Five mistakes to beat…before they beat you

Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes.

That’s good. Without mistakes, we wouldn’t have successes.

But it’s not easy to spot mistakes when they’re based on larger concepts. The situation may be different each time, but your actions may be the same. You need to be on your guard. So, by way of example, here are five issues that aren’t always easy to spot, but which can get in the way of you and a big bag of win:

photo by mao_lini

1. You have too many things going on at once

I’m sure none of us like to miss out on life. It’s rubbish if you say ‘no’ to everything.

But you don’t have to be available to everyone, for everything, all the time. Choose to be choosy. Pick to be picky. Be selective in which events you wish to attend and limit the number of hobbies you pursue. That way, you’ll miss out on less, not more.

2. You’re too dependent

Uni is meant to bring out your independence and give you masses of life experience. But if you’re used to other people clearing up messes and dealing with your problems, it’s hard to change. Why bother when you know someone else will sort it all out for you?

There will come a point in your life when you will have to do things for yourself. You may get away with it now, but people will begin to know your game. You either have to reinvent yourself (which is difficult, even at uni) or find a whole new set of people to annoy (and why would you act that way on purpose?). The longer you leave it, the worse the fall.

3. You silently sort out other people’s messes

Independence requires an assertive attitude too, otherwise you risk a different type of dependence. You may think it’s less bother to clear stuff up yourself, but you end up giving yourself more work and getting no further with it.

I knew a group who lived together with a messy housemate who didn’t tidy up and left a trail of rubbish and washing everywhere. The others ended up doing the cleaning for him (quite literally silently sorting out another person’s mess). After weeks of this, they eventually plucked up the courage to do something about it. They politely asked the housemate to deal with the mess, explaining that it wasn’t a group of magic elves cleaning after him…

Good news is, the housemate listened and dealt with the mess. Over the rest of the year, they fared a lot better with the cleaning (it wasn’t perfect, but hey!).

This kind of confrontation takes guts, even as a team, but it’s more productive in the long run. It’s better to deal with the source of the problem, rather than the problem itself.

photo by braineater

4. You do anything else just to ignore the important stuff

Faced with tasks you’d rather not do, your thoughts tend to stray on everything else you need want to do.

We all procrastinate at times. But for some, the problem spirals out of control. It can get to the point where you make a conscious, active effort to find other things to do specifically in order to stop thinking about important work.

TheUniversityBlog has a big post about procrastination in the archives. Stamp down on it before the issue grows.

Heavy procrastination could be masking a deeper rooted problem, such as a dislike of the subject or a tutor. Be aware of outside issues that may be causing the procrastination, because it’s better to deal with the issues under those circumstances.

5. You put yourself down

“How did I even get to university in the first place?”

Everyone else seems so much better compared to you. You don’t understand the lectures, you don’t feel skilled enough to join one of the clubs, and you’re a rubbish dancer so don’t go clubbing with your friends.

It’s amazing how many people are down on themselves. Truly amazing. Why should anyone think it reasonable to make themselves look worse than they really are?

Even if you believe all this negativity, there’s no point in moping around and feeling even worse! Seek to improve your lot. Get some study advice and ask your tutor how to get ahead, join a club and learn from others as you go, take a night out with your mates and watch how practically none of us can dance!

—

Find a motto

As I said at the start of this post, it’s not easy to spot mistakes when they’re not isolated one-offs. Once a pattern emerges and you discover an area you’d like to improve upon, sometimes all it takes is a motto.

For instance, my ‘motto of the moment’ is:

“Know when to stop.”

I’m surprised how much it helps to remember those four words. It’s the anchor I use to improve. I say it in my head and allow it to refocus my thoughts. Over time, I’ve had to remind myself less because knowing when to stop becomes a natural part of what I consider.

This isn’t a quick fix, but it is a quick snap to jolt you in the right direction. What would you give as your ‘motto of the moment’?

photo by Kyle Kesselring

Should recycling be part of your everyday routine?

A quick question for you:

Do you recycle?

photo by spratmackrel

While checking my Twitter feed, I noticed the following update from Sheffield student @Joe_Oliver:

“Going on a recee to find some recycling bins – before my housemates simply throw my heap of carefully collated recycling away…”

This reminded me of a conversation with a friend earlier this year about recycling when fewer people were doing it on a regular basis. She said she’d been recycling as much as she could from an early age. It just came naturally. But many of her other friends thought it was time consuming and pointless.

This further reminded me of one of my uni house shares. The council do a recycling collection (as you’d expect), so I put out boxes for paper/card, plastics and metals in the kitchen and asked everyone to use them. It was a little bit of extra work, but surely something worth doing.

However, not everyone wanted to take part. I’d see stuff like uncrushed cardboard cereal boxes and plastic milk packaging in the refuse bin. They pretty much filled up the bin on their own! Since it was easy enough to do, I’d take the stuff out the bin and put it with the recycling. [I tried not to moan…it’s their choice, after all!]

Then there were bottles. As ‘typical’ students, we tend to dabble in alcohol on occasion. With large quantities of empties from the delicious wine, beer, and the like, that’s a lot of glass to be recycled. Just a short walk away on uni grounds (60, maybe 90 seconds walking distance), there was a bottle bank. But that short walk was enough to mean bottles were often put in the bin, rather than the bank.

photo by James Cridland

Universities are keen to promote as many environmentally friendly credentials as possible, helping wherever they can to make saving our planet as easy as possible. Among student-facing measures, many universities have introduced initiatives such as recycling facilities in communal areas on campus and in accommodation, making the process even easier to deal with. But a uni can’t succeed unless students do their bit too.

Part of the problem is that universities probably have more incentive to ‘go green’ than individual students. In Monday’s Guardian, there was a piece about the forthcoming book, Superfreakanomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (Amazon link). The article states:

The problem with trying to reduce carbon emissions, [the authors] argue, is that the incentives are all wrong. Too many of the benefits are “externalities”, from which the people making the sacrifices will never benefit – and the whole history of economics demonstrates that such completely unself-interested behaviour is impossible to implement on a large scale, especially when so many people suspect that their sacrifice would not, in fact, make a significant difference to the outcome. “Behaviour change is hopeless,” Levitt says. “It’s just completely pointless to think that you’re going to get six billion people, the poorest people around and the richest people around, to work together, when every individual person has no impact on the problem. That’s a fundamental issue that economists have thought about, and recognised the hopelessness of, for hundreds of years . . . One thing we know is that I’m not going to sacrifice, materially, my own life, to help an anonymous person in Bangladesh who might not even have been born yet, when I know that there will be no help for that person anyway.” Calling on people to reduce their carbon emissions, the authors write, “is a noble invitation. But as incentives go, it’s not a very strong one.”

If this is the case, it’s a real shame. Though there is hope. A report in The Economist about the International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2009” concluded:

“Green-minded folk have been reminding this correspondent to switch the lights off when leaving a room for years, but it has taken a detailed report on the matter from an international organisation to persuade him of the case.”

At least they were persuaded!

Whatever the case is, I did think recycling was becoming an everyday thing for most of us now. However, it seems there are still a number of students who haven’t made it part of their lifestyle. It doesn’t take much to think before chucking everything in a bin. I hope lack of incentive doesn’t cause all requests to be fruitless.

I mentioned the 10:10 campaign when it launched. The campaign asks us to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% by 2010. It’s a big deal, but with an achievable target. Recycling is one way you can aim toward that 10% target. For more ways to reduce your emissions, read this 10-point checklist.

There’s a saying that I expect most of you have heard:

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”

photo by Nick Bramhall

The words are in order of importance. Therefore, if you don’t reduce, then reuse. If you don’t reuse, then recycle. If you don’t recycle… 😦

None of us are perfect, but when it comes to simple changes, surely it’s worth the few seconds of hassle to help for the longer term. Isn’t it?

What’s your experience? Are you a keen recycler (or not)? Have you signed up to 10:10? How do you help protect the environment?

photo by Polska Zielona Siec

Why even your independence goes through a dependent phase

I believe everything I read and I regularly fall to peer pressure. Just like you do. Just like everyone does.

photo by fotologic

The most independent free spirits among us may seem a law unto themselves, but they may just be better at working beyond an acceptance of what other people tell them.

If that sounds far-fetched, check out this fascinating piece on PsyBlog about it. Whether it’s group work, a lecture, a textbook, or just some random late-night conversation, our natural instinct is to do a couple of things:

Believe what’s being communicated to us;
Follow the actions of our peers.

That’s why young children often believe everything they hear and why they want to copy other people (their parents, their friends, a stranger…). It’s pretty natural.

Now, you may think this is beyond you. You may think peer pressure is for other people and that you disagree with more than enough things to believe everything. But apparently you’re just better at overcoming the instincts.

I bet it can go the other way too. There are probably subjects, beliefs or people that automatically trigger an alarm in your head that turn you so cynical that you won’t believe anything that’s put to you. It may be more of a learned process, but it works on a similar level.

In academia, it’s important to overcome the instincts and come to your own conclusions. You don’t need to find a unique opinion (it’s okay to agree with someone else), but you do need to understand why you think a certain way. An independent view is a massive step toward critical thinking, which is so crucial to effective study in your degree.

photo by fotologic

Create a good impression in a presentation

Doing a presentation is like being marked for public speaking.

If you don’t like speaking in public, you probably cringe at the thought of working on a presentation. If only you could write an essay instead…

But no, you’ve got to crack on. The nerves are playing up and there’s ages until the big day. You’ve still got to put the talk together, so it’s not worth worrying now. But you do. It’s a big deal!

On the day, it’s clear that most people aren’t too keen on the situation. Many read from a script with eyes facing down at the page the whole time, read too quickly or quietly (or both), and start reading off bullet points from a projection while the audience looks at the back of the speaker’s head.

I can see why this happens, even with people who are usually comfortable with an audience. It’s because the presentation is graded. You’ll get a mark for the work, so you want to get it right. And surely it’s the content that’s important? Why mark someone up because they’ve been entertaining/engaging? How does technique make a difference to the final grade?

It makes a difference because the better you present something, the more effective you’ll be in conveying the information to whoever is marking your performance. You can reel off an amazingly detailed and thought through talk, but you need it to come across well in order that everything is taken in and appreciated. That’s why it’s a presentation and not an essay.

From childhood to this day, I’ve experienced many different types of public speaking and presentation. Some of it was a major success. Some of it was a total disaster. It’s true to say that I’ve learned as I’ve gone along. I’m still learning.

From my past success (and failure) so far on an academic level, here is my take on how you can make your presentation shine:

photo by Macarena C

QUESTIONS TO SHAPE WHAT’S TO COME

First off, answer these questions as best as possible:

(more…)