How are those resolutions working for you?
This is about the time that all those good intentions begin to fall by the wayside. The resolve to clean my desk everyday gets buried, along with all the papers, reports and files.
But we do have a reprieve.
It’s Ukrainian New Year’s Day today so you get a second chance. (And of course you get another chance at Chinese New Year). So I’m looking for ways to help us keep firm on our resolves for the New Year.
As part of another resolution, I’m starting my own self-study on the brain.
Mark Murphy, author of Hard Goals: The Secret to Getting From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be, maintains there is neurologic research that suggests our goals may not be challenging enough. He says “Tough goals force us to pay attention.”
John Medina, a brain researcher at University of Washington and author of Brain Rules, says, “The more the brain pays attention to a given stimulus the more elaborately the information will be encoded.”
In other words, by having harder goal where we have to learn, our brain gets stretched and the neurons start amping up.
Our brains pay close attention with images or visuals of what we want. We’ve known for years that a picture is worth a thousand words. It even has its own name – Pictorial Superiority Effect or PSE. Images trump words every time.
Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90 percent accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds.
So post that picture or image where you could see it everyday to help you towards your goal.
