Intelligence : Pay Attention to Body Language – Understand more

  Some people may seem like mind readers, but very often they are just better at guessing what people around them are thinking. This is largely because they are more aware of non verbal signals.

Researchers believe that the ability to read faces is a human skill that is acquired through evolution. Understanding groups and tribes has been extremely important to survival got prehistoric man. Being excluded from a group could mean death or starvation, hence humans became very good at evaluating facial expressions and social cues.

The same is true for people who have faced regular rejection by peer groups. They are generally able to recognise who is and who is not being genuine simply by scrutinising their smiles.

Quick Tips

• To become a better reader of body language look at the eyes of people when they smile. If the muscles around their eyes crinkle, its the real deal. A false smile only requires you move your mouth.
• Rapid swallowing or blinking and restricted arm movements also signifies dishonesty.
• The book ‘Reading People’ by Jo-Ellen Dimitrius and Mark Mazzarella is a wonderful guide to understanding body language.

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Become a good listener, hear more

In order to become more intuitive, you need to actively pay attention to what others and your environment are telling you. The more information you take in, the better informed you become when making decisions.

To prove this point, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development based in Berlin, interviewed ordinary people who had invested in the stock market simply by choosing stocks or companies that they has heard about. The scientist made portfolios of these stocks and compared their success to similar sized stock purchases made by industry experts. After six months, the portfolios put together by the lay group earned more money than the ones done by the experts. Researchers theorise that the rookies probably chose stocks they’d heard good things about.

Quick Tip

Tutors advocate this strategy when you are stuck on a test or work problem. Go with the solution that resonates the most with you even if you cannot pinpoint why it feels right. If you are a better listener, finding things that resonate with you becomes more defined.

To become a better listener, ask yourself the following questions:
‘How often do you cut people off?’
‘How frequently are you trying to get your point across rather than listening?’
If you are guilty of doing the above too often, then you can decrease this habit by maintaining eye contact with the person you are speaking to. You are less likely to interrupt somebody you are staring at. May prove difficult on teleconference calls.

Not interrupting and focusing on the speaker will help you really hear everything that is being said. Over time it will help you pick up on things that others don’t – giving you the information edge.

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Are we too clever to create?

Picasso said and I quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

From the perspective of brain development, Picasso maybe on to something. The frontal lobes are the last brain areas to fully develop and are considered our control center and home to our personality and ego.

The frontal lobes and ego : how do they relate?

Information processing occurs in various brain areas, like the visual cortex (what we have seen) or auditory cortex (what we have heard). Responses to this incoming information are carried out by yet other brain areas such as the primary motor cortex (voluntary movement – i.e. run away from a lion in front of you) or Broca’s speech area (respond verbally (speak) to alert others of an impending danger).

The role of the frontal lobe is to monitor the functions of these areas. Information coming in from the visual cortex passes to the frontal lobe, which may halt the response i.e. running away from the lion (effected by the motor cortex). This occurs because a second piece of information gets added into the equation by the frontal lobe, that the lion is actually on a cinema screen, hence it is only an image and not an actual lion. The frontal lobe therefore enables some voluntary control over automated behaviours. The rest of the brain and body seems to function almost automatically.

As the frontal lobe develops, our ability to voluntarily control behaviour and responses seem to increase.  Hence we have the ability to control how we want others to see us. This is how the ego develops. The frontal lobe enables us to navigate societal challenges and adapt our behaviours. The better we are at doing this, the more successful we will be perceived. But can we become too good at this? Can we become too controlled? Every talent comes with a tradeoff. When we repress our urge to act spontaneously, we also repress the urge to create.

Quick Tip

The way around this may be to learn to control our frontal lobe function.

The first step is learning to accept our mistakes. In fact when we learn to celebrate our mistakes, with no fear of appearing ‘the fool’ – we may finally be getting somewhere with frontal lobe control. And we too may remain the child-like artists forever.

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Why Do We Need to Lay Blame?

As humans, we tend to do all we can to suppress negative emotions. We do this because we don’ t want to

• focus on what scares us
• unleash our own anger
• admit we are wrong
• be responsible for sorting things out

We therefore blame others. By transferring our negative thoughts about ourselves onto others, we can justify our own behaviour.

We have to start forgiving ourselves for being human and making mistakes because there is not a human alive who does not make mistakes.

If you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you have always got.

You have to change in order to get something different.  Only you can change you.

Lets make it our motto to “Stop Blaming and Start Living”. Take responsibility for your actions.

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Recognising Negative Self Concepts – a summary of my reading

One of the best ways of assessing how good you feel about yourself is to monitor your thoughts and opinions of other people.

If we don’t have a good opinion of ourselves, it is not quite possible to hold good opinions of others.

When we feel good about ourselves, we do not need to have critical or judgemental attitudes about other people. If you were comfortable with any issue in yourself, you would not need to react to it in others.

A criticism of someone else is really a criticism of yourself, and a judgemental approach to life is a direct reflection of how you feel about yourself.

A simple exercise for experential learning: This has really helped me recognize my negative self concepts and make then more positive.

Spend one day monitoring all your critical thoughts and judegements about yourself and others around you. Start with the people you are interacting with on a daily basis.

Notice specifically what it is you feel critical about and make notes  of  your thoughts.

At the end of the day, ask yourself:

Are your criticisms the same or different than those of other people?

Does this reflect in how you feel about other people?

How does this exercise make you feel about yourself?

Now just something else to consider:

Lets change our perspective to the following. As people, we are all doing the best we can with what we know.

Does this change the way we feel about ourselves and others?

It has helped me view things differently and encouraged me to try to see things from the perspective of others. It is very often not the intention of people to hurt or offend us. Very often they are just doing what they feel is right for them.

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Nature inspires Creativity

Sunrise in Malta

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Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

Intelligence increases when you think less

Guy Claxton in his book “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind” argues that the mind works at different speeds. Some of its functions may be performed at lightening speed, others take seconds, minutes or even days to complete.

Some of these processes can be speeded up, like we can become quicker at crossword puzzles and math. Other processes cannot be rushed. We need to learn to respect these slower processes and give them the time they need. It is these slower, deeper thought processes that often enables us to lead fulfilling, deliberate lives.

The society we live in seems to operative on the motto “Think fast, we need the results”. This may sometimes be counterproductive.

Each individual learns, thinks and knows in different ways. These modes of mind operate at different speeds and are good for different mental jobs.

The proverbs, “He who hesitates is lost” and “Look before you leap” have opposing meanings. Yet both are true.

Roughly speaking, the mind has three processing speeds.  The first, which is faster than thought is wonderful for situations that demand an instantaneous reaction, like getting out of danger.  This is a reflex action and has evolved in our species enabling us to achieve rather complex manoeuvres without thinking about them.

Then there is thought itself.  The sort of intelligence which involves figuring matters out, weighing the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems. Our society labels people good at solving these sorts of problems as “bright or clever”. Hence most education systems only focuses on developing this type of thinking.

But there is another mental mode that proceeds more slowly.  It is often less purposeful and more playful, leisurely and dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over, being contemplative or meditative. We may be pondering a problem, rather than trying to solve it.

Latest cognitive research show that this leisurely, apparently aimless ways of knowing and thinking are just as “intelligent” as the faster more direct ones. Allowing the mind time to meander is not a luxury that can be safely cut back as your life gets busier.

On the contrary some kinds of everyday predicaments and natural phenomena are better approached with a slow mind. Some mysteries can only be penetrated with a relaxed unquestioning attitude. Scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of problems that are intricate, shadowy and ill-defined – the truly intelligent stuff.

Einstein seems to have used the leisurely, slow mode of thinking and look where it got him.

It seems that we need the tortoise mind as much as we need the hare brain. Ensure that you develop yours, give yourself a chance to daydream. You never know where it may take you.

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Positive Learning

Every single experience you have ever had has been for your own benefit, however bad it was at the time.

This feels like a strong statement and you are probably thinking that it cant be true for everything.

I challenge you to look back to a very negative experience that you had a few years ago. Now think about the decisions that you made due to this experience. Did those decisions bring you to where you are now? What did that experience teach you?

Every experience that you have ever had has taught you something. However, that learning may have been positive or negative.

Negative learning encourages us to:

• Retreat into a protective shell
• Blame others for what has happened
• Restrict our lives in order to protect ourselves
• Treat people and circumstances with suspicion
• Remain angry and bitter
• Perpetuate the damage the original event caused by remaining a victim
• Perpetuate the damage caused by the original event by repeating the action against others before they get us.

Whereas Positive learning allows us to

• Recognise our own responsibility in the event
• See how not to behave
• Recognise things in others that we do not want in ourselves. But also recognise their right to be however they are
• Recognise what we have learned such as what to do or not to do the next time
• Have better coping skills in future experience
• Learn things about ourselves that we did not recognise
• Heal ourselves and forgive ourselves for getting into the situation in the first place
• Forgive others and recognise that they have taught us valuable lessons.
• Move on and make our lives even better than it was before.

No matter what our experience was, the sooner we can forgive ourselves or the abuser, the sooner we can live and enjoy more fulfilling lives.

Guilt and regret are heavy burdens to carry.

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Chaos and Creativity: Whats the connection?

“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star” ~ Nietzsche

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What does Creativity require?

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Erich Fromm

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