This years travel December 28, 2009
At the end of each year, I like to review what I did, things I liked, things I didn’t, how I grew and other interesting things I learnt.
This year I thought I’d share some of my explorations in Travel…
First off, I did plenty of travel. This year I traveled to (sometimes multiple times):
New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Phillipines, Japan and Malasia. And around Australia to Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Cairns, Byron Bay, and many others. All told about 26 weeks away.
Worst situation while traveling. Once again, a stop over story. Returning home from Malasia and routing through Singapore I had a 7 hour stopover. Now I hate stopovers anyway, but this one was extra special as it was between midnight and 7 am.
I knew this would be the case when I booked the tickets, and I thought – incorrectly it turns out – Singapore being an international hub, would have the business class lounges open between those hours.
Next time (and I’ve said this several times already in my personal history) I’ll book a more direct flight…
Best situations in transit:
Traveling through Malasia for the first time. On arrival the city didn’t touch me. The food was great, but I can find great food almost anywhere. It took about a week for me to get a real feel for the country.
Practicing my language learning in Japan. Both encouraging and disheartening all at the same time. Encouraging because I had the ‘tip of the toungue’ feeling while listeining to certain conversations. Disheartening when I compared that to listening to the news.
Being slammed into the Aikido mat over and over again in many and varied cities.
Can you control your emotions? December 22, 2009
An easy question to answer – it depends…
Being in control of your emotions does not mean you can’t get angry, upset, sad or even happy. It means you have choice of what emotion you feel when.
At least in the western world, ‘emotional control’ often implies no emotion at all. A robot.
The opposite side of this is the person who is a rudderless boat under full sail in an emotional storm. Every event they have a full emotional response to. Very young kids are often like this.
For an aduly, both are just as bad as the other.
Part of the reason for this is there is a prevailing idea that emotions are out of our control. Many times you’ll read an article or listen to someone speak and notice the underlying current that because someone has emotional control, they are somewhat special, or somewhat alien. In reality they are special like someone with a ham sandwich is special – anyone can get a ham sandwich if they put the effort in.
With your friends, they are used to your emotional responses, be they high, low or inbetween. When interacting with someone new, the amount of emotion you can display changes with the person you’re speaking with. For example, in general if you’re speaking to Japanese, emotional outbursts will damage your credibility (or worse). Not enough emotion when speaking to others will achieve the same result.
The trick is to always know yourself first, and then the person you’re speaking to.
Self deception is good? December 3, 2009
I’ve been investigating lies and lying of late (in case you didn’t notice the other posts). In doing so I discovered some very interesting research on self-deception.
Such interesting research that it fits into many different areas. From life, sports, business and other pursuits. And the research hints at top performers often ’self-deceive’ more than others.
Psychologist by the name of Joanna Starek discovered that swimmers who lie to themselves swim faster than those who do not. (Link to the research).
The document hints at much of the other evidence out there that ’self-deception’ helps with stress, depression, happiness, and more.
Above all, this shows that the ability to focus on your goal, ignoring any other information that goes against that goal, makes it more likely to reach your goal.
So what do you think? Is self-deception needed for success? Does it help at all from your perspective?
Thanks to Radiolab for the links.