Tijuana. Schedule informational interviews. Set aside time to research online and at the library. Read books and magazines in your area of interest. Gathering concrete information is the name of the game.

O - Over-reward yourself. This is hard work! You must reward and motivate yourself. The next time you identify a reward for yourself, I challenge you to double it. If you haven't rewarded yourself yet, you MUST do so immediately, if not sooner. Here's why: living with mentality of abundance is going to take you much farther than a mentality of scarcity ever will.

N - Network, network, network. Each time you speak to someone about your dream or idea, make sure to utter the magic words, "Who else should I speak to?" or wording to that effect. To network is the act of building your physical connection to people. When you feel uncomfortable asking others for help, ask them how you can be helpful to them. In fact, no matter what, ask that anyway.

Standing at the edge of going after what you want can be the most challenging phase of transition. You're walking an unsteady swing bridge between where you are and where you want to be. The next time you find yourself on The Threshold between your idea and bringing it to fruition, take a deep breath and focus on this question, "What's my purpose right now?" The answer will take you where you need to go.

© Copyright © 2006 Claudette Rowley
Claudette Rowley, coach and author, helps professionals identify and pursue their true purpose and calling in life. Contact her today for a complimentary consultation at 781-316-1923 or by email. Sign up for her free newsletter "Insights for the Savvy" at www.metavoice.org.

Top ten geek business myths

Since I've started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I'd try to summarize some of the mistakes that people -- especially smart people -- make when they decide to try to turn their bright ideas into money. Here then is my top-ten list of geek business myths:

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.

Reality: A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.) Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey. This is not to say that Larry, Sergey and Bill are not bright guys -- all three of them are sharper than I can ever hope to be. But the idea that any of them woke up one day with an inspiration and coasted the rest of the way to riches is a myth.

Myth #2: If you build it they will come.

There is a grain of truth to this myth. There have been examples of businesses that just built a product, cast it upon the ether(net), and achieved success. (Google is the canonical example.) But for every Google there are ten examples of companies that had killer products that didn't sell for one reason or another. My favorite example of this is the first company I tried to start back in 1993. It was called FlowNet, and it was a new design for a high speed local area network. It ran at 500Mb/s in a time when 10 Mb/s ethernet was the norm. For more than five years, FlowNet had the best price/performance ratio of any available network. On top of that, FlowNet had built-in quality-of-service guarantees for streaming video. If FlowNet had taken over the world your streaming video would be working a lot better today than it does.

But despite the fact that on a technical level FlowNet blew everything else out of the water it was an abysmal failure as a business. We never sold a single unit. The full story of why FlowNet failed would take me far afield, but if I had to sum it up in a nutshell the reason it didn't sell was very simple: it wasn't Ethernet. And if we'd done our homework and market research we could have known that this would be, if not a show-stopper at least a significant obstacle. And we would have known it before we spent tens of thousands of dollars of our own money on patent attorneys and prototypes.

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it's too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don't have any brains then it doesn't matter what they do.)

Patent protection does serve one useful purpose: it can make investors feel warm and fuzzy, especially naive investors. But I strongly recommend that you do your own patent filings. It's not hard to do once you learn how (get the Nolo Press book "Patent it Yourself"). You'll do a better job than most patent attorneys and save yourself a lot of money.

Myth #4: What you think matters.

Reality: It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small.

Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.

As with myth #2 there is a grain of truth here. As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, prophecy is a lost art. There is no way to know for sure how much money your business is going to make, or how much it will cost to get to market. The reason for doing financial models is to do a reality check and convince yourself that making a return on investment is even a plausible possibility. If you run the numbers and find out that in order to reach break-even you need a customer base that is ten times larger than the currently known market for your product then you should probably rethink things. As Dwight Eisenhower said: plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.

This myth is the basis for one of the most classic mistakes that geeks make when pitching their ideas. They will say things like "Even if we only capture 1% of the market we'll make big bucks." Statements like that are a dead giveaway that you haven't done your homework to find out what your customers actually want. You may as well say: there's a good chance that only 1 customer in 100 will buy our product (and frankly, we're not even sure about that). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.

Reality: You've been in denial about this your whole life. You were either brought up to believe that being smart mattered, or you just didn't believe your mother when she told you that getting along with the other kids was more important than getting straight A's.

The truth is, who you know matters more than what you know. This is not to say that being smart and knowledgable is useless. Knowing "what" is often an effective means of getting introduced to the right "whos". But ultimately, the people you know and trust (and more importantly who trust you) matter more than the factual knowledge you may have at your immediate disposal. And there is a sound reason for this: business decisions are horrifically complicated. No one person can possibly amass all the knowledge and experience required to make a broad range of such decisions on their own, so effective business people delegate much of their decision-making to other people. And when they choose who to delegate to, their first pick is always people they know and trust.

Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer.

Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.

Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.

[UPDATE: this is not to say that getting a Ph.D. is useless. You can learn a lot of useful stuff by getting a Ph.D. But it's the knowledge and experience that you gain by going through the process that is potentially valuable (for business endeavors), not the degree itself.]

Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business

Reality: Unless you're building hardware (in which case you should definitely rethink what you're doing) you most likely don't need any startup capital at all. Paul Graham has written extensively about this so I won't belabor it too much, except to say this: you don't need much startup capital, but what you do need is a willingness to work your buns off. You have to bring your brilliant idea to fruition yourself; no one else will do it for you, and no one will give you the money to hire someone to do it for you. The reason is very simple: if you don't believe in the commercial potential of your idea enough to give up your evenings and weekends to own a bigger chunk of it, why should anyone else believe in it enough to put their hard-earned money at risk?

Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.

Reality: The idea is very nearly irrelevant. What matters is 1) who are your customers? 2) Why will they buy what you're selling? (Note that the reason for this could very well be something like, "Because I'm famous and I have a huge fan base and they will buy sacks of stale dog shit if it has my name on it." But in your case it will more likely be, "Because we have a great product that blows the competition out of the water.") 3) Who is on your team? and 4) What are the risks?

Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.

Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there's no money to be made. There are six billion people on this planet, and it's very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.

The good news is that it is very likely that your competition sucks. The vast majority of businesses are not run very well. They make shoddy products. They treat their customers and their employees like shit. It's not hard to find market opportunities where you can go in and kick the competition's ass. You don't want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there's plenty of that out there.

Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I'll be happy.

If you don't enjoy the process of starting a business then you will probably not succeed. It's just too much work, and it will suck you dry if you're not having fun doing it. Even if you get filthy stinking rich you will just have more time to look back across the years you wasted being miserable and nursing your acid reflux. The charm of expensive cars and whatnot wears off quickly. There's only one kind of happiness that money can buy, and that is the opportunity to be on the other side of the table when some bright kid comes along with a brilliant idea for a business.

All these myths can be neatly summarized in a pithy slogan: it's the customer, stupid. Success in business is not about having a brilliant idea. Bright ideas are a dime a dozen. Business is about taking a bright idea and assembling a team that can turn that idea into a product and bring that product to customers who want to buy it. It's that simple. And that complicated.

Good luck.

Opportunity today comes from your ability to innovate, adapt and evolve. Stay static, and you'll

The new tuna pouch provides a good segue into what is perhaps one of the most important

leadership issues that you must deal with: getting your organization out of its tin-can rut in order

Change can be rather difficult to cope with. It's easy to lose your drive, your courage to go

forward and your willingness to change. You might still be thinking tin cans when everyone else

That's why the StarKist story is so important: it's not just a product innovation — it's a culture

innovation. Here's an organization that has somehow shaken away the complacency that

enveloped it for over a century. It has woken up to the opportunity that comes from real

That's your key leadership challenge today, and one that you must begin to manage before it

􀂄 Every industry is now involved in a "race to the bottom" as low-cost producers dominate

􀂄 Every product and service is being commoditized due to the "Wal-Mart effect," leading

􀂄 Margins suffer as a result, and going "premium" might continue to be the only means to

􀂄 At the same time, hyper-innovation will come to challenge your ability to keep up with

changing expectations. Every industry is witnessing furious rates of innovation.

􀂄 Expect nano-life cycles to become the norm for most products and services; that is, product

manufacturers, for example, now expect their product to have a shelf life of only six

These are all signs of the increasing challenge that exists in the world of business today. Don't let

yourself become complacent as the world evolves around you. As a leader, it is time to confront

Rapid times require bold change; action is critical. Thinking differently about what you do is often

the first best step to adapting. My advice is simple: 1. Forget everything you know. The pace

of evolution of knowledge is now so quick that entire careers and industries are changing faster

than ever before. Consider this: some say that 65% of the kids in preschool today will work in

jobs that don't yet exist. Statistics like this clearly indicate that knowledge is momentary; learn to

grab it when you need it, and don't assume that what you know right now will have any relevance

tomorrow. Your job from this moment forward is to learn, continuously and relentlessly, about the

new world, the new technologies, methodologies and business models that surround you.

2. Trap creativity. The ideas, thoughts and initiatives of those who surround you can be your

most potent weapon. In 2005, place less emphasis on innovation-killing buzzwords such as

"compliance," "risk management" and "accountability." Readapt the buzzwords that count:

"brainstorming," "innovation" and "risk taking." We've become far too focused on managing

instead of growing, and to deal with the rate of change that surrounds us we must get back onto a

3. Get young. Take time to listen to young people. They're building the future right now, and

you'd do well to understand it. Don't expect them to subscribe to the same old beliefs that you do.

You won't survive in their future if you don't take the time to understand what they are doing,

4. Appreciate wisdom. At the same time you listen to young people, be patient with your elders.

They have experience and wisdom. Your impatience for change might delude you into thinking

that things are far easier than they really are; they know better, and have the battle scars to

5. Forget permanence. Everything is transient. The innovative new product you develop today

could be obsolete tomorrow. Accept that change is constant and the rest comes easy, since it will

help you to focus on what needs to be done, rather than looking back at what was done.

6. Change your focus. Old glories and corporate nostalgia won't define future success —

aggressiveness and adaptability will. Stop thinking about the past, and focus firmly on the future

and the challenges and opportunities that exist. The most important trait that you can work on

developing through the next year is becoming more forward-oriented so that you can spot the

7. Think "clear and present opportunities." Don't focus on the negativity of change — which

is all too easy to do. Shift your perspective, and things can easily fall into place.

8. Get excited, be happy. Studies show most people don't like change. But if you change your

attitude, you'll find that things really can improve. The next year is full of opportunity, and it's

Jim Carroll (www.jimcarroll.com) is a futurist, trends and innovation expert based in Mississauga, Ont. He welcomes your comments via e-mail at jcarroll@jimcarroll.com.

Employment Test

Put about 100 bricks in some particular order in a closed room with an open window. Then send 2 or 3 candidates into the room and close the door. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours. Then analyze the situation:

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How to Power Nap

How much do you sleep? Is that enough to keep you energized all through the day? If you’re like most people the answer is “probably not,” even if you take a good multivitamin/mineral/phytonutrient supplement. That’s why today I’ll be discussing the much taunted, much mocked, and much made fun of to the point of toomucherry yet ultimately effective technique known as “Power Napping”. (Insert whooshing sound.)

Honestly, although it is often mocked, the power nap is one of the best tools for busy people who have to rely on clarity of thought in order to be the most effective at what they do. This includes business executives, counselors, programmers, managers, coordinators, mathematicians, and of course, writers, among others. Basically if most of your work involves thinking and wiggling your fingers on a keyboard, blackboard, or waving a writing utensil over a notepad then this most likely applies to you.

A power nap can make the difference between a good idea and a great idea. It can make the difference between being enthusiastic and radiating enthusiasm. It can enhance relationships, both personal and professional, by allowing you to better concentrate on a person or group of people, their message, and enhances your ability to properly act upon the newly received information. Truly, the power nap is one of the most important skills to master as either a student or professional.

A power nap is a short nap, usually between 10 and 30 minutes long, taken in the middle of the day in order to reinvigorate you for the next part of the day. Power naps are not like regular sleep, so you won’t be groggy after taking one. While you might have “dreams”, power naps are more akin to meditation, where thoughts are allowed to move from the sub-conscious mind to the conscious mind and back again without you concentrating on them. (I’ll discuss how to do this a bit later.)

Power naps can be taken just about any place where you can fully and honestly relax: a couch, a car, a bed, and even the floor. The key here is that it must be somewhere mentally comfortable: that is, you must be able to relax completely, just as you would on your own bed. Physical comfort is also important, but without the mental comfort, the power nap looses its effect. This is why somewhere private, such as a car or a private office, is pivotal to the successful power nap.

Now, you may be asking yourself why you even need to learn how to nap. After all, isn’t napping something we learned how to do in pre-school?

While this is true, the sad fact is that after leaving primary school, most of us are forced to endure the unnatural act of staying awake from one full sleep cycle to another with no rest in between. The problem is that most of us already don’t get enough sleep – in fact, while most of us associate “full sleep cycle” with “eight hours” the sad reality is that most of us don’t get that copious amount – so attempting to keep this pattern up is detrimental for both mental acuity and, in the long run, physical health.

Again, power napping isn’t really sleeping; it’s more like meditation. Of course, in the process you will sleep, but the point of this nap is to allow your mind to unload some of the baggage already cluttering up your mind and refreshes you. Remember this as you begin your nap.

To start, find a location where you can nap uninterruptedly for at least 10 minutes, or for the duration of your power nap. Turn off the lights (if possible or desired) and, if you wish, put on something relaxing (or boring) to listen to. (Keep on reading for my suggestions regarding sound and lights.) You may also wish to put some kind of an alarm on. Remember to give yourself at least a minute to come out of the nap process.

Note: One important thing to remember is that the longer you rest, the deeper you’ll slip into your sleep, and the more likely it is you’ll be groggy when you wake up. This may cause more harm than good, so if you are to err, err on the side of too little sleep, not too much. Remember: At least 10 minutes, but no more than 30. My power naps are usually between 10 and 20 minutes long, depending on how tired I am and where I’m napping. If I don’t have at least 10 minutes then I’ll eschew napping completely and instead go out for a brisk, 10 minute walk where I can relax and not focus on any particular thought. This is a form of walking meditation.

Audio: If you’ve had an especially turbulent day, or if you suffer from tinnitus, it may be helpful to have some sort of noise in the background which you can both lock on to and ignore at the same time. That’s because if you had such a day, then relaxing your mind may take too long, or be nearly impossible, unless there is some sound there to center yourself with. This can be done with both music and spoken text.

If you choose music, you’ll probably want to play something relaxing. Stay away from anything with too much of a beat, such as pop music or techno. The beats, while comfortable to listen to when awake, may actually disturb your nap, due to the fact that your mind is trained to lock in on those beats. Instead, you may want to listen to some western classical (preferably Romantic-era music, such as late Beethoven, or Mahler, or Impressionists, such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, or Eric Satie), some east-Asia inspired meditation music, soft New Age music (like that of Enya or Loreena McKennitt), or even zero-beat ambient (see Bluemars’ Cryosleep).

If instead of music you prefer spoken word, make sure that whatever you choose isn’t too interesting at the time, and that the speaker has a pleasant voice. If you go this route, however, you may also want to consider recordings in another language, one you’re not too familiar with. This way your mind can’t lock in to anything said and what is spoken cannot affect your napping. (One of my favorite things to do is put the spoken word commentaries of films in another language, usually Japanese.) Alternatively, listening to talk radio or CSPAN is usually helpful. After all, where else will you find people using so many words to say so very very little?

Lighting: This is actually a bit of a touchy subject. Most people recommend finding a dark, comfortable place. However, that’s more of a personal issue. If you’re power napping outside by a lake then you obviously can’t turn the sun off. Likewise, you may be in an office where you are unable to control the lighting. On the other hand, you may not mind the light at all, or even prefer it over darkness. Or you may simply be one of those folks who doesn’t care either way. In any case, make sure you know what lighting situation is best for you and find a way to get into that before starting your nap.

Once you’ve found a place, make your self comfortable by lying on your back and relaxing your body. It is important that you lay facing up, even if you’re a side- or stomach-sleeper, since this pose will keep your back in proper alignment and will make it easier for your body to quickly relax. You will want to rest your hands on your stomach or on your side, depending on where you’re sleeping, and position them in such a way as to ensure that your shoulders and arms are completely relaxed.

From this point it’s all in your mind, literally. The temptation here will be to start thinking about something, anything, actively. Don’t! If a thought comes to your mind, that’s fine, let it be there, but don’t focus on it; don’t nurture it. Simply let it come and go.

If you want to expedite this process, move your pupils around a bit in order to simulate REM sleep. (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and it’s the state of sleep in which we most often dream.) This may in and of itself become a distraction, so treat this technique carefully.

Focus on your breathing. Not on the act of breathing itself, but instead focus on how your nostrils feel when air moves in and out, or how the air feels when it hits the back of your throat. If you are playing something, focus on the sound of the instruments or voice, but don’t focus on the tune, or what’s being said: it’s not important. Don’t worry if thoughts come to your mind — they’ve been doing that all your life, they’re not going to stop now. Just focus on them. Let them come and pass. If one thought is dominating your mind, let the next thought come: it’ll supersede the current thought. Keep doing that as long as you need. This way, no thought can take root, and your mind will begin to unload information faster. It may seem that your mind is now full and that you’re thinking too much, but remember that you’re not thinking about anything, thoughts are just passing. Your mind is now unloading information, and this is exactly what you want it to do.

In a short time this should almost feel like you’re starting to dream. You may, in fact, do so. That’s fine. It means you’re relaxed and your mind is refreshing itself.

If you have an alarm, once it goes off, simply open your eyes and lay there. Your alarm, should you choose to have one, should not be too intrusive. You don’t want to scare yourself out of your nap. Most cell phones have alarm features which will serve this purpose. Some people can work without an alarm, and that is just fine. In either case, when you wake up, give yourself a minute or two to bring yourself back. Concentrate on your breathing and open your eyes. Feel your body and begin to stretch. sit up slowly and take it all in. Your mind should be clear now, so simply take in whatever you see and here and realize you’re in the “now.” If you were pondering a problem previously, it is very likely you’ll now have an answer. While you were napping, your subconscious mind went to work solving whatever issue needed resolution.

After a minute or two you should be almost totally awake again, more relaxed than before; time to get up and start your day anew. If you can, take a short walk: 2 or 3 minutes will do. This will get your body back in sync with your mind.

Advice for students: Twenty uses for a Post-it Note

[T]he Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool — it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet, for all its streamlined efficiency, it was playful and user-friendly. . . .

As the photograph suggests, I’m partial to Post-it Notes. Here are twenty ways to use them:

1. Mark your place in a book. It seems so obvious, yet relatively few students seem to do it. When your professor picks up with the poem or short story or chapter of the day, you’ll be on the same page.

2. Mark the beginning and ending points for a reading assignment: immediate feedback on your progress.

6. Keep several Post-its on the inside cover of a datebook, planner, or notebook: now you’re prepared to leave a note anywhere.

7. When you sit down to work, make a small-scale to-do list on a Post-it and stick it to your desktop.

9. Avoid fines and late fees: put Post-its with due dates on library books and DVD rentals.

10. When there’s no Scotch tape, cut the sticky edge from a Post-it to use as fake tape.

12. Fold the sticky edge into a hinge to hold a piece of paper or a postcard on a wall.

15. Jot down less familiar keyboard shortcuts on a Post-it to keep by your computer.

16. Which way does the envelope go when you feed it into the printer? Draw a diagram on a Post-it and stick it on your printer.

17. If you drive an older car that doesn’t remind you that you’ve left your headlights on, use a Post-it as a reminder. When you put your lights on in the daytime, stick a Post-it note on the driver’s side window. When you leave your car, you’ll see the note and remember why it’s there.

18. Keep a Post-it on the refrigerator and jot down what you need from the supermarket.

19. When you go to the supermarket, remove the Post-it from the fridge and stick it on your wallet. At the store, stick the note to the handle of your cart and have both hands free for shopping. Toss the note when you leave the store.

20. Splurge! Use a whole pad of Post-its to make a flip book. (Thanks to my son Ben for this last tip.)

Michael Leddy is the author of“How to e-mail a professor”. He blogs atOrange Crate Art. The photograph above is of his paperback copy of Marcel Proust’sThe Guermantes Way, the third volume ofIn Search of Lost Time.

The 7 deadly sins of resumé design

September 26, 2006 by Chanpory

So you’ve labored with sweat and tears writing your resumé, and now you’re all set to turn it into a magnificently designed creation. Unfortunately, with the freedom of modern computers and fancy software, comes huge opportunities for abuse. When it comes to resumés, both non-designers and professional designers commit some almost unforgivable sins. Here are the 7 deadly sins of resumé design and how to repent:

1. Fancy “resumé” paper

Take a tour of any office supply store and you’ll see shelves of extravagant “resumé” papers featuring special “linen” and “parchment” finishes. Avoid these like dog poop on a New York summer sidewalk. They’re too expensive and don’t make you look extra special.

To repent: Save your money and get paper with a plain smooth finish. It can be slightly heavier than regular copy paper, but not stiff as a board. An ever so slight hint of cream is fine. It’ll make your resume easier on the eyes than the super-ultra-pure-snow-driven white paper many designers are fond of. I prefer Neenah Classic Crest in Natural White with a Super Smooth finish. Never ever use pink paper with strawberry scent.

2. Times New Roman

The default typeface in Microsoft Word is Times New Roman, and thus it’s the default for most resumés. It’s a tragedy, because Times’s letterspacing and wordspacing is wretched in Word. The result is an unharmonious mess.

To repent: Choose a different typeface. I won’t go into explaining x-heights or the difference between Humanist Sans and Geometric Sans. If you’ve got money to spare, pick any of the typefaces in FontShop’s professional collection, and you’ll be a step above Times New Roman. If you’re cheap, use Matthew Carter’s Georgia. It’s free and already installed on your computer. If you send your resumé electronically as a PDF, it also looks quite good on-screen. If you need more guidance, check out Before & After’s tutorial on picking typefaces.

3. Teeny tiny font size

Designers fresh out of school love teeny tiny type. The belief is that it looks elegant, refined, and allows for more white space on the resumé. It’s a shame. For all that elegance, no one can read it, because most people in hiring positions won’t have fresh baby eyes with 20/20 vision.

To repent: Set your resumé no smaller than 9 points for sans-serifed type and 10 points for serifed type. Anything smaller, and your resumé is at risk of being shredded.

4. Grey text

Designers also love grey type. On an inkjet printer, grey text looks better because it reduces the appearance of noise. If you go too light, though, it becomes illegible and unfaxable. But wait, should you really be using inkjet to print your resumé?

To repent: Use a laser printer and print in 100% black for ultimate clarity. If you do go grey, don’t go lighter than 75% black.

5. Excessive decoration

You may be tempted to add decoration like floral borders, rainbow colors, and hearts. Perhaps, you want to use an illustration of a swan, tiger or unicorn to represent you. This is great if you want to look like a box of crayons melted on your resumé. Otherwise, don’t try to be cute.

To repent: Add some character by setting your name slightly larger, or in a different weight as the same typeface as the rest of your resumé. Use color, but very sparingly, if at all. No more than one color in addition to black.

6. Weird paper size

If you live in the United States, the standard paper size is 8.5 x 11in. In Europe, it’s 210 x 297mm. Anything else will fit awkwardly in a binder or file. When it doesn’t fit, it gets thrown out.

To repent: Keep to the standard paper size of your geographic location. It’s easier to print and package.

7. Horizontal format

In an attempt to stand out, some designers format their resumés in a landscape format. This is more annoying than innovative.

To repent: Keep to a portrait format. The first person who sees your resumé is usually a Human Resources person who sees hundreds of resumes daily. Too much variation from the norm makes it harder for them to make a quick assessment of you. If you want to stand out, write a good cover letter instead.

118 Creative Ways for Students to Pay for College

So you have already looked for scholarships, grants, and loans and are still finding it hard to pay your way through college? It goes without saying that the typical college student is either broke or financially hanging in the balance most of the time. We’ve assembled a long list of both practical and creative ways you can save some green while you’re going to campus.

Managing the Money You Have

To save money you need to manage it. I hate to get on the topic of money management right off the bat, but if you expect to save money you need to be a bit savvy with the little bit of cash you have:

1. Get a free checking and savings account. The bank will nickel and dime you on dumb stuff like too many ATM withdrawals, too many checks written, or a funds transfer. Shop the town for banks catering to students. Make sure you can access online banking, pay bills and manage your account without attached fees.

2. Take the free checks that the bank offers in the maximum amount they allow - mine was initially going to give me 50, but for some reason I thought I needed more right away and paid $4.95 for another 50. If you need more, you simply go online and order more, but leftover checks are more typical than not, especially with online bill pay options becoming more commonplace. Extra checks become nothing more than wasted paper and wasted dollars.

3. Failure to keep track of your bank/checking account can easily cost you money via overdraft fees. Your debit card can easily get you into the red if you don’t know what’s in your checking account. Think your card will be declined if your account has insufficient funds? Think again.

If you go into the red in your checking account, your debit card will usually continue to work without even so much as a burp. Every time you make a debit card purchase while you have insufficient funds in your checking account you are also being slammed with a banking fee. (My banking faux pas cost me $250 in fees one weekend because I didn’t pay attention to the balance in my checking account and my debit card just kept on smokin’. On top of that, the bank charged me another separate fee to transfer funds from my savings account to my checking!) Unless you have an automatic overdraft protection that enables funds from your savings account to be transferred, you can be way more broke than you ever imagined in one, short weekend. Make sure you know what banking fees you’ll be spanked with if you make a mistake.

4. If you have to have a credit card, make sure you get one with the lowest interest rate possible; no annual fees and with only enough of a credit limit to get you by in an emergency. Don’t carry it with you, but instead keep it in a safe place known only to you.

5. Pay credit card bills on time. Companies charge late fees, sometimes as much as $50 per month. And do not go over your credit limit—that offers just one more way for your credit card company to get rich off your poor judgment.

6. Serious about saving money, huh? For one month save every receipt of everything you purchase, from a pack of gum, a tube of toothpaste to your computer. Log each expense in a notebook. When the month is up, tally up what you’ve spent and take a good look at just where most of it went. Food? Beer? Gas? Games? This sure fire technique will unabashedly expose the evils of your spending ways.

7. Save that spare change you’ve got jangling in your pocket or sloshing around in the bottom of your backpack or purse in a big jar or can somewhere out of the way.

· Stay away from those coin-counting machines you see at the grocery store. They will rip you off or at the very least charge you a fee.¹

Alcohol

It’s an expense many college students will not forego. Each year, college students spend about $5.5 billion on alcohol, mostly beer.² So here’s how to save, and some creative alternatives for your favorite beverages.

· Buy the cheap stuff. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Old English 40 oz. bottles come to mind ;)

· Buy in bulk. A cheap 5th of Vodka might cost about the same as a drink or two at a bar.

· Drink where the specials are. Some college bars and dance clubs have pitcher specials, 1 dollar drink specials, no cover charge, or other specials for people going out early or going out on slower nights.

10. For those beer lovers who really dislike the cheap beer, join a beer brewers club or get a group of dorm mates to brew beer. In the last few years the hobby has grown exponentially and college students everywhere are brewing. Warning: brewing may not be “legal” in your dorm room….que sera, sera.

12. At a sit-down restaurant avoid ordering the alcoholic beverages. Most restaurants make a killing on beer, wine and fancy cocktails. The alcohol mark up can be anywhere between 75 and 400 percent! An option is to shop for BYOB restaurants.

Books

Every college student must buy books. You’ve probably heard horror stories of textbook “final bills.” Well, we have options that will save you money on your textbooks. Make sure to allow yourself time; don’t wait to run to the bookstore the day before your class begins.

13. Before you even think about putting out money for a textbook, don’t you think someone else on campus had to already have one? Borrow if it’s possible.

14. If you can’t borrow, buy used college textbooks. On sites like Amazon.com used hardcover books are often cheapest. Soft cover are more valued for convenience, so if you’re willing to haul a couple extra ounces, then hardcover is the cost-saving choice. ISBN.nu allows you to easily compare book prices from major online book stores. The campus bookstore will sell a supply of used books, but they are limited; so check the online sources as well.

15. If you are buying new, check for an “international” edition. The book will be almost exactly the same, except for maybe some Chinese characters on the front, AND it will be exponentially cheaper.

· Sell your used textbooks online and make some cash for yourself, at the same time you will help some other starving students save their money.

· Or you can sell them back to the campus bookstore, but expect to take a big hit on the value if you sell them back to the book store. Some sneaky students wait in the campus bookstore with their old books in hand, trying to connect with new students that need their books, hoping to strike a better payout directly.

Food

Food is one of the top priorities in a college student’s life. Eating fast, eating healthy, it can all cost money if you don’t take time to consider the nitty-gritty of eating to save money.

18. If you live on campus and pay for a partial or whole meal plan, then use it. Some programs don’t restrict you from taking food to go or eating as many meals as you wish. Peanut butter packets are your friend :)

19. Have a coffee fix? If you are one of millions of college students ducking into the corner coffeehouse every morning for your daily cuppa Joe, then you are wasting money.

Your daily latte, cappuccino, or mocha will run you between $2.50 and $3.50 depending on the size you need. Seven days of that routine costs you $17.50 per week, $70 per month and around $280.00 per semester! That’s over $500 a year you drank in morning caffeine. Make your own. By the time you graduate from a four-year degree, you’ve saved over $2000 in coffee beverages. That’s just one a day….Buy a decent coffee maker or even a small espresso/cappuccino machine for your dorm room or apartment. You’ll save hundreds of dollars.

20. Don’t tip just because someone poured you a cup of coffee. Keep your own change. Everyone wants a tip; “Poor college students work here…..” You’re poor, too. They have a job. Drop it in that change jar we mentioned under “Managing the Money You Have.”

22. Skip the fast food forays and late night take-out. Make sure you keep healthy, affordable options in your room or apartment. Yogurt, cottage cheese, string cheese, bagels, peanut butter are all affordable, convenient and much more healthy than a late night burger and fries.

23. Collect coupons and follow the weekly sales at the grocery store. Avoid high-end markets like Whole Foods. These are nice, but most products cost much more. Once you’re out of school and have a good job you can shop the upscale markets.

24. Kick the bottled water habit; support your local tap water and drink for free. Get a some kind of filter if you want better tasting water.

25. Avoid a sit down restaurant with a large group. You’ll already be charged at least 15% gratuity, and if everyone decides to “split the bill,” you can really get screwed if you tried to eat cheap and didn’t splurge on alcohol. Know in advance what the tone of the party will be and what will be expected so you’re not surprised when the bill arrives.

26. Many people suggest sharing a larger meal at a restaurant, but make sure you’re eating someplace that doesn’t ding you with an extra charge for splitting.

27. Don’t have anything to eat, dining hall closed? Go to a take-out joint if you must, or some other low-cost eatery where self-serve is available and you are not obligated to tip.

28. If you’re on a date, prepare a simple, candlelit dinner and stay in; it’s not the food that counts, but the ambianc. Get your roommates to stay out for the night. Bonus ambiance tip: don't forget the Courvoisier.

29. Save your tip if the pizza guy gets lost, your order is messed up, or he is lacking in customer service and general niceness.³

Computers - Hardware and Software

Not many college students can survive these days without their own computer, but do you need to put out the big money for a souped up version, or can you make it on the stripped down model? Begin by shopping wisely following these money-saving tips:

31. If you’re buying a computer, save by shopping the student specials; discounts, rebates and back to school specials. Some regions/states even have a tax-free shopping week. Apple Computer offers student discounts to students and teachers, and consistently advertises important education incentives and rebates. I recently bought an Apple laptop because it was bundled with a free Nano iPod and a free photo printer, copier, scanner. These freebies were rebate items so I had to take the time to fill out online applications and attach copies of receipts and bar codes from the packaging, but my total savings was close to $400 for some very worthy items. Other computer companies offering student discounts:

· Dell Computer offers student discounts directly through a participating college or university.

· Hewlett Packard’s Academic Purchase Program is available to eligible students and teachers. You have to sign up. Word has it that you can save around 15% on the purchase of an HP computer. ⁴

32. Should you go for the inexpensive desktop or the snazzy little notebook model? Okay, all college students want a sharp-dressed little laptop they can take with them to class or the coffee shop. But if you know you can do without the laptop, you will possibly save hundreds of dollars shopping the desktop models. Bank the most savings if you opt for a model that gets the job done without a lot of extra (read “costly”) bells and whistles. If you MUST have a notebook, you may consider exploring the refurbished notebooks; a used laptop will cost significantly less than a model not driven off the lot yet, and in some cases you can get a darn attractive warranty and a good system to boot.

33. While you’re in college don’t take risks with your electronic equipment. Laptops and other trendy little electronics can be made off with quickly in a dorm environment. Unless you’ve bought some renter’s insurance, you will foot the bill to replace.⁵ Keep your room locked and valuables stowed.

34. Software is another high-dollar item. Using Linux software will keep you away from the higher-priced Windows alternatives. You can also buy discounted software through Apple’s Education Store. The company specializes in attracting college students and offers enticing student discounts and rewards. Microsoft discounts for students come in the shape of mass “licensing programs” through participating colleges and universities. Also shop online software clearinghouses for discounted products from all vendors. Many categorize by subject.

35. Freeware and shareware are a great way to get your hands on games, utilities, spyware removal, anti-virus and firewall programs:

· Tucows features thousands of products free or for just a few bucks-- “rated and reviewed.”

36. Decline extended warranties. Your computer should be under manufacturer’s warranty for the first year anyway. Companies dupe you into believing the plan is worthwhile. They become rich off your extra cash. Anything extra is likely just….extra.

37. Not only do we suggest you protect your physical property, but you’ll head off future repair bills if you protect your computer investment with anti-virus software and a firewall. Anti-virus and firewall protection will keep your computer in top working order and it will last much longer. When shopping for software avoid retail electronics departments. Instead seek out some good freeware and shareware products on the sites we mentioned in #35.

38. Your computer printer is a costly headache when the ink cartridges run dry. Aaaagh! Cartridges at an office supply store can cost you top dollar. Leave with a black cartridge and a color cartridge and you will likely have spent $40 or more.

· Try shopping for printer cartridges online, compare prices and find free shipping.⁶

· You may be able to get your ink cartridge refilled economically from a local ink refilling store like CartridgeWorld.

· If you are daring and a do-it-yourself type, ink refill kits can cost as little as $5 per cartridge.

39. Hacker ethic? Lifehacker shows you how to convert a laptop into a DVR recording fiend.

40. Have you ever tried to throw away an old computer? You cannot just put computer components in the trash, and that includes monitors and printers. Old inoperable computers must be recycled. Recycling typically costs you money. Facilities that recycle, and most municipalities do, must charge for their disposal services. Also consider asking if hard drives are “de-gaussed.” This means they are magnetically erased en masse. Besides municipalities and recycling businesses, some computer manufacturers such as Dell and Apple provide customers with their own recycling programs.

Entertainment- Music, Movies, Arts and Culture

You’d think you would have plenty to keep you busy what with studies and all. How to entertain oneself, on the cheap, is one of the major concerns for college students. Our best advice is to be creative.

41. Forget about the T.V. You can watch cable television through your computer. Make sure your desktop or laptop has a DVD/CD player and you can also watch your favorite movies. Your laptop has graphics equal to most HDTVs, so enjoy.

42. Nearly as essential as the T.V. is the stereo. Today’s computer speaker sets have clear high and midrange sounds with clean bass. You should be more than satisfied using your computer as the stereo. If you have your music library all set up in iTunes all you have left is to outfit yourself with a decent set of speakers and you still have saved money. Websites like Pandora create custom music channels based on a song or artist of your choice.

43. Trying to save money on going out to the movies? Hit the matinee showings. Look for free movies on campus; chances are you will find classics, independents, student films, noir and experimental.

44. Rent DVDs as a group. Pass the disk along before its due date. Everyone watches for a fraction of the cost to rent. Only share with responsible friends.

46. Have a stock of your own personal DVDs you don’t want anymore? Turn them in for credit at most of your brand name video stores.

47. Make your own movies. Talk about hours of entertainment. Stage your own music videos or film a short. Screen for friends, share a beer and laugh your a------s off.

48. Saving money on music opens a virtual Pandora’s box of methodology. If you decide to use a file sharing network program, make sure you do your research on the software program to make sure it doesn't contain any spyware or other inconvenient additions. You know, most of the mainstream pay-per-song sites cost just as much as if you went and bought a whole CD. You can still save money by just buying your favorite singles, and there are, however, many places that allow you (legally) to download music that is free- copyright-free, that is. Most of what you will get is the work of new and upcoming artists, but if you are the experimental type, you can find yourself a whole library of music. This is precisely how many future music stars are found:

49. Buy used CDs at the local music shop. Turn in your old CDs for credit and you may never have to exchange real money!

50. Start a book club. Read for entertainment, then get a group together to discuss it and enjoy each other’s company. Any interest would work for group involvement: stamp collecting, scrap-booking, weight training, running, cooking, and chess. My favorite book is A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. It rocks.

51. Study groups help keep you focused on the primary reason you’re in college- to get an education. The more time you spend being focused and involved, the less time you have to spend money on frivolous things.

52. Offer your services as a tutor. Anytime you have the opportunity to help others is less time you have worrying about what you don’t have or think you need. The sooner you find out that you can survive nicely on very little, the better off you will be; or should we say, the richer you’ll be.

53. Avoid spending money this weekend. Be creative in what you choose to do, even if it includes a picnic, a long walk, flying a kite, a pick up game of soccer or football, an impromptu poker game (not played for money), or reading a good book.

54. Volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build homes with Habitat for Humanity. Community service activities like this will not only help you fill free time wisely, but you’ll come away with a real appreciation for those who have no money.

55. Pick up a local newspaper and check upcoming events for freebies: concerts, arts and crafts fairs, theater, festivals, art galleries, and museums.

56. Opt instead one Saturday evening a month to stay in and do something alone and for yourself. Enjoy a bath and a good book. Like Kung Fu movies? Drag out the microwave popcorn and go to town. Those DVDs can’t cost much to rent and maybe someone else will chip in on it with you.

57. Play on the web! The web is a virtually limitless land which will allow you to deeply explore any topic of interest, and participate in communities discussing those topics. You can also play games like Zuma or visit true time waster sites like HotorNot.com. Searching around online auctions like eBay may help you find deals while also being entertained by the prospects of bidding and winning.

Off-Campus Apartment Living

Sometimes an off-campus apartment is a choice and in other instances it just is a necessity. Living in your own digs brings its own array of money matters. Here are a few tips to help you stay in budget living off-campus.

59. Rent a place that will have all appliances provided. Bringing in your own or having to buy is a hassle. Think you can live without the microwave? You will likely wish you had one.

60. Beg your parents - they will feel a connection to you by letting you use their stuff or by buying you new stuff. The more they buy the less you have to.

61. Don’t spend a lot on décor and accessories. There are plenty of resources for creative decorating that won’t put you in the poor house.

63. Save money on bills by keeping the A/C or heat turned down or off if possible.

64. Turn off lights; use the oven sparingly and take shorter showers. Electricity costs money. If you find an apartment where utilities may run on natural gas (stove, hot water heater) it’s generally more cost-efficient.

65. Living on an upper floor will typically keep you warmer in the winter, but it’ll get hotter in the summer. If you go to school in a region where winters are longer then upper floors are smart, otherwise live low.

66. If winters are cold and heat bills are high you can insulate your windows with plastic.

Shopping

Things must be bought at some point, but where, when and how you go about it can make all the difference to your cash flow. Remember, extras, frills, bells and whistles are the little things that really add up.

67. If you have to shop, make sure you patronize places that offer student discounts.

68. Shop for stuff you really need during the tax-free week - available in many regions of the country.

69. Shop early or late for Christmas and the holidays. There is no more stressful time for someone close to broke than the holidays. In fact, some shopping mavens stress that there is no better time to pick up Christmas presents than the day after Christmas! Need a quick Christmas gift for a friend you have yet to see? Buy last minute on clearance sales. Also, buy for next year. Savvy shoppers have no problem making this option one of the most cost efficient shopping days of their year.

70. Create Christmas and holiday gifts with your own two hands. The discount craft stores sell everything you need to make candles, soap, even beaded jewelry. If you can get a couple of crafty friends together you can all very affordably chip in for the materials and learn together.

71. Ask for practical items for Christmas or your birthday. No, it’s not much fun, but getting things you need saves you from spending the cash.

72. Get a few friends together to pitch in for the price of an annual membership at a place like Sam’s Club or Costco.

73. Buy in bulk. You’ll save money per unit for a pack of twelve bars of soap versus singles.

74. Save time and transportation money by shopping online. Make sure you choose an e-tailer with free shipping.

75. Save money in decorating the dorm room by shopping at discount stores and maybe a yard sale or two. The Pottery Barn dorm room may be great, but it’s definitely not on the bargain table.

76. Don’t shop hungry, and that goes for any kind of shopping. If you’re in the grocery store, you’ll grab more and spend more; if you’re somewhere else you’ll probably spend more than you planned getting something to eat. Carry a snack in your purse or backpack.

77. Learn how to shop for clothes at the consignment shop. Today’s second-hand is nothing like your mother’s thrift store. In fact, these places are regularly trafficked by college students and others for the great finds in name brand, “gently used” clothes and accessories.

78. While we’re on the subject of saving on clothes shopping, remember to make sure your fine consignment garments are washable versus “dry clean only.”

Transportation

Most of us have come to expect that we simply need to move around. Think foot power and you will already have taken steps to align yourself with a saving frame of mind.

80. Don’t take the car to campus. You will spend money on parking and gas, at the very least. Having no car will keep you closer to campus as well.

Travel

At some point it’s likely you will have to decide the best and least expensive route from point A to point B. It may be national or international, but you always have a cheaper choice.

83. Save money by doing the least amount of traveling necessary. Road trips are great fun, but you will put out money for gas, accommodations, food, drink andentertainment. When it’s all said and done, your long weekend will smack your wallet.

84. Name your own price for a flight or accommodations, if you must travel, by using services such as Priceline. Factors such as current events and gas prices may cause travel prices to fluctuate.

85. Check prices for Amtrak or Greyhound versus air travel. Both companies offer student discounts.

86. A student travel discount card will get you nice discounts on accommodations, food, and transportation if you are traveling nationally or internationally:

87. Carpool home for the holidays. When everyone splits the cost of gas, it’s pretty darn cheap.

The Cost of Keeping in Touch

Communicating with friends and family can run you into steep monthly costs if you are not willing to think outside the box.

88. Join your parents’ family cell phone plan. It is usually much cheaper than a standalone account.

89. Refer to cell phone comparison sites that offer side-by-side data of plans from company to company. Save time and save money on your next cell phone plan:

90. Avoid text messaging. You can easily text your way to hundreds of dollars in extra fees. Also, because text messaging is charged both to the sender as well as the receiver, ask your friends to refrain from texting you, too. Make a phone call when you are able (and during your free minutes) or send an email instead. Some cell phone plans come bundled with a maximum number of free text messages. Know how many you can send or receive without being charged extra.

91. Use a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan. This will only work if you use your cell phone on a minimal basis.

93. Use an inexpensive or free internet phone calling service. Once upon a time the sound quality and incidence of dropped digital data packets was high, but VoIP calls have come a long way, baby. Some families, especially those spread far and wide, even international, subscribe to an online conference service. Here everyone in the group may participate in a group meeting, share photos, keep current with goings on, etc.⁷

· Skype - eBay's VoIP service. Offers free incoming and outgoing calls in some areas.

· Google Talk - Google's voice enabled instant messaging service which allows you to leave voicemails

· Trillian & Gaim - instant messaging services that interface with most major IM services

94. If you are traveling, especially out of the country, catch up with friends and family before you leave, and check into the various international calling cards available.

Personal

We’ve included toiletries, personal grooming and laundry in this category - the annoying, so-not-fun expenses that are perhaps some of the most spendy. Girl Brushing Teeth.

95. Ladies, how ‘bout forego the salon nails for the year. Instead make it a girl’s night in and do each other’s nails. Same thing for waxes and facials.

96. You don’t have to let your hair grow to your knees, but you don’t have to choose the toniest “hair design” spot in town either. Shop around for a salon that offers student discounts. Have a cosmetology school nearby? They will charge much less for cuts, highlights and color in exchange for the use of your head. Also, funkier little salon/barbershops offer great services, for a fraction of the cost; you just need to be a bit adventurous.

97. Share the cost for personal toiletries. This works well if you share a room, apartment or suite with others and can agree on products that suit both or all: soap, shampoo, blow dryer, curling iron, hair spray, conditioner, package of razors, shaving cream, lotions, toothpaste, mouth wash, etc. We don't recommend sharing your tooth brush though ;)

98. Whether you share or not, it’s always a cost-saver to avoid high-end grooming products. You don’t really need the most expensive shampoo or facial scrub to keep yourself looking good. High-end products can run you between $10 and $20 per product. Buy affordable and quality products at much lower prices.

99. Shop for your personal items at a discount retailer. Money strategists suggest buying the “store brand” as a cost-saving alternative, as well.

100. Doing laundry costs money. A machine load of laundry costs at least a $1, and in most places a good bit more than that. Don’t drop your laundry at a service, stay and wash it yourself. Spend the time studying or decide to use laundry time to catch up on your favorite magazine or book. Maximize your laundry savings in the following ways:

101. If you are totally outraged with the cost to wash and dry at the nearest laundry joint or your residence laundry machines, then shop for cheaper at another nearby residential building. Most have laundry rooms. Keep your ear to the ground for the best cost per load deal in the area and only wash when it’s necessary.⁸ You can always hand wash a few items to get you through to wash day.

Exercise

If you are already involved with an athletic program, you will have plenty of opportunity to travel off campus and socialize with other students. Meals will typically be covered during team travel, too. If you are on an athletic scholarship you will already have plenty of time scheduled for practice and games or competition to worry about money.

102. Join a club or intramural sport. It will gain you instant friends and offer no-cost exercise and socialization.

103. Buy an exercise video game. A console and exercise game together cost under $200 and offer weeks or months of fun. Who knew you could lose weight playing video games? Playstation 2 offers a video game called Kinetic - The Personal Fitness Trainer. And as if that wasn't good enough, why not give Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix a try!

104. If you need music to help you have the motivation to exercise, iPods and similar devices can be bought for around $100. Many music fans also take advantage of low download costs or free downloadable music offers.

105. Ask someone to sponsor you for a marathon or other run. People do it all the time for charities. Turn paying for your education into a noble cause.

106. Enroll in an on-campus exercise class such as yoga, tai chi, kick-boxing or spinning. Exercise will keep you healthier and happier and will fill up time you might otherwise have spent spending money.

107. Feeling down and getting the urge to splurge? Instead go for a run, a bike ride, or a brisk walk. You’ll get some exercise-induced serotonin coursing through your brain and the feeling will cost you nothing.

108. Get a dog. While feeding them may seem expensive, they offer low cost company ready for a walk if you get lonely or might not exercise as much as you should. Dogs love exercise.

Make a Few Bucks

No one says you have to hold down a traditional part-time job, but there are tons of ways to make an extra buck or two while you’re in college.

110. We're not endorsing prostitution, bu if you can give some of yourself by donating blood plasma, you can net an extra couple hundred dollars a month. But, be careful if you try combining this with alchohol. ;)

111. Volunteer for a medical study. Most do not require much time and you get paid!

112. Sell your expertise in a subject as a tutor, computer skills, music lessons.

113. Get a job in the food service industry. Chances are high that you can eat for free!

114. If you are a true subject matter expert why not create a website about your favorite topics? Many people make a few hundred to few thousand dollars a month from Google AdSense, by publishing relevant contextual ads on their websites.

115. Be your campus computer tech. Troubleshoot computer issues in exchange for a few bucks or a beer. Make yourself available in a pinch.

116. Solicit grad students for help with their dissertation research, proofreading, editing or document typing and formatting.

117. Don't forget to work extra and save up during the summer to make the school year more comfortable.

118. Offer a resume writing service. This can make you quite a bit of extra pocket money. But put it in savings.

Good luck! If you think “thrifty” we think you could possibly leave college with a little in your savings account to show for your hard work and efforts.

Reading is something that most of us take for granted. We learned it sometime in the first grade and eventually bingo, the world came alive with new ideas as we grew more proficient and the books and magazines we were able to read became more complex. This happened pretty much on course—for most of us. But a good number of children barely advance beyond their first-grade readers. What happens to these kids? Where does the process of learning to read break down?

"Reading is a language skill," says Dr. Virginia Mann, professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading authority and researcher on reading skills. "To be proficient, a child has to master the different components of language."

Those language components, argues Mann, include phoneme awareness, a skill that is well recognized as being fundamental to understanding how a sequence of letters stands for a spoken word. But research is also showing, says Mann, that good readers are able to recognize morphological aspects of words, which is important if they are to appreciate the shared meanings yet slightly different pronunciations of the letters 'h-e-a-l' in heal and health, for example. Beyond that, good readers must also possess solid working memory skills, which enable children to link words, sentences, and eventually full passages together. Grasping these elements, in sequential order, says Mann, is the key to successful reading.

For a long time, educators believed that a difficulty with reading was related to a problem somewhere in the visual system. For example, it was thought that, children with dyslexia couldn't read well because their visual processes fumbled the letters. This is why, it was thought, kids would write letters such as 'b' and 'd' backwards. But the research, Mann argues, has not supported this notion.

"Visual problems are not at the root of reading problems," says Mann. "The vast majority of children are not seeing backwards."

A related misconception, Mann says, involved an assumption that children who were poor readers had problems translating spoken words to visual representations. In researcher-speak, they had trouble with "cross-modal integration." "But people combine and move through modalities all the time," Mann says.

Mann explains that the visual problem idea has been challenged by research showing that few of the actual reading errors that were made by children who were labeled "dyslexic" actually involve seeing letters or words backwards (i.e., the children don't tend to misread 'saw' as 'was' or 'big' as 'dip' or 'dip'.) Likewise, children who were identified as having visual problems were not more likely to have problems learning to read. Instead of a problem with translating visual sequences into auditory ones, a far more prevalent problem for children who were problem readers involved trouble repeating sequences of spoken words and sentences.

An important key to reading, Mann argues, lies not in what a child sees, but in the child's ability to understand what the letters of the word 'stand for'. A skill called 'phoneme awareness' is critical to understanding how sequences of letters stand for spoken words. It involves being able to break apart the sounds, or phonemes, within a word. To have phoneme awareness is to not only hear the sounds, but also to be able to manipulate and compare them. An example of phoneme awareness at work is when we see that 'cat' and 'cup' start with the same phoneme, or that 'cat' without its first phoneme is 'at'. Encoding happens next when budding readers learn how to match the sounds with their respective letters in the alphabet. For example, readers understand why 'c' is the first letter in 'cat' and 'cup' and how 'cat' and 'at' are related.

This idea became clear following research by Isabelle Liberman, Donald Shankweiler and their colleagues, who looked at the types of errors children made when they were just learning to read. These researchers found that children performed pretty well at recognizing and pronouncing the first letters of words, but then they were often guessing at the rest. In other words, if shown the word 'bag' they might guess 'bat' or even 'butterfly'.

"That was an aha! moment," Mann says. This research showed that these children didn't recognize that the letters linked to phonemes. They had all certainly heard the words 'bat' and 'bag', and most likely knew the difference if you asked them to talk about it, but in reading, they couldn't translate the sequence of letters 'b-a-g' into the sequence of phonemes that formed the word 'bag' as opposed to 'bat'.

"It seems so obvious to adults," Mann says, "that words can be broken down into phonemes. But since speech perception is automatic in the human brain, children can hear the differences in words like 'bag' and 'bat' without appreciating the fact that the difference between the two words involves differences in phonemes. Speech research has to look inside the perception process to look at how the 'b' in 'bag' is being computed in the brain, and this is proving to be a marvelously complicated task. Readers somehow have been able to look inside of their language perception process, but this process is hard for kids who are just starting to read."

Thus, the call has gone out to put more emphasis on phonemic awareness. Just last year, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health, released a report arguing that a combination of methods that included phonemic awareness, is essential to reading instruction.

After learning the phonemes, the next step to reading is being able to string the sounds and then the words together, and then hold those in the brain and process them while going on the next set of sounds and words. To master full reading comprehension, the child must then be able to not only hold the individual sounds and words together, but full sentences and then paragraphs, and so on. That's a lot of work! This ability to temporarily hold new information in mind is called working memory, and Mann believes that evidence is growing showing that children who don't master reading may have a working memory problem.

Working memory is a great tool. It enables us to remember phone numbers we've just been told or our co-worker's lunch order as we approach the take-out counter. It helps us follow conversations and helps us follow instructions. Without meaning attached to these bits of information, however, they most likely will not enter into our permanent, long-term memory. This convenient system keeps our heads from filling up with too much useless information. Can you imagine how distracting it would be if we had sandwich orders from three months ago still in our minds?

But working memory also enables us to keep track of words and ideas as we are reading. Most of us do this so quickly and easily we don't even think about it. But given something to read that is entirely new or outside our arena of knowledge, we often have to read—and sometimes re-read—in order to understand it. Struggling new readers must do this same thing with basic language structures. Their working memory systems work over-time to recover the words that the phonemes compose, and then the phrases and sentences needed to move onto understanding. Again, that's a lot to ask of a young person.

"Poor readers do not do well with things that you remember in the form of silent speech, and this includes strings of letters and strings of words," says Mann. "So it's a double-whammy problem. Their phoneme awareness problems give them trouble in seeing what phonemes the letters represent, and the working memory problem causes an added trouble remembering those phonemes and the words they compose." But, luckily, phoneme awareness problems are not intractable, she argues. "There is evidence that phoneme awareness can be taught and trained. As for working memory, practice, practice, and more practice is probably going to help."

If remembering phonemes, the alphabet, and individual vocabulary words wasn't hard enough, English adds another twist to learning to read: a dubious thing called morphology. Morphology is what turns a relatively simple word like 'heal' into the similar but different word 'health'. Entering vocabulary growth in about the third or fourth grade, morphology, says Mann, is what tends to separate the beginning reader, who is still trying to master the basics, from the proficient reader. This is because the English alphabet has the special property of sometimes standing for morphemes (the 'heal' in health, the '-tion' in 'action') as well as for phonemes.

"Among readers in the later elementary grades, morphological awareness," she says, "is a key factor in reading success, because it is so important to the reading of multi-syllabic words"

Morphology, says Mann, is "linked to phonemic awareness, but it also counts on its own." Because derivations of words—'politics', 'political', and 'politicize' being just another example set out of hundreds in the English language—compose the complexity and richness of the language, the ability to comprehend them is essential for fully understanding English itself. (Non-native English language learners often have a particularly difficult time with morphological awareness, says Mann.)

The reader who has trouble with phonemic coding of consonants will not progress easily toward coding the diphthongs and other eccentricities in spelling. The reader who has trouble with morphology will have trouble recognizing suffixes such as 'tion', and trouble pronouncing these words as well. Thus the meaning, function and pronunciation of words containing these morphologically-rich letter combinations may be lost. The syntax and sentence comprehension that follow and lead to mastery of reading will lag behind as well.

While many have argued that if a child doesn't master reading by the third grade—and definitely by the fifth grade—he or she never will, Mann says that is not necessarily so. Attention to the skills of phonemic awareness, working memory, and morphology will certainly aid reading instruction. "We need to build these skills into reading exercises and training activities. We need to see where the weaknesses lie and then act to provide appropriate remediation," she says.

Tools designed to specifically test and re-test these skills are a valuable addition to reading instruction, she says. Those built on systems of reward and motivation are particularly useful as they motivate the child to practice and train skills like spelling that in themselves may be pretty boring.

"How do we build a system that will train most effectively?" she asks. "How do we not turn a child off with failure? What makes you keep going is challenge, novelty, and reward. If children are not motivated, they won't keep going. Knowing how to strike that balance is really important."

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.

The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.

Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.

The new approach puzzled many parents. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 120 divided by 40, students might cross off groups of circles to "discover" that the answer was three.

Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.

Nevertheless, the council's new guidelines constitute "a remarkable reversal, and it's about time," says Ralph Raimi, a University of Rochester math professor.

Francis Fennell, the council's president, says the latest guidelines move closer to the curriculum of Asian countries such as Singapore, whose students tend to perform better on international tests. There, children focus intensely on a relative handful of topics, such as multiplication, division and algebra, then practice by solving increasingly difficult word and other problems. That contrasts sharply with the U.S. approach, which the report noted has long been described as "a mile wide and an inch deep."

If states adopt the new standards and teachers adjust their methods, "we'll be more competitive," says Prof. Fennell, who teaches at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md.

Nearly 80 teachers and other experts spent 18 months writing and reviewing grade-by-grade guidelines, which cover preschool through eighth grade. The panel aims to give a roadmap to instructors, schools systems and states about exactly what children should be learning - and to start a debate that could put the math wars to rest.

According to their report, "Curriculum Focal Points," which is subtitled "A Quest for Coherence," students, by second grade, should "develop quick recall of basic addition facts and related subtraction facts." By fourth grade, the report says, students should be fluent with "multiplication and division facts" and should start working with decimals and fractions. By fifth, they should know the "standard algorithm" for division - in other words, long division - and should start adding and subtracting decimals and fractions. By sixth grade, students should be moving on to multiplication and division of fractions and decimals. By seventh and eighth grades, they should use algebra to solve linear equations.

Unlike many countries, the U.S. has no nationally mandated curriculum, so the math council's guidance has significant influence. In recent years, states have developed their own standards, in part because of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires that schools make progress in raising students' scores on state achievement tests. Another math group, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, created by President Bush, is preparing its own guidance for how best to teach the subject. It meets in Cambridge, Mass., this week.

A recent study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington nonprofit group, found that only two dozen states specified that students needed to know the multiplication tables. Many allowed calculators in early grades.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation's president and a former top official at the U.S. Department of Education, blamed the earlier math-council guidelines for state standards that neglect the basics. He described the new advice as a "sea change," saying that "it's a little bit like Lutherans deciding to become Catholics after the Reformation."

Supporters of the council's previous views worry that the new report may lead to a return to the kind of rote learning they say left many children without any understanding of concepts. They say few adults spend much time doing long division, and students are better served getting a grounding in real-life problem solving.

"The risk is that we end up with students who have no idea what math is all about or how to use it," says Joseph Rosenstein, a math professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who reviewed the new guidelines.

Understanding math, rather than parroting answers to poorly understood equations, was the goal of the council's controversial 1989 standards. Those guidelines called on teachers to promote estimation, rather than precise answers. For example, an elementary-school student tackling the problem 4,783 divided by 13 should instead divide 4,800 by 12 to arrive at "about 400," the 1989 report said. The council said this approach would enable children using calculators to "decide whether the correct keys were pressed and whether the calculator result is reasonable."

"The calculator renders obsolete much of the complex pencil-and-paper proficiency traditionally emphasized in mathematics courses," the council said then. In 2000, in another report, the council backed away somewhat from that position.

Still, in response to the earlier recommendations, many school systems required children to describe in writing the reasoning behind their answers. Some parents complained that students ended up writing about math, rather than doing it.

As the debate heated up, concern grew about U.S. students' math competence. In 2003, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a test that compares student achievement in many countries, ranked U.S. students just 15th in eighth-grade math skills, behind both Australia and the Slovak Republic. Singapore ranked No. 1, followed by South Korea and Hong Kong. Fueling concern about the quality of elementary and high-school instruction: one in five U.S. college freshmen now need a remedial math course, according to the National Science Board.

If school systems adopt the math council's new approach, their classes might resemble those at Garfield Elementary School in Revere, Mass., just north of Boston. Three-quarters of Garfield's students receive free and reduced lunches, and many are the children of recent immigrants from such countries as Brazil, Cambodia and El Salvador.

Three years ago, Garfield started using Singapore Math, a curriculum modeled on that country's official program and now used in about 300 school systems in the U.S. Many school systems and parents regard Singapore Math as an antidote for "reform math" programs that arose from the math council's earlier recommendations.

According to preliminary results, the percentage of Garfield students failing the math portion of the fourth-grade state achievement test last year fell to 7 percent from 23 percent in 2005. Those rated advanced or proficient rose to 43 percent from 40 percent.

Last week, a fourth-grade class at Garfield opened its lesson with Singapore's "mental math," a 10-minute warm-up requiring students to recall facts and solve computation questions without pencil and paper.

"In your heads, take the denominator of the fraction three-quarters, take the next odd number that follows that number. Add to that number, the number of ounces in a cup. What is nine less than that number?" asked teacher Janis Halloran. A sea of hands shot up. (The answer: four.)

Ms. Halloran then moved on to simple pencil-and-paper algebra problems. "The sum of two numbers is 63," one problem reads. "The smaller number is half the bigger number. What is the smaller number? What is the bigger number?" (The answers: 21 and 42.)

In this class, the students didn't use the lettered variables that are so prevalent in standard algebraic equations. Instead, they arrived at answers using Cuisenaire rods, sticks of varying colors and lengths that they manipulate into patterns on the tops of their desks. The children use the rods to learn about the relationship between multiplication and geometry. The goal: a visceral and deep understanding of math concepts.

"It just makes everything easier for you," says fifth-grader Jailene Paz, 10 years old.

The Singapore Math curriculum differs sharply from reform math programs, which often ask students to "discover" on their own the way to perform multiplication and division and other operations, and have come to be known as "constructivist" math.

One reform math program, "Investigations in Number, Data and Space," is used in 800 school systems and has become a lightning rod for critics. TERC, a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit organization, developed that program, and Pearson Scott Foresman, a unit of Pearson PLC, London, distributes it to schools.

Ken Mayer, a spokesman for TERC, says many parents have a "misconception" that Investigations doesn't value computation. He says many school systems, such as Boston's, have seen gains in test scores using the program. "Fluency with number facts is critical," he says.

Polle Zellweger and her husband, Jock Mackinlay, both computer scientists, moved to Bellevue, Wash., from Palo Alto, Calif., two years ago so their two children could attend its highly regarded public schools. She and her husband grew suspicious of the school's Investigations program. This summer, they had both children take a California grade-level achievement test, and both answered only about 70 percent of the questions correctly. Ms. Zellweger and her husband started tutoring their children an hour a day to catch up.

"It was a really weird feeling," says their daughter, Molly Mackinlay, 15. "I do really well in school. I am getting A-pluses in math classes. Then, I take a math test from a different state, and I'm not able to finish half the questions."

Eric McDowell, who oversees Bellevue's math curriculum, says parents misunderstand Investigations. Mr. McDowell says schools supplement the program with more traditional drilling in the basics, and students end up flourishing in the system's rigorous high-school courses. "It's not an either/or situation," he says.

In the Alpine School District in Utah, parent Oak Norton, an accountant, has gathered petitions from 1,000 families to protest the use of Investigations. His complaints began more than two years ago, when he discovered at a parent conference that his oldest child, then in third grade, wasn't being taught the multiplication tables.

Barry Graff, a top Alpine school administrator, says the system has added more traditional computation exercises. Over the next year, Alpine plans to give each school a choice between Investigations or a more conventional approach. Mr. Graff, who says Alpine test scores tend to be at or above state averages, expects critics to keep up the attacks and welcomes the national math council's efforts to provide grade-by-grade guidance on what children should learn.

"Other than the war in Iraq, I don't think there's anything more controversial to bring up than math," he says. "The debate will drive us eventually to be in the right place."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Why Boys are Behind at School

Studies by Dimetri Christakis at the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle have determined that the brain need touch, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting stimulus to grow fully.

· The average child spends 900 hours a year in school and 1,023 hours a year watching television.

· By the time a boy reaches eighteen years of age, he’ll have spent 22,000 hours watching television. That is more than any other activity besides sleeping.

· The number of videos and DVDs families rent every day is twice the number of books read.

· By the age of sixteen, the average boy will have seen 200,000 acts of violence on television, 33,000 of them acts of murder.

· One fourth of children under two years of age have a television in their bedrooms.

· Two thirds of preschool boys sit in front of screens for more than two hours per day. That is more than 3 times the hours they spend looking at books or being read to.*

*Randy White. Children’s outdoor play and learning environments: returning to nature 2004

It seems there should be a direct and clear solution to this issue. But, after having spoken to any number of parents, I find this is not the case.

As odd as this may seem, I hear the same statement again and again. Parents tell me when the television is turned off the children have no idea how to occupy themselves and look to the parents to entertain them.

How did this come to pass? I remember in my own childhood spending the majority of my time in rough and tumble games outside until forced in by darkness. Now, I find that children are completely unacquainted with their own next door neighbors.
Parents are understandably exhausted after 10 and 12 hour work days and are unable to entertain the children.

What solutions or suggestions have you found for this bizarre and escalating phenomenon?

Software for Students

These days, even the youngest students are comfortable learning on computers. Fortunately, there's a lot of great software out there to help our kids learn in exciting and interesting ways. Struggling to help with calculus? Never fear--there are calculus tutorials that pick up where mom's & dad's brains stopped. Literature students can also benefit from this list of software programs that enhance the reading experience.

For students who are looking for help in several homework topics, Microsoft Student 2007 might prove helpful for older kids. Don't worry, there are plenty of programs for the younger students, as well. Our Guides provide reviews of programs that offer help in everything from science and math to history and English.

Young children who are learning English might benefit from English for Kids, by Edusoft. This program leads young learners through a series of playful exercises that provide specific learning targets for young ESL / EFL learners.

We haven't forgotten Macintosh families, who will find a variety of great programs , including Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, an old favorite and an essential for kids learning to use a computer keyboard.

The Frugal Adult College Student

Frugal methods of getting a college education

It always seemed to me that there was a series of scams set up to cheat me out of a college education. Sure I was intelligent enough, or so I was told, but it was all the stuff that got in my way to getting that degree that would make me more "employable."

First I'd have to buy lots of very expensive books that once I read, I'd never look at again. Then there were the supplies such as software and computers that could cost more than the classes. Next there are the classes themselves that I'd have to take to satisfy some obscure requirements. To top it off, some of these r

Self-Confident	Low Self-Confidence
Doing what you believe to be right, even if others mock or criticize you for it.	Governing your behavior based on what other people think.
Being willing to take risks and go the extra mile to achieve better things.	Staying in your comfort zone, fearing failure and so avoid taking risks.
Admitting your mistakes and vowing to learn from them.	Working hard to cover up mistakes and praying that you can fix the problem before anyone is the wiser.
Waiting for others to congratulate you on your accomplishments.	Extolling your own virtues as often as possible to as many people as possible.
Accepting compliments graciously. “Thanks, I really worked hard on that prospectus. I’m pleased you recognize my efforts.”	Dismissing compliments offhandedly. “Oh that prospectus was nothing really, anyone could have done it.”
Viewing challenges as opportunities to grow and learn.	Feeling desperate when things don’t go as planned.
Putting a positive spin on negative things that happen. “We lost this round, but we sure learned how important it is to work together and follow the plan.”	Dwelling on negative events and view them as reasons to quit. “We lost again, why bother showing up!”

Building Self-Confidence Prepare yourself for success!

Affinity Diagrams Organizing Ideas Into Common Themes

What is Self-Esteem?