Practice – tutoriale

I found out about WOOP via a great online course (“The Science of Well-Being” by Yale University | Coursera).

WOOP is a science-based mental strategy that people can use to find and fulfill their wishes, set preferences, and change their habits. (Home — WOOP my life)

What is the WOOP method?

• W: Think about your wish;
• O: The best outcome;
• O: Potential obstacles;
• P: Your if/then plan.

(via »)

There’s also a book: Gabriele Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (a nice introduction to the work on using implementation intention and WOOP in your daily life).

And an article: Stop Being So Positive. And another one: WOOP – Science’s #1 Tool For Goal Achievement and Habit Change.

A quote related to the obstacles:

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.” ― Caitlyn Siehl

Some thoughts:

• It reminds me of a video in which Horia-Roman Patapievici talks about the present moment » (it starts at around 32:54).
• It matters a lot if I want to change something in myself, to imagine the process. And I can go really deep into this, I can imagine all the details. I can describe all the mental images, via various senses (image, audio, sensorial, smell).
• Imagining the best outcome helps me really get involved. I can see the positive final result.
• Potential obstacles are also useful because I can try and manipulate the image. How do I refer to the obstacles? How much of an obstacle are they, really? I can also get used to them.
• If I can get to love the obstacle, I can relate to them much better.
• The if/then plan allows me to set up a thing that will help me avoid a bad outcome.

Citește mai departeOn the WOOP method – for wishes, preferences, habits

How can you tell whether someone is vegan ?

Answer: Because they tell you… again, and again, and again

One of the key things in losing weight is, at least for me, keeping track of what I eat using MyFitnessPal.com (Free Calorie Counter, Diet & Exercise Journal).

If today I eat something with a large number of calories, and with high-calorie density (highly processed foods, sweets), by weighing myself the next morning I will likely see an increase in my weight. Tracking very thoroughly my calorie intake also helps with this – it helps me keep in my mind the fact that I need to lose weight.

Other than that, I try to do some basic calorie restrictions and having a longer time frame of not eating.

I do some sports, it surely helps, but I consider the impact at a minimum level.

Citește mai departeHow do I lose weight?

It surely happened to you – you entered a room with a dilemma, and the first thing you say is, after a “Hello!”, “How can we solve the dilemma?”.

While this might appear a fine in solving the issue, it might actually be a wrong step.

What I suggest instead is to take a while.

Enter the room, ask a silly introductory question (about the weather, for example), do some small chat, take a sip of water, and only afterwards confrunt the elephant in the room.

Don’t rush it in, don’t jump right to the conclusion, don’t force things into solving hastly.

While it might appear that you’re losing precious time if you don’t go ahead and jump to the conclusion, you might actually be losing a step in the right direction for solving the problem.

So, don’t stand and solve the issue, sit, drink some tea, get into the amtosphere, and only then solve the issue.

While I might be wrong, I associate Turkish people with this kind of approach. And I applaud it!

Citește mai departeSitting, standing

Sometimes, I get invitations to connect on various social networks. But there’s a maximum limit on the number of people you can add to your network.

Sometimes, I meet new people, some of them at the start of their careers. Who should I consider to be more successful in the future?

Sometimes, I need to evaluate a website on its future value. How will it grow, how will it decline?

Sometimes, I need to evaluate a partnership between a YouTube channel and a sponsor. How will the partnership go?

The thing is, life, both personal and professional, is full of surprises. A hard-working and bright person has the future in their hands, and a website, business, or YouTube channel that does things correctly now, will likely do so in the future.

But it’s very very hard, for me at least, to correctly predict luck and fortune. I don’t easily evaluate what would the career of a person look like 10 or more years in the future. It’s hard, close to impossible, to know if a business will be still on the market 5 years later, or if it will be a hit 10 years later.

The solution? Accept invitations to connect, do meet the people, do consider them capable of success in the future, do consider the potential of a business / YouTube channel / website to grow.

Citește mai departeFuture evaluation

Plastic cutting boards, Cliver found, are easier to sanitize. But cutting on them also leaves lots of grooves where bacteria can hide. Wood is tougher to sanitize, but it’s also (often) tougher in general – you won’t find as many deep scratches in the surface.

Fast Facts About Cutting Boards and Food Safety in Your Kitchen | NC State News

The tests results indicate that the surface of a wooden board will actually stop dangerous bacteria from multiplying and the germs simply die out after a period of about three minutes. Following the experiment, the scientists at the University of Wisconsin found that 99.9% of the bacteria placed on the wooden chopping boards had died out completely within minutes whereas some of the cheaper plastic boards had very little effect in terms of killing dangerous microbes.

Myth or Fact: The Antibacterial Properties of Wood

The study indicated that an antibacterial effect of wood, especially for pine, is caused by the hygroscopic properties of wood and the wood extractives.

(PDF) Wooden boards affecting the survival of bacteria?

The only situation where plastic appeared less contaminated than wood (when sampling had been done by contact agar) was just after a drastic cleaning and disinfecting. But we do not know how long this difference was maintained during the working period, or whether the wood had been scraped before cleaning and disinfecting.

Sanitary quality of meat chopping board surfaces: a bibliographical study – ScienceDirect

There was a significant difference in bacterial recoveries from wood and plastic. Bacterial numbers decreased faster on the wood surfaces than on the plastic surface.

Wooden boards affecting the survival of bacteria? A. Schönwälder, R. Kehr, A. Wulf and K. Smalla

& Also »

Citește mai departePlastic vs. Wooden cutting boards

It’s a paradox that in some parts of the world, people try to lose some weight, while in other people don’t have enough food.

I’ll mention the “losing weight” people in this blog post because I tend to be more familiar with the situation.

“De ce îi este omului de astăzi foame? De iubire și de sens.”
Nicolae Steinhardt în Jurnalul fericirii

While Nicolae Steinhardt might refer to emotional hunger by saying that the modern person wishes for more love and meaning in life, I think that when you are hungry you tend to wish for things like pizza or chocolate, high in calories, and delicious food.

“In conclusion, even short-term fasts can lead people to make more unhealthy food choices, picking a lower quantity of high-calorie, relative to low-calorie, foods.”

Fattening Fasting: Hungry Grocery Shoppers Buy More Calories, Not More Food | Lifestyle Behaviors | JAMA Internal Medicine | JAMA Network

What’s the solution? I’ve found two solutions:

• Let’s say it’s 8 in the evening, and you feel hungry. As a  preventive measure, you don’t have pizza or chocolate in the house, but there are other temptations. The first solution is to settle for less. OK, perhaps not pizza, but how about some food which you do find very tasty, but is much less taxing? I like some nuts & seeds, fish caviar, eggplant salad, and even combinations of milk/kefir and bread/polenta (some people don’t like this, while I most certainly do). Even if you eat some jam and bread, it’s not like you eat some chocolate in the evening.
• The second solution is not to exaggerate the portions. Do you feel like eating some food? Go ahead, but don’t eat until you are 100% full, leave some food for tomorrow. You’ll surely live to see the new day.

With my solution, even if for the day perhaps you’ll eat more calories than in a typical day with calorie restrictions in place, you will not lose much time.

Second-best solutions can be great, too!

Minimize your losses.

Citește mai departeEnding world hunger

I have advising advice for advisors – don’t give advice, that’s my advice, which I also advise you to advise others (about this advice, of course).

Joking, aside, that’s my tip: don’t give advice.

Sure, you can say things which help people notice – “Look, I notice you do so-and-so”. You can express how this impacts you “You doing so-and-so makes me feel so-and-so, and I generally need to take this action in order to …”. So, do tell people how they impact you and what a specific action makes you feel.

On another hand, saying “You should do this” is, in my opinion, a poor solution.

The main reason is that this makes the advice easy to reject.

If you tell me “You tend to …”, I can accept this or reject this. If you tell me “You should do …” / “Why don’t you …” / “I think you should …”, I will definitely have a tendency for rejecting this.

It’s not my idea (“Oh, I need to do so and so”), but a foreign one (“Oh, X told me …”). Thus, I’ll fight it.

Citește mai departeAdvising advice for advisors