A few things I wanted to share before you start your weekend…
I haven’t gotten into the adult coloring book craze yet, but as a huge fan of her work, I ordered this new book by Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project Mini Posters: A Coloring Book: 20 Hand-Lettered Quotes to Pull Out and Frame. It features quotes on happiness and pretty, easy artwork to color. I’m going to share this with my 13 and 11 year old daughters as a fun project to work on together. They love doing crafts and art, and they often print and color things to put on their walls.
Filed under fascinating:
A teen in my home state awakes from a coma speaking fluent Spanish. This phenomenon has been documented before. And it’s interesting to me for a few reasons.
For one, it illustrates that our brains are capable of infinitely more than we know. (Someday we will tap into this!)
Obviously the WORDS WERE THERE in the young man’s mind, because this is not voodoo, it’s just that the person was afraid to speak them before because they worried about not doing so perfectly. Or perhaps they just didn’t care about learning the foreign language. But the words were in their brain regardless!
I wouldn’t want to get a stiff punch to the face, but I DO want to de-activate the part of my brain that’s worried that “I’m going to look/sound stupid“. That part of our brains is in control far too much of the time, and the courageous, creative, intuitive bit is inactive too often (maybe the coloring book will help? Ha!).
And since our brains and bodies can do these amazing things, we need to stop telling ourselves we can’t do whatever it is!
I’ve read that people attempting to learn a foreign tongue do better if they drink a little alcohol while practicing, helping to deactivate the anxiety. I’ve been trying to teach myself French for a couple of years, and find that I freeze up when encountering a native speaker, but I sometimes DREAM conversations in French, meaning the knowledge is there for me to access when I’m not inhibited.
Clearly, the answer to this conundrum is for me to fly to Paris and sit at a cafe, drinking wine. Tout suite!
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Along similar lines, a psychologist has been able to teach people how to be lucky. (And I don’t mean lucky as in “in cahoots with the Devil”, I mean lucky as in fortunate.)
Unfortunate people are anxious, tense, and don’t see things that are right in front of them – the article gives examples, whereas fortunate people notice patterns and connections, have great intuition, are positive and invite variety into their lives, which increase their chances of success.
Have you ever known someone like that, who was always having good things “happen” to them? Or the opposite – someone who, it seems, was always getting injured or having bad strokes over and over?
More evidence that we really do create some of that reality in our lives.
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Thank you so much to those of you who answered my survey. It’s still running for a few more days. I’ve gotten great feedback and I appreciate you taking the time to answer it.
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Exciting news for me: my book, The Temporary Tightwad, is under review in Amazon at the moment! In a few hours it will be live and available for .99 as a “soft” launch to thank the people on my newsletter list and who read this blog, before the price goes up. Look for an announcement here soon. I’m very proud of this book, I think it’s the best I’ve written, and I believe (and hope!) it will change people’s lives for the better.
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My sister is coming to town today and everyone is excited. Since our beach vacation was cut short by Hurricane Matthew, we didn’t get to see her and everyone was very disappointed.
Enjoy your weekend, and don’t forget to flâner a little bit!
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