Smoking helps you relax – a new perspective
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Humor & comedy
A big picture, Mountain Life Lens™ perspective.
Fresh. Or maybe not so much 🙂
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: humour, life lenses, smoking
The Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is out: An Introvert’s 6 Step Guide to Networking
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication
- See fellow Canadian Azita Ardakani, founder of LoveSocial a ‘small & mighty communications agency focused on human interaction.’
- Check out Resonate, which teachers leadership skills to women in Rwanda using storytelling.
- Or Geeks on a plane, “we travel by planes, trains, and automobiles … with the sole mission of uniting geeks and exploring cross-border opportunities.”
Networking Resources on the Lighter Side
- A funny video demonstrating how NOT to network (3:36 min)
- If you’ve been exposed to pushy, ‘salesy’ networking you’ll appreciate these guys’ ability to sell the most useless product (40 sec)
- Someone I met at Nexus is looking for a partner, so with tongue in cheek I sent her Amy Webb’s TED talk, the woman who hacked online dating (17:27 min)
Tags: geeks on a plan, introvert, lovesocial, networking, nexus, TED
Stress levels related to the weight of your shopping bag
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness
Photo Credit: bottled_void via Compfight cc
Research in the Journal of Consumer Research found a correlation between how heavy the shopping bag you’re carrying is with your stress level. The heavier the bag, the more we tend to feel stressed.
“We found that carrying a heavy load leads consumers to feel that an unrelated event is more important and more stressful,” said Dr Meng Zhang, who led the study.
It’s an interesting perspective. When applied to women’s purses, does it mean that those of us who consider ourselves prepared (one woman quoted in a similar article carries shoe polish – ‘just in case’) are indeed weighing ourselves down?
Does it mean that detail oriented Carrot Life Lenses™ need to take note of (at times) head in the clouds Mountain Life Lenses™?
Food for thought. Carry that thought around for a while & muse upon it.
Source: The Telegraph.
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: journal of consumer research, life lenses, Wellness
The Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is out: An Introvert’s 6 Step Guide to Networking
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication
- You find yourself standing alone amidst a sea of interesting looking folks, all of whom look like they know everyone else but you & what’s more, are talking to everyone else but you.
- Coming home from a conference you find yourself with a pack of business cards, most of which you can’t remember meeting the owners of or why you collected them in the first place.
- You’re working on a project that you’d love to involve uhm, what’s her name that you met at that uhm, event that you can’t remember the name of nor where she worked. Insert groan of despair.
Tags: introvert, networking, nexus
The truth about bees & elephants
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Conflict resolution, Creativity & innovation
Dominique Thoenes is an environmental artist & creative director (that’s her work above). She had an art show at the UN recently which stopped me in my tracks.
Besides her gorgeous art was information about Dr. Lucy King, who get this, found a very strategic connection between bees & elephants.
Before I tell you what that connection is, know that elephants & people have been competing recently for land & resources. The consequences for everyone have not been great.
Enter Dr. King. She discovered that ‘elephants run from bee sounds & that they communicate about the threat of bees to other elephants using low frequency rumbles.’ What’s that got to do with the price of butter?
Dr. King uses these findings to make ‘fences’ out of bees – in other words, she uses beehives as fences to protect crops.
It’s a great example of thinking outside the box, or fence as it may be.
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: dominique thoenes, dr lucy king, the truth about bees and elephants
Is it the end of knowing? Here’s 13 Google Search Tricks That Make Life A Whole Lot Easier
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development
While listening to a recent TED talk via NPR on Unstoppable Learning (do yourself a favour & listen, it’s terrific) Sugatra Mitra talks about how we may be heading into the age of not needing to ‘know’ things. He recommends we use what he calls S.O.L.E.’s (self-organized learning environments) to surf & learn.
It’s got me thinking. Which made me perk up when I saw this Huffington post article on Google search tricks.
My fav? The Google timer. See below. Who knew!?
Set A Timer
The Solution: Type “set timer for” into the search bar and a Google timer will appear as the first result. Enter the time you want in hours, minutes or seconds and start the timer. Google will start beeping at you when your time runs out.
Tags: google, npr, sugatra mitra, TED, unstoppable learning
Perspective truly is everything
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication
Perspective is truly everything. What do you see above? A mansion? An idyllic, huge pool?
What about from this view? A little smaller? A little more contained?
Here’s ‘reality’ (from Shaun McLane’s facebook page).
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: perspective, shaun mclane
2000 years of cultural migration mapped in just over a minute
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Creativity & innovation, Training & development
How cool is this – 2000 years of culture mapped in just over a minute. Take a peak & marvel at the innovative way cultural movement is portrayed.
Northeastern University researchers map 2,000 years of cultural migration:
[The researchers] tracked the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 intellectuals (culled from several databases, including the General Artist Lexicon, the Getty Union List of Artist Names, and Freebase) in Europe and America over the span of the last two millennia. They then visualized the results by mapping the geographical trajectories of these artists and thinkers over their lifetime, marking birth places in blue and death places in red.
I originally saw this post here.
Tags: culture, mapping, northeastern university
How do you get guerrillas to demobilize? By appealing to their human side
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Conflict resolution, Creativity & innovation
Photo Credit: harrystaab via Compfight cc
Jose Miguel’s Wired article ‘How I Tamed Guerrillas with Guerilla Marketing’ speaks for itself, in its quest to turn perspective on its head. The setting? Deep in the Columbian jungle. The problem? Getting Guerrillas to demobilize. The answer? Appealing to the guerrillas human side.
In our quest to find new things to say, we became overwhelmed by the personal stories we heard. One deeply-in-love couple was separated by their commanders, because falling in love is forbidden in the lower ranks; the woman’s testimony, recorded for radio, was heard by her boyfriend, who immediately left his group to find her. There was a mother who had been made to abort repeatedly but wanted to have a family; a son who missed Christmas so much he had decided to risk his life to return.
We realised the human side would never wear out. So we installed Christmas trees near where guerrillas moved soldiers and supplies. At night these nine gigantic trees covered in lights delivered our message: “If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilise. At Christmas, everything is possible.” There was a 30 per cent year-on-year increase in demobs.
We went to the towns where most of the guerrillas had been born and asked locals to send small messages or gifts to the guerrillas a few kilometres away. We then set out to deliver thousands of heartfelt messages with small gifts such as toy cars and a few pieces of religious jewellery. Each note or gift was put in a separate floating illuminated ball that travelled down-river into the guerrillas’ hands (the army later picked up the uncollected balls). Again, the power of human emotions proved invaluable.
Happy day from a Heart Life Lens™.
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: guerilla marketing, life lenses, perspective
Dr. Seuss meets push pins – “The Best Use of Office Supplies We’ve Ever Seen”
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Creativity & innovation, Humor & comedy
Need some quick comic relief with a touch (okay buckets full) of creativity?
Check out this short video, about an adventurous girl named Elastika which I found on The Muse & is from Guillaume Blanchet I Filmmaker.
Who knew there were so many creative ways to use push pins & elastics?!
A GIRL NAMED ELASTIKA from Guillaume Blanchet I Filmmaker on Vimeo.
Tags: guillaume blanchet, inspiration