Well researched with a personalized touch, this book brings to light the troubles early education is presenting to our youth, and how that will impact an entire generation. Being an early childhood educator and school consultant, Christakis has direct experience seeing how the emphasis on our current curriculum standards aren’t actually benefiting our children in the classroom. Children need to play, be creative and get their hands dirty, and that is exactly what we have been discouraging them from doing.
Buy It on AmazonQueen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
This elegant and quick read doesn’t claim to be a biography about Marie-Antoinette, but rather focuses brilliantly on the clothing choices she and her handlers made at every juncture in her tenure as Dauphine, and later Queen of France. This is the perfect gift for history buffs and fashionistas alike.
Buy It on AmazonThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
There is a good reason this book is a number one seller. This tidy manifesto has the power to change your life my encouraging a zen style de-cluttering and approach to stuff. If you know someone in need of getting their home, office or life in impeccable order, and only keeping around the items that spark joy, this is the gift for them.
Buy It on AmazonTable Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother
For every young person, woman and man, world traveler or homebody, who needs brushing up on their manners, this is the perfect gift. This book presents the importance of values in a witty and knowledgeable manner from the creative mind of Jeremiah Tower, James Beard award winning author and chef and classic cartoon style illustrations by Libby VanderPloeg. This book is for everyone for any occasion.
Why to Care About Sharing
Does chocolate taste better when shared? Absolutely, and research backs it up. Sharing an experience with another intensifies it. According to the study’s lead researcher, Erica Boothby of Yale University:
When people are paying attention to the same pleasant thing, whether the Mona Lisa or a song on the radio, our research shows that the experience is much more pleasurable.
Boothby discovered the power of sharing when participants in a study rated chocolate as tasting better when they ate it at the same time as another, rather than when they ate it by themselves. Sharing, it seems, shapes perception.
Before you run to a friend with a box of chocolates, consider this: the concept operates with and strangers as much it does with loved ones. In Boothby’s words:
When people think of shared experience, what usually comes to mind is being with close others, such as friends or family, and talking with them. We don’t realize the extent to which we are influenced by people around us whom we don’t know and aren’t even communicating with.
Connection amplifies experience. So the next time you watch a movie, go to a museum or eat a piece of chocolate, check your impulse to dive into your smartphone because you’re effectively “unsharing” a moment. As Boothby explains:
We text friends while at a party, check our Twitter feed while out to dinner, and play Sudoku while watching TV with family — without meaning to, we are unsharing experiences with the people around us. A pleasant experience that goes unshared is a missed opportunity to focus on the activity we and others are doing and give it a boost.
The old saying rings true:
The best things in life are meant to be shared.
I wish you all the best,
Dr. Samantha Boardman
Love & Compassion: The Secrets to Self-Control
With all the focus on strategies to resist the proverbial marshmallow and boost self-control, we may be missing something right under our noses. David Desteno, PhD, author and professor of psychology at Northeastern University, proposes a seemingly counter-intuitive approach to building self-control. Instead of demonizing emotion, he argues that some emotional responses such as gratitude, love and compassion may be the most powerful weapons we have against temptation.
According to his research, socially oriented emotions like gratitude, love and compassion greatly enhance self-control and facilitate delayed gratification.
As he writes in The Pacific Standard:
…There are two routes to self-control: cognitive strategies that depend on executive function, willpower, and the like; and emotional strategies that rely on the cultivation of specific feelings…You might prevent yourself from making an impulse purchase by placing your money in an account with stiff penalties for early withdrawal…Or you might do the same by taking a few minutes to stop and count your blessings.
Other research supports this approach. Kurt Gray, a researcher at Harvard University, found that after people donated money to charity or even thought about helping another person they were able to hold up weights longer than those who didn’t engage in pro-social thoughts or actions.
According to Gray, helping others heightens willpower and self-control. As he suggests:
Perhaps the best way to resist the donuts at work is to donate your change in the morning to a worthy cause.
By doing good and by cultivating positive emotions, we arm ourselves against temptation and immediate gratification. Dr. DeSteno sums it up:
We can’t just exert self-control by willing ourselves to resist the first marshmallow or averting our eyes from it; we have to be grateful that someone’s offering it to us in the first place.
I wish you all the best,
Dr. Samantha Boardman
