Tiny Steps Towards Change
Tiny Habits.com is my all-time favorite habit building tool, created by B.J. Fogg, PhD of Stanford University. BJ studies how to change habits. and over the course of his decades of research B.J. has come up with the Tiny Habits system. The idea is quite simple: smaller habits are easier to build and sustain than […]
Make Smaller Circles
In The Art of Learning Josh Waitzkin has a chapter called “Making Smaller Circles.” These three simple words have profound implication on the learning process and on rapid skill growth. Making smaller circles fits with my experience of learning in several different ways. First, I’ve been making a habit of examining the small steps necessary to […]
Ask More Loving Questions
His hands were tied behind his back and he was standing on the outside of the bridge railing, preparing to jump. As I moved towards him, he shouted over to me: “One step further and I’ll jump!” He sounded hoarse and it was clear he had been crying. I stopped and stood, waiting. This occurred […]
Breeching The Comfort Zone (And Thoughts On Working Abroad in Buenos Aires)
I’ve talked before about one of the reasons I love working with autism. Kids on the spectrum are constantly violating my assumptions and in order to be effective I have to continue re-evaluating my beliefs and discarding what doesn’t work. This week I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina working with several families with special needs […]
Tools to Learn Anything Well (Hint: It Is Simpler Than You Think)
The more time I study learning the more I realize that the tools which improve performance apply across disciples. Everywhere we look there are struggles and every-day heroes overcoming those struggles: athletes achieving record-breaking feats, regular people losing that last 10 pounds and children with autism self-regulating, tantruuming, and improving. I make a study of […]
Lessons in Spontaneity: Driving for Lyft
I’ve rarely taken taxis in San Francisco, generally preferring to walk, bicycle or drive myself. But with the recent abundance of peer-to-peer ride sharing in San Francisco I couldn’t help but be impacted and eventually get involved. Among my peer group I am a middling adopter of new technologies so it was only after Lyft […]
Escape, Exercise, or Appreciate? A Few Shortcuts to Happiness
One Habit That Will Change Your Life, which I posted during Thanksgiving in 2012, has been shared more times than anything else I have ever written. In that post I described one habit I’ve cultivated, What Went Wells (or WWWs) as described by Martin Seligman in Flourish. This is just one of many behavioral patterns I’ve […]
Parking in San Francisco is Easy (Or How to Hack Any Task)
There’s just one secret that anyone parking in San Francisco needs to know. Read the fine print first! I use my car to travel throughout San Francisco, a city that has twice as many cars as parking spaces. I was recently parking in the Inner Sunset – or attempting to. I circled the area six […]
Option Process® Dialogue – The Practical Philosophy Tool
I spent the month of January 2013 at the Option Institute – an international learning center and home of the Autism Treatment Center of America. I am now one of 125 people in the world ever to be certified as an Option Process Mentor. I’ve brought in a friend from the Institute – someone who […]
Running 100 Miles “Because It’s Fun”
January is the biggest month for personal trainers everywhere. February and March make up the largest number of discarded fitness goals every year! When I am continually successful within any new discipline it because I really want to act and enjoy the process. So I’ve brought in my friend Kiwi to talk about how she […]
One Habit That Will Change Your Life – What Went Well
Gratitude works. What I mean by this is if you want to have a good life – be grateful. Try this short exercise: think of one thing in your life – be it a friend, an object, or an experience – that you are grateful for. Picture that thing clearly. I find it helps to […]
Learn How to Overcome Discomfort (by Jumping into Ice Covered Lakes)
I’ve always gone swimming in really cold water. I’m not sure that I really enjoyed the swimming part but the thrill afterwards kept me going back for more. From an age when I was still learning how to walk I would follow my father into High Sierra snow melt. There is one lake that I […]
Sweaty and Frustrated – Shortcuts to happiness
As I write this I am covered in sweat having spent the last hour pushing a 600 pound motorcycle up San Francisco “hills.” Had I stopped–paused for just a moment–and considered why the bike wasn’t starting up I would have realized that I had forgotten to turn the fuel valve back on. No gas, no […]
Stimulus Belief Response (or How to Be Happy at a Funeral)
From a talk Robin P. Zander gave on the concept of Stimulus, Belief, Response. How we choose to see the world around us determines how we respond to it!
Reflections on “Suggestible” (Ditch skepticism, curiousity is more useful)
I had a conversation after Toastmasters this evening which had me thinking about the usefulness of persuasion and the power of positive thinking. As an academic I was taught to be skeptical. Skepticism was regarded the highest courtesy among my scientific peers. Tonight, after giving a speech which I intended to my audience to try […]
How Much Evidence Do You Need
One day some months ago, in the middle of a very intense segment, Anat asked my class: “How much evidence do you need to know that something is so?” Today, a number of events have conspired to encourage me to consider these words. This afternoon I posted a New York Times article @robinpzander on the […]