Personal Growth Tips

A minimum desire and tendency to control the actions and the persons around us exists in every one of us. This purpose becomes more difficult when it comes to control our mind. Human mind still remains a partially controlled “area”. I believe that more important than control is to permanently develop those essential cognitive skills for an efficient adjustment in the future.

I’ve recently also found this approach of the mind in the book “Five minds for the future” wrote by the well-known psychologist H. Gardner. Based on the concept of “minds”, his point of view outlines that the key for the human’s evolution is to achieve five types of mind.

1. A disciplinary mind prevents us to become “slaves” of passive information learning. The idea is not to exclude the learning process but to do it understanding every discipline. We should be able to think from at least a couple of disciplines’ perspective (science, mathematics, history and an art discipline) and to educate our teenagers not by the past standards but for the future.

2. A synthesizing mind needs abilities to organize the overwhelming “wave” of information and to integrate ideas from different disciplines. By being a synthetic structure we can easily take correct decisions for every problem.

3. A creating mind could be expressively described by the legendary dictum of Socrates “I think, so I exist” transformed into “I create, so I exist”. A creative person is always looking for the challenges. This kind of individual analyzes a situation from more than one perspective trying to clarify any questions or phenomenon. Generally, every person wants to be creative and to realize something new in life.

4. A respectful mind creates a cause-effect relation between persons: the ones disrespectful don’t deserve the other one’s respect. Thinking respectfully means to live one next to other without wanting to produce any harm and to promote tolerance between people. Respect signifies to appreciate the human diversity. The poet W.H.Auden drastically expressed the reality by saying: “we must love each other or die”.

5. An ethical mind is set to warn us about the non-ethical persons and the ones refusing to assume any responsibility. Once we interiorize the ethical perspective we think about the welfare of all the people not only about ours. A notorious religious chief priest said that when all that’s important can be sold and bought, when going to shopping is seen like a salvation or when the publicity commercials are considered as prayers, values are destroyed.

Achieving this five minds isn’t very easy because of obstacles as conservatory attitudes, resistance to everything is new, hidden risks or the lack of proper methods and ways. Further more, it’s also needed a people’s reorientation from the technology evolution to human values and personalities. We have to be more preoccupied for our cognitive and spiritual wellbeing than the material one.

If we want to make the world a better place in the future, we must start from changing our mind’s concepts and choosing the ones that can help us to grow as unique personalities. – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

“Human rights” is a concept promoted for a long time in many international documents. The national and international conflicts, political attitudes and human behaviors are drawing a tough reality for us to realize that we respect human rights only on paper. Theoretically speaking we all seem to know and to talk about human rights. We even feel offended by certain remarks regarding our questionable behavior.

The humanity is stepping into a ridiculous circle by talking with an incredible credibility about respecting human rights to cover the reality behind it:

• intolerance regarding human diversity;
• cognitive stereotypes and social labels used to appreciate a person;
• discriminative behavior;

Taking into account the difference between reality (who we are) and appearance (how we present ourselves), I ask a few minutes of your spare time to think about the case called “European Train”.

“You took the train Dear Valley Express for a hall trip from Lisbon to Moscow. You are traveling in a couchette that you must share with three other persons. With whom would you prefer to share it from the next passengers?”

1. a Serbian solder from Bosnia;
2. a Swiss overweight broker;
3. a D.J. that seems to have a lot of money;
4. a young artist with AIDS;
5. a gipsy from Hungary recently released from jail;
6. a Basque nationalist constantly traveling in Russia;
7. an Ukrainian student who doesn’t want to go home;
8. a blind accordionist from Austria;
9. a 40 years old Romanian woman with no visa and carrying a 1 year child;
10. an impulsive and misogynist German;
11. a bald-headed Swede apparently drunk;
12. a professional fighter from Belfast which goes to a football game;
13. a Polish prostitute from Berlin;
14. a French farmer speaking only French and with a basket full of cheese;
15. a Kurd refugee living in Germany and going back in Libya;

This conscience exercise must be seriously approach by choosing three desirable persons and three undesirable ones to travel with. It’s a hard thing to do when the persons on the list are extremely different and they could have a hidden agenda considering their description. Every choice has to be explained so you can become aware of the reasons behind your decisions.

The paradox is that no matter who we choose, we’ll still discriminate someone. So you’ll wonder what’s the point if there will be at least one person discriminated. The purpose is to determine more people to realize we are the “slaves” of an intolerant attitude and a stereotypical thinking. Further more everyone could and must learn from this situation that we must have and keep an open mind. - Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

People are more and more overwhelmed by stressful situations and the most frequent response to the present reality is “I’m stressed”. The stress is contagious especially in a larger group as an organization and so a stressed person “spreads” it to his colleagues, his manager or his subordinates. In this context, an individual must control not only his stress level but also to pay attention to others’ stress impact on him.

There is a mutual influence between stress and the personal way of thinking. A moderate level of stress has a benefic effect on our mind’s flexibility, while an excessive one deteriorates our clear thinking and it affects our own discrimination and evaluation power. Our thoughts can stimulate as well the stress level and that’s why some of us perceive a situation more stressful than other ones.

Even there are stress sources we can’t totally control as overburden, role conflict, uncertainty and the major transformations of the offered products and services; every individual has access on certain measures to neutralize stress’ effect as:

• a better understanding of the company’s politics – sometimes leaving the company turns out worst than staying and trying to found out which are the organization’s motives to act in a certain why and direction;
• organizing our own labor space /desk – it can decrease the stress by the visual stimulation;
• a positive relation with colleagues – when you pass through a stressful period it’s better to share it with your close colleague;
• an appropriate communication – every individual must know that some of us prefer verbal communication and others the written messages;
• the analysis of the stress level in different year or day’s periods – by doing this analysis it can be identified the crowded periods which allows us to restage the activities;
• time management – our life’s objectives are being arranged according to our own life vision but all of us must use the same criteria separating the activities in three types: important and urgent, important and less urgent, less important;
• interior equilibrium – even there are unpleasant and uncomfortable situations any individual must learn to control his reactions; an efficient attitude is never to let a feeling of guilt to overwhelm you;
• physical and mental relaxation period next to an equilibrated food diet;
• observing the stress’ signs on other persons – apathy in relations, indifference regarding others’ opinions, self-isolation, irascibility, unorganized work style, disorder and the permanent search of things, the postponing of tasks’ solving, repeated delays on meetings;
• activities to diminish the stress in our spare time – never sacrifice your time dedicated to your family for your job because small or great family’s events give you the familial fulfillment! – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

Each passing day proves a reality which is that human’s life is deeply influenced by all kind of models. Either it’s the case of living models or the ones “imprinted” upon the social memory of humankind, the sphere of theirs activity (science, art, music, politics) or the status of public persons or unknown ones (persons that only we recognize), there isn’t one who doesn’t have somebody as a model. Some of us have not only one, but various models, a one for every area which makes a point of interest for us.

Probably every one of us remembers about our first “confessions” regarded our model, obviously from parent’s stories. The most frequent question of our childhood or youth “what do you want to become when you’ll grow up” got answers as “I want to be a singer like… /a painter like…/or just like my mother”.

Child or adult, we both looking up to a model and we identify ourselves with him mostly because the process of our own development needs certain milestones. We all must have some guidance in our life to ease our social integration and to perform in career and family.

The relation between us and our model starts as an appropriation process when we try to “still” all the good parts and positive ideas that we agreed to from him. In a more or less obvious way, we imitate the most representative attitudes and behaviors of his personality because makes us feel right and capable of being for a moment just like the model.

In time, this emotional and unfiltered “absorption” of anything it comes from our model it must become more selective, more critical and centered on a specific target-the one of maintaining a benefic relation with our model, mutually advantageous. This means to avoid being annihilated by his personality and to use those personal positive aspects of him in our own evolution as a unique person.

Considering the fact that a secret of life is also to know when to stop or how far to push an action, the model’s power must be controlled as well. We need to be vigilante and draw a line between us and our model so we won’t be assimilated or become emotionally or cognitive addicted to him. What I’m trying to say can be express like this: “I admire my model for the way he writes, but I have to find my own style to write; I appreciate my model for his remarkable paintings, but I need to see which painting technique is suitable for me”.

So when a model’s impact is negative on us? The answer centers on the moment when we are feeling and thinking more like him than like us; when we are being more emotional than cognitive around him or when we talk about him; when we let him to “govern” our own existence. And, probably, these “dangers” are more imminent in the situation of a living model. In that particular instant, the model-person changes into an idol and the normal admiration and appreciation develop into an exaggerated worship called fanatic attitude.

Don’t let your model to take over your own life!-Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc