Psycology:

History:

and Physics:

Like Rob, i’m an TED-addicted. Therefore it is really hard to convince me replacing my for-TED-preserved-time with ohter stuff. But academicearth definitely has the potential to do so. Beside speakers of Yale, MIT and Stanford, you’ll get access to lectures of Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton. Most of the lecutres can be downloaded as video (mp4) or audio (mp3) file or embed them in your site as we did.  Votings and the creation of your favorites is possible as well.

Totally awesome! Especially for going much more deeper in detail than TED, academicearth.org is worth a look. No doubt, here comes not a TED-replacement, here comes a very valuable addition. Congrats to such an ambitious asimpressive project!

I hope we can see lectures from German univerities as well in the future. The Technical  University of Ilmenau in Thuringia has experimented with lecture streams,  but afaik there are no complete semestres available.

Academicearth.org – How to catch up missed Lectures is a post from: emendatio Produktivitäts Blog

No related posts.

© Matthey Hains, published at sxc.hu

I noticed that I the entire idea of being rejected or of losing a deal was just an issue in my head, a consequence of a different problem: I felt uncomfortable talking to strangers. And I realized something else: it was quite easy to overcome once identified. As always your good old friend, the internet, held a great collection of tips and guides. This is a summary of what I’ve collected so far, but I bet there is tons of other stuff I missed so far:

A great place to start is wikiHow, the talented people over there wrote some great articles on How to start a conversation and How to talk to strangers; they even explained How to go from introvert to extrovert and How to look approachable.

David Funk vom accociatecontent.com wrote a good article on How to Talk to Strangers in Business. The Socyberty blog explains 7 Reasons Why You Should Talk to Strangers.

Scott H. Young explains How to Meet New People, How to Improve your Social Skills and goes even further to explain How to Overcame Fear in general.

Finally, set a bit apart from the original topic, there’s a great article in the Freakonomics blog which has been published just a few days ago. In it Stephen J. Dubner talks about The Cost of Fearing Strangers and it’s definitely worth reading.

What is your experience on this topic? Are you a natural or did you learn how to speak to strangers?

Learn how to speak to strangers. is a post from: emendatio Produktivitäts Blog

Related posts:

1. Learn to use effective self-criticism.
2. Learn more in less time.
3. Learn how to use Pivot Tables

Why is listening so vitally important for good communication? Because we think at a much faster rate than we listen. Which means that although we might listen to someone talking to us, our mind is working on the words it is processing on a much faster rate. Our brain will take whatever word it hears and construct new words, ideas and thoughts around this. Very often we tend to literally get lost inside this process and stop listening and following the conversation. Therefore listening is not only about asking the right questions, but more importantly about stopping yourself from “thinking too fast” and forcing yourself to focus on the conversation.

The best way to stop yourself from dwelling away is practicing it. Whenever you are in a conversation and you notice that your thoughts are drifting, force yourself to stop. You can only think about one thing at the same moment, therefore you have to focus. The lifecoaches blog suggest the following little exercise to train this ability:

Take a moment and think about where you would like to go on your next vacation. What would you like to do? How much fun would you have? Okay, so you got the dream vacation? Now, what do you have to accomplish at work or home tomorrow? What did you notice took place when you went from thinking about your dream vacation to work or home? What happened in your mind? Did you switch gears from vacation to work? You were so focused on creating that dream vacation and then you easily began focusing on work or home. This exercise is what we must practice when having conversations with people. It will help us to stay focused on what the individual is saying.

This will be the first and most important skill for improving your listening skills. Force yourself to focus on what’s being said, focus on not letting your mind drift away. In a next step you should fine-tune your listening skills, here are a few methods how to do it:

1. Learn to “listen ahead”: By “listening ahead”, trying to anticipate where a discussion is leading to, during the dialogue, determining the conclusion in advance of your required response allows you to relax and improve information absorption. This might sound contrary to what I’ve said above, but it means that your mind should focus on the conversation, not on anything else.
2. Learn to periodically validate communicated information: By mentally striving to validate the accuracy and completeness of information points made by the prospect, especially during pauses in the dialogue, (which can be achieved with note taking), you can allow yourself to absorb more information easier, especially information forthcoming in the continued dialogue.
3. Utilize “Active Listening” techniques: By periodically, mentally summarizing the major points communicated by the prospect and voicing, reaffirming your interpretation of the points made back to the prospect you add a tremendous amount of clarity to the information exchanged thus far.
Strive to understand versus “Judging”: By working to consciously understand what the prospect is saying versus the natural tendency of judging – approving or disapproving what is said will allow you to absorb what is actually said more than any other listening development technique.
4. Use your eyes to “get the rest of the story”: By listening with your eyes, paying attention to the prospect’s body language, their nonverbal facial and body movements or hand gestures you can see what the whole body is trying to tell you, not just the mouth!
5. Maintain a mental repertoire of common responses: By mentally developing and rehearsing how you are going to strategically respond to common sales prospect purchase objections, for example, in advance of a sales call, allows you to listen more effectively. A comprehensive mental inventory of common responses will also give you more confidence in any selling situation.

Listening is the most effective way to build trust, establish a strong relationship, maximize your time by properly disqualifying dead end opportunities and protecting your own and your company’s resources. When you listen with interest, you encourage communication. This allows another person to open up to you. If they feel safe, they will trust you. Encourage communication by showing interest in what someone shares with you by nodding when they speak. You don’t have to agree. You’re just showing that you’re listening. Don’t interrupt when someone is speaking just so that you can have your turn.

Good listening skills are directly connected to good questioning skills. I will talk about them in one of the next posts here. Meanwhile I’d like to recommend googling for more information on listening skills, there are tons of stuff on the intertubes.

Why listening is the ultimate (business) skill. is a post from: emendatio Produktivitäts Blog

Related posts:

1. Increase your trust in people.
2. Grabbing some energy back.
3. Shorty: 5 Ways to Work on Yourself at Work.