The Many Benefits of Lifelong Learning

From the time we’re children, we’re pushed to learn things. By adulthood, most people are somewhat relieved when the learning portion of their lives is over. The problem is, saying goodbye to learning isn’t a good idea. There are so many benefits of lifelong learning, stopping with graduation, and a diploma would be a serious mistake.

 

What are some of those benefits?

 

Solutions Are Easier to Find

 

A brain kept sharp through continuous learning is going to be better at finding solutions to problems, in part because of better cognitive function. Also, because there’s just more knowledge available to draw on to find a solution. 

 

You Just Sound Smarter

 

When you constantly challenge yourself to find out new things, your conversation shows the effects. You’re more up on current events, and your ability to talk intelligently in social situations increases. Knowledge also raises your cred on social media, especially on sites such as LinkedIn, which is essential when job hunting.

 

You’re Better Prepared

 

Not sure what to do in a crisis? Spend time learning. By understanding the basics of first aid or how things are supposed to function in your workplace, you will be better able to handle an emergency.

 

You Mind Sparks

 

Looking for an idea or new perspective? Perhaps you want to be more creative? You can easily enhance each of those areas through learning. 

 

You Become a More Capable and Confident Employee

 

When you’re always learning in the workplace, you become more self-assured in your work, a feeling you’ll start carrying with you into other aspects of your life. It’s this attitude that gets you noticed, especially when the time comes for promotions.

 

It’s Good for Your Brain

 

Finally, perhaps one of the most important reasons for pursuing knowledge is that it’s good for your brain. Studies have shown a brain engaged and continuously challenged with new information is sharper, with better cognitive skills. The benefits don’t stop there. Learning means your brain keeps growing, creating new neural pathways. Learning things has also been proven to help prevent Alzheimer’s and other effects of dementia. It has even shown to reverse some of the impact of those issues as you age. No wonder it’s a good reason to keep learning as you grow older!

 

Lifelong learning is something to be pursued, not just because it’s ‘good for you’ like taking the proverbial vitamin pill. Chasing after learning can be both enlightening and fun and will serve you well throughout your entire life. With that in mind, it’s an easy decision to become a lifelong learner. Only through knowledge can you truly become your very best self.

 

6 Ways to Fire Up Your Creative Spark in 30 Minutes or Less

Not feeling very creative, but have a little time to try and boost that creative spark? Below you’ll find several tips that will set your brain back in motion in just 30 minutes or less!

 

1. Create something. By using your hands to create something new, you stimulate your brain to think creatively. Buy some modeling clay and see what you can make. Take up knitting or crocheting. Try baking something (especially bread dough that you can knead yourself). The key is to put your fingers in motion.

 

2. Get outside – specifically in a green space. Studies have shown that exposure to green spaces stimulates the brain in numerous ways – one being in the areas associated with creativity. To get your fill of green, visit a park. Or if you’re feeling more adventurous take a hike. Have some space? Try gardening.

 

3. Spend time with your BFF. By getting together with someone you know well and have come to trust, you can relax and talk about the things that are really on your mind. Your BFF is the perfect person to brainstorm with, or even to talk out a problem. And who knows, they might even have the solution you’re seeking!

 

4. Try yoga. The gentle movements involved in yoga makes it an ideal exercise for anyone. But did you know that there were specific poses said to inspire creativity? Add to this the fact that yoga is known to reduce stress and relax the mind. That means it’s the perfect exercise for the person who is stuck and needsto find a creative spark.

 

5. Try something you’ve never done before. By experimenting with a new skill, or even a new recipe, you stimulate parts of the brain that you haven’t used in that way before. That inspires new connections in your neural networks, which are so necessary for creative thinking. 

 

6. Last but not least – take a nap. It could be that you’re just too tired to be creative. Half an hour is the perfect amount of time for a cat nap, to rest and recharge that brain!

 

Having a limited amount of time shouldn’t keep you from being creative. There’s a lot of things you can try in only 30 minutes or less. The key is to get your mind engaged in something new or interesting. Pay attention to what works, and then consider using whatever caused the spark to create a new habit. That will keep the creativity flowing year-round!

 

Why You Need to Know How to Think Critically

Do you ever wonder what heights you could rise to in your personal and professional life if you put all of your thinking into focus? So much of our brain capacity is unused and lying dormant. What if you knew the secret of thinking so that you life would improve tenfold and help you achieve all the goals you have in life?

 

Critical thinking is developed over time and is like learning any sport or art. You can’t just get up one morning and say, “I think I’ll become a critical thinker today.” No one can simply will it into happening. For many, it takes years to develop the critical thinking knack. In some older citizens, we call it, “wisdom.”

 

The only paths through which a person can develop insightful thinking are by knowing and accepting the truth that there are flaws in your thinking. You must also constantly practice becoming a thinker who can effectively solve problems through logical thinking rather than emotions.

 

Becoming a critical thinker can help you develop strategies where you overcome the obstacles that life presents. Here are some obstacles you may want to obliterate from your life – and that’s possible with critical thinking:

 

·    Analyze the influences in your life. Learn to make your own decisions rather than falling under those influences.

·    Get your ego under control. Your ego may be keeping you back from advancing at work and from developing better relationships. Critical thinking can help you think without the influence of an inflated ego.

·    Solve problems. Being too scattered to solve problems and “thinking” with emotions usually doesn’t solve anything. Using critical thinking can help you get in touch with your emotions and solve problems through logical thinking.

·    Stop wasting time. You may be wasting entire days of productivity by going in many directions at once. We may not actually be enjoying anything we do to waste time because we know we’re going to be behind on our work or frustrated about wasting the day. Critical thinking can teach you how to evaluate your time and spend it wisely.

 

We all have great capacity to think critically and to improve our lives immensely, but most of the time, it’s dormant. That’s because it’s undeveloped. We can make it better with practice, just as we would when learning a musical instrument or sport.

 

Non-critical thinking is a habit that we’re not even mindful of most of the time. We sit, staring at a mindless program on television, playing mindless video games or engaging in gossip or other pursuits that don’t require critical thinking.

 

If you want to develop the traits of a critical thinker, know that you must study and research – then, put what you’ve learned into practice on a daily basis. It’s worth the effort.

 

Critical Thinking and Creativity

Critical thinking and creativity go hand in hand. Critical thinking lets you look objectively at a problem, issue, object or person and take into consideration the entire picture. Creativity enables you to take that entire picture and look at it in a new way. While some may think of critical thinking as more scientific, while creative thinking is more abstract, they’re more alike than they are different.

 

The creative person is likely to be seen as an imaginative and emotional type such as artists, writers and philosophers. A critical thinker is more likely to be thought of as a scientific genius who may be skeptical and lacking in imagination and creativity. Actually, both types are masters of the thought process.

 

The reasoning process of critical thinking shows imagination to be able to proceed to the next level. Critical thinking is present in creativity by carrying the thought process further than critical thinking logic and presenting it in a creative light. Great critical thinking minds such as Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin could never have brought their inventions to light without the streaks of creative thinking that took them beyond the realm of logic.

 

Here are some attributes that are similar in both critical and creative thinkers:

 

·      Interested in exploring new possibilities.

·      Challenge assumptions and standard ways of thinking.

·      Imagining alternatives to a situation or problem.

·      Have multiple perspectives on everything.

·      Use trial and error experimentation methods.

·      Thinks about new ways of doing things.

 

The phases involved in critical and creative thinking are also similar. For example, both types of thinking are triggered by a thought or even that takes the thinking process outside the realm of common thinking.

 

Then, the thoughts are appraised and clarified, opening the door for ways to explore the thought and how to present it to others. This leads the way to developing alternative ways to think and then implementing the thinking process through inventions, writing, art or ideas.

 

Both types of thinking also require a large measure of self-confidence and the ability to think of and present multiple ways to view a situation or problem. To promote both critical and creative thinking a person should have an inquiring mind that drives them to read, to engage in out –of-the-box thinking and to try things that are outside what they would usually do to try.

 

Critical and creative thinking can complement each other by bringing new ideas and ways of thinking into your life. 

 

5 Barriers to Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is essential to using your overall experience, background, common sense and other attributes to become more aware of how your efforts for success are being spent. When you have barriers to the critical thinking process, it can seriously harm your ability to move forward.

 

When you’re aware of these barriers, you can better overcome them and focus your thinking on what’s going to move you forward rather than getting stuck behind a barrier – unable to move forward.

 

Here are five barriers that can impede the critical thinking process:

 

1.  Thinking in Black or White – Some people ignore a situation’s complexities by thinking that there’s only one way to solve a problem. The problem is placed in a category, given a label and that’s the only way that matters. Thinking in black and white comes from our need to have certainty in our lives, but it’s false logic to assume that everything is totally one way.

2.  Thinking with the Ego – Egocentrical thinking is thinking with a lack of understanding others wants and needs. It limits your thinking to only your point of view and doesn’t have room for others’ ideas. This thinking process is deeply embedded in our psyches, and it sometimes takes deliberate effort to overcome it.

3.  Social Thinking – The drone mentality of social thinking only lets us see things in the way of the popular point of view – or the way that our spouse, companions, parents and friends think. Thinking outside the box is almost impossible when you have a barrier of social thinking and it can greatly impede the critical thinking process.

4.  Authoritative Thinking – Just because someone in authority says it’s true doesn’t mean it is. You’ve likely been swayed at one time or another by political leaders who say one thing is true only to find out later that it was a lie or a misleading way of thinking. The authority could be a person, peer group, institution or anything that makes you think that they’re right because they’re in an authoritative position.

5.  Judgmental Thinking – When you judge something or someone based on moral evaluation it’s usually done in haste and based on our past in some way – such as the way we were raised, educated or other values and mores. Judgmental thinking is usually non-rational thinking and can block understanding and insight about a person or an issue.

 

It’s important that we recognize our own barriers to the critical thinking process and replace those barriers with rational and reasoned thinking and then make a concentrated effort to avoid them.

 

Smart Shaming Trend

Trends can be anything you can think of from Cotton ball diets to rainbow-colored hair. Who would have thought that smart-shaming would also be included in the latest list? What’s wrong with being “smart”? Why is smart the new target of bullies? What does it mean to be smart these days? 

 

To answer questions popping in your head right now, indeed, smart shaming is already a trend – people would often comment things like, “Yeah, always the smart one!” in bitter tongues. There are many pseudo-names you should be aware of: The Grammar-Nazi, The Honor Roll and yes – The Smart One!

 

Smart-shaming can be viewed both in a positive and negative light. Focusing on the positive, this trend may mean that with or without the shaming part, “smart” is gaining popularity and getting noticed as a great influence in ones’ whole personality. How? Check the list below: 

 

·    Being smart means you’re not just book-smart but street-smart as well. Street smart is defined as having the ability to cross the street with ease, knowing how to haggle for prices, and surviving the metro (commuting, having your own apartment, paying your bills, etc.) Hence, your chances of surviving this world are higher than most. 

·    Being smart beats out being physically attractive in the long run. How so? Because the fact is we all grow old, and no amount of serum or snail secretions can counter that. The good thing is, being smart is the opposite. Brains grow by the year, meaning, you can get smarter provided that you ‘feed’ it with worthy experiences and new learnings. 

·    Being smart makes you a cool person these days. Why so? Because you can talk about a lot of things – books, experiences, etc. and you sure are not a bore in any gathering. That’s why people would want your company.

 

The list could be longer and there are longer eBooks if you would want a more readings regarding this millennial trend.

 

Healthy Habits for Healthy Brains

The brain is an organ and of course, in order to maximize its capacity, you need to take care of it just like any other part of your body. What makes your brain stand out from the rest of your organs is its intellectual function. You use it to memorize, learn, keep memories, do daily tasks, converse with people, amongst other things. So, can you imagine how a poor-functioning brain can affect your life? It may cause havoc your relationships, your career and even your finances. Of course, nobody wishes for this to happen. So, to make sure that you have healthy brains that healthily function, here are some habits to start practicing: 

 

• Sleep at least 7 hours a night – It takes at least two days for your body to recover from an all-nighter. This means your brain needs more. Remember the time when you are so sleep-deprived that you ended up giving extra bills to the cashier at the coffee shop or said yes to a suitor and wonder about the sweet you received the following day? Healthy brains need sleep. 

• Let the sun rewire your brain – This may sound a bit crazy but there is really unseen brain activity that connects you with the sun. Not that convinced yet? Well, notice that there are rhythms, patterns, and seasons in this world you live in and that somewhat has a connection to your brain. That’s why it knows night and day, Christmas and summer. 

• Take supplements – Fish oil is healthy for your brains. Do this especially if you’re the picky one when it comes to your food. picture this: you massage a muscle when it’s overworked, you bandage a scratch, but you can’t even hold nor see your brain. Show some love then by taking in supplements that it needs for proper function. 

 

The brain is a complex organ and so will discussing it. For further readings, eBooks are available for easy access. 

 

Challenging Activities to Challenge Your Brain

Why is there a need to challenge your brain? Think of how you go to the gym, jog, swim, bike to keep your muscles at bay. Now, how could you do the same to your brain? We all know that you can’t set an appointment for a brain spa or brain massage to keep your neurons at bay. As a matter of fact, brain cells die. But they do regenerate especially when you try to help the process. So, what could you do? Keep the challenges coming with the following: 

 

·    Learn something new – whether it be a musical instrument, new craft, hobby, sport, step into something unfamiliar to you. Knitting, the sax, forest bathing, polo, etc. are some of the examples you could add into that bucket list of yours. 

·    Try some silly but effective exercises - try brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand or washing your face with your left hand of you are right handed and vice versa. Dong these simple exercises sends signals to your brain that something is amiss, thus, the brainwork follows. 

·    Enroll in a class you think is interesting and also take a class you think is not – observe your reactions. Sometimes when we already have our own set of biases, the brain starts to relax as it already knows what will happen next. Now, taking a new route like enrolling in a class especially the one you think is not interesting will hint new reactions from your brain. 

·    Do physical activity habitually, religiously and daily. This is not just for your physical health but to your mental health as well. Keeping the body healthy is also keeping your brains healthy. A healthy lifestyle has a holistic effect. 

 

The “challenges” above are just part of a long list of suggested activities to challenge your brain. If you want to learn more, there are handy eBooks available for easy you easy access. 

 

Why Bother with Cognitive Skills?

First of all, what are cognitive skills? It is simply defined as an individual’s ability to process his thoughts, learn and do problem solving. What has all these got to do with your life and being smart? Well, the skills related to cognition are: logic and reasoning, memory, visual processing, etc. so as you can see, these skills are vital in your life. How so? Top employers look for the following skills: 

 

·    Ability to focus on a task and meet deadlines

·    Ability to evaluate and give solutions to problems

·    Able to work with minimal supervision

·    Ability to observe and learn from observation

·    Able to read and understand materials

 

So, if you think it’s high time for you to improve on your cognitive skills, here are baby steps you could take: 

 

·    Know your stress triggers and try to address it as soon as possible. Stressed brain means poor cognition. Also, stress affects your physical health, so it makes it hard for the brain to reach its full potential if your physical body is not healthy. 

·    Take Omega-3 supplements or fish oil. It feeds the brain. Your gray matter is made up of mostly fats, and these types of fats are its friends. You could include nuts, spinach, soybean and wheat. 

·    Never stop learning. This applies to anything from a new hobby to Spanish classes. Learning something new initiates new neuron connections. And new neuron connection means healthier brains. 

·    Focusing on the improving your cognitive skills could also make you less susceptible to diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.

·    Make it a part of your daily habit to exercise. If you can’t hit the gym, bike or jog, then stick to simple exercise routine you could do at home. Flexing your muscles also flexes the thing inside your head. 

 

If you feel you need to dig deeper, there are a lot of eBooks in the market today that tackles the topic at a more comprehensive level.