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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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I just found a list of 100+ motivational techniques for students at Smart Teaching. I believe that many of these are of use to anyone, not just students:

Here are 100 or so suggestions of ways that you can make your classes more engaging and encourage your students to work harder at learning.

General

Here are some basic ideas to consider when motivating your students.

1. Encourage internal motivation. While some students may need a great deal of motivation from you, your ultimate goal is to get them to motivate themselves. Encourage students to provide their own motivation for getting things done rather than relying on you to motivate them.
2. Prepare students to learn. Before you begin teaching, make sure that students have been prepared and are in the appropriate mood to sit down and learn. Those who feel uncomfortable for any reason will feel much less motivated to pay attention.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6d7dc3. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so when I heard this quote again on the radio yesterday, I immediately though of you.

“One of the major reasons so many of us remain hurried, frightened, and competitive, and continue to live life as if it were one giant emergency, is our fear that if we were to become more peaceful and loving, we would suddenly stop achieving our goals. We would become lazy and apathetic.

You can put this fear to rest by realizing that the opposite is actually true. Fearful, frantic thinking takes an enormous amount of energy and drains the creativity and motivation from our lives. When you are fearful or frantic, you literally immobilize yourself from your greatest potential, not to mention enjoyment. Any success that you do have is despite your fear, not because of it.”

~ Richard Carlson, Ph.D

How does that make you feel right now? Think about where you are in your life and work this weekend, and consider this:

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

And what is one step that you can take today to get closer to that goal?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5jvvyv. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I am working on some cool new things with mind-maps and software applications. Chuck Frey and I have been talking about some ideas, and he has a post on his blog about why you should use mind-mapping:

1. It’s unbelievably flexible. The number one benefit of mind mapping software, hands down, is this: No other type of program lets you manipulate ideas, knowledge and information with as much freedom and flexibility as mind mapping software. That’s because it encapsulates ideas and knowledge in “containers” that can hold various types of content and data and can be rearranged at will.

2. It can make you more productive. Mind mapping software can increase your productivity by an average of 20%, according to two independent research studies conducted by me and Mindjet. That’s the equivalent of saving one day a week. What you could accomplish in your job if you could save that kind of time? What could that magnitude of productivity increase do to your reputation as a “can do” worker?

(Disclaimer: There is a sales pitch at the end, and I have not yet reviewed the product. The post is still imformative.)

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6g735y. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Today’s piece of advice: “Keep moving forward.”

Newton’s First Law of Motion says that moving objects will continue moving in the same direction at the same speed.

No matter what might be going on in your life, you can do one thing today to advance your goals. You may even be able to do two things. Then tomorrow will be a little bit easier.

Apply some acceleration and reach your goals. Live your life.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5uek9o. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen