Interactive Motivational Quotes

The greatest win is walking away and choosing not to engage in drama and toxic energy at all.

Perfectly Imperfect We have all heard that no two snowflakes are alike. Each snowflake takes the perfect form for the maximum efficiency and effectiveness for its journey. And while the universal force of gravity gives them a shared destination, the expansive space in the air gives each snowflake the opportunity to take their own path. They are on the same journey, but each takes a different path. Along this gravity-driven journey, some snowflakes collide and damage each other, some collide and join together, some are influenced by wind... there are so many transitions and changes that take place along the journey of the snowflake. But, no matter what the transition, the snowflake always finds itself perfectly shaped for its journey. I find parallels in nature to be a beautiful reflection of grand orchestration. One of these parallels is of snowflakes and us. We, too, are all headed in the same direction. We are being driven by a universal force to the same destination. We are all individuals taking different journeys and along our journey, we sometimes bump into each other, we cross paths, we become altered... we take different physical forms. But at all times we too are 100% perfectly imperfect. At every given moment we are absolutely perfect for what is required for our journey. I’m not perfect for your journey and you’re not perfect for my journey, but I’m perfect for my journey and you’re perfect for your journey. We’re heading to the same place, we’re taking different routes, but we’re both exactly perfect the way we are. Think of what understanding this great orchestration could mean for relationships. Imagine interacting with others knowing that they too each share this parallel with the snowflake. Like you, they are headed to the same place and no matter what they may appear like to you, they have taken the perfect form for their journey. How strong our relationships would be if we could see and respect that we are all perfectly imperfect for our journey.

Don't ever stop believing in your own transformation. It is still happening even on days you may not realize it or feel like it.

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

Being charismatic does not depend on how much time you have but on how fully present you are in each interaction.

Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces. Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web. It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept... ..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

An employee's motivation is a direct result of the sum of interactions with his or her manager.

Don’t assume sabotage when obliviousness is the more likely answer. Human beings are inclined to attribute things to malice that are best explained by apathy, and when we falsely identify other people’s motivations, we create a situation in our minds that not only doesn’t exist but colors all of our future interactions.

niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

I don’t understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, “I am getting the hell out of here!”. There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don’t want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, “Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life!" A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things.

Everyone chatters about their imaginary friends. Some are ascribing agency, motivation, and intelligence to patterns of societal forces that are the emergent properties of distributed interactions. Others are writing—or filming—fiction.

the world’s interactions with Africa are not necessarily motivated by altruism, but by the self-interest of states seeking to maximize their opportunities and minimize their costs, often at the expense of those who are not in a position to do either.

Every relationship is governed by motive, capability and reliability and these three factors become the core components of the trust equation

Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M's or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson. But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone.

You know a book is well-written when it makes you read it over and over again, and in every time you enjoy the events, interact with the conflict, and continue to the ending. It teaches you new lessons every time and uplifts your spirit, reminding you with needed humanitarian feelings.

How we interact in our world that we inhabit determines how much happiness human beings enjoy. The ego guides human beings in performing their practical activities, and egotistical utility in turn motivates human behavior. An inflated ego can cause human beings to live in a corrupt and unethical manner that is hostile to other humans and the environment. A person’s passions can imprison them.

With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality. This means that when their perception of you is stereotypical, your own mind follows suit. For example, [Princeton University psychologist Stacey] Sinclair manipulated one group of women into thinking that they were about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man. (Not a woman-hater, but the kind of man who thinks that women deserve to be cherished and protected by men, while being rather less enthusiastic about them being too confident and assertive.) Obligingly, the women socially tuned their view of themselves to better match these traditional opinions. They regarded themselves as more stereotypically feminine, compared with another group of women who were expecting instead to interact with a man with a more modern view of their sex. Interestingly, this social tuning only seems to happen when there is some sort of motivation for a good relationship. This suggests that close or powerful others in your life may be especially likely to act as a mirror in which you perceive your own qualities. (...) No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the “like” button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed.

An object must be desirable for envy to work as a motivating force.

While interacting with you, a person learns a great deal about himself. Show him all the good he possesses. That is what matters most.

Dignity impacts the quality of your external world in your relationships, communications, and interactions.

Armed with intentions for who we wish to be, how we wish to interact with others, and what we wish to give, we become conscious people. We gain the full might of our personal power.

Just be Nice. Nice—this little word has a big meaning. Use it generously. Being nice helps people feel emotionally safe, allowing for more authentic, trusting, and happy interactions.

True confidence is not something that can always be determined by a first impression. It may take a few interactions to detect whether a person is full of false bravado or if they are the "real McCoy.

Life is a total process, the inner as well as the outer; the outer definitely affects the inner, but the inner invariably overcomes the outer. What you are, you bring about outwardly. The outer and the inner cannot be separated and kept in watertight compartments, for they are constantly interacting upon each other; but the inner craving, the hidden pursuits and motives, are always more powerful. Life is not dependent upon political or economic activity; life is not a mere outward show, any more than a tree is the leaf or the branch. Life is a total process whose beauty is to be discovered only in its integration.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

Environmental influences also affect dopamine. From animal studies, we know that social stimulation is necessary for the growth of the nerve endings that release dopamine and for the growth of receptors that dopamine needs to bind to in order to do its work. In four-month-old monkeys, major alterations of dopamine and other neurotransmitter systems were found after only six days of separation from their mothers. “In these experiments,” writes Steven Dubovsky, Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Colorado, “loss of an important attachment appears to lead to less of an important neurotransmitter in the brain. Once these circuits stop functioning normally, it becomes more and more difficult to activate the mind.” A neuroscientific study published in 1998 showed that adult rats whose mothers had given them more licking, grooming and other physical-emotional contact during infancy had more efficient brain circuitry for reducing anxiety, as well as more receptors on nerve cells for the brain’s own natural tranquilizing chemicals. In other words, early interactions with the mother shaped the adult rat’s neurophysiological capacity to respond to stress. In another study, newborn animals reared in isolation had reduced dopamine activity in their prefrontal cortex — but not in other areas of the brain. That is, emotional stress particularly affects the chemistry of the prefrontal cortex, the center for selective attention, motivation and self-regulation. Given the relative complexity of human emotional interactions, the influence of the infant-parent relationship on human neurochemistry is bound to be even stronger. In the human infant, the growth of dopamine-rich nerve terminals and the development of dopamine receptors is stimulated by chemicals released in the brain during the experience of joy, the ecstatic joy that comes from the perfectly attuned mother-child mutual gaze interaction. Happy interactions between mother and infant generate motivation and arousal by activating cells in the midbrain that release endorphins, thereby inducing in the infant a joyful, exhilarated state. They also trigger the release of dopamine. Both endorphins and dopamine promote the development of new connections in the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released from the midbrain also triggers the growth of nerve cells and blood vessels in the right prefrontal cortex and promotes the growth of dopamine receptors. A relative scarcity of such receptors and blood supply is thought to be one of the major physiological dimensions of ADD. The letters ADD may equally well stand for Attunement Deficit Disorder.

By no means are introverts against intimate relationships; indeed we are motivated by depth in our relationships. And while the emphasis on intimacy with Jesus is welcome, in community we prefer interactions with smaller numbers of people with whom we feel comfortable.

An ambivert navigates the introvert/extrovert spectrum with ease since they do not fit directly into either category. Since neither label applies to them, they are social chameleons who adapt to their environment to maximize their interaction and optimize their results.

Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life. And the greatest of these, of course, was sex. I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy. Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

research suggests that all students are motivated to learn, as long as there are clear expectations, the tasks and activities have value, and the learning environment promotes intrinsic motivation (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995; Eccles & Wigfield, 1985; Feather, 1982; Kovalik & Olsen, 2005).

4 Steps for Understanding Each Other 1. Identify your beliefs and core values; ask how they determine your behaviors and habits. 2. Realize with whom you are interacting and try to identify how their values are explaining their behavior. 3. Assume positive intent. 4. Seek ways to adapt your behavior to help bridge the cultural gap.

Ambiverts typically . . . • Can process information both internally and externally. They need time to contemplate on their own, but consider the opinions and wisdom from people whom they trust when making a decision. • Love to engage and interact enthusiastically with others, however, they also enjoy calm and profound communication. • Seek to balance between their personal time and social time, they value each greatly. • Are able to move from one situation to the next with confidence, flexibility, and anticipation. “Not everyone is going to like us or understand us. And that is okay. It may have nothing to do with us personally; but rather more about who they are and how they relate to the world.

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive. Kelly

Most lecture-based courses contribute nothing to real learning. Consequential and retained learning comes from applying knowledge to new situations or problems, research on questions and issues that students consider important, peer interaction, activities, and projects. Experiences, rather than short-term memorization, help students develop the skills and motivation that transforms lives." [p. 7-8]

Maybe the real issue here is that we were not created to do life by ourselves. We were not given a sentence of solitary confinement and placed in a world of isolation, but from the moment we entered this human experience, it was clear there was a world waiting to be discovered, creatures which were there for our interaction. And the spark inside us often has to be spoken to, to be touched by the soul of another. It’s as if the spark is only visible through the lens of night vision, a set of goggles which only another human being can hand to us.

I have to say, after talking to my friend, it was hard not to feel like I have the better deal at Liberty. Sure, it’s frustrating not to be able to relieve sexual tension, but with that option off the table, I’m free to be totally transparent. The whole interaction feels more honest, more straightforward. In the words of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, “our entire motivation in relationships is transformed.” I’ve said things to Aimee tonight that I would never say to girls back in the secular world for fear of alienating them. Strange things to say to a girl who looks really beautiful—like, “You look really beautiful.

We all assume that offering people money will get them to do what we want. But let’s say you go into a bar after work. You meet someone attractive, and you sense the feeling is mutual. You buy each other drinks and have an interesting conversation. After a while, you say, “Hey, I really like you! Want to come back to my place?” Who knows? You might get lucky. But what will happen if you add, “I’m even willing to pay you $100”? You’ve completely changed the meaning of the interaction and insulted the other person by effectively turning him or her into a prostitute. By adding a monetary value to your interaction, you’ve essentially destroyed what might have blossomed into a nice relationship.

Painful Misinterpretations of ADHD Symptoms and Motives Good communication isn’t just a matter of saying the right words or starting your assumptions in the same places. Correct interpretation is critical, and in this realm couples dealing with ADHD may fail miserably for two basic reasons: An ADHD symptom is lurking that they don’t realize is influencing their interaction (and subsequent interpretation of the interaction). They “live in the world” so differently that they incorrectly assume they understand the motives that are influencing frustrating behaviors. One of the most common misinterpretations is feeling as if an ADHD spouse doesn’t love his partner anymore because he isn’t paying attention to her.

There is nothing, though, in “An International Episode” or “Daisy Miller,” fine as they are, that prepares us for the subtle psychological realism of James’s depictions of the elusiveness of self-knowledge and the terrors of confronting one’s concealed motivations in the three premier stories of this volume, “The Aspern Papers,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” Beginning in the 1880s with Portrait of a Lady (1881), which literary historians tend to think of as James’s breakthrough novel, the fate of Americans in Europe and the interaction between European sophistication and American innocence became more a matter of the heart and psyche than one of manners, social relations, and cultural differences.

Most people have heard of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who led India to independence from British rule. His life has been memorialized in books and film, and he is regarded as one of the great men in history. But did you know Gandhi did not start out as a great hero? He was born into a middle-class family. He had low self-esteem, and that made him reluctant to interact with others. He wasn’t a very good student, either, and he struggled just to finish high school. His first attempt at higher education ended in five months. His parents decided to send him to England to finish his education, hoping the new environment would motivate him. Gandhi became a lawyer. The problem when he returned to India was that he didn’t know much about Indian law and had trouble finding clients. So he migrated to South Africa and got a job as a clerk. Gandhi’s life changed one day while riding on a train in South Africa in the first-class section. Because of his dark skin, he was forced to move to a freight car. He refused, and they kicked him off the train. It was then he realized he was afraid of challenging authority, but that he suddenly wanted to help others overcome discrimination if he could. He created a new vision for himself that had value and purpose. He saw value in helping people free themselves from discrimination and injustice. He discovered purpose in life where none had existed previously, and that sense of purpose pulled him forward and motivated him to do what best-selling author and motivational speaker Andy Andrews calls “persist without exception.” His purpose and value turned him into the winner he was born to be,

I couldn’t believe my problem was extrinsic. I wanted to die because I was an idiot and could never improve, never move forward or do better—not because I was sick and therefore locked in a skewed perception of the world and myself within it. It’s not just me. Again and again, people I’ve spoken to bring up their sense of isolation, that theirs is a personal flaw unique to themselves, not something faced by others, certainly not something fixable. Debilitation—that inability to get out of bed, to interact with people—fuels self-revulsion. I loathed myself for the endless stasis, projects unrealized and opportunities ungrasped. I felt I was expending all my energy on the most basic level of functioning and had nothing to show for it—just years of going through the motions. And the worse I felt, the less motivated I was to pursue treatments that felt ineffectual.

The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What

We need a new level, a deeper level of thinking—a paradigm based on the principles that accurately describe the territory of effective human being and interacting—to solve these deep concerns. This new level of thinking is what The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is about. It’s a principle-centered, character-based, “inside-out” approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness. “Inside-out” means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character. The inside-out approach says that private victories

Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As we will see in Chapter 4, the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take. 2. Managing emotions. Handling feelings so they are appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness. Chapter 5 will examine the capacity to soothe oneself, to shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or irritability—and the consequences of failure at this basic emotional skill. People who are poor in this ability are constantly battling feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back far more quickly from life’s setbacks and upsets. 3. Motivating oneself. As Chapter 6 will show, marshaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential for paying attention, for self-motivation and mastery, and for creativity. Emotional self-control—delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness—underlies accomplishment of every sort. And being able to get into the “flow” state enables outstanding performance of all kinds. People who have this skill tend to be more highly productive and effective in whatever they undertake. 4. Recognizing emotions in others. Empathy, another ability that builds on emotional self-awareness, is the fundamental “people skill.” Chapter 7 will investigate the roots of empathy, the social cost of being emotionally tone-deaf, and the reason empathy kindles altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to the subtle social signals that indicate what others need or want. This makes them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales, and management. 5. Handling relationships. The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others. Chapter 8 looks at social competence and incompetence, and the specific skills involved. These are the abilities that undergird popularity, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness. People who excel in these skills do well at anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others; they are social stars.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism. Empathy (particularly in the sense of sympathetic concern) prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own. Self-control allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly. The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it. And the faculty of reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of the other better angels of our nature. In one section I will also examine the possibility that in recent history Homo sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome. But the focus of the book is on transformations that are strictly environmental: changes in historical circumstances that engage a fixed human nature in different ways.

The Three Lives We all lead three lives: our public life, our private life, and our deep inner life. Our public life takes place in a community setting, where we interact with others. Our private life is away from the public—we may be alone, with a friend, or with family members. But our deep inner life is our most significant life. It is where our heart is. It’s where we have the capacity to explore our own motives, to examine our own thoughts and desires, and to analyze our problems and our needs. We can go into this deep private life—we could call it a secret life—even when we are in a public or a private setting. Our secret life is where we are able to tap into the power of the four human endowments: self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and independent will. When you are dealing with the development of a personal mission statement, you need to go into the deep inner or secret life, which influences the other two. It is the part of you where you decide the most fundamental issues of your life. As the psalmist put it: “Search your own heart with all diligence, for out of it flows the issues of your life.” It truly is a secret life. No one knows the thoughts and intents of your heart. You alone have that awareness, and you can step in on your own deep inner life; you can examine, explore, and change it. Many people, unless they are in pain because of something they care about that is not being fulfilled, will not go into their deep inner life at all. In a sense, they’re not living. They’re just being lived, publicly and privately.

Putting the Other Person Down The manipulator has other options available to help them reach their ultimate goal. One tactic that can be quite effective consists in putting their target down on a regular basis. However, this isn’t done through insults or threats. This covert technique is very useful because the manipulator uses it in a very subtle manner. This can be seen in the abundant use of sarcasm or perhaps passive-aggressive attacks. For example, the manipulator may say, “don’t we look lovely today” when it is clear that the victim is not at their best. A passive-aggressive approach might be something like, “I’m just going to have to take you in for a good scrubbing and a haircut.” It might say in a playful tone, but the subtext is far more sinister. As for the target, they may not realize that they are the subject of manipulation. They may feel terrible as a result of the interaction, but may not realize that they are being deliberately acted upon by the manipulator. Consequently, the target is left to wonder is what the motives might be for being treated in such a manner. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, at least not to the manipulator. What does matter is that the target is left feeling vulnerable and exposed. This is where the manipulator can make the most of their efforts. When a victim is left feeling defenseless, the manipulator is in a prime position to take advantage ([27]). On the contrary, if a person feels safe and empowered, the likelihood of them being manipulated is quite low. That’s why manipulators prey upon people with low self-esteem. If a person has high self-esteem, then they won’t be easily manipulated. If anything, put-downs and insults will spark a defensive reaction. That would leave the manipulator with no choice but to move on to the next victim.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however – myth, literature, and drama – portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the 'objective world' – what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is 'the world of value' – what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action. The world as forum for action is 'composed,' essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory 'Word' and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this 'world of divine characters,' much as the 'objective world.' The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in 'reality' a forum for action, as well as a place of things. Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of 'ritual imitation of the Great Father' – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This 'restriction of adaptive capacity' dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos. Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to 'identification with the devil,' the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience – is adoption of 'God’s place' by 'reason' – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning. 'Identification with the devil' amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly. Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation. Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero – the 'savior' – who upholds his association with the creative 'Word' in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves? In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order, and stability). Up one level are the need for love and for belonging. Above that is our desire for growth—the opportunity to attain personal goals, to master knowledge and skills, and to be recognized and rewarded for our achievements. Finally, at the top is the desire for what Maslow termed “self-actualization”—self-fulfillment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. Maslow argued that safety and survival remain our primary and foundational goals in life, not least when our options and capacities become limited. If true, the fact that public policy and concern about old age homes focus on health and safety is just a recognition and manifestation of those goals. They are assumed to be everyone’s first priorities. Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age. What’s more, our driving motivations in life, instead of remaining constant, change hugely over time and in ways that don’t quite fit Maslow’s classic hierarchy. In young adulthood, people seek a life of growth and self-fulfillment, just as Maslow suggested. Growing up involves opening outward. We search out new experiences, wider social connections, and ways of putting our stamp on the world. When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in. Given the choice, young people prefer meeting new people to spending time with, say, a sibling; old people prefer the opposite. Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than simultaneous tasks. Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task. The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include: avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.

For the moment, the only other suggestion (a.k.a. rule) here is that you pay attention on a very conscious and present level to the content not only of your interactions with other people, but what you think you know about every situation and every person’s motivation. If you’re like me, you may end up at the conclusion that the more you learn, the less you’re sure of.

When learners have choices to interact with the content and discuss what they watched, read, and learned, they are actively participating as learners. Encouraging learner voice and choice is the key difference to the other terms: differentiation and individualization. When learners have a voice in how they learn and a choice in how they engage with content and express what they know, they are more motivated to want to learn and own their learning.

Is he a psychopath?” “The relationship between psychopathic and serial killers is particularly interesting. All psychopaths do not become serial murderers. Lucky for us, because there are a lot of them out there. But serial murderers may possess some or many of the traits consistent with those of a psychopath. Psychopaths who commit serial murder do not value human life and are extremely callous in their interactions with their victims. This is particularly evident in sexually motivated serial killers who repeatedly target, stalk, assault, and kill without a sense of remorse. However, being a psychopath alone does not explain the motivations of a serial killer. Psychopaths are not sensitive to themes such as sympathy for their victims or remorse or guilt over their crimes. They do possess certain personality traits that can be detected, particularly their inherent narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. Psychopathy is a personality disorder manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish needs.

Cutting-edge research shows how Rifkin motivates other people to give. Giving, especially when it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within a group. It turns out that giving can be contagious. In one study, contagion experts James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis found that giving spreads rapidly and widely across social networks. When one person made the choice to contribute to a group at a personal cost over a series of rounds, other group members were more likely to contribute in future rounds, even when interacting with people who weren’t present for the original act. “This influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person),” Fowler and Christakis find, such that “each additional contribution a subject makes . . . in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence.

Horst (2005) used simplified readers in a study of vocabulary development among adult immigrants who were enrolled in an ESL programme in a community centre in Montreal, Canada. The 21 participants represented several language backgrounds and proficiency levels. In addition to the activities of their regular ESL class, students chose simplified readers that were made available in a class library. Over a six-week period, students took books home and read them on their own. Horst developed individualized vocabulary measures so that learning could be assessed in terms of the books each student actually read. She found that there was vocabulary growth attributable to reading, even over this short period, and that the more students read, the more words they learned. She concluded that substantial vocabulary growth through reading is possible, but that students must read a great deal (more than just one or two books per semester) to realize those benefits. As we saw in Chapter 2, when we interact in ordinary conversations, we tend to use mainly the 1,000 or 2,000 most frequent words. Thus, reading is a particularly valuable source of new vocabulary. Students who have reached an intermediate level of proficiency may have few opportunities to learn new words in everyday conversation. It is in reading a variety of texts that students are most likely to encounter new vocabulary. The benefit of simplified readers is that students encounter a reasonable number of new words. This increases the likelihood that they can figure out the meaning of new words (or perhaps be motivated to look them up). If the new words occur often enough, students may remember them when they encounter them in a new context.

Concurrent time is a state of time where all the happenings occur at the same time. The creations of the present are influenced by both the past and the future actions and all the three interact where even a future event can change what can happen in the present.

Martine was intrigued by the propensity and intracies of activities this new artificial social life was offering. The web of possibilities could provide her with an imaginative and creative outlet to her somewhat stagnant social life. She was motivated to participate fully and explore the various types of satisfaction and pleasure it could yield. Almost overnight her social life would be transformed and would now be vibrant, full and colored with experiences and interactions that provided satisfaction and enjoyment. Excitement filled her every pore and caused her body to tingle in anticipation.

but today he didn’t mind it so much for the passage of time now meant he would be the caretaker, the instructor, the force, behind the intellect and personality of a new existence on the face of the earth. An existence that could perhaps motivate the entire totality of everyone else’s existence. He

Such is the recipe for bad marriages and bad negotiations. With each party having its own set of objectives, its own goals and motivations, the truth is that the conversational niceties—the socially lubricating “yeses” and “you’re rights” that get thrown out fast and furious early in any interaction—are not in any way a substitute for real understanding between you and your partner.

HABITS” DEFINED For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three. I may be ineffective in my interactions with my work associates, my spouse, or my children because I constantly tell them what I think, but I never really listen to them. Unless I search out correct principles of human interaction, I may not even know I need to listen. Even if I do know that in order to interact effectively with others I really need to listen to them, I may not have the skill. I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being. But knowing I need to listen and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won’t be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions. The being/seeing change is an upward process—being changing seeing, which in turn changes being, and so forth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth. By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been

There are good biological reasons for accepting the fact that man is so constituted that he possesses an inner world of the imagination which is different from, though connected to, the world of external reality. It is the discrepancy between the two worlds which motivates creative imagination. People who realize their creative potential are constandy bridging the gap between inner and outer. They invest the external world with meaning because they disown neither the world’s objectivity nor their own subjectivity. This interaction between inner and outer worlds is easily seen when we observe children at play. Children make use of real objects in the external world, but invest these objects with meanings which derive from the world of their own imagination. This process begins very early in the child’s life. Many infants develop intense attachments to particular objects. D. W. Winnicott was the first psychoanalyst to draw attention to the importance of such attachments in his paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.7 These phenomena are closely connected with the beginnings of independence and with the capacity to be alone.

Keep These Things in Mind While Enrolling For A Professional Online Course While online courses are gaining in popularity due to the conveniences they offer, you must consider a few things before enrolling in one. Not all programs are suitable for everyone. Not everyone is good at learning online. There are a lot of conditions that must be satisfied to make such learning successful. It is better that you consider everything carefully before starting your e-learning course. 1. How Will The Course Help You? There are many online professional programs available from various universities and educational platforms. You must see which one will be most useful for you. If you are working and you need to acquire a skill to get a promotion, then you must choose such a course. It is not just money that you are spending on these courses. You are also investing a lot of your time and effort to successfully complete your learning. 2. Do You Have The Motivation To Learn By Yourself? Getting motivated to study when you are in a classroom full of students is easy. A professor is teaching and also watching you. But in online certification courses, you have the freedom of studying whenever and wherever you want. Many of the e-learning platforms allow you to complete the program at your pace. This can make you lethargic and distracted. You must ask yourself whether you can remain motivated to complete the course. 3. How Familiar Are You With The Technology? You don’t need to be a computer genius to attend online professional programs. But you must be familiar with basic computer operations, playing videos on both desktops and mobile phones, and using a web browser. The other skill you will require in e-learning is the speed of typing on different devices. When there are live exchanges with the professors, you will need to type the queries very fast if you want to get your answers. 4. How Well Will You Participate In Online Classes? It is very easy to remain silent in virtual classes. There is no one staring at you and pushing you to ask questions or give answers. But if you don’t interact, you will not be making full use of online certification courses. Participation is very important in such classrooms. You must also take part in the group discussions that will bring out new ideas and opinions. E-learning is not for those who need physical presence. 5. Who Are The Others On The Programme? Knowing the other participants in online professional programs is very important, especially if you are already working and looking to acquire more skills. There must be people in the virtual classroom whose contributions will be useful for you. If the course has only freshers from college, then it may not give you any value addition. As a working person, you must look at networking opportunities that will help you with career opportunities. To Sum Up….. For working people, virtual classes are the best way to acquire more skills without taking a break from employment. These courses offer you the flexibility that you can never get in campus education. But you must make yourself suitable for e-learning to benefit from it.

In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success.

The world is living through a time of great pain but great pain is always a motivator for exosocial expansion. The tearing of endogroup bonds and former euphoric connections results in a global need to create new connections. We have an opportunity to create those connections with discovery, with creation and with each other, through altruistic and power-free interactions.

Avoid interacting with fake people, it's painful for your mind

Typical topics covered within user interviews include: Background (such as ethnographic data) The use of technology in general The use of the product The user’s main objectives and motivations

Of all the current social theories, the rational/utilitarian tradition, in its modern incarnation, is most finely tuned to a way of making social policies work. The conflict tradition, with its tradition of conflicting movements and revolutionary upheavals, has a tendency to focus on the evils that exist, and the conditions that will bring about an uprising against them. Where conflict theory is weak is in explaining what will happen after the revolution, or after a successful movement has won some power. Its attitude tends to be: put the oppressed peoples in charge and everything will be great. At this point conflict theory stops being realistic. In their own ways, the other lines of social theory also tend to be vague about social theory. The Durkheimian tradition, with its emphasis on the conditions that produce solidarity and its ideals, doesn’t see people as very capable of generating specific social results; its victories are symbolic and emotional rather than practical. The micro-interaction theories, with their emphasis on the shifting cognitive interpretations of social reality, are also not very good at specific social policies. They assume either that somehow a social belief will be created that people find satisfactory, or that people live in their own little worlds of cognitive reality-construction, like separate bubbles in a stream. The modern rational/utilitarians, for all their faults, nevertheless are no the forefront in attempting to apply sociological insights to propose policies that have a realistic chance of succeeding. That is not to say that the theoretical basis of rational/utilitarian theory is necessarily adequate yet to this task. We have seen a consistent problem in the utilitarian tradition, on the level of how to motivate people for collective action. Can the appeal to interests alone motivate people to adopt great reforms, whether this appeal is embodies in the legal codes advocated by Bentham, in Adam Smith’s freedom of the market, or in schemes for new rules of the social game such as those proposed by Rawls, Buchanan, or Coleman? There is an element of pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps in these proposals, as long as one starts from the isolated individual concerned for his or her own interests. As an alternative, we may still need to draw on the conflict theory, which suggests that people fight for their interests rather blindly, solving one problem but creating new ones. The other alternative is the Durkheimian tradition of social solidarity, which explains precisely the emotional links among people that rational/utilitarian theory leaves out.

We Repeatedly Pronounce Black and White Verdicts on Life Situations And The People We Interact With But We Tend To Overlook The Different Subtle Shades Of Human Dynamics”.

Considering the mental domain privilege over the bodily is a long-standing bias of psychologists and philosophers, but it is not inevitable. More than a hundred years ago, John Hughlines jackson contemplated the relations of mental abilities to brain networks in patients with brain disorders and concluded that the separation of mental functions from sensorimotor made no sense. The brain evolved to regulate the motivational control of actions, carried out by the motor system, guided by sensory evaluation of ongoing environmental events. There are no "faculties" ―of memory, conscious perception, or music appreciation―that float in the mental ether, separate from the bodily functions. If we accept that the mind comes from the brain [the brain in ongoing interaction with environment], then our behavior and experience must be understood to be elaborations of primordial systems of perceiving, evaluating, and acting. When we study the brain to look for networks controlling cognition are linked in one way or the other to sensory systems, or to motivational systems. There are no brain parts for disembodied cognition.

The brain evolved to regulate the motivational control of actions, carried out by the motor system, guided by sensory evaluation of ongoing environmental events. There are no "faculties" ―of memory, conscious perception, or music appreciation―that float in the mental ether, separate from the bodily functions. If we accept that the mind comes from the brain [in ongoing interaction with environment], then our behavior and experience must be understood to be elaborations of primordial systems of perceiving, evaluating, and acting. When we study the brain to look for networks controlling cognition are linked in one way or the other to sensory systems, or to motivational systems. There are no brain parts for disembodied cognition.

Schutz correctly theorized that all human behavior and interaction is motivated by three fundamental desires to feel: 1. Important and significant. 2. Competent and capable. 3. Liked and accepted.

When a toxic person doesn't get his or her way, their next gambit is often to make your motives sound sinister. They will lie to others about why you won't meet. They will insist you stop what you're doing and interact with them or else pay the price. When to Walk Away

Is there a small habit that can support a major habit?” (For example, packing your exercise clothes in the morning so they’ll be ready for the gym in the evening.) “Do I often end the day frustrated because I didn’t complete the most important tasks?” (Identify the most important tasks for the next day and then schedule them into your calendar.) “What quick activities make me feel inspired or happy?” (For example, watching a short motivational video each morning.) “What five goals are the most important to me right now?” (What can you do daily to support all five of these goals?) “What are the activities that I love to do?” (Think of tasks that can support hobbies, like running, knitting, traveling, or reading.) “What areas of my financial life do I need to improve?” (If you’re in debt, then address this first. But if you have money in the bank, then you should build a habit that focuses on building up your investment portfolio.) “Can I improve the quality of my interpersonal relationships?” (Think about your interactions with your parents, children, significant other, and closest friends. Is there anything you can do daily to make these interactions better?) “What makes me feel great about myself?” (If something brings you enjoyment, then you should either do it every day or schedule time for it each week.) “How can I become more spiritual in my daily life?” (For example, read from a book of prayers, practice a bit of yoga, or recite positive affirmations.) “What is a new skill I’ve always wanted to master?” (For example, make a habit of researching and learning about talents like home brewing, playing a musical instrument, learning a new language, or anything that sounds fun.) “Is there anything I can do to support my local community or an important cause?” (We all believe in something. So if you schedule time daily for this activity, then it’s not hard to consistently help others.) “Is there something that I can do to improve my job performance and get a raise?” (For example, build a skill that will become valuable to the company.)

Based on what we know today, the environment conducive to optimal experience should: Provide a high intensity of interaction and feedback Have specific goals and established procedures Motivate Provide a continual feeling of challenge, one that is neither so difficult as to create a sense of hopelessness and frustration nor so easy as to produce boredom Provide a sense of direct engagement, producing the feeling of directly experiencing the environment, directly working on the task Provide appropriate tools that fit the user and task so well that they aid and do not distract Avoid distractions and disruptions that intervene and destroy the subjective experience

Business ideas are like human reproduction – they never cease to be birthed as long as there is constant interaction between the brain and questions of life.

In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success.

The goal here is to focus on facilitating better interactions among your users so that they actually can exchange value. Without this step, the theoretical value of a network will remain just that: theoretical. Creating interactions between users is how the magic starts to happen. As we saw with the core transaction, a platform needs to motivate its users to create and consume value.

The Behavior Model is a way to describe what leads to a behavior. There are three elements that have to come together at the same moment. A person has to have some level of motivation. They have to have the ability to do the behavior. And then they have to be triggered to do the behavior. Those three things have to happen at the same time. If any element is missing then the behavior won’t happen.

The Three Lives We all lead three lives: our public life, our private life, and our deep inner life. Our public life takes place in a community setting, where we interact with others. Our private life is away from the public—we may be alone, with a friend, or with family members. But our deep inner life is our most significant life. It is where our heart is. It’s where we have the capacity to explore our own motives, to examine our own thoughts and desires, and to analyze our problems and our needs. We can go into this deep private life—we could call it a secret life—even when we are in a public or a private setting. Our secret life is where we are able to tap into the power of the four human endowments: self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and independent will. When you are dealing with the development of a personal mission statement, you need to go into the deep inner or secret life, which influences the other two. It is the part of you where you decide the most fundamental issues of your life. As the psalmist put it: “Search your own heart with all diligence, for out of it flows the issues of your life.” It truly is a secret life. No one knows the thoughts and intents of your heart.

This concludes the review of three commonly cited prototypical confluence theories of creativity, namely the systems approach (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), which suggests that creativity is a sociocultural process involving the interaction between the individual, domain, and field; Gruber & Wallace’s (2000) model that treats each individual case study as a unique evolving system of creativity; and investment theory (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996), which suggests that creativity is the result of the convergence of six elements (intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and environment).

As Foster writes, “We will never have pure enough motives, or be good enough, or know enough in order to pray rightly. We simply must set all these things aside and begin praying. In fact, it is in the very act of prayer itself—the intimate, ongoing interaction with God—that these matters are cared for in due time.”1

In every person lies a beast and a giant. Be careful which of them you awaken to the world with your interactions with people.

As A and B interact, in whatever manner, typifications will be produced quite quickly. A watches B perform. He attributes motives to B’s actions and, seeing the actions recur, typifies the motives as recurrent. As B goes on performing, A is soon able to say to himself, “Aha, there he goes again.” At the same time, A may assume that B is doing the same thing with regard to him. From the beginning, both A and B assume this reciprocity of typificatíon. In the course of their interaction these typifications will be expressed in specific patterns of conduct. That is, A and B will begin to play roles vis-à-vis each other. This will occur even if each continues to perform actions different from those of the other. The possibility of taking the role of the other will appear with regard to the same actions performed by both. That is, A will inwardly appropriate B’s reiterated roles and make them the models for his own role-playing. For example, B’s role in the activity of preparing food is not only typified as such by A, but enters as a constitutive element into A’s own food-preparation role. Thus a collection of reciprocally typified actions will emerge, habitualized for each in roles, some of which will be performed separately and some in common.22 While this reciprocal typification is not yet institutionalization (since, there only being two individuals, there is no possibility of a typology of actors), it is clear that institutionalization is already present in nucleo. At

The Interview The largest determining factor in whether you get a job is usually the interview itself. You’ve made impressions all along—with your telephone call and your cover letter and resume. Now it is imperative that you create a favorable impression when at last you get a chance to talk in person. This can be the ultimate test for a socially anxious person: After all, you are being evaluated on your performance in the interview situation. Activate your PMA, then build up your energy level. If you have followed this program, you now possess the self-help techniques you need to help you through the situation. You can prepare yourself for success. As with any interaction, good chemistry is important. The prospective employer will think hard about whether you will fit in—both from a production perspective and an interactive one. The employer may think: Will this employee help to increase the bottom line? Will he interact well as part of the team within the social system that already exists here? In fact, your chemistry with the interviewer may be more important than your background and experience. One twenty-three-year-old woman who held a fairly junior position in an advertising firm nonetheless found a good media position with one of the networks, not only because of her skills and potential, but because of her ability to gauge a situation and react quickly on her feet. What happened? The interviewer began listing the qualifications necessary for the position that was available: “Self-starter, motivated, creative . . .” “Oh,” she said, after the executive paused, “you’re just read my resume!” That kind of confidence and an ability to take risks not only amused the interviewer; it displayed some of the very skills the position required! The fact that interactive chemistry plays such a large role in getting a job has both positive and negative aspects. The positive side is that a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a particular job. Often, with the right basic education and life skills, you can make a strong enough impression based on who you are and how capable you seem that the employer may feel you are trainable for the job at hand. In my office, for example, we interviewed a number of experienced applicants for a secretarial position, only to choose a woman whose office skills were not as good as several others’, but who had the right chemistry, and who we felt would fit best into the existing system in the office. It’s often easier to teach or perfect the required skills than it is to try to force an interactive chemistry that just isn’t there. The downside of interactive chemistry is that even if you do have the required skills, you may be turned down if you don’t “click” with the interviewer.

PERSONAL PROFILE FOR EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION Consider the following list of twelve characteristics that are central to communicating both in an interview and on the job. If you feel you are lacking in a particular category, you can use the explanations and suggestions given to enhance your interactive ability in the workplace. 1. Activation of PMA. Use positive thinking techniques such as internal coaching. 2. Physical appearance. Make sure to dress appropriately for the event. In most interviews, business attire (a suit or sport coat and tie for men; a suit, dress, or tailored pants for women) is recommended. What you wear to the interview communicates not only how important the event is to you but your ability to assess a situation and how you should behave in it. Appropriate grooming is essential, both in an interview and on the job. 3. Posture. Carry yourself with confidence. Let your posture communicate that you are a winner. Keep your face on a vertical plane, spine straight, shoulders comfortably back. By simply straightening up and using the diaphragmatic breathing you learned in Chapter 6 (which proper posture encourages), you will feel much better about yourself. Others will perceive you in a more positive light as well. 4. Rate of speech. Your rate of speech ought to be appropriate for the specific situation and person or persons it is intended for. Too fast is annoying, and too slow is boring. A good way to pace your speech is to speak at close to the rate of the person who is talking to you. 5. Eye contact. Absolutely essential for successful communication. Occasionally, you should avert your gaze briefly in order to avoid staring. But try not to look down at your lap or let your eyes wander all around the room as you speak. This suggests a lack of confidence and an inability to stay on track. 6. Facial expressions. You gain more credibility when you are open and expressive. The warmer personality will seem stronger and more confident. And perhaps most important, remember to smile in conversation. If you seem interested and enthusiastic, it will enhance the chemistry between you and the interviewer or your supervisor. You can develop the ability to use facial expressions to your advantage through a kind of biofeedback that makes use of the mirror and continuously experimenting in real life. Look at your reflection for several minutes. Practice being relaxed and create the expressions that are appropriate. Do you look interested? Alert? Motivated? Practice responding to an interviewer. Impress the “muscle memory” of these expressions into your mind.

Admittedly, there will be times when you must interact on a superficial level and adjust your behavior to fit in, go along and get along.

Fearful people tend to be shaped by past interactions.

How do you enter a room? How do you walk into a job interview? How do you approach a sales prospect for the first time? Accomplished leaders know that the way they make an entrance can project their confidence and set the tone for their interaction with others. Use your poise, postures, and gestures to make it grand.

The Warm Welcome of Hospitality. Walt Disney World is the epitome of world-class customer service. Employees must be hyper-vigilant of spatial orientation to engage, impress, and interact with guests. For simply being near a guest, employees are trained to: • Make eye contact and smile. • Greet and welcome each and every guest. • Seek out guest contact. • Provide immediate service recovery. • Always display appropriate body language. • Preserve the “magical” guest experience. • Thank each guest and demonstrate that appreciation.

When you are sitting behind a desk with a person on the other side, there is a barrier between you that becomes a psychological and subliminal message. Some of the best leaders I know have a round table or a circle of chairs in their offices so that when people come in to speak with them, the arrangement lends itself to more engaging interaction. Using a roundtable in which there is no head fosters collaboration, cooperation, mutual respect, and equal positioning.

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behavior, social interaction, and communication. Imagine invisible bubbles around every person that provides each of us with comfort zones for social engagement and interaction.

In 1966, American anthropologist Edward T. Hall specified four distinct distance zones to describe the perception of physical space around us. Understanding these zones and honoring their invisible boundaries will give you a sixth sense about another person’s “space” as well as your own. Intimate Zone (less than 2’) —This zone represents our personal space and is reserved for the most trusted and loved people in our lives. Touching, hugging, standing side by side, and engaging in private conversations is common and encouraged. When an interloper violates this personal space, great discomfort and awkwardness can be created. What to do? Take a step back or sideways. Personal Zone (2’-4’) —This is the distance for interaction with good friends, family, social gatherings, or parties. It's an easy and relaxed space for talking, shaking hands, gesturing, laughing and making faces. Social Zone (4’-12') —This zone seems to be an appropriate distance for casual friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to interact. It is the comfortable distance we maintain while interacting or addressing large groups of people. Public Zone (over 12’) —This is the distance we keep from strangers or persons with little acquaintance. It provides the greatest distance between people. This is a safe space that still allows us to experience community and belonging with new people.

As you seek new opportunities to make favorable first impressions, be ever aware of the subtle effect that physical positioning and distance/closeness can have on your interactions with others and use this understanding to your advantage.

Look for all of the possible missteps in the following scenario. My friend Amy arrived at a consultation with her Hispanic business partner. The African American woman to whom they were delivering their presentation was a long-time friend of her partner’s. Her partner was greeted with a hug and Amy was greeted with a handshake. The meeting was a great success. As it came to a close, the two friends hugged. With enthusiastic affection, Amy went to hug the African American client. The woman took a step, turned her shoulder to block the hug, and looked at Amy with dismissive anger. It was almost a defensive move. Her partner, recognizing this, put her arm around Amy to soften the situation and make light of the inappropriate gesture. Everything turned out fine, but Amy was baffled by the barrier. She was confused by the woman’s reaction since their interaction had been cordial and positive. She wondered if she had been socially insensitive or culturally inappropriate. After much reflection, however, she realized that she had simply been too quick to assume familiarity. Thankfully, she earned and learned the lesson quickly to become more aware. Amy eventually earned the trust of her client and secured her valuable business.

It is no mystery why nice people are well-liked and get along harmoniously with others. Being nice makes people feel emotionally safe, allowing for more authentic, trusting, and happy interactions.

Google Proves Nice Counts. On a quest to discover what it takes to build the "perfect team," Google launched the Project Aristotle initiative to find the answers. Over a period of several years, they surveyed hundreds of teams, conducted interviews, analyzed studies, and observed how team members interacted with one another. Google’s findings revealed that "psychological safety" is the key ingredient for creating a high-functioning team. It nurtures a healthy environment that encourages freedom of expression, engaging communication, empathy for one another, caring, support, respect and, drum roll please . . . BEING NICE!

Benefits of Being Nice • You set positive karma into motion. • What you give is what you get back in return. • You are more likable. • People will treat you better. • You will reduce personal stress. • You will make friends more easily. • You can improve someone else’s day. • You will have less drama in your life. • It takes less energy than being otherwise. • It makes you a more valuable team player. • You create a sense of emotional safety for others. • It can keep you physically and psychologically safe. • You set a positive example for others to play nicely. • You will build bridges of cooperation and collaboration. • You will improve personal and professional interactions • Lastly, being nice feels nice!