We also cover how to write by getting out of your own way and writing what is already welling up inside you. There is nothing like the powerful magnetic pull of a story to get your point across. That means stepping out of yourself and delivering a solid story. In fact,s tory telling is one of the best ways to get a point across.

The interview also covers the important art of making course corrections. If you aren’t writing, then you don’t know how to improve, but if you are writing, whether as a beginner, intermediate, or as a professional, you know that every piece you write can be improved. Once you write, you can take a measure of where you are. Using that information, you can plot a new course and correct yourself to success.

Professor Conrad interview with Gracie Lake on making a connection and getting out of your own way by Professorconrad on Mixcloud

The post How to Write | Learning How to Blog for Social Media: Part 3 appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

Peter Conrad and Gracie Lake interview on how to write a blog by Professorconrad on Mixcloud

The post Learning How to Blog for Social Media | Interview appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

Hi X,

It sounds like prayer is one of the things you do to change the equation in your function box. You know, we all are awash in a sea of our own thoughts. The good and the bad things that happen in our day get automatically processed in our function boxes. We react with more good or bad thoughts as output. The output thoughts control the link to what we do about the events.

Interestingly, some people believe that we cannot control the flow of our thoughts. That doesn’t mean they believe we can’t change the output of the function box. Instead, they think that we can release stress as we step back from our thoughts and observe them.

When you do this, close your eyes and relax physically. Allow your thoughts to run freely without trying to do anything other than watch them like a movie. As you take on the role of observer, you lose responsibility for your thoughts. They pop up on their own.

When they show up, you just acknowledge each thought by saying to yourself, “I’m thinking _____.” Fill in the blank for each thought and let it move on. Another will pop up immediately after this. Just do the same thing–acknowledge it and let it move on.

Try it for five or ten minutes with no interruptions. See if it helps to clear out some of the cobwebs and gives you a greater ability to focus after your time in observation. See, also, if it helps you to change the way the equations in the function box work on the output.

After all, If you take a negative event and let your brain do what it does–think up every wild solution it can, but you don’t automatically accept its solutions, then you take control of the link between your function box output and your reaction to it. You can decide to act in a positive way even when the input was negative, and the function box delivers a negative output.

Choosing our reactions is one of the things that makes us different from animals. Even after all the processing of our brains, we can still choose to act in whatever way we want, as long as we take control of that link between function box output and action.

Ultimately, we have control of our actions, regardless of what happens to us. We are not confined to automatic reactions that don’t lead us to what we want to achieve.

I’ll give you an example of the difference between our capability to choose a reaction and what happens in the rest of the animal kingdom. Did you know that you can easily trap a fly once you know its behavior? Yes, a pesky little fly that you chase around the room for fifteen minutes with a flyswatter can be captured easily if you know what it is going to do.

You don’t have to be a fly mind-reader. There is no magic here. All you need is an understanding that flies are hard-wired to behave in a certain way. They have a function box too, but they can’t choose how they react to the output. They follow whatever the function box tells them to do. The link between function box input, function box output, and reaction is completely automatic. Knowing this gives you an advantage over the fly.

To test this, get a glass, fill it to the brim with water and soap suds. Watch the fly. When it lands on the ceiling, slowly (no sloshing!) lift the glass toward the fly and directly under it. When it senses danger, it will do the same thing every time. It will drop down about six inches before zooming off.

The fly has a great built-in survival mechanism. It reacts instantly to a threat by carrying out the drop and zoom behavior. In fact, this behavior is exactly why it continues to get away when you swat at it. The place you are aiming for is the place where the fly used to be.

Because the fly has a tiny brain running a very simple program, it reacts faster than you. It gets away more often than not, leading you around the room while you are wildly swinging the fly swatter and working up a sweat.

If, however, you simply raise the glass of sudsy water straight up beneath the fly, and if you get within that six inch range, the fly will drop straight down and get trapped in the suds. It will happen every time.

The fly population lacks the ability to adapt to this new threat. They can’t communicate with each other and say “Watch out for people with deadly glasses of soapy water!” They just use their built in programming and follow their simple rules.

As a human who knows about the link between function box output and reaction, as a human who knows that you can intervene in the link and block the automatic action, and as a human who now knows that doing so often enough allows you to reprogram the function box itself so that it begins producing different outputs . . . all this new knowledge allows you to control your behavior in the world, regardless of the input.

Here’s an example of how fly-like behavior in humans. Advertisers treat us as if we are flies. They know that we will react in a certain way to specific input, so they show us images of the stupid dad and the wise mom, they show us the caring father giving the keys of his safe, sensible car to his teenager, they show us life lived without worry after we take some medication, knowing that our function boxes will only process the positive message and will completely ignore all of the negative messages telling what the drug might do. They treat us this way because, as a group,  we react to their messages and buy their products.

Statistically, human behaviors are fairly predictable. As individuals, though, we can take control of our reactions and adjust our behavior to match what we want instead of what we are programmed to do. We are people, not flies. We have the capability of control.

The post You as a Function Box | Part 2 appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

Hi Class,

Since I began teaching many years ago, I have heard many possible versions of why students couldn’t get their work in on time. The most common is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at home.” Another common version is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at work.”

Of course there are the individual events related to health and money that jump up and get in the way of schooling. Sometimes these issues are fabricated as plausible excuses to get out of work, but far more often there is at least a seed of truth in the statements. I don’t discount them. In fact, I can understand how home life, work, health, and money can all impact the way we think, and therefore the way we perform.

If you see yourself in any of the above statements or possibilities I talk about, please don’t take it personally. My point is not to single you out. In fact, I’ve heard each of them many times already in this class alone. So why am I bringing them up? My goal is to show everyone in class that we are all stuck in life at the same time we are trying our best to work through this class. Life isn’t polite enough to stand by silently while we complete the coursework. It stands up and shouts at us while we are trying to concentrate.

Stay with me while I explain the following. Please pay attention. It’s important, and it will make sense by the time I’m finished.

You as a Function Box:

Math teachers use the concept of a function box to show how equations with two variables work. If you drop a number X in the box, a number Y pops out. Y is a function of X. It sounds more complicated than it really is. If the box contains the equation Y = X + 1, the output will follow a simple pattern. Drop the number 5 in the box, and out pops 6. The function box added 1 to the number 5 and provided the answer 6. The box might have a more complicated equation that takes the number 5 as X, runs it through the function box, and delivers 30 as a result. We don’t know what the equation is, even though we might imagine a host of them. It might be any of the following:
Y = X + 25
Y = X x 6
Y = 7.3/X x 20.5479452
The equations could be even more complicated than that. The point is that we don’t know what is in the box until we test it. In fact, we have to test it a couple of times in order to determine what’s really inside the function box. To test it, we’ll try another number. Drop unlucky 13 in the box and see what happens.

In the first function, Y = X + 25, the number 38 will pop out of the box
In the second function, Y = X x 6, the number 78 will pop out of the box
In the third function, Y = 7.3/X x 20.5479452, though, it gets a little hairy. The number is a little more difficult to process. I used a calculator on this one. Drop 13 in, and the number 11.5384615 will pop out of the box.

If we can’t see the equation inside the function box , then it will be more difficult to imagine what produced a decimal number like 11.5384615 for Y when we dropped in poor unlucky 13.

Enough with the math lesson. Here’s my point. People are function boxes. If we drop an input into them, some kind of an output is generated. Physically, if I eat too much cake, I will gain weight. That is an example of a function box at work. Mentally, though, we are more complex. If I drop the same event into different people, I get different results. Take a holiday for example. Some people love to celebrate holidays, and others hate them. Suicides increase around Thanksgiving and Christmas–the very times we should be most happy . . . the same time others are getting together to exchange gifts and joy.

Take another event–a bad day at work, an argument with a loved one, a health issue . . . plug in anything that is bothering you. We all have these issues. If I drop each one of these issues into a student’s function box of a life, I will get a result. It will be different for each student. Some will continue on with their work, some will call work to a halt and not produce anything. Some will drop the class. I’ve already lost too many students from this class due to drops. You see, some input X got in the way of each student who dropped. Some event dropped into their function boxes and they responded differently than you have responded. Instead of generating a solution to their problem or finding a way to work around it, they responded to their X input by generating a Y output that says quit working and get dropped from the class. Many times the students shared their X inputs to me before they dropped. Yes, they were problems, but they were all problems that a good function would turn into a success.

I want all of you to know that the function box inside of you is not as much of a mystery as you might think. You can write the equations that go inside your function box. You can develop solution equations that give you a successful Y instead of one that puts you right back where you were before you started the class. It’s up to you to write those equations, and it us to you to live with them. I have had heroic students who gave birth during an online class and wrote their discussion question posts in between contractions while at the hospital. I have had students who have had all of their belongings, including their computer, stolen, yet they found a friend’s computer and completed the class. I have had students who were working three low-paying part-time jobs and still managed to get the classwork done.

I am not belittling the problems any of you have, I’m saying that everyone has problems, but some write the equations in their function boxes so that they get a different output–a successful output. That is what I wish for all of you.

The post You as a Function Box appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

All these look like what a writer does . . .at least that’s what writers do in the movies. They muse and wrestle with writing demons for hours, days, and sometimes months or years. Finally, the dam breaks and they begin to flow their ideas on the page. It takes no effort, and they work until they collapse, producing the artistic triumph that only the agony of musing and wrestling can bring. Looking like a writer may feel like being a writer, but it ain’t necessarily so.

Writing is certainly about inspiration

Writing is certainly about inspiration, but it’s really about inspiration transformed into words on a page. The best way to accomplish this, to find that inspiration, is to show it you are looking for it. If you write, it will appear. Counterintuitive, isn’t it? You have to write in order to get inspiration. You don’t get inspiration and then write.

Look, your brain wants to please you. It wants you to be successful. If you tell it you want to look like a writer, then go ahead and pace around the room thoughtfully. Your brain will comply and you will look like a writer. If you want to be a writer instead of looking like one, then keep in mind the old but true statement:

Writers write.

Writers write. They write all the time. They think about writing when they are not writing because writing occupies their mind-space. How do they do it?

One of the best techniques you can use is free writing. The first time I came across this technique was when I was trying to teach kids in a rural town how to write. Like you, they looked at a blank piece of paper (or a blank computer screen) as a stressor. The best way to beat this stressor for most was to look like a writer and try to access writerly thoughts. Imagine this: 20 kids in a classroom, all of them with blank sheets of paper sitting on their desks, most of them with a pen in hand as they looked at the ceiling. If I asked them what they were doing, they would answer in near unison, “I’m thinking.”

Here’s my response: “No you’re not. You’re staring at the ceiling. If you were thinking, then words would be pouring from your pen onto the page.”

How can you write . . . if you don’t think first?

They looked at me like I was crazy. How can you write, they wondered, if you don’t think first? To understand this, the writer has to confront and overcome two illusions.

Here is the first illusion. If you believe that writing is separate from thinking, then you stare at the ceiling. If you believe that writing, especially free writing, is synonymous with thinking, then words begin to flow on the page.

The second illusion is that thinking stops. It doesn’t stop. Never. Not even when you are feeling as if you are as blank as that sheet of paper. It can’t stop because your brain never stops thinking. What the brain does to make it look like it is blank is block what you want to think about with negativity.

Your brain is a mean editor. You get a thought, and the brain tells you you’re stupid, the thoughts you think are stupid, everyone you know is stupid, oh yeah, and writing is stupid too. It tells you you could have been a good writer if only you have paid attention to all those sentence diagramming lessons in Mrs. Peabody’s fourth grade class, but no, you just wanted to stare out the window and think about what it would be like to be outside playing instead. Yep, that’s it, you’re just not a writer. That’s for other people. Best go get a candy bar . . . . 

The brain is never quiet

Free writing can quiet that voice, if you let it. Once you quiet the voice, another more useful one pops up because the brain is never quiet. The brain is like Santa Claus: it works while you are awake, it works while you are asleep. If it stops working, you are headed for the hospital because it is broken. Yours is not broken, by the way. Your brain is just fine.

Here is what you need to do. I’ve given the following set of instructions to all of my students since the 1990′s, and it works just fine. Just quit worrying and do it:

Get out a pad of paper or open up the word processor on your computer. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write whatever comes to mind. If you think about the time your mom played her first practical joke on you on April Fool’s day, then write about that. Give all the details. Show what she did, look at it from her viewpoint. What did she see? How did you look when you were pranked? What did you do in response? How did that make her feel? Where were you? What did that place look like–really? Get down to the details. If you can’t remember, then make them up, but write about the textures of the materials, write about the colors, write about the sounds and smells and tastes involved. Keep writing and DO NOT STOP FOR AT LEAST FIFTEEN MINUTES.

DO NOT STOP FOR AT LEAST FIFTEEN MINUTES.

That’s all. Just don’t stop. When your brain tells you you are out of ideas (you aren’t–it’s lying), then go ahead and write about anything. Repeat yourself without any shame. Write the same word over and over for as long as it takes to let your brain know that you are serious and intend to write.

At the same time, you will be signaling your muse, the poor muse never actually wanted to wrestle with you in the first place, to come on out and give with the inspiration thing. It will show up. It will give you one idea, then another, until ideas and examples and details are flowing so fast you can’t keep up with them.

In order to know how this is possible you need to know that the brain operates in an associative fashion. It has a thought, which triggers another couple of thoughts, which triggers four our so and on and on as it searches for information and meaning. This is happening all the time–every moment of every day. Free writing captures this thought process on the page for you. Go ahead, give it a try. Free write today . . . and tomorrow . . . and the next day . . . . Keep going and find out what it means to be a writer instead of a person who thinks about writing while sometimes looking like a writer. Let me know what happens. I’d love to see your comments on this and other processes as I tell you more about the writing process and how it can benefit you.

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post How to Write 2 | Free Writing appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

There is no need to doubt. You have a writer within you. You have ideas, interests, and knowledge to share. You have stories and poems tightly packed in the most powerful computer we know–your brain.

Here’s something you might not know. . . .You have a brain that is no different from anyone else’s. Your brain is not defective. It is not unable to capture beautiful ideas. It can do anything anyone else’s brain can do as long as you tell it what you want it to do, and then stick with the task until it produces for you.

If you haven’t been able to write before, it’s not because you couldn’t write, it’s because you believed you couldn’t.

If you haven’t been able to write before, it’s not because you couldn’t write, it’s because you believed you couldn’t.  That’s okay. Did you notice the one key thing that makes it okay? The statement was written in the past tense. In fact, everything you have every experienced is in the past. Let it go if it was not productive. Let go of old disempowering beliefs. Replace the old concept that you can’t write with a new one and tell yourself you are a writer.

Then take the leap. You have your computer open. You might prefer a pen and paper approach. Either one is fine. Just begin. Let some ideas flow out on the page.

But what if I don’t have any ideas to write about?

That happens to the best of us. Here are a few techniques you can use to get the words flowing:

1. Keep a notebook handy at all times. When something interesting pops up, write it down immediately.
2. When you find yourself without any new ideas, get some from someone else. Pick up a book and read until you come across a great sentence that makes you think. Put that sentence down on the top of your screen or page and use it as a seed for developing a thought.
3. Do what William Faulkner did when he ran into a dry spell with no new ideas–pick an author  you respect (Faulkner chose F. Scott Fitzgerald, but you can choose any author you like) and start copying what that author wrote word for word until ideas start developing in your mind. Make sure you don’t publish their work, though. Publish your own writing.
4. Sit back and daydream for a moment. When an image comes up, describe that image. Think about that image and describe it with so much detail that another image arises . . . and another.

Once you get your creativity flowing, don’t stop writing. Make yourself keep on putting words down for at least fifteen minutes without pausing.

How do I write without stopping?

How do I write without stopping? It’s simple. Give some examples to develop your response. Provide some details. Keep on going until you have entered original territory and explore that. Just keep the pen moving or the keys clicking on that keyboard. Keep on going until you have written for at least fifteen minutes. Do that every day and you will be a writer instead of a person who wishes to be a writer. Instead of wondering what to write about, you’ll wonder how you will have enough time to write all that you want to write. More on freewriting in my next post–How to Write 2 | Free Writing

***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post How to Write | Getting Past I Can’t Write appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

Setting the stage for being confused:

Being confused means falling out of the comfortable line of thinking.

Life became a bit more complicated during tax season this year. We have been working with an accounting program that normally does a great job of keeping all of our income and expenses organized, but for some reason the program’s database got corrupted (I’m pretty sure I was the corrupting influence, but with computers, it’s always best to blame the machine–just to be safe). All blame aside, someone (me) had to transfer every transaction out of the database and go through it by hand. This meant reorganizing every bill and every receipt to make sure that dates, amounts, and categories all lined up.

I was confused.

Believe me, they didn’t line up. I was confused. For example, I had about twenty or so different business receipts all dated July 1, regardless of when they were actually paid or billed. The same thing happened in September. According to the data, we had eaten at a place called Dobson’s Restaurant over a dozen times, but we only went there once. The clincher was the bill for $78 for parking at Malaga Car Park, which happens to be in Spain. Um . . . Spain? Didn’t go there. Didn’t park there. Yeah, I was confused.

. . . more arrogance than confidence.

Now keep this in mind–We don’t do our own taxes anymore. We have enough transactions to know that we need a professional. In order to best make use of our professional tax preparer, we have to give him good data. Confident as always, when we found out that our accounting system was messed up, I told my wife that I’d have everything fixed up lickety-split–no problem. It would only take a couple of days. After all, I am pretty good with Excel spreadsheets. Once I saw that I could download all the transactions into one spreadsheet I was absolutely certain I could easily figure it all out. Confidence is based on real skill and knowledge. My belief in my own abilities was more arrogance than confidence. It took me two weeks to sort it out, not two days.

The confused person’s face-down:

By the middle of day two I was sure this was a bigger problem than I had anticipated. My rational brain couldn’t wrap itself around the corrupted data. There were multiple entries of the same transaction, sometimes three or more. I had to go through the thousands of transactions to sort them all out and make sure none were doubles. I had to figure out which were money coming in and which were money going out. That doesn’t sound too difficult, and it isn’t really, if you have a system. I didn’t. I had to invent one. I looked at a bookkeeping book for guidance and got a few hints, but for the most part I was stuck in a mire by myself, struggling to keep my head up.

That is what confusion in learning looks like. It is difficult. It seems unending. It doesn’t present a nice neatly-wrapped solution or a lifeline for someone stuck in a mire. Belief in self is challenged. There is a desire for escape (Hey, let’s go to a movie . . . Are you hungry? . . . Want to go for a walk?). Luckily, I had no choice. We had to get the taxes done, so I had to get this data organized and into our tax preparer’s hands or Uncle Sam’s angry minions would come looking for us. I’m too big to hide, so I just kept on plugging away.

. . . that’s when we begin to learn.

Once we cave in and bury ourselves in the work, avoiding the escapes and figuring out each problem as it arises, that’s when we begin to learn. We have to face down the adversary of confusion. This might be the biggest fight any learner ever faces. In ancient times our nomadic and hunter-gatherer forebears would have given confusion its own deity and made it something outside of themselves they had to physically and mentally battle. There’s good old Mr. Confusion, sitting over in the corner of the office mocking me and tempting me with distractions to keep me from doing my work.

There is some wisdom in this approach. If I personalize Mr. Confusion, I can identify him when he shows up. To battle Mr. Confusion, I have to stop listening to him. I have my own methods for battling him. First, I get rid of every distraction I can. Second, I fill the mental space Mr. Confusion usually occupies with something else–like sounds of nature or instrumental music. Whatever I listen to cannot have a voice in it, otherwise I’ll listen to the voice and it becomes another distraction. The sound has to be loud enough to drown out the voice of Mr. Confusion.

The sound has to be loud enough to drown out the voice of Mr. Confusion.

When I get rid of Mr. Confusion’s voice something magical happens. I can work for longer periods of time. I can analyze and solve bigger problems and organize bigger chunks of data so they make sense. Yes, it took two weeks for me to reorganize all of our transactions and summarize them in a way that our tax preparer could use, but those two weeks were a period of high learning for me. During the times when I tuned out Mr. Confusion’s voice, I tuned into my own ability to think. I created a system for keeping our records. Now we have a system I can apply to next year’s taxes without worrying about updating the accounting software we used to buy. I have become more capable, which means my real confidence is higher and my arrogance is a little lower.

***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post Confused? appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

This morning we put a pot of beans on slow boil after soaking them all night. Neither my wife nor I gave them a second thought, which can be a mistake when boiling beans. We noticed the smell when we went into the kitchen to make tea. Burnt garbanzo beans smell a lot like burnt toast. The toasted ones that didn’t get all black ended up tasting pretty good. Not a bad discovery . . . but I doubt we’ll be seeing them in the snack aisle.

Stay with me here. It’s okay . . . I’ll get back to the beans in a minute. When trying to achieve mental focus, the first thing I do is limit the amount of input to my eyes and ears. I find a quiet place and turn off the distractions: the TV, the radio, and even the background music. I have refined my environment by removing the excess noise. That clears out the clutter and gives my mind room to think.

It’s a lot like boiling that pot of beans. If we don’t keep an eye on the pot, then the water slowly disappears. If that’s what we want, then great. Distillers do that with all kinds of products. When done purposefully, we separate the stuff we don’t want from the stuff we do want. In boiling beans, we might get lucky and find a tasty treat, or we might just end up with food turned to trash and a difficult pot-cleaning job. In terms of mental focus, once I have created a calm room, I have to work on refining what’s going on inside my mind, just like keeping an eye on that pot of beans. If I don’t pay attention, then I end up with garbage.

In order to achieve mental focus, we need to do more than just removing the distractions.

The constellation Orion: head, shoulders, belt, sword, and knees.

In order to achieve mental focus, we need to do more than just remove the distractions. We need to focus on a specific target once the distractions are gone. That’s where the metaphor of the telescope comes in. My dad was interested in astronomy. He had several books about astronomy and a small telescope we could take out in the driveway and look at the moon and planets. A cop came over one time and my dad had to show him Jupiter through the viewfinder to deal with the neighbor who wondered what my dad was really looking at, but that’s a different story.

Once my dad was confident that I wouldn’t break the telescope, he let me take it outside and look at the stars by myself. I wonder if that was his intention all along. Without him there to aim the telescope, I had to learn how to swing it around and adjust it on my own. If I wanted to look at the constellation Orion, I first had to locate it in the sky. Finding a real constellation is a lot different than finding one on a star map where the cartographers draw lines and provide names. If I know what to look for, though, I can find a particular constellation out of all the other stars in the sky.

In mental focus terms, that’s like saying it’s time to study math. Out of all the things I could possibly focus my attention on, I choose the math book. That is my constellation. Having the book is good, but I have to work a little harder. With a book, I have to open up to the chapter I am working on.

With a telescope, I set it up in the right place. The “quiet room” for a telescope is a place outside on a clear night with no other lights around. I swing it around until the big tube of the telescope is pointed in the general direction of the target. I can eyeball this and come fairly close, but even if it is focused properly, I am probably not looking right at the target when I look through the eyepiece. If I am, it is by sheer good luck.

There’s a good reason for this.

There’s a good reason for this. A telescope helps me to see things in detail, but that means focusing in on just a small portion of the sky. You can get a feel for this by looking though a cardboard tube. The more powerful the telescope, the smaller the tube diameter. A good telescope is like looking down a straw, only magnified. Mine was more like looking down the cardboard tube at the center of a roll of paper towels. Still, that’s enough.

Okay, I have the chapter of my math book open, but I am still not to my target yet. With the math book, I have to turn to the lesson. This is the equivalent of looking through the finder scope on top of the main telescope. A finder scope is a low power telescope with a set of crosshairs. I can see a bigger swatch of sky through the finder scope than with the big telescope with its greater magnification. The crosshairs help me to center the big telescope on my target. When the crosshairs line up, then the higher-powered telescope is on target.

That is like finding the problem I want to work on in the lesson. First, of course, I read how to do the problem, but then I have to try it out for myself. I write the problem onto a sheet of paper, and then I set about solving it. All of my attention should be focused on that one problem. It’s like looking through the telescope and seeing not the entire constellation, not just a big part of it, but perhaps just that fuzzy dot that looks like a star in Orion’s sword.

The Orion Nebula, the fuzzy “star” that isn’t a star at all!

. . . then I get a revelation.

When I see that through a telescope, then I get a revelation. One of the “stars” making up Orion’s sword is fuzzy, and it stays fuzzy no matter what I do to adjust the focus. If all the other stars are clear, it shows up as a cloud of luminous gas. It’s not a star at all. It’s a nebula. I know that because I can see it with clear eyes on a clear night with no distractions. I am focused. My telescope is focused, so I see what others looking up do not see.

The same thing happens when I focus down on that one math problem. I see how it works. All of my energy is concentrated on solving it. None of my energy is wasted on all of the possible distractions around me. If I do that, and if I have done all the preparatory work so that I can understand this problem, like listening to the teacher and reading the lesson, then I can’t fail. I will see my target.

Bullseye! The Orion Nebula in view or the math problem solved. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We live in the real world of distractions too. Yes, find your quiet place to study, but don’t forget that you left the pot boiling on the stove–and make sure that you are looking at Jupiter or Orion when the cops come in response to a complaint about a possible peeping Tom looking through a telescope out in the driveway.

 
***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post Mental Focus | Refining Your Focus appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

I love to tutor kids. Yesterday I was tutoring a 7 year old who has been struggling with attention issues in school. He is a great kid, a stick of TNT in terms of energy. Most adults I know think how nice it would be to have that much energy, but if you really think about it, you might just prefer your somewhat diminished adult energy.

The force of energy in TNT comes from within, but as the explosion develops the energy expands in different directions, getting weaker the further it gets from the center of the explosion. It happens very quickly. That is exactly what this kid is like. His mind is operating at high speed, but it is going in so many directions that his thought energy is wasted. He is struggling in school, but he is by no means stupid or incapable. He just has to find a way to harness the powers within him. His energy serves no purpose unless it is focused.

I am a candle in comparison.

I am a candle in comparison. Energy from the combination of paraffin wax, oxygen, and heat create light. From what I have read, paraffin wax has about half the energy of TNT. Keep in mind–I have never studied chemistry, so take this data with a grain of salt. However you figure it, this is still a lot of power. If someone threw a half-strength stick of TNT into the room, I’d run for cover.

The candle’s energy is released slowly, though. If you look closely at a lit candle, you can see that it forms a focus. Fresh oxygen is pulled in from the sides, it combusts with the wax and forms a rising glowing taper of light. The heated gases rise, drawing in more fresh air. It’s a neat system. In a quiet place, the candle’s energy will provide useful energy in the form of steady light for many hours.

Compare this to TNT. You might be able to read by the light of TNT, but only for a fraction of a second. then it’s chaos. I used to work with TNT. We had two rules–handle it with care and don’t be around when it goes off. A candle is different though. By finding a calm room with relatively still air you can light a candle and read all night  . . . and you don’t have to duck and take cover.

. . . and you don’t have to duck and take cover.

So let’s get back to the challenge of mental focus. The trick is to find a way to control the energy. A candle controls energy by requiring the oxygen to come from an outside source. The wax doesn’t all go up at once because its source of oxygen is outside. TNT carries its own oxygen, so that oxygen can combine with the fuel all at once. TNT is self contained. A candle has to work with the outside world in order to function. TNT will blow up in a vacuum. Wax won’t. A person with a lot of mental energy will have to struggle with it all going off at the same time. External stimulus doesn’t seem to matter much. All those neurons are firing inside and the poor kid is struggling to focus on anything for any length of time.

Sure, I have trouble focusing my mental focus. We all do. Disturbances in the air around a candle cause a candle’s flame to flutter and sputter. If the disturbances are strong enough, they can extinguish the flame entirely, leaving smelly smoke where calm and focused flame used to be. The same thing happens to mental focus. The more disturbances we have, the harder it is to maintain the focus we have chosen. Our thoughts sputter and flutter. Sometimes they snuff out entirely. As adults, we can choose our environment to minimize the disturbances from without. We can also take efforts to calm the inner disturbances that affect our minds and take us off track even when everything is calm around us. We can choose mental focus.

We can choose mental focus.

How do we get this concept across to a 7 year old boy who seems to be in a constant state of explosion? How do we get him to understand the idea of mental focus? Frankly, if I told him everything I just wrote, he would have been long gone already. His internal explosive force would have taken him all around the room, up the stairs to talk to dad, into the den to talk to his sister, and on the floor playing with the cat.

Kids like stuff. They like things they can hold. I brought binoculars. After he did a fair amount of work on his worksheet, I took him out on the porch for a lesson. he thought it was a reward for doing his work, so he was happy to be outside with me. We sat down on the step and looked around. I put the binocular strap around his neck, just as my father had done for me when I was a kid. I told him in a serious voice that he always needed to put the strap around his neck when using binoculars. That’s what real men do. They wear the strap and protect the binoculars.

He noticed a jet flying high overhead and wanted to see it up close.

“Point to the airplane,” I said.

He pointed, saying, “it’s right there.”

“Go ahead and look through the binoculars,” I said.

He put the binoculars up to his eyes and began to scan the sky, saying, “I can’t find it!”

“I can’t find it!”

“Keep looking,” I said. He pulled his eyes away from the binoculars and zeroed in on there the jet was, then aimed the binoculars and found his target. Within a second he was read to look for something else. We found a newspaper in a neighbor’s driveway and a pair of ceramic dogs on the lawn of another neighbor. I had him point to each, then look at them with the binoculars. He had fun with that until the tutoring time was about to run out. I asked him to point to the newspaper. He pointed to the driveway.

“Do you see an airplane there?”

“No, it’s up there,” he said, pointing to the sky.

What happens if you look for an airplane, but you are looking near the newspaper?”

“I won’t find the airplane!”

“When you were about to work on the worksheet, do you remember what you told me? You told me three things.”

“I said I didn’t like the worksheet. I said I can’t do it. I said it’s too hard.”

“Did you do the worksheet?”

“Yes.”

“Was it too hard?”

“No.”

“Were you able to do it?”

“Yes”

“When you say things like ‘it’s too hard,’ and ‘I can’t do it,’ that’s just like looking for an airplane in your neighbor’s driveway. It’s a waste of time. You know where the airplane is. If you focus up in the sky, you’ll find it. If you look at the ceramic dogs, you won’t see the airplane. If you focus on why you think you can’t do something, then you won’t be able to do that. When it’s time to do the worksheet, throw out those other ideas and just do the worksheet. Think about it like it’s the airplane and make sure that’s all you are letting your brain look at. Don’t let it look somewhere else. It just make the work harder for you.”

“But it wasn’t hard at all!”

“You’re right, it’s not hard, as long as you look for airplanes in the sky, and newspapers on the ground, you’ll always find them.”

***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post Mental Focus appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.

I am Van Gogh, I am Einstein, I am Beethoven, I am Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).

I am Van Gogh, I am Einstein, I am Beethoven, I am Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). So are you. We are all capable of doing anything we desire. If you have some other genius you admire, then use that name instead. The names, the genders, the races are irrelevant. Each of us is each of them. I look up to many others as geniuses. These are just the names that came to mind this fine Saturday morning.

Interesting, isn’t it? There are people we call geniuses. We look up to them as if they are different than we could ever be, yet each of them was once a newborn with no particular knowledge, skills, or aptitudes other than the ability to learn.

The ability to learn–that’s the one thing all of us have in common, regardless of where we are or who we are. Don’t believe me? Look up Srinivasa Ramanujan.

I am Vincent Van Gogh not because I have Van Gogh’s talent or vision, but because I have all of the tools I need to create great artwork. It is up to me to create the vision and develop the talent. We are all of us great artists with something powerful to add to the world. We don’t need to accidentally bump into the one thing that will make us stand out. If we wait for that accident of fate, then most of us will wait a lifetime.

If we wait for that accident of fate, then most of us will wait a lifetime.

How did Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Von Beethoven, and Samuel Clemens find the one thing that made them stand out? I don’t know. We could go back into biographies and even autobiographies to find some answers, but biographies and autobiographies are limited. Remember–each of these creative adults was once a drooling and wiggling potential wrapped in a blanket and taken care of by others. All potential. No knowledge. No talent. No vision. Not yet.

I do know that somewhere along the path from birth to death each of these once blanket-wrapped drooling potentials forged their genius. They might or might not have been aware as the whisk of genius peeked in from some outside influence. They may have simply been good ground for that genius to grow. All of us are good ground for genius to grow! Somewhere in their lives, however, they made a choice to pursue their studies. They chose to work at the raw materials of a craft until they developed skill and technique. They chose to work at skill and technique until it became art. Then they chose to work at art until it became genius.

We begin by learning willpower.

Choosing to work is self discipline in action. We begin by learning willpower. I’m not talking about just showing up at a job, although genius can show up there. My grandfather, Judd Conrad, was a case in point. My father Dan told me that Judd was the go-to rate man for shipping freight across the country. People would call Judd from other railroads to figure the rates and find the path that allowed goods to ship from point to point while still turning a profit. Judd didn’t graduate from high school. He started work as a teenaged dropout (like most boys of his era) and learned his job better than the people around him. He did this without computers. Certainly, Judd Conrad didn’t change the entire economy with his vision, but he extended himself beyond his circumstances.

Each of the geniuses I mentioned had to pass through the gates of willpower by learning willpower as they went. In order to become technically competent, they had to first learn how to learn. That made them students. Then they had to learn what others knew. That made them technicians. Once they had the skills, knowledge, and  techniques down, they had to learn what leaders and new thinkers in the field had learned. That put them into the leading group, the avant-garde. This is enough for most. The true geniuses, though, decided to weigh their new knowledge and decide what was right and what should be questioned. That put them at the leading edge of the avant-garde.

The leading edge is an interesting place in itself. It is the pinnacle of current skill and knowledge. It is as far as anyone has ever gone in a field of art or study. Once there, the person who masters it all is the leader. This leader is faced with a choice: to look back and see who is gaining, or to ignore what is going on back there, turn around, and keep moving forward into the wilderness. The wilderness is where inventive, creative, and visionary genius lives. A Zen Koan asks what you should do when you get to the top of a hundred foot pole. In terms of genius, the answer might be: keep climbing.

In terms of genius, the answer might be: keep climbing.

So where does that put us non-geniuses? At birth we are the droolers laying on the ground at the foot of the pole. We have to begin the process of learning willpower from the foot of the pole. As we mature we journey as far up the pole as our willpower takes us. Some of us do things that drop us back down, but seldom do we drop as far as we think we do. How many adults do you know who have reverted to true infancy? Not many. I don’t know any.

How do we get to the point where we become geniuses? Say to yourself, “I am a genius in the making,” and then start making genius. Wherever we are on the pole, we can start climbing again, make progress, go toward the top. We decide the direction we are going. That’s one of the few decisions we have total control over. If we have the willpower, we move upward. The most powerful tools that any of the above geniuses had at their disposal were not the books, not the paint brushes, not the university, not the orchestra . . .the most powerful tools all geniuses share are the minds that can conceive, learn, and create, and the willpower to do so.

***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

The post Learning Willpower appeared first on StudioBLearning.com.