Status on self-improvement: March 2008. What you can learn from this

Short intro: I’ve been in a winter school at Predeal, Romania for one week (February 20 to February 26, 2008). There was no Internet connection, I never watch TV, and everything could be considered atypical (atypical relations in a good way, non typical housing, food, interactions) so there was a lot of time just for personal analysis and my memory worked better in those conditions (atypical situations, remember?). I’ll present in here some of the things that I monitor on myself, and present them as a little status. At the bottom of the post there are conclusions. I hope you’ll find this blog post interesting.

Contents
1. Attention
2. Self-awareness
3. Memory
4. Spatial perception
5. Negotiation skills
6. Conclusions

1. Attention. For the whole period of the Predeal winter school we had training, we created some papers via teamwork, we did some physical and unless you didn’t speak Romanian you couldn’t keep your mouth shut for too long. I’ve also read from a book on my way home. Except for communication, these were all activities that I’ve had troubles keeping up with in the past.

The great news: in the winter camp I could understand what the trainer was saying (also due to the fact that I was allowed to come up with my own comments), I gave good feed-back on the team’s activities (really no problem focusing on the task, but I could add that this was not a very challenging task for my attention), and naturally I could focus on what other people were saying while speaking (maybe because they didn’t use hard-to-understand words).

The not-so-great news: although my attention was good at reading the book, it wasn’t that great, considering it was supposed to be a book easy to read, from a field I should be fairly familiar with (psychology). It was a Romanian book (my native tongue), with fairly understandable words. In 2002, when I discovered I had a trouble with the attention span, I tried my best to find ways to work on it. The most obvious trouble was with school: I couldn’t follow any teacher’s class (even if writing, I still didn’t remember a thing from the class, I didn’t even know what the class was about; I could follow seminar activity though), and I couldn’t read any of the school manuals. Back then, I didn’t considered the fact that I was not paying attention to what others were saying to be a big deal. Now I do, and that problem is solved. Anyhow, not being able to read a book was a primary target five to six years ago, and I still have problems on this. They are nevertheless much smaller (I did understand and followed 70 to 80 percent of the book).

Why is attention so important? Besides things like reading a book, a thing of deadly importance is crossing the street. My only accident like this happened when I was about 4 years old, on a zebra – I was not attentive, and a motorcycle threw me to the ground. Nothing bad happened to me, I was just very scared. Also, most of the other almost-to-happen incidents happened while crossing the street on zebras. It just that I don’t pay attention.

How did I learn to focus better? First of all, this is a hard to answer question. There is not a single factor that helped me better focus on things, and it’s not always easy to see a direct correlation activity-focus. So, how did I learn? I will skip the less successful factors, and only present the top one: via sports. Tae-bo, Karate, Korfball, even home exercises (gymnastics with or without dumbbells) – they all helped. My focus also improved, I think, due to healthier lifestyle – better eating, better sleeping.

What’s still to be done? I read a lot of time each day. Unfortunately, rarely do I read a book. I read news articles (via Internet when at my PC or via hard copies when in the subway), blog posts, web pages, and generally a lot of information goes before my eyes. Yet a book is harder to be skimmed, I can’t go from page 30 to page 50 and still understand a thing, and if I lose focus for two minutes, then the whole books becomes hard to understand. So a basic trick on improving my skills on reading books would be not only reading more materials, like I already do, but actually reading books. Skimming is not easy to do in a book, and with time and practice, I think, my skills will improve. Also, continuing on the healthy life style (eat, sleep, do sports) can’t do any wrong.

2. Self-awareness. Now this should have been one of my top skills and my mouth dropped when in the winter camp I found out a thing about me that should have been obvious. It goes like this: following a dispute with a person whose expertise I highly valued, I found out that I have a different than most other persons perception on how human relations should be. I valued conflict and no-peace as a way to improve on things, while most other persons, including the person with whom I had the dispute, valued peace and harmony. I went on my past experiences to test this presumption, and found it to be true. The fact that it took a winter camp in Predeal to find out this simple thing was a hit to me. “How could have I been so unaware of this contrast in the way I and others view human relations?” Other than that, I received a lot of feed-back, and I can’t say my personal observation were low, so I already knew some things being told: I already noticed some things, but it’s still good to see how others perceive you.

How did I learn to be good on self-awareness? Well, simply put, by practicing. I just thought a lot on my skills, my thoughts, my way of acting. It’s not a skill I wish to improve upon, but the fact that in the winter camp I found out a very important thing to me that was not obvious shook for a bit my belief that I’m good with self-awareness.

3. Memory. This is a short one. On the winter camp: I basically can’t remember any name. I share a room with a person for 6 days and still not know its name, I can be in a team and work for hours with somebody, and have no idea what that person’s name is. Generally speaking: I remember well my experiences, I can understand and recall an argumentation, but names, faces, what people wear, who said what, addresses, paths I’ve already been to, buildings – I seem to be much lower than average on remembering these. I don’t think there was ever an improvement on my memory skills (and this thing can hardly be improved), but basically due to increased attention, and a healthier lifestyle my memory is a fraction bit better.

What’s still do be done?
I can still live healthy and my memory functions are helped a bit by this, but that’s just about it. The memory itself can hardly be improved.

But I can uses reminders, have a Calendar, use objects to remind myself (I leave one object on my backpack, so I know that I will take with me) – basically help my life go on in spite of bad memory.

Also reading on memory improvement techniques might help (most of the articles I read are on health) – a recent article caught my eyes. It’s about “Ten Minutes Of Talking Improves Memory And Test Performance” in “Science Daily”.

4. Spatial perception. Each time a close person asks me “How was the winter school?”, I answer “I hit a girl in the face with the fist” and then I explained what happened. Now it’s obvious that a bad thing happened, but why would I start my description of a 7-days school with one of the poorest experiences? First of all, it’s a rather funny story (in a rather awkward way for me), and a story which creates strong emotions. Both are good things. Then it helps me live with the story. If I can tell my best friend the bad thing, and he has a reaction, and that reaction is calmer than mine, it helps me calm myself. And when people think about “hitting in the face” it’s usually the region: mouth-nose-eyes. It was actually in the forehead, so a bit more easy to handle. Coming back, the story about me hitting a girl is quite exemplary for my spacial perception, so I’ll tell it. Me, a boy and two girls were at a improvised contest: “Who can throw a snowball further with the left arm?”. They all throw, the boy was quite good at this. Then I try. To have an imagine of my strength, I can do 50 push-ups, and I weight about 77kg /170 pounds. I’ve done about two years of karate before 2008. Also, my left arm is stronger than right. So I try to do a normal course of the arm (a rounded course in a vertical plan). But in the last moment I decide not to hit in a vertical plan, but do a horizontal throw. So the direction of the fist changes in the last moment, and it lands in the forehead of a girl. How hard can I hit someone? At karate, I didn’t do as advised: “Try to hit your opponent, but the strength of the hit should be much lower on the impact itself”. Instead, I avoided hitting anyone. This went well for one and a half year of karate training – I had experienced opponents, and not hitting them was easy. At some moment a complete novice comes to karate, and I get to train with him. When he was hitting, he had a bad habit of moving his head to the front. The unavoidable thing happened: I hit him in his left eye each time I tried to hit the air. He was surely suffering. I hit him again. And again. I got used with his style and avoided this after a while, but three hits in the eye must have left an unforgettable memory. So I can say I can hit someone pretty hard.

For now on I can say this: I got involved in one team play outdoors, and managed to hit someone in the face (forehead, to be precise). I once went to the mountains, and I got the record of most falls on the ground (snow, ice and slippery boots helped). Indoors, I ran into a flip chart and put it down. I did manage to do one thing right: go to a nearby forest and carry some wood repetitively for almost an hour (but I was cautious enough to stay away from the ax).

So overall, my spacial perception is very low. How does this affect my life? First of all, I can’t drive. Driving is out of the question. I had no intent of hitting someone, of falling on the ground, or of putting a flip chart down. But, unlike driving, these are mostly things that are relatively unavoidable, and relatively I can live with mistakes on common actions. Living with “I hit someone with the car, and I drove although I knew I had a problem with spacial perception” is not acceptable. Then bumping into people, although vastly reduced from what it was years ago, is still so common that it’s a bit of a problem. And the final thing: if there’s something on the floor there’s a high probability I’ll either step on it, or I’ll trip.

What did I do to solve this? Sports and playing theater. They all helped more or less, but still there’s room to grow. There’s not to much thing to be done other than continue with sports (playing theater as an activity is very close to waste of time if not thoroughly made and not paying attention to time itself).

5. Negotiation skills. I will not end this post with the grumpy conclusions that everything I do is failure. So I’ll change the time frame a bit, and present a different story. On March 9 2008 I go to buy flowers. Context: from 1 to 8 March a lot of flowers are sold in Romania, and the sellers also buy a lot of flowers in this period, some of which don’t get sold. This implies that on March 9 you are most likely to buy some unsold flowers from March 1. I wanted to buy only three flowers, so the reasoning of “I buy a larger quantity, give me a discount” couldn’t be used (this would be an easy-to-do negotiation). So I go to a local market and look on flowers. I ask the price of some flowers that seem not to be old. The answer is like this: 8 RON a flower thus 25 RON a bouquet of three flowers (so instead of cutting the price due the quantity argumentation described above, they actually increase the price with 1 RON, perhaps due to the not-so-valid “we do the packaging” reason). I ask for 7 RON, I get a “No” reply. I went on to other flower sellers, the quality was poorer, while the price tag was about the same. Now here comes an interesting point: I only wanted to buy from the seller with beautiful flowers, no matter what the price tag is. But he doesn’t know this. So I come back to him and look a bit hesitant, almost like leaving. He starts the conversation “Come on mister, should I give you this bouquet?” I say “7 RON”. “No, this can’t be done”. “7.5 RON”. “What’s the difference between 7.5 and 8 RON? Settle for 8 RON?”. (Here comes my solid opinion: If there is no difference then …) “7.5 RON”. I had already left him one time due to the price, his own defense argumentation (that it’s only a small difference) was being used against him, and I was persistent. Tricky situation. He asks a different person, who was doing the bouquets (as if this was the first time in his life he had heard this question) and gets her permission. “OK, should we give you this bouquet?” And he shows me a pre-made bouquet. The trouble with pre-made bouquets is that they usually contain old flowers, since they’re harder to see within the package. So I say “No” and I manually pick three flowers, one close to another, so he can’t comment on the fact that he doesn’t have time to pick flower by flower and he already made me a concession. There were all good flowers, so I lost nothing on choosing them close one to another. He tries to give me two of the flowers I picked, and a different one, which looked a bit older, and I insist on having my exact three flowers. “No fancy packaging, just a small one, right?”, he says (it’s a “Yes”-ending question, fighting is a bit not easy). “Right”, I say. I had three reasons on this. First, a book on politeness written by Aurelia MARINESCU says that flowers should not be packed at all, so a smaller package is fine. My flower bouquet will also look different than a typical bouquet. Also, paying 1 RON for packaging seemed like a bad idea. While the lady packages my flowers, the guy looks at me and says a lovely thing, although in a bit annoyed way: “So you like to negotiate, mate?” I smile and say “Yeah”. I want to pay him. I generally have exact amounts of every conceivable sum of money, but this is done due to the fact that I know how to keep small money in my pocked and give the large banknotes. So I give him 50.5 RON (instead of the requested 22.5 RON), and he should give me 28 RON. He couldn’t not give me 0.5 change with the reasoning “I don’t have that small amount of money on me”, and I anticipated this. He asks for an exact amount (it seems he didn’t have or wish to give me even 28 RON), and I still don’t give him 22.5 RON, but 52.5, and he gives me 30 RON. The lady finishes packaging and I then take my flowers.

What’s my negotiation skills done me? First, a reduction of price from 25 to 22.5, which is a 10% off. This is quite big considering that my argument is none than “I won’t pay you that much, it’s too expensive”, and all the prices in the market were the same. I knew the exact prices for the flowers in all of the market. I bought the most beautiful flowers in the market, picked by me. My flower arrangement looked different due to packaging. And although the seller can forget about me in two weeks time, in case he remembers me, he will know that I negotiate, and will not insist that much. I also have a precedent of a winning negotiation with him, which will be in my advantage. As a funny thing, I also changed a 50 RON bill into 10 RON bills.

How did I learn negotiation? First of all, I got to cope with the stress of negotiating via conflicts where I live. The people I live with right now are tough negotiators, most of the “talk” in the house is done arguing, so I learned how to talk like that and cope with the stress of negotiating the hard way. I also have some theoretical background on the negotiation process from the graduation paper done on negotiation (strategies and techniques) for the faculty final exam. These two refer to: stress within the negotiation process (zero to me), strategies to do while negotiating (I know some basic stuff). But there is another element, very important itself: a good argumentation. This was learned on Internet forums. You see, on an Internet forum most of the communication is done by fighting with the other person’s opinions. This might be good for thinking process, this might be bad for peaceful communication in day-to-day life, but one can’t argue the fact that writing on a PC forum improves one’s argumentation skills. I don’t wish to improve on this skill, it’s pretty good.

6. Conclusions
1. Even hard-to-deal-with processes like memory can be improved some way or another (for memory: sleeping well, eating well, becoming familiarized with a field, paying more attention);
2. Most strategies on fixing something on yourself can and should focus on the bad thing itself (attention, self-awareness, memory, spatial perception, negotiating skills), but on ways to adapt your behavior to it (talk to be attentive, think to have a better self awareness, use reminders for better memory, use maps and ask people for spatial perception, try to understand the other person’s opinions for negotiating skills);
3. It’s best to evaluate your skills from time to time (I constantly note what my sports performance has been after a training, even one in the “comfort of my own home”, like a commercial says);
4. Some skills have small direct implications on other’s people’s life (not memorizing names, poor self-awareness on things one says), and others have huge impact (not being attentive while crossing the street, bad spatial perception while driving); don’t let the huge impact implications ruin your life (find ways to cross the street and be attentive; don’t drive);
5. Knowing your best skills is one thing; Using them each time you can is another; You can and should use your best skills each time you get an opportunity.

Has any of the actions described here made an impact on you? Leave a comment below.