Better self Archives - from Gnome to Goliath

Gamify Your Running

Running helped your ancestors survive, but in the modern society you don’t run to get food. Learn to run for joy and for good health.

It is 10:30 AM in the morning. The sun is comfortably sitting high in the sky, but it is not hot yet. You’ve left your kid at a summer camp and you’ve finished the most burning tasks at work (thank you global pandemic!) You put on your running shoes, tie them up, and go out for a 5k. You come back, take a shower, and you sit in front of your home office monitor to tackle the onslaught of meetings, just when your West Coast colleagues are waking up. They keep wondering why you have so much energy in these stressful times …

This article describes how I gamified myself into developing a running habit. As always, I will share a few books and tips for everybody else. Continue reading, if you can picture yourself as the main character in the story above.

Care More About Less

Caring is our greatest trait, but modern life exploits it with news, gossip, problems, and clever product placement. This article teaches you how to care more about less, by reviewing and evaluating the important parts of your life where you want to spend your Care tokens.

Humans are caring animals. Most of you will stop and take care of a person who has fallen, or a bird that is trapped, or a puppy that is lost. Care has turned humans from groups of animals into societies. It has given us the power to unite (and separate), to achieve great things (and suffer huge failures). The modern life exploits this trait of ours, to force us into brand-loyalty, consumerism. This also causes more stress in our lives and generally makes us unhappy.

The answer, however, is not only to care less, it is to care more … about less. Review the things in your life you care about and rank and evaluate them. Imagine that you only have 6 care tokens a day. Do you want to spend them on Prince X and Princess M’s wedding news? On the turmoil in Country Z? Or on your family and kids?

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How to Learn Meditation and Change Your Mind and Body

Ask not what meditation can do for you, ask what you can do to meditate! Five simple steps to learn meditation and change your mind and body.

Meditation is (or should be) an important and integral part of your life. Daily meditation of 20 minutes or more has a very positive effect on your stress levels, energy levels, happiness, and your life in general. If you do it twice a day, you will be able to achieve amazing things.

Your mind works constantly. It worries, thinks, plans, remembers, loves, hates. When you sleep your mind is busy sorting your memories, dreaming, or planning. Meditation is the only tool to make your mind take some rest.

In this article, I will briefly touch on what meditation is. But most importantly, I will teach you one of the easiest ways meditate.

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Better Self – 10 Ways to Increase Your Charisma

Charisma is the intangible skill to draw others to your cause, to own a room or an audience. This article lists 10 tips for increasing your charisma.

Do you happen to know a man or a woman that own the room wherever they walk in? That immediately draw the attention of the others to themselves? Or that could easily get others in the room (yourself included) to support their cause or views? Such people are perceived as likable, powerful, irresistible and dynamic and this usually opens all doors in their path. You cannot usually explain why you like those people, but you do like them. This talent is known as “charisma“.

Some people are born charismatic and they should not do anything else to get what they want. But according to the studies, charisma is trainable. Increasing your personal charisma (especially in the workplace) is just a matter of decoding and mastering the communication strategies that are used by a “genuine” charismatic person. You can break that skill down to behaviors that can be learned, practiced and made natural.

This article aims at decomposing the set of skills that make the charismatic people who they are. And it gives you a list of 10 easy to practice and adopt tips in order to make you more charismatic. You do not require any knowledge prior to reading them. And even if you just read them (and never go back to them again), they will remain in the back of your mind, waiting to be pulled when needed.
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