Cultivating Mental Toughness

"Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory", said Bill Russell. In fact, mental toughness is the most important ingredient that is very much necessary for achieving goals in life because during the course of your journey towards your life's goals, chances of you facing bumps are very high. Not only that, this trait will help you acquire resilience, determination and willpower so you can persist till you reach your goals.

Mental toughness gives you the ability and strength to push despite opposition and hurdles. So, it is imperative that you must try cultivating the trait. But before that, let us understand what we mean by mental toughness.

What is mental toughness?

Mental toughness can be described as the attribute that allows you to handle the difficulties you may face in your life. A few experts firmly restrict this attribute to the sports field. But a number of other experts believe that this attribute pervades every area of our life. Peter Clough and Dough Strycharczyk, researchers who authored the book "Developing Mental Toughness," says that this attribute is "the quality which determines in large part how people deal effectively with challenge, stressors, and pressure... irrespective of prevailing circumstances."

According to these researchers, this trait consists of a few critical components and they are challenge, control, commitment and confidence. As far as "challenge," the first component, is concerned, you must view challenges, not as obstacles, but as opportunities. The crux of "control," the second component, is to believe that you have complete control over your destiny and life.

Commitment is nothing but possessing the capabilities needed for sticking to tasks and ensuring to complete them regardless of the hurdles you may face. 'Confidence' is believing in your capabilities. Peter Clough and Dough Strycharczyk firmly say that mental toughness and the skills related to it apply to every area of life.

Researches prove that the attribute has a genetic link. At the same time, experts suggest that people can learn and strengthen their mental toughness as well. But how can you cultivate this trait?

1. Believe that you have the ability for achieving your goals

A study conducted in 2002 revealed that top performers and especially, elite athletes always possessed extreme self-belief. This means that they firmly believe that they can succeed. In other words, if you believe in yourself and keep encouraging yourself positively, you can achieve your goal regardless of what it is.

2. Prefer intrinsic motivations to external rewards

External rewards like popularity, money, etc. are certainly nice but intrinsic motivations are better because they come from the "within." This means you will love doing things just for doing them. When you love doing things, you will push harder and try to perform better. In fact, mentally tough people love doing things in which they are interested and their success in their tasks come from intrinsic motivations and not because of external rewards. This means that they love the challenges they may face while doing things and overcoming those challenges is the real reward for them.

3. Mentally tough people do not get upset when they encounter setbacks

Mentally tough people rebound even when they encounter setbacks and while doing so, they move ahead with stronger determination and resolve. They innovate to find out new ways for overcoming such phases.

4. They are self-directed

This means that they do not let things happen. Instead, they focus on creating the life they like to lead. They set goals and take appropriate action for going behind their goals and achieving them. In other words, they learn the process of setting goals and pursue the goals relentlessly.

5. They keep their focus even if there are distractions

Distractions are bound to be there in everyone's life but mentally tough people do not allow them to play spoil-sport to their focus. Remember that it is impossible to always have everything right. Even if other things need your attention, you must focus only on your goals and work towards achieving them.

6. They are committed

Commitment is a major ingredient that helps in cultivating mental toughness. Remember the words of Winston Churchill who said, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." So, you should always remain committed to making the right efforts for achieving your goals.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Cultivating-Mental-Toughness&id=9723966

Strategies for Effective Reading

Introduction

Regular reading is essential for anyone. It will help one to develop his/her knowledge, skills or attitude. It is often done for different purposes by different groups of people. Some read for advancing their knowledge; some others do it for improving their language skills; another section of people do it just for pleasure. Whatever be the purpose, the habit helps everyone in improving his/her personality in many ways.

Students and academics usually pay little attention to assess how bad they read. They do not, in normal case, assess how well they can improve the speed of their reading. Speed of one's reading can lead to improvement in learning effectiveness. Learning to read well is an essential skill every academic should develop systematically.

The reading habit helps everyone build up his/her personality in many ways. Choosing the right text or material to read is the first thing. Reading for academic purposes is strenuous. Students need to focus on understanding the contents of the material in depth. But reading for pleasure tends to be light. The latter does require less concentration and can be done at an average speed of 100-200 words per minute. Prior knowledge of the subject is a key element of effective reading comprehension.

There is a practice for some people to read word by word. It is better to focus on reading phrases rather than just words while reading. Reading the material as phrases allows one's brain to process the reading input as 'ideas or phrases'.

Reading Strategies

There are different types of techniques for reading. For improving the rate, one should practice skimming, scanning or previewing as a reading strategy. The method should be chosen as the reading material and purpose demand.

The first one is skimming. It is reading rapidly for gathering the main points. In this process, the reader reads quickly to gain a general idea. The reader understands the whole text without reading it from first to last or word to word. The technique may allow you to read up to 1000 words a minute. In this process, the key ideas of a text is gathered by reading first and last paragraphs, topic sentences, and other parts like titles, abstracts, summary of chapters, photograph captions, etc.

In skimming, the practice is to identify whether to read or not, what to read carefully, and which place is the right one to begin with. If you skim through a text before you read it, it will help you understand the material better.

In scanning, the practice is to read rapidly to find out a specific piece of information. It is a technique that anyone can employ to find out specific information, facts or ideas without reading the whole text. Scanning may help you examine up to 1,500 words a minute. The purpose of scanning a text is to evaluate the relevance of the material. Scanning is to be done before skimming. It will help you determine whether a material carries the information the reader wants. Once a resource is scanned, it can then be skimmed for further details.

Surface reading is yet another process of reading. It is used to find the 'information words' from the text you read. Half of the words in a material are "information" words. They alone make sense of the material. The other words in it works like glue and paint. They provide connections but are not essential for making out the meaning. Concentrating on information words may help you read faster. The comprehension will also be better. Paying more attention to what the author is trying to say is the essence of this type of reading.

Extensive reading is reading a longer text, often for pleasure with emphasis on overall meaning. But intensive reading is reading a short text for detailed information. Phrase reading is yet another process.

Process of Rapid Reading

The process of reading results in a series of eye jerks, known as 'fixations'. During fixations, the eyes take in words for comprehension. Slow readers take in only one or two words in each fixation. Increase the words in each fixation by continuous practice. You will be able to gather more number of words in each fixation. Therefore, you have to practise reading the sentences without eye jerks, but with smooth movement of eyes from one to another. One can practice this strategy with conscious effort.

Marking important points in the text is good for learning. Underlining or highlighting key words, and making notes in margins etc., can improve speed in reading. Making marks in texts such as underlining the sentences can help you in improving concentration, in identifying key points and in making the book easier to survey, if you prefer to do so.

Other Points to Remember

Note taking always supports reading comprehension. Taking down essential points is what you do in note taking. Note-taking during reading or listening can help you gain deeper understanding and reflection of the text you read. It can help you remember or recollect easily what you have read. Summarizing what the reader has learned is another way to improve their overall comprehension of text.

Language proficiency will help you read better. Reading, on the other hand, will help your proficiency in language skills. Mastering the basic 3,000 or more words, which constitute approximately 80 percent of texts in English you normally use, can aid you in reading, understanding and learning any material on any subject in English, easily. Extensive reading, comprehension skills, reading fluency, and vocabulary building, are all integral ingredients of advancement of knowledge.

Active readers, with clear goals for reading, can become good learners. They regularly evaluate whether the text and their reading practice meet their goals. Good readers scan the text before they read. They get to know what the structure of the text is and what sections of the text are relevant to them. Good readers can make predictions about what is to come. They choose what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what to re-read, what not to read, and so on. Good readers read different texts differently. They evaluate the text's quality and value, and respond to the text intelligently.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Strategies-for-Effective-Reading&id=8356743

How Fear Warps Your Thinking—and 3 Ways You Can Fight Back

Why fear is the biggest threat to your success

           

A tall, wobbly ladder–and you at the top.

A black spider with eight hairy, spidery legs.

A clown—any clown.

Fear can be a great survival tool. But as a way of life? It has some nasty side effects.

In every stressful or threatening situation, your brain starts logging details and adding warning labels. You may not notice at the time—you're too busy dealing with the situation—but later, whenever you encounter one similar detail to that threatening situation, you'll find yourself with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Once triggered, fear manifests in one of two primary ways: as a continual low-level fear or as a high-level, intense fear.

Anxiety is the low-level, everyday, garden-variety type of fear. It's an alertness to potential danger rather than a response to present danger. When you're anxious, your brain releases stress hormones and shuffles your priorities. Instead of focusing intently on one thing, you go into a vigilant scanning mode.

This is really useful if, say, you're on the savanna and need to notice that clump of bushes swaying before the lion jumps out. It's not so useful if the anxiety is triggered by deadlines, strained relationships, financial pressure or an overloaded inbox. In those cases, hyper-alert mode keeps you from concentrating, which is precisely what you must do to solve those anxiety-inducing problems.

The full fear response is intense, usually short-lived, and has profound effects on your body and mind. The first major effect is energy redirection. When fear kicks in, survival—rather than health—becomes paramount. Your brain reroutes energy to necessary survival skills, like eyesight and muscle response. Other functions, such as your digestive system, get put on hold.

Fear also redirects your thinking. Normally, sensory inputs take a long, leisurely route through your prefrontal cortex, where they are evaluated. Logical, abstract moral, and creative thinking all happen here. Fear gives your sensory inputs a short-cut, straight to your emotional, instinctive center: the amygdala. Here you get quick, concrete, reactive, specific thinking and emotionally or instinctively-driven decisions.

You can probably see how emotionally driven decisions might not be helpful when the fear you face is, say, an angry boss or an unhappy spouse.

Fortunately, there are some actions you can take to keep fear from controlling how you think. Here are three:

1. Recognize fear with body check-ins.

Perform a simple, hourly body check-in by asking yourself, What am I feeling right now? and then scanning your body, head to toes. When you find something off, such as strained vision, tense shoulders, heartburn or shallow breathing, ask yourself, Why am I feeling this right now? If you can identify the source of the fear, you can then face it consciously and determine if it is a real threat or not.

2. Reduce fear with buffers.

Everyday situations can cause unending anxiety that literally disables your brain from doing concentrated, creative work. Ease your anxiety by building buffer into your work and personal life. Set up soft deadlines a few days before the real deadlines. Add transition time between meetings, clients or events. Schedule extra commute time. As much as you can, space out your obligations and projects so your brain can relax and do its work well.

3. Face fear with controlled experiences.

For defined triggers, those distinct fears you know you have, you can slowly train yourself to handle them better. Nothing extreme; just decide on a simple action you'll take instead of freezing the next time you encounter the trigger. Freezing is the body's initial, automatic response. When you force yourself to take a different action instead, you slowly retrain your brain to respond to that particular fear in a different (more productive) way. Over time your brain learns that this trigger is not an unpredictable danger, but a manageable, if unpleasant, situation that you can handle.

Being unaware of fear can keep us locked into it. But when you know what fear feels like, looks like and does to your brain, you can start taking control.

http://www.success.com/article/how-fear-warps-your-thinking-and-3-ways-you-can-fight-back

Have Trouble Concentrating? Try These Suggestions.

                  

We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed, of being beset by distractions.

Too many things clamour for your attention. People are trying to reach you, by phone, email, text, Twitter, or old-fashioned yelling up the stairs. Colleagues interrupt. You need to update, check in, post, or ping. Ads jump at you from the most unlikely places. Devices buzz, ring, chirp, and vibrate.

There are steps you might consider to quiet the buzz in your brain – even if you don’t want to take up meditation.

In addition to feeling calmer and more focused, you’ll probably be more efficient, too. Turns out that people aren’t very good at thinking about two things at once. One study showed that when people were interrupted to respond to email or IM, it took about 15 minutes for them to resume a serious mental task.

So consider taking steps like these, at least occasionally. They may not all work for you, but you may find a few that will help you focus.

1. If you keep the TV, radio, or music turned on in the background – while you’re getting dressed, say – turn it off. Some people love background noise, but I find it very draining.

2. I have a sticky note in my bedroom that reads, “Quiet mind.”Whenever I see it, I drop my shoulders, relax my jaw, and try to smooth out my thoughts. It actually works.

3. Organize space so it’s attractive, well organized, and well lit. One of my most important Secrets of Adulthood: Outer order contributes to inner calm.

4. Cut down on the multi-tasking. Don’t talk on the phone while you’re doing dishes, don’t check your email while you listen to a conference call, don’t sort the mail while your child explains the school project that’s due next week.

5. Turn your cell phone ringer off. Hearing your cell phone ring – or even imagining that you’re hearing it ring – is a big source of jumpiness.

6. Take a break from doing errands. Keep a list, but don’t try to cram them in throughout your day.

7. Use the internet only to look up specific pieces of information; no jumping from link to link, no browsing.

8. Turn off your email for some parts of the day.

9. Stop counting. In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp mentioned an interesting approach: occasionally, for a week, she’d “stop counting.” She avoided looking at clocks, contracts, bank statements, bathroom scales, or anything to do with numbers, in order to let the other part of her brain take over.

10. Exercise. If I don’t exercise regularly, I’m too jumpy and restless to sit still and concentrate. I keep popping up and down. It’s true that taking regular breaks is good for focus — but within limits! (Here are some tips for getting regular exercise.)

11. Flee temptation. I find it hard to work in my home office, because my family, the phone, my email, and the internet constantly beguile me away from my work. So when I have serious writing to do, I go to a library near my apartment which has a study room with a strict rule of silence.

It’s important to have space in which to think. Yesterday, I overheard someone complain, “My phone was dead, so I was so bored during my cab ride home. I just had to sit there.”

There are few things that I love more than looking out the window of a car, train, or bus. One day, when I was gazing out of a bus window, I was struck by a thought: “What do I want out of life?” “Well,” I thought, “I want to be happy.” It occurred to me that I never thought about whether I was happy or not, or how I could be happier, or even what it meant to be happy.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237645