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"In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency."

How to stay cool under pressure. We are constantly trying to evaluate our situations and make judgments on the perceived danger or reward for the current situation. Automatic responses to these judgments are usually very primal reactions.These judgments are emotions. You are constantly evaluating the world around you for rewards or threats. Positive things like food, pleasure, or happiness are viewed by the brain as rewards. Negative things like danger or pain are viewed as threats. Your brain developed a system to survive that causes us to RUN away from danger, which was a necessity to stay alive, and simply WALK toward reward. The AWAY response is stronger and longer lasting than the toward response. Our threat response is much stronger than our reward response and given this information, we tend to react more strongly to negative situations or threats than we do to positive things and situations.

 

The Limbic System

  • Our limbic system is a much more primal and subconscious area of our brain. 
  • The limbic system tracks your emotional relationship to thoughts, objects, people and events.
  • Once emotion kicks in trying to suppress it doesn’t work it only makes it worse and reduces your memory of events significantly. Suppressing emotions can also make other people feel uncomfortable.
  • Your limbic system determines how you feel about the world and derives your behavior often unconsciously.
  • Our limbic system is making judgments and evaluations constantly to keep us alive. 
  • Moment-to-moment decisions involve more than just rational processes it also involves these subtle choicesbased on value judgments.
  • An important piece of information to keep in mind, your brain cannot use the prefrontal cortex to its full potential when your limbic system is in an aroused state. Your limbic system becomes aroused when we face an emotional situation. 
  • Your limbic system tends to make quick generalizations, a function of primitive survival, but in today’s world can lead to snap judgments that might not be correct. 
  • The limbic system also errs on the side of pessimism, also a function of primitive survival, but in today’s world can be a hindrance. 
  • The limbic system is derailed by drama, when we face a challenging event our ability to think is hindered as our limbic system jumps in to “save you”
  • Think of the Limbic System (EMOTIONS) and the Prefrontal Cortex (RATIONAL THINKING) as a see-saw. When one goes up the other side goes down. You cannot be in a high arousal state and be thinking rationally.
  • It takes a lot of mental resources to think about thinking, this being said when we are faced with over-arousal or drama, we tend to go on autopilot to conserve the mental resources. This is when you are not being mindful and you are operating on automatic processes. 
  • When you operate on automatic and limbic reactions you tend to miss things, be more negative, make more snap judgments and you tend to make more mistakes. 
  • Labeling your issues and emotions. Then activate your “director” and become more mindful – Think about your thinking.
  • Your director is your awareness that can stand outside your experience and make evaluations and decisions on how you will respond. This is also being mindful and aware of the present.

TIPS FOR WORKING WITH YOUR LIMBIC SYSTEM

  • Know your hot buttons – the things that trigger your emotional responses. These are experiences stored in your limbic system about past experiences deemed as a threat. 
  • Past emotional events can impact the way you interpret and perform in the present – unless you can identify this is what you are doing and manage your emotions effectively.
  • If you are reacting emotionally it significantly reduces your ability to perform rationally. 
  • Given that the limbic system errs on the pessimistic side once you have a negative response you tend to respond negatively to situations and the downward spiral continues. 
  • In highly emotional situations you need to be able to use your director (being mindful) to stop and think about the situation and try to reappraise the situation.  
  • Labeling the emotion is a helpful tool when dealing with highly emotional situations. If you stop and label the feeling you are becoming aware and mindful of the way you are feeling instead of simply reacting to it. Taking a step back and evaluating the situation and emotional state will help with labeling the emotions. 
  • Individuals need to be able to function in an elevated state of arousal and still remain CALM. This can be achieved by labeling your emotional states. Stress is not necessarily a bad thing, it is how you deal with stress that matters. Successful people are those who can be in a high level of arousal but maintain a quiet mind so they can still think clearly. Once you practice this enough it becomes an automatic response can your brain will be able to do this automatically. 
  • Try assigning words to emotional states and use these words before the emotion becomes too strong.

We’ve all been there…

You follow your diet religiously for a week and then break it with a weekend binge. You commit to working out more, hit the gym for two days, and then struggle to get off the couch after a long day of work. You set a vision for your career and get excited by the possibilities, only to get dragged down in everyday responsibilities and not return to your dream until months later.

I’ve been there too, but as time rolls on I’m beginning to realize something important:

  • These small hiccups don’t make you a failure, they make you human. The most successful people in the world slip up on their habits too. What separates them isn’t their willpower or motivation, it’s their ability to get back on track quickly.
  • There will always be instances when following your regular routine is basically impossible. You don’t need superhuman willpower, you just need strategies that can pull you back on track. Habit formation hinges on your ability to bounce back.

With that said, here are seven strategies that you can use to get back on track and bounce back right now…


1. Schedule your habits into your life.

Give your habits a specific space in your life. There are two main options for making this happen…

Option 1: Put it on your calendar.

Want to get back on track with your writing schedule? 9am on Monday morning. In the chair. Hands on keyboard. That’s when this is happening.

Want to bounce back with your exercise habit? Give yourself a time and place that it needs to happen. 6pm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll see you in the gym.

Option 2: Tie it to your current behavior.

Not all of your habits will fit a specific time frame, but they all should have a trigger that acts as a reminder to do them.

Want to floss? Everyday after brushing your teeth. Same order, same way, every time.

Want to be happier? Every time you stop at a red light, tell yourself one thing you’re grateful for. The red light is the reminder. Same trigger, same sequence, every time.

The bottom line is this: it might be nice to tell yourself that you’re going to change, but getting specific makes it real and gives you a reason and a reminder to get back on track whenever you slip up.

Soon is not a time and some is not a number. When and where, exactly, are you going to do this? You might forget once, but what system do you have in place to automatically remind you the next time?

For more on how to develop a sequence for your habits, read this.


2. Stick to your schedule, even in small ways.

It’s not the individual impact of missing your schedule that’s a big deal. It’s the cumulative impact of never getting back on track. If you miss one workout, you don’t suddenly feel more out of shape than you were before.

For that reason, it’s critical to stick to your schedule, even if it’s only in a very small way.

  • Don’t have enough time to do a full workout? Just squat.
  • Don’t have enough time to write an article? Write a paragraph.
  • Don’t have enough time to do yoga? Take ten seconds to breathe.
  • Don’t have enough time to go on vacation? Give yourself a mini–break and drive to the neighboring town.

Individually, these behaviors seem pretty insignificant. But it’s not the individual impact that makes a difference. It’s the cumulative impact of always sticking to your schedule that will carry you to long–term success.

Find a way to stick to the schedule, no matter how small it is.


3. Have someone who expects something of you.

I’ve been on many teams throughout my athletic career and you know what happens when you have friends, teammates, and coaches expecting you to be at practice? You show up.

The good news is that you don’t have to be on a team to make this work. Talk to strangers and make friends in the gym. Simply knowing that a familiar face expects to see you can be enough to get you to show up.


4. Focus on what you can work with.

We waste so much time focusing on what is withheld from us.

This is especially true after we slip up and get off track from our goals. Anytime we don’t do the things we want to do — start a business, eat healthy, go to the gym — we come up with excuses…

“I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have the right contacts. I don’t have enough experience. I need to learn more. I’m not sure what to do. I feel uncomfortable.”

Here’s what I want you to think instead:

“I can work with this.”

Because you can. The truth is that most of us start in the same place — no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience — but some people (the winners) choose to get started anyway.

It’s not easy, but I promise you that your life will be better if you choose to feel uncomfortable and make progress, rather than complain and make excuses. Shift your focus from what is withheld from you to what is available to you.

It’s rare that your circumstances prevent you from making any progress. You might not like where you have to start. Your progress might be slow, but you can work with this.


5. Just because it’s not optimal, doesn’t mean it’s not beneficial.

It’s so easy to get hung up on doing things the optimal way and end up preventing yourself from doing them at all.

Here’s an example…

“I really want to eat Paleo, but I go to Chipotle every Friday with my friends and I like to get sour cream and cheese on my burrito and I know that’s not Paleo. Plus, I have a book club meeting every Tuesday and we always have ice cream and I don’t want to be the only one not joining the group. Maybe I should try something else?”

Seriously? Is eating clean five days per week better than not eating clean at all?

Yes, I believe it is.

In fact, eating healthy one day per week is better than none at all. Make that your goal to start: eat clean every Monday.

Just because you can’t stick to the optimal schedule, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick to it at all. Good habits are built gradually. Start slow, live your life, and get better along the way. Progress is a spectrum, not a specific place.

Furthermore, if you haven’t mastered the basics, then why make things harder for yourself by fretting about the details?

The optimal strategies will make the last 10% of difference. Meanwhile, 90% of your results will hinge on you simply sticking to the basics: don’t miss workouts, eat real food, do the most important thing first each day. Master the fundamentals now. You can optimize the details later.


6. Design your environment for success.

If you think that you need more motivation or more willpower to stick to your goals, then I have good news. You don’t.

Motivation is a fickle beast. Some days you feel inspired. Some days you don’t. If you want consistent change the last thing you want to rely on is something inconsistent.

Another great way to overcome this hurdle and get back on track is to design your environment for success.

Most of us acknowledge that the people who surround us influence our behaviors, but the items that surround us have an impact as well. The signs we see, the things that are on your desk at work, the pictures hanging on your wall at home … these are all pieces of our environment that can trigger us to take different actions.

When I wanted to start flossing consistently, one of the most useful changes I made was taking the floss out of the drawer and keeping it next to my toothbrush on the counter. It sounds like a silly thing to focus on, but the visual cue of seeing the floss every time I brushed my teeth meant that I didn’t have to remember to pull it out of the drawer.

With this simple environment change, I made it easy to do the new habit and I didn’t need more motivation or willpower or a reminder on my phone or a Post-It note on the mirror.

Another example of environment design is the “green plate trick” that I suggest as an easy way to lose weight and eat more green vegetables.


7. Care.

It sounds so simple, but make sure that the habits that you’re trying to stick to are actually important to you.

Sometimes forgetting your habit is a sign that it’s not that important to you. Most of the time this isn’t true, but it happens often enough that I want to mention it.

It’s remarkable how much time people spend chasing things that they don’t really care about. Then, when they don’t achieve them, they beat themselves up and feel like a failure for not achieving something that wasn’t important to them all along.

You only have so much energy to put towards the next 24 hours. Pick a habit that you care about. If it really matters to you, then you’ll find a way to make it work.


Get Back on Track

Change can be hard. In the beginning, your healthy habits might take two steps forward and one step back.

Anticipating those backwards steps can make all the difference in the world. Develop a plan for getting back on track and recommit to your routine as quickly as possible.

BY TYRONE SGAMBATI |


Do you ever find yourself mulling over your beliefs and opinions, thinking about why and how you came to hold a certain conviction, perhaps even questioning whether you might be wrong? Or maybe you can remember a time when you’ve learned some new information—in a conversation, in a book, or on TV—and you had an aha moment that changed a long-held opinion. 

Those are examples of a concept that psychologists and philosophers call “intellectual humility,” which is defined by an appropriate awareness of our intellectual limitations and the recognition that beliefs we hold may be inaccurate or misguided. One common misperception is that having intellectual humility involves never trusting yourself—but it’s closer to the truth to say that intellectual humility is about correctly calibrating the strength of your beliefs to the evidence you’ve gathered and the limitations you face. 

The science of intellectual humility is growing rapidly, and scientists are beginning to find that this kind of humility has far-reaching benefits, from how we approach learning and respond to failures, to how we perceive and are perceived by people who are different from us. Here’s an overview of this emerging science—and we hope that discovering these benefits can motivate you to cultivate intellectual humility in yourself!



1. Intellectual humility can help you learn new things

A series of five studies recently published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences examined how intellectual humility was related to “mastery behaviors,” which are characterized by challenge-seeking and persistence in the face of failure. After completing a challenging online learning module, study participants were asked how interested they were in learning more about the challenging topic, and then given the option to view a tutorial on that topic. 

As predicted by the researchers, the people who were higher in intellectual humility reported being more interested in the challenging topic, and they were more likely to watch the tutorial. The researchers found a similar pattern of results outside of the lab. In high school classrooms, the students higher in intellectual humility were more likely to respond to their test scores with mastery-oriented intentions, like: “For my next test, I will try to determine what I don’t understand well.” This impression was shared by teachers, too. At the end of the semester, teachers rated students’ mastery behaviors, and the researchers found a strong association between student’s intellectual humility and mastery behaviors in the classroom.

The authors of this research believe that these findings may be explained by one potential driver of intellectual humility: curiosity. Building on prior evidence, they suggest that people who are intellectually humble may be more genuinely curious and interested in learning—and so they are more likely to persist in the face of failure and seek out challenges. 

2. You’re more likely to investigate further when confronted with opposing views and false information

In a 2018 study, researchers collected information on participants’ political beliefs on several issues and then presented them with a written statement of what was purportedly another participant’s opinion on one of the same issues. However, the statement was secretly pre-prepared by the experimenters so that it always expressed the opposite view as the participant. Later, researchers offered participants the opportunity to learn more about reasons that either supported or contradicted their opinion—and it was those higher in humility who chose to learn more about reasons that opposed their own view.

These scientific findings paint the humble individual as curious and eager to learn, but one more study hints that intellectually humble people are not indiscriminate about the information they choose to believe.


3. Intellectual humility might improve your relationships

The benefits of intellectual humility don’t end with how we approach and evaluate knowledge—it might also improve our relationships. Although maybe not immediately obvious, this link makes a lot of sense. Would you rather have a conversation with someone who is adamant that they are right, with no regard for the quality of their evidence or their limitations (which would suggest low intellectual humility)—or someone who takes those things into consideration and is open to the possibility that they were wrong? What about someone who sees no value in your opinions and beliefs, would you expect them to have your best interest in mind? 

group of researchers, led by Benjamin Meagher at Hope College, paired participants as discussion partners and looked at two things: how intellectual humility is related to how people perceive each other and whether intellectual humility is related to certain patterns of communication. The researchers found that partners perceived people who scored higher in humility as being more open-minded. Later, when partners were asked to rate each other’s intellectual humility, they found that individuals rated humble by their partner were also more likely to be seen as warm, friendly, and generous. When researchers examined speech patterns, they found that although intellectually humble people talked more, they asked more questions, used less negative language, and provided more reasons to support their viewpoints. 


Other research has documented a relationship between intellectual humility and other “prosocial” qualities like empathy, gratitude, and altruism. In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso found that intellectual humility was, indeed, related to a whole host of prosocial outcomes and value systems. People who were higher in intellectual humility showed more empathy, were more concerned about the well-being of others, valued having power less, and were more altruistic. Additionally, the higher someone’s intellectual humility was, the more likely they were to report valuing and wanting to protect the welfare of all people and things. 


4. You can better build bridges with different kinds of people

It might seem more obvious that intellectual humility could be a cure for political polarization and religious dogmatism. Indeed, that’s exactly what research is finding.

There are two seminal papers that examined the relationship between intellectual humility and extreme attitudes. Both studies, led by researchers at Duke University, found that intellectual humility predicted less extreme attitudes on a variety of topics. It is crucial to note that intellectual humility was associated with less extreme attitudes but not with more support or opposition for any one position. That is to say, people higher in intellectual humility generally had more “centrist” views and were not any more likely to indicate that they supported, say, physician-assisted suicide than that they opposed it. 

Importantly, intellectual humility is unrelated to political orientation, according to most studies to date. Whatever side you’re “on,” the other side is, on average, no less likely to be intellectually humble. They might even be just as altruistic or empathic as you, in their own way. 


5. Intellectually humble individuals are more tolerant of other people

But there’s more to polarization than just our attitudes about social issues. Maybe even more important is the interpersonal aspect: how we view and treat our opponents. 

Other research, also from Duke University, has directly examined how intellectual humility is related to perceptions of opponents on political issues and willingness to affiliate with them. The study focused on several contentious political issues. After rating their support for an issue, participants shared their moral and intellectual perceptions of people who held opposing views. 

Generally, people had unfavorable perceptions of the moral character and intellectual capabilities of their opponents (although this varied by issue)—but people higher in intellectual humility had more favorable impressions of their opponents on both dimensions. In a later study, the same researchers found that participants higher in intellectual humility were also more willing to “friend” and “follow” people on social media with views that differed from theirs. 

Taken together, this body of work suggests many reasons why it would be beneficial to cultivate intellectual humility. Unfortunately, researchers don’t yet have a “quick fix” for those times when we’re forgetting or struggling to be humble (they’re working on it, though, don’t worry). In the meantime, we should all take to heart this advice from psychologist Mark Leary: “The next time you feel certain about something, you might stop and ask yourself: Could I be wrong?”


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Ingredients


  • 1 pound pizza dough, at room temperature
  • All-purpose flour, for dusting
  • 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage, casings removed
  • 3/4 cup whole-milk ricotta cheese
  • 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese 1/2 cup shredded provolone cheese 1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced
  • 4 cups baby spinach (about 21/2 ounces)
  • 1 small bulb fennel, trimmed, cored and thinly sliced
  • 1/2 cup chopped roasted red peppers
  • 3/4 cup quartered marinated artichoke hearts, drained and halved
  • 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
  • Red pepper flakes, for topping


Directions


  1. Make the pizza: Place an inverted baking sheet or pizza stone on the lowest oven rack; preheat to 475 degrees F. Stretch the pizza dough into an 11-by-15-inch rectangle on a floured piece of parchment paper; trim any excess paper around the dough. Transfer the dough (on the parchment) to a pizza peel or another inverted baking sheet and slide the dough and parchment onto the hot baking sheet. Bake until browned in spots, 10 to 12 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking it up into pieces with a wooden spoon, until no longer pink, about 4 minutes.
  3. Remove the crust from the oven. Spread the ricotta on top, leaving a 1-inch border. Sprinkle with the mozzarella, provolone and parmesan; top with the sausage and garlic. Return the pizza to the oven and bake until the cheese is bubbling, 8 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle with the oregano.
  4. Meanwhile, make the salad: Soak the red onion in ice water for 10 minutes, then drain. Toss the spinach, fennel, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts and red onion in a large bowl with the vinegar and olive oil; season with salt and pepper.
  5. Top the pizza with the salad and cut into pieces. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes.





A teacher's vitality or capacity to be vital, present, positive, and deeply engaged and connected to her/his children and students is not a fixed, indelible condition, but a state that ebbs and flows and grows within the context of the teaching life. Stepping Stone School is committed to a program of professional development devoted explicitly to nourishing the inner and external life or core dimensions that are increasingly important for our educators on their journey.
-Rhonda Paver
The Educator Vitality Journey is a program designed to help our teachers to make a daily, conscious effort to be positive, self-aware, passionate, and fully engaged in their roles, while deepening their understanding of their true potential.