Show notes
Hello and welcome, I'm Arnold Beekes and I enable you to have a better life between the ears. Because, why is that relevant? Because your inner state creates your outer reality. Today we are going to discuss some basics of brain fitness and these are really, really important and if you want to improve your brain fitness, I suggest that you pay a lot of attention to them and you apply them, preferably daily into your schedule.
Number one is full feeling. What does that mean? Is that you don't try to suppress your feelings, but you fully experience them, that you fully feel your feelings. Why is that relevant? Well, because emotions are the core psychological and physiological platform that determines the quality, consistency and effectiveness of your actions.
So, emotions are really, really, like I said in another podcast, are really the driving force of everything you do and they provide the fuel for everything you do. So, instead of ignoring or suppressing your feelings, feel them where they are. What are they? Are they positive feelings or are they negative feelings? Are they constructive or are they destructive? The second basic is self-kindness.
Be kind to yourself and validate only internally, not externally. Don't wait to feel good if some other people say you are okay. No, say it to yourself by yourself and we all have that inner voice which is very likely to be an inner critic.
That is the language it uses is mostly very, very unpleasant. But sometimes your inner critic, because it tries to protect you or keep you safe, is relevant, but most of the time it repeats the language which your parents used and your most dominant parent used to you in your childhood. So, that inner critic is not helping you and I would suggest to transform your inner critic into an inner cheerleader.
So, self-kindness. The third one is help others. If you want to keep your brain fit, just help others and that doesn't mean like big things.
You can just greet people. You can just, if you go into the supermarket, keep the door open for someone else or if somebody has some problems with a computer and you say, hey, do you want any help? And it can be very small things and most likely these small things you can do every day. Maybe your neighbor is sick and say, hey, can I get you some food from the supermarket? Or better, you want some food which we have cooked.
So, helping others. And the next one is diverge and converge. What does it mean? Diverge means that you allow your curiosity to go where you want it to go and not say, oh, you're looking into something which is not relevant for my work or my hobbies.
No, it's okay. It's okay to be curious and to look into things where you have no clue about but you're like, I would like to know what these red birds are with these red feathers and making loud noises. What are they? That's your curiosity.
Follow it. It's really good. And once you have followed your curiosity, then later you can, what they call converge, which means bring it more together.
So, diverge is going wide. Converge is bringing it together and create something out of all the experiences you have. And that doesn't mean the experiences from just this week or the last month.
You can have topics which you viewed for years and years and years in your life and then all of a sudden you see an application and you create something out of that for a topic where you had no clue years ago that it would be so useful. So, I would like to repeat these basics for your brain fitness. Fulfilling, self-kindness, help others, diverge and converge.
We conclude each session with some examples of everyday beauty because beauty and especially moral beauty like kindness, again, courage, compassion has a very positive influence on your inner state. Today's topic is about a positive use of artificial intelligence and it's artificial intelligence protecting elephants. In certain areas there are acoustic sensor networks deployed in forest canopies and they now can detect the sounds of poachers, chainsaws and illegal vehicles in real time using AI analysis.
And that gives rangers, the guy who take care of the parks, of the wild parks, early warning that protects both elephants and the forest they live in. Please remember, we need your uniqueness. Be a better maker for yourself, for others, for the world.
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