What are you chasing, and where would that energy be better served? – Nedra Tawwab

Alan Alda has been my “boyfriend” since Mash and when I found out he was smart and a good husband, in addition to being adorable, he entered the main room of my Hall of Admiration.

Below Kevin Dickinson outlines Alda’s rule of three for effective communication. Considering how much material we skim and try to stuff into our brains daily, using this method might actually backfire and lead us to realize we don’t know what we are trying to communicate!

Check it out and have a good Spring Sunday!

Hug

Vicki P

3 Rules to Express Your Thoughts So Everyone Will Understand You (excerpt)

by Kevin Dickinson

(…)

Whether from public speaking or just having a heart-to-heart, life is full of these types of conversations. You’ve been there, I’ve been there, and Alan Alda has been there.

Though best known for his role on the 1970s sitcom M*A*S*H, Alda is a public speaker, science enthusiast, and long-time advocate for better science communication. He has interviewed scientists as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.

In that time, he has developed a playbook of strategies to help people engage in conversation and voice their ideas clearly. If these tips can help biologists explain genetic drift, physicists Hawking radiation, or linguists anything about Chomskyan linguistics, then chances are they can help us express our thoughts and feelings when we need others to understand them the most.

What’s in your control:

• what you do
• what you say
• what you think

What isn’t:

• what other people do
  
• what other people say
  
• what other people think

– Ryan Holiday

“No way of doing things is beyond improvement.”

I love Edwin de Bono’s quote above. Read it in the column I am featuring today, written by Thomas Oopong.

How about keeping that quote in mind so you don’t break your own back patting it?

Yes. How about: not only could someone else be doing what I am doing – better – but SO COULD I!

Don’t you just love pushing your lazy self-serving brain around? No? What’s the risk? You might change your mind?

Awwwwwwwww… well don’t look for no sympathy here.

AND…have a good week.

Vicki

How to Use Lateral Thinking to Remove Unnecessary Cycles in Life (excerpt)

by Thomas Oopong

You’d be forgiven if you think lateral thinking is something that only works in the creative industry. After all, who would need to think outside the box in real life? The answer is everyone.

Anyone can find themselves in a situation where traditional thinking simply won’t cut it. It could be a job interview, clarifying a new idea, making a life-changing decision, or another challenge you face daily.

Thinkers like Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Edison all had one thing in common: they were all masters of lateral thinking.

They were able to view problems from unusual angles, coming up with creative or original solutions that others simply couldn’t see.

YOU ARE ACTING LIKE AN IDIOT!

The School of Life had a recent post on the “inner idiot” – the one we all shelter within. Obviously the more we accept our own idiot, the more we will accept the idiot in others.

In the coming week, when someone’s actions surprise us, we could remember today’s post and remember, “Oh, maybe I need to find the humor in this!” (Or maybe compassion.)

Good luck!

Hugs to all,

Vicki P

THE INNER IDIOT

‘The Inner Idiot’ is a bracing term used to describe a substantial, hugely influential and strenuously concealed part of everyone. An Idiot is what we deeply fear being, it is what we suspect in our darkest hours that we might be – and it is what we should simply accept, with humour and good grace, that we often truly are. A decent life isn’t one in which we foolishly believe we can slay or evade The Inner Idiot; it’s one in which we practice the only art available to us: sensible cohabitation.

“The crucial point is it has to be now…”

I have several framed quotes on my kitchen counter. One is “If today was the last day of my life, would I do what I am about to do?” “NO!!!” is the answer.

Another quote is: “Base your decisions, not on feelings, but the outcome you want.” I have lost track of what that might even mean right now.

Burkeman has called me on the carpet. I am one that postpones “real life” to the future when I have time. “When I have time” is always the carrot I am chasing. How about you? We need to knock it off, I think…