Posts tagged as:

psychology

Original image by blakie In my first two posts about procrastination, I suggested a simple reframe and one unusual method that can help you become more aware of your procrastination habits. Even just this awareness can be a great help in overcoming procrastination. In part three of the series, I look at some of the [...]

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Flow

by Shane on October 31, 2009

Image by gwylow71 Mihály Csíkszentmihályi – what looks like  the result of me randomly banging my forehead against the keyboard is actually the name of an academic who is one of the pioneers of positive psychology. He coined the term “flow” as a particular state of mind and concentration, sometimes also referred to as “optimal [...]

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What is a (Mental) Reframe?

by Shane on October 6, 2009

It occurred to me recently that I have already mentioned “reframes” in past articles (most recently in this one about procrastination), but never explained what meaning of the term I was referring to. In this post, I will briefly explain what a mental reframe is and show you how reframes can be helpful as well [...]

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Yeah, I know, hilarious title. I worked on that one all day. Moving on: Finding something entertaining and distracting to do is easier than ever and as a consequence of this, procrastination has become a wide-spread problem. As long as you have internet access, the next status-update, short message, puzzle-game, cute animal picture or dubious [...]

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Building productive habits is key to any kind of personal development, no doubt about that. Unfortunately, building new habits also tends to be very, very difficult. In this post, I will introduce two key factors that make habit-building so difficult. These factors are habituation and homeostasis, and while they can be your worst enemies, when [...]

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Fool’s Plight: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

by Shane on September 14, 2009

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that warps our ability to judge our own competence. To put it very bluntly, stupid people tend to think that they are quite brilliant, because they are too stupid to tell that they are, in fact, stupid.
(Don’t worry, I know it’s a bit more subtle than that.)

The effect is named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, who discovered it by doing a series of tests…

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Mistaken Expectations, Wrong Predictions

by Shane on September 6, 2009

How do you decide what restaurant to go to, which movie to see, what pants to wear today? And what about big and important decisions like what career-path to choose, where to settle down and buy a house or whether to have kids or not? To some extent every decision we make is based on predictions. We imagine what an evening at one restaurant would be like versus an evening at a different one and make our desicion based on where we imagine we will have more fun, get better food and other criteria.

Interestingly, there are some systematic mistakes we tend to make when we imagine such future events and this can lead us to making bad decisions…

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