How Mindfulness, Flow, & Small Habits Help you Achieve your Goals
As a freelance editor, it’s hard to find time to relax and enjoy where I am. When I’m working, I’m thinking of all the things I want to do when I’m on hiatus. But when I’m on hiatus, I’m spending all my time and energy trying to find the next job. I’m always looking ahead to the next stage of life and completely missing the moment I am in. This is the fast path to stress, anxiety and unhappiness. Recently, I’ve decided to take a new tactic. I’ve begun to practice mindfulness and fill my brain with positive thoughts, words, and content.
How to Improve Your Creativity and Productivity
The human brain fascinates me. It’s capacity to hold limitless memories and bits of information as well as keeping our blood flowing and our organs functioning is nothing short of spectacular. As an editor it’s important to take in and absorb a lot of information at once. When we watch dailies we have to pay attention to actors performances, continuity of movements and props, camera moves, lighting, etc. We then have to be able to recall all these observations so we can use the best pieces of the dailies we just watched as well as remembering them for when we work with the director and/or producers who will inevitably ask for something different. This is a lot of information to keep active in the brain. This got me curious as to just how the brain works and how I could make it work more effectively. Cut to me taking an online course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn taught by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.
Connecting Stories from Smallville to Glenn Beck
Storytelling is not a new concept. It's been around since the beginning of humanity. But it's a topic that often gets undervalued and underappreciated in today's world. We have so many different mediums to tell our stories...books, blogs, magazines, social networking, television, films, podcasts, etc. Each medium has their own set of devices to employ more effective storytelling, but at the heart of each one, is still just a story. And a good story can have a profound impact on our lives. A good number of successful people are great storytellers.
Recently, I was listening to the Glenn Beck interview on The Tim Ferriss Podcast and Glenn Beck's advice to people was to tell more stories. He said that we should look for the people who are making a difference in the world and tell their story. This bit of advice resonated with me because my desire to tell stories is the reason I became an editor. I want to tell stories that touch people and inspire them. I want to show the different sides of humanity.