- We cannot act right when we do not feel right
- Put their feeling into a word then use that word in a sentence
- Good feelings cannot come in until the bad feelings are acknowledge and let out
- Often, trying to “fix things” is about protecting ourselves from the feelings of others
- Just accept the darn emotion!
- “‘But’ takes away the gift you have just given”; use something like “The problem is…” or “Even though you know…” instead
- Acknowledge their desires in writing or drawings
- Match your tone with emotion
- Help them fantasize what they want but should not have (“If you could have cake for dinner, what kind would you have?”)
- Try leading with a statement instead of a question
- “Please” should be reserved for actual requests
- Offer choices
- Think about how to put the children in charge… With restraints.
- Use a gesture or word (noun) to remind instead of bossing around
- Appreciate the progress you see before pointing out the deficiencies
- Act without insult
- Actions are for protection, not for punishment
- Try to make amends, not apologies, instead of punishments (“Your sister was hurt when you pushed her. What can we do to help her feel better?”)
- Problem solving
- Acknowledge their feelings first
- Briefly describe your feelings
- Ask for, and write down all ideas
- Decide the ideas that you both agree on
- Try out the solutions, double check the plan with your child
- Rewards are offered with an implied threat
- We are driven by a sense of autonomy, competency or mastery, and purpose
- Praise that evaluates sounds dismissive or dubious
- It is not always appropriate to praise, consider asking questions or starting a conversation instead
- Describe what you see regarding effort and progress instead of evaluating
- Instead of praising behavior, describe the affect the behavior has on others
- Try to avoid being proud (because it implies you did the work, not them) and comparisons to others
- When they are discouraged, acknowledge their feelings and offer a new picture of themselves they can work towards
- Quietly move to their level
- Do not expect consistency in usage of new skills
- (So much of raising kids well seems to be focused on helping them make sense of the patterns of the world)
- Tell them what they can do instead of what they cannot, they may understand the words but not the context
- Everyone wants to feel understood, act autonomously, be competent
- Acknowledge the facts instead of asking obvious questions
- Lying is a natural stage of development, guide them to being truth telling
- All feeling are acceptable; some actions must be limited
- We will not be calm and in control all the time, neither will they
- Try telling the story of what happened
Category: Reading
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“How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen” by Joanna Faber and Julie King
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“When” by Daniel H Pink
- Positive affect (attitude) tends to rise in the morning, drop in the afternoon, then return in the evening
- We are more rational in the morning
- Timing can have a notable affect on math, analytics, and rational work
- Insight thinking is best during suboptimal times
- Larks, owls, third birds
- Fall/Winter births tend to be larks
- Synchrony effect seeks to align type, task, and time
- Determine your chronotype
- Determine the activity type
- Determine when you should do the work
- “Vigilance Breaks” are short breaks taken before high-stake activities to make sure every one and every thing is primed and ready
- Take a 20-30 minute “Restorative Break” every few hours
- Frequent short breaks can recharge us
- Lunch with autonomy and detachment is important
- Napping boosts mental capacity, more boost the older you get
- Best naps are 10-20 minutes
- Learn to pause like a pro
- Start right, start again, start together
- Slow moving “When” problems can be just as bad as fast moving “What” problems
- When a competition starts, judges have a baseline assumption; as the competition progresses, they adjust their expectations
- Midpoints can put us into a slump or spark us
- Midlife has less of a crisis and more of a slump from mid-thirties to mid-fifties
- Virtue signaling is most important at the beginning and end
- “Punctuated equilibrium” is the natural, human inclination to start slow, transition to heads down suddenly (always halfway between the start and deadline)
- Thinking we are trailing by a little tends to motivate us better than almost anything
- Interim goals help overcome slumps
- Stopping work in the middle, when there is a clear starting point, helps prevent stagnation
- We start editing towards the end of our setting
- Give bad news first
- Poignancy mixes a little sad with happy which is more enjoyable overall
- Codes, garb, and touch
- Synchronicity binds us to each other
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“12 Rules For Life” by Jordan B Peterson
- Stand up straight, with your shoulders back
- We battle for dominance with each other but not too hard lest we exhaust ourselves too much in the fight
- Resting places are important
- Lobsters have chemical jets under their eyes that they can squirt at other lobsters to exchange information about size, sex, and health
- Physical dominance only lasts for so long
- Building relationships with others in the troop is important to continued dominance
- Fear of death and social embarrassment are the worst
- Tyranny tends to grow when there is no push-back
- Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
- Oddly, people are better at filling and administrating prescriptions to the pets than they are to themselves
- Pain matters more than matter matters
- We see the world as animated with purpose and intent
- Perception of things as tools happens as quickly as we perceive them as things
- We see what things mean just as fast, or faster, than we see things as they are
- We see the “personality” of things (or actions) of others before we see the action themselves
- Meaning is found when we are balanced in order and chaos, this is when time flies and we feel fulfilled
- “The Way” is fixed in a place of order, surrounded by chaos
- We need both the order to be secure and chaos to grow
- We can either make children safe or strong, not both
- We coevolved with snakes
- Be ready to give up something lower for something better
- Once you know you are vulnerable, you realize how to torment yourself and others… This is the knowledge of Good and Evil
- Evil often comes as a result of continued rejected sacrifices
- PTSD usually happens from something done not something seen
- Problems tend to be forgotten after they are solved
- Make friends with people who want the best for you
- New places allow us to reset ourselves and circumstances
- Make sure you want the best for your friends
- Things fall apart on their own… But we often help things along
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone is today
- If the cards are always stacked against you, even by yourself, perhaps the game
- Talking yourself into irrelevance is not good
- Anything worth doing can be done better or worse
- Resentment either means immaturity or tyranny
- Ask your resentment what it needs
- To see, we must aim
- What you aim at determines what you see; what you see determines where you go
- Our wants often conflict with each other, so we have to rank them
- Obedience is a good starting point, but not an end
- Do not let your children do anything that will make you not like them
- Too much chaos breeds too much order
- Habitual occurrences may feel trivial but really make up our lives
- Children need interaction with adults to grow-up
- Proper discipline is a combination of mercy and long-term strategy
- People often ask the wrong, opposite psych question: “Why do people do drugs?” Drugs are the default; Violence is the default, peace is the mystery
- We push supposed limits until we find the real boundary
- “Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.”
- Angry cries are different from hurt cries
- Discipline is different from punishment
- Children need to be socialized to fit into society
- Limit the rules to the minimum needed; Excess and seemingly arbitrary rules lowers respect for all the other rules
- Aim for the minimum needed force
- “No” really means, “Stop or I will make your life unpleasant because I have the power to do so”, this either needs to be physically or mentally as required by the child
- Set your house in perfect order before criticize the world
- Hurricanes are acts of god… Failure to prepare when we have been warned is our fault
- Just because you do not know why you know something does not mean it is wrong
- Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient
- Sacrifice is delaying now for future reward
- Tell the truth or, at least, don’t lie
- This includes lying to yourself
- Lies warp our perceptions to fit an ideal, this tends to eliminate our drive
- Vitality requires original contribution
- We need to experience new things in order to be fully activated
- By playing the game, you admit the game is important
- Any weakness can be magnified into crisis with enough deceit
- Reason, rationality, is best seen as a personality as it has its own motives and ego
- Totalitarianism is when Reason has all powers
- If you have no aim, anything can be everything, this is anxiety inducing
- A man’s worth can be determined by the truth he can tolerate
- The Big Lie is what corrupts, wrapping all other lies in it
- Most lies are acted out, not told
- Assume the person you are listening to might know something you do not
- Genuine conversation is sharing, listening, and strategizing
- Each of us is a walking cacophony of integrated experiences
- A sufficiently happy ending can make all the bad stuff that came before make sense
- Memory is a tool to guide the future
- Super saturated liquid
- Try to not steal problems from others
- We simulate our world with little avatars of ourselves
- We find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening alone is too dangerous
- Try restating before continuing
- Give the devils their due so you can hone your own position
- Be precise in your speech
- Communications requires admission
- There is little in a marriage that is so little it is not worth fighting about
- Are we so afraid of failure that we refuse to define success so we never know when we fail
- Precision is very important
- Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
- Kids need playground that are dangerous enough to engage them
- We need a degree of danger to live well so we can feel invigorated
- It is often not that we love the poor but that we hate the rich that we seek to socialize
- Without some dangerous experience, it is easier to reject humanity entirely
- Women tend to want to marry equal or better, men do not care
- Competence, not power, tend to be the primary indicator of dominance
- Group identity can fractionated down to the individual level
- Healthy women want men, not boys
- “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak ones can do”
- Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
- People tend to favor those in their group, even when groups are arbitrarily chosen
- We love people, in part, because of their limitations
- Set aside time to talk or think about the worry, daily, so it will not consume you
- Your brain is more interested in the fact there is a plan, not the details of the plan
- Stand up straight, with your shoulders back
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“The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben
- True “forest” trees share resources amongst each other via roots, equalizing what they produce
- Connectivity determines resource distribution
- Conifers produce every year where deciduous trees decide, together, each year if they will blossom the next year or not
- Oak and Beech trees create such masses of seeds that it affects the birth rates of foraging wildlife
- On average, each tree successfully produces one offspring during its life
- Tree canopies are so thick, seedlings can barely grow a stem and a few leaves
- Slow growth while young is necessary for strong, aged trees
- This keeps the wood cells tiny preventing air and fungus from breaking them
- If the tree is wider than tall, the tree is waiting patiently
- Saplings lack sugar and so are more bitter
- Trees on snowy slopes are pushed over by slowly moving snow while it continues to grow up, causing the truck to bow then straighten
- The same thing can happen where the ground is slipping
- Trees are constantly shedding bark, like we do skin cells
- The deeper the bark cracks, the more reluctant the tree is to shed its bark
- Chemical processes are managed by the roots
- Mites and weevils are critical for forest processing
- We are liberating CO2 faster than the debris accumulate
- Less CO2 = Longer tree life span
- We need to let trees grow old to capture maximum CO2
- Trees will morph their environment to suit there needs; for example, growing tall and thick blocks the wind which reduces evaporation and increases moisture
- Deciduous trees are designed to direct rain fall down the leaves, through the branches, down the trunk to their roots
- Inland rain falls are thanks to tree transpiration
- Fall color changes include the relocation of resources back to the trunk
- Oak and beeches need rest, which is why we cannot grow them inside
- Trees cannot sleep until their leaves are shed
- Quaking aspens have leaves that can photo synthesize on both sides
- Green light is rejected light that the chlorophyll cannot process
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“Factfulness” by Hans Rosling
- “This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.”
- “[O]ur dramatic instincts—are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”
- Beware of averages… The can make a huge gap out of a sea of overlap
- “Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves non-representative extraordinary events and shuns normality.”
- News is, by definition, novel and not routine
- “To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.”
- “Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis from a temporary dip pulled out of its context…”
- “Don’t assume straight lines. Many trends do not follow straight lines but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents would expect it to.”
- We want to consume dramatic information
- “You can spot stories about them in the news every day:
- physical harm: violence caused by people, animals, sharp objects, or forces of nature
- captivity: entrapment, loss of control, or loss of freedom
- contamination: by invisible substances that can infect or poison us”