Hi Subscriber First Name!

Apparently, I use spiral-bound notebooks as scratch pads. Here I was, thinking I was taking very important notes from Zoom meetings and webinars, with an occasional brain dump (aka to-do list), only to find that I also make use of any available space for other scribbled words.

There’s a different colored pen here and an upside-down note there, phrases surrounded by circles or parallelograms, and miscellaneous 3D hearts (pretty much the only doodling I doodle). Fun.

Communicating
with yourself and others.

Language evolves over the years. Methinks we doth no longer speaketh Elizabethan, forsooth. The eight parts of speech, however, remain the same. A noun has always been a person, place or thing. An adjective describes a noun or pronoun, answering the question “what kind of?” Adverbs describe by answering “how” or “when?”

The eight parts of speech are adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, nouns, pronouns, prepositions, verbs.

“Oh dear! Surely you and I can write a complete sentence with all of them.”

Collections

Communication is when what you say and what I hear are the same thing; when what I write and what you read are the same thing. When we are on the same page, we are communicating.

Life Tip

Why do we procrastinate? There’s no single answer. What’s the antidote? Again, not a one-size-fits-all. Here’s my take on one possible reason for procrastinating and a tip to mitigate it.

You know how some of those advice-givers continue to suggest we trick ourselves into doing more work? "Just tell yourself you’re going to do it for five minutes,” they say. “Before you know it, three hours has passed. Isn’t that great?”

No, it’s not great. It’s lying to your own brain. Lying like a cheap rug. Sure, it can work on occasion, but at some point, the brain won’t let you get away with lying anymore. It knows you told yourself, "Just a few more minutes and I promise I’ll stop," but then you went full throttle on that project for four hours until you almost burst a kidney. Your brain knows that three and a half hours from now you’ll be mired in this 10-minute project—writing an essay or cleaning out a closet or cleaning an essay—and the mixed messages don’t jibe.

So, your brain doesn’t want you to start in the first place. Enter: procrastination. Mental trickery doesn’t work on an honesty-craving brain.

How to retrain an energy-drained brain? Set a timer for 5 minutes and mean it. When it goes off, stop. Whether you’re in the zone or not, or the groove or flow, stop what you’re doing and back away.

The harder this exercise is, the more you’ve been lying to your brain all these years. (This is my assumption; I’m not a brain scientist or brainiac or Brainy Smurf.)

As with any new practice, it might be better to start with something small? Set alarms for different periods of time over several days. Let’s prove to our own brains that we really are honest and trustworthy.

No more self-imposed mental trickery, what do you say?

Have a fabulous day.

Do you have a grammar question? Until I can figure out how to create a suggestion box on my website, hit reply to this email. I’d be so happy to hear from you.

Kathie Stamps
kathie@stampscommunications.com