Take a Tiny Step to Improve Your Life
At this time, in January, most of us are feeling a bit discouraged about our progress with one or more New Year Resolutions. In fact, ...
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Help Your Brain Through Menopause
One of my newsletter readers asked me recently whether I could offer any advice for her memory problems and difficulty concentrating while she was experiencing ...
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How to Boost Your Productivity
Being consistently productive requires focused attention and appropriate skills to do the work. Everyone suffers from a lack of productivity from time to time. It ...
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Amaze Your Readers with Your Impressive Writing Skills
Now that you have overcome your writer’s block (see last month’s article), you are ready to polish your draft into a concise, accurate, easy-to-read document. ...
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Overcoming Writer’s Block
Writer’s block happens when you have been thinking about something you have to or want to write. You have even had sentences or whole paragraphs ...
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Building a Dementia-resistant Brain
Alzheimer’s doesn’t have to be your brain’s destiny, says Lisa Genova, neuroscientist and author of Still Alice. She shares the latest science investigating the disease ...
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A Healthy Brain Forgets a Lot
It is normal to forget someone’s name, where you parked your car, and why you walked in here.The sellers of online services think it is ...
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Developing Your Resilience to Today’s News: Eat Well
We are all developing more resilience in our ability to cope with this seemingly endless pandemic. Here is another way to give our brain and ...
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Are You Experiencing Brain Fog?
This month, with the permission of Jennifer Moss, I have used a lot of the article she posted on CBC News on February 21st because I ...
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The Secrets of Perfect Timing
I have just finished reading Daniel Pink’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and I would like to share with you the insights ...
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Maximize Your Focus in Turbulent Times
These turbulent times do make it more difficult to focus on what you really want to do. Assuming you have set some goals for 2021, ...
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What is Your Worst Case Scenario?
Your brain has two functions. One – to keep you alive and safe physically and psychologically. Two – to conserve energy so that it has ...
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What is Unconscious Bias? Why Does It Matter?
If we were not living in an increasingly diverse world, and if we had not already found that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams, all this ...
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Bring Mindfulness to Work
Internal distractions come in the form of stray thoughts, emotional upheavals and daydreaming. You can learn to be more mindful and more observant of your ...
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“How To” Increase Your Learning
This month I’ve put together a round-up of practical “how to” articles. Internet usage is way up, including blog readership. Many people are taking advantage ...
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How to Boost Your Immune System
As you know, I read, watch, and listen to the most credible sources I can find about our brains. Last week I shared insights on ...
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Staying Mentally Healthy in a COVID-19 World
How to manage your mental health in this crisis, by Dayna Lee-Baggley, Ph.D. (published with permission) If you’re feeling anxious or stressed about COVID-19, please ...
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Strive for Excellence, Not for Perfection
Recently I taught a course called Excellence: When Perfect Is Not Good Enough. Here are some of the behaviours the participants wanted to develop: To ...
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Use Tiny Habits to Reach Your Goals
This is the time of year that we think about habits we want to change. We know the recipe – set a challenging goal, give ...
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I am Proud of My Scatterbrain
I have just finished reading Scatterbrain: How the Mind’s Mistakes Make Humans Creative, Innovative, and Successful by neuroscientist Henning Beck. Now I feel much better ...
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PURRRR Your Way to Productivity
Procrastinators want to find a way to nudge, push, or force themselves to stop the delays. They want to get the things they really want ...
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Learning Agility
Many people complain that they have a “poor memory”, but only when they forget something. You have a fantastic long-term memory, and an effective immediate ...
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Socializing Smarts for Your Brain
This month I have spent some time exploring the value of our social connections in keeping our brains and bodies healthy. To my great surprise, ...
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Eating Smarts for Your Brain, Your Heart, and Your Gut
Recently I watched an A Passionate Eye episode on CBC called ‘How to Stay Younger’. There are now blood tests which, by measuring the damage ...
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Resilience Smarts: How to Handle Stress
Most of us prefer to make some extra effort to keep our brains and bodies in good shape so we can have enjoyable and rewarding ...
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Sleep Smarts: How to Sleep Well Every Night
Imagine waking up in a pool of blood, with a cut needing five stitches and a broken cheekbone. That is what happened to Arianna Huffington ...
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Exercise Smarts
While working on this article, I have become excited again about the amazing research which shows over and over again the profound effect regular exercise ...
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Outsmarting Dementia
Hands up if you have ever worried about getting Alzheimer’s. You cannot do anything about getting older every day, but you can seriously reduce your ...
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A Grinch with a Grudge
Just like the Grinch, sometimes our hearts shrink a little as Christmas looms. Let’s reduce some holiday stresses this year. Forget about creating a “perfect” ...
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Sleep… Chief Nourisher in Life’s Feast (Shakespeare)
If you are sleeping for less than seven hours for three nights or more every week, you are probably sleep deprived. Care of family members, ...
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How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Cut out looking bright screens early in the evening. Children in the developed world are spending more half of their waking lives looking at a screen. ...
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Is it Crazy in Your Workplace?
By crazy, I mean even though you and your co-workers were hired for your brains, the conditions at work make it very difficult for your ...
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What Is the Difference Between Emotions and Feelings?
I have been listening on CBC to people calling in to talk about their experiences with tornadoes and other frightening weather events. Those who had ...
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Reduce the Distraction of Worry When Working
Have you ever found yourself trying to get some work done when something is worrying you? Often you get caught in a loop of “worry ...
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Boost Your Creativity and Reduce Your Stress
Question: Would you like to improve your creativity, your productivity, and your accuracy at work while at the same time reducing your stress level? Answer: Stop multitasking. ...
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Is the Internet Messing with Your Brain?
How many hours per day do you spend looking at a screen? To understand how much that matters to your brain, and even more importantly ...
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Boost Your Success by Asking for Feedback
When you received your last performance review, did you feel threatened… or motivated? If feedback could be provided without triggering the threat response, it could ...
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“Can I see you in my office please?”
“Can I see you in my office please?” Most of us would experience a sinking feeling if we heard those words from our manager. That sinking ...
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A Budget for Your Brain
As we head into one of the busiest and often the most stressful months of the year, you might want to consider creating a budget ...
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Changing a Lifetime Habit
I have decided to change a lifetime habit which has cost me, and continues to cost me, thousands and thousands of dollars. This habit allows ...
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How ‘Leaning In’ Can Lead Us All To A Better World
Thirty years ago women achieved a form of equality, at least in simple numerical terms: they became more than 50% of the college graduates in ...
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Grow Your Influencing Skills with SCARF
If you want to be a better influencer – a better manager, colleague, partner or parent – a good starting point would be to study ...
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Surprise: I Can Learn to Speak French
Recently I talked about how to make learning stick, which got me thinking about my own learning. At the same time, I realized from studying ...
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How to Make Learning Stick
Anybody at work is well aware of the constant need to learn new information and new skills. But our ability to make that learning stick ...
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Get Your Grudge to Budge
Does somebody’s behaviour really annoy you and leave you feeling resentful? Would you like to get rid of this particular stressor in your life? “Resentment ...
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Working with Your Memory to Find a Lost Item
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to find a misplaced item. The pressure to find it increases exponentially when it is something really important ...
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Good News for Modern Brains
Before birth, a baby has learned to recognize its mother’s heartbeat. Some babies have learned how to suck their thumbs. At birth, the brain is ...
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Rap for Growth
I am excited to attend the NeuroLeadership Summit in New York. Neuroscientists who are interested in the applying brain research to the workplace plus leaders ...
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Musical Memories Ease Dementia
Do you worry about getting dementia? I do. It is one of the reasons I am so interested in getting and keeping my brain as ...
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Have Supportive, Collaborative Relationships
This month we’ve gathered together a list of past articles which include advice and tips for improving the relationships you have at work with colleagues, ...
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Why Your Brain Hates Performance Appraisals
According to this Harvard Business Review article, being ranked at work, either as individuals or as teams, provokes our brains into a “fight or flight” ...
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Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
Do you have a more fixed or a more growth mindset? I love the idea of having a growth mindset. It ties in with everything ...
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Working with the Goldilocks in Your Brain
David Rock’s book, Your Brain at Work, is a great read. Until you have a chance to read it yourself, here are some key points ...
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Your Gut has a Brain
We have been hearing a lot about the importance of our gut bacteria these days, so I was very interested to read The Diet Myth ...
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Power Up Your Brain with Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a technique that helps you to work more efficiently with both sides of your brain. Even though we read, talk, and write ...
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Unlocking a Frozen Brain
Have you ever felt that changing your unhelpful thinking, or changing an unproductive habit is just too hard? This story might encourage you to challenge ...
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Alternative to Worry and Anger
The limbic system is the seat of our emotions. Since the days when we lived in caves, the speed and power of our emotions has ...
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Resist Distraction
It takes a lot of energy to stop yourself from following a distraction. Yet it’s better to stop yourself early, quickly, and often before the ...
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What You Say to Yourself, You Believe
Now let’s consider the relationship between your conscious and subconscious mind. With your conscious mind, you’re constantly thinking and talking to yourself. Your conscious mind ...
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Enhance Your Developmental Intelligence by Working with your Memory
Whether you want to improve your ability to remember names or to learn another language, improve your knowledge of a certain subject or learn to ...
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Make Routine Tasks More Engaging
Our lives can’t always be a series of engaging activities, but we can turn even mundane maintenance activities into interesting challenges. For instance, I used ...
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Three Levels of Listening
Level 1: Active listening At this level, listeners refrain from judging the speaker and attempt to understand things from his or her point of view. ...
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The Difference between Happiness and Pleasure
an excerpt from Get More Power from your Brain Pleasure means enjoying something that comes from outside of ourselves, like taking pleasure in eating, having ...
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Learning to Work with Your Brain
an excerpt from Get More Power from your Brain Most of us at work today are paid to think, but how often have you had ...
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Your Brain Loves Patterns and Routines
an excerpt from Get More Power from your Brain The nearly 86 billion neurons in our brains connect with each other through dendrites, which are ...
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Make Friends with Your Brain
Want to be more effective at work, and have more fun at home? Just make friends with your brain. Get to know you brain a ...
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Are you Addicted to your Phone?
When you hear the sound of a text message on your phone, do you automatically reach for and look at the screen? Does your teenager ...
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I Never Procrastinate
…on what I want to do now, like eat a piece of chocolate, read a good book, or wander around the internet. Procrastination is the ...
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Sculpt Your Brain
From my reading about brains and minds, I have become convinced that we can compensate for many weaknesses in our own brains by deliberately stimulating ...
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Build and Condition Your Brain
If you were offered a pill that could do the following for your brain… Increase the growth of brain cells in your memory centre (hippocampus) ...
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Disputing Your Irrational Thoughts
That *** makes me so mad!! It feels as if ***’s behaviour instantaneously makes us angry, but really it is our own thinking that is ...
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Am I at Risk for Alzheimer’s?
Joan and Shirley don’t know each other, but they’d enjoyed similar careers. Each was a well-respected accountant who became Chief Financial Officer of her organization. ...
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Wired and Tired
There is growing evidence that when we play video games, or even just surf the internet for engaging information, we trigger the fight or flight ...
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Are You Sabotaging Your Best Intentions?
“Self-Control is not a problem in the future, it is only a problem now.” – Shlomo Benartzi According to eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we each ...
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Scarcity: Why Having so Much Means so Little
How is it that we can be so smart in many ways, and yet some of us can’t manage our time? How come others are ...
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Wired for Easy Answers
Good decisions take time. Daniel Kahneman demonstrates that we have two systems of thinking: System 1 is what he calls ‘thinking fast’. It represents intuition, ...
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Read Faster, Remember Longer: Technique
We see and we think very rapidly, much faster than we can talk. Have you ever been in (or narrowly avoided) an accident? Do you ...
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Strengthen your Willpower
The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That’s the conclusion of Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney in ...
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How to Remember Names
Here is a mnemonic – a memory technique – to help you remember names. You need to pay attention to the sound of the name ...
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Attention, Interest, Repetition, and Organization
Whether you want to improve your ability to remember names or to learn another language, improve your knowledge of a certain subject or to play ...
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Train Your Brain to Get the Important Things Done
First you need to understand how to harness and direct your fantastic brainpower. Your pre-frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) is where all your big ...
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Perfectionism is Unhealthy and a Waste of Time
According to Dr. Gordon Flett of York University who has specialized in studying perfectionism and anxiety, “Perfectionism is the need to be, or to appear ...
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Mistakes were Made (but not by me)
This is the title of an excellent book by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson which I highly recommend you read. But until you get the time to ...
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Depression at Work: How you can help
What do you do when a good, hard-working employee gradually becomes less productive, makes more mistakes, seems withdrawn and anxious but denies that anything is ...
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Can You Teach an Adult Brain New Tricks?
For many years, we thought that once you were an adult, your brain was mature and did not change for the rest of your life. ...
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Productive Reading – Read Faster and Remember Longer
If you are like most people, you read more slowly than you can think. Since a piece of writing is actually slowing down your thought ...
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Get More Power From Your Brain
If you are 35 or older, you have had at least one moment when you cannot remember something you know well. At first, we laugh ...
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Tune Up Your Memory
Have you ever thought that you could be using your memory more effectively? Lots of people complain that they have a poor memory, that their ...
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First Break All The Rules – What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
After examining the answers from one million employees and eighty thousand managers, the authors of this book distilled out some fascinating and important information from ...
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Concentration at Work versus Mind Wandering
I heard an interesting discussion on CBC radio last Saturday. Dr. Judson Brewer was being interviewed about his study which showed that experienced meditators have a ...
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Greater Brain Power Skills Defeat Procrastination
Fear and doubt are what’s actually causing us to procrastinate most of the time, so to alter that habit we need to look into what’s ...
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I’m Right, You’re Wrong
“I’m right – you’re wrong!” Although we would rarely, if ever, make that bold statement out loud, we often act as if we believe that ...
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"10 Ways to Keep Your Brain Healthy"
The information included in this chapter of Get More Power from Your Brain is in order of effectiveness to get and keep your brain as healthy and productive as possible. The most important thing to understand about your brain is that it can continue to grow new neurons and dendrites throughout your life.
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