How to Use Your Unconscious Mind to Achieve Your Goals

John Bargh

James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where he directs the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition Motivation and Evaluation) laboratory.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_use_your_unconscious_mind_to_achieve_your_goals 

 The most effective way to change your behavior for the better is to work in tandem with your unconscious mind.

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 It’s the end of January. How many of us made New Year’s resolutions this year, but have already broken them? Maybe we told ourselves we’ll exercise more, or spend more time with our children, or not get so angry all the time. But we’re no closer to these goals than we were before.

It turns out that part of the problem is the way we make these resolutions: They rely on our conscious decision-making processes. We just set a good intention to do things differently, and we leave it at that. But experience should tell us that good intentions are often not enough. 

In my new book, Before You Know It, I present all the ways our personal ship of good intentions can get blown off course by the powerful unconscious motivations and environmental cues that also influence what we do. Because we are not aware of these unconscious influences, we do nothing to counteract them. Yet they are like the currents and winds that affect a ship’s course just as much as the captain’s rudder. Ignore them, and you may drift further out to sea—or crash into the rocks. 
The first question to ask yourself when a resolution is failing is: Do I really want to change? If you are honest with yourself, maybe down deep you actually want to keep drinking, or overeating, or not exercising. And those “wants” are going to override the good intentions of your resolutions. 
There was a famous experiment done at Princeton many years ago with divinity students—highly moral and compassionate individuals. They were supposed to give a sermon in their next class, but the experimenters intentionally made them late; they had to hurry to be on time. Along the way, a person lay in distress in the hallway, but the late students rushed right by and didn’t help. Their goal to get to the next class on time overrode their own personal values, and they failed to act on those values and help the person in need. Ironically, the topic of the sermon they were to deliver was the Good Samaritan parable from the Bible.
The same thing can happen to you and me. Despite our values and intentions, we may have some other goal that conflicts with our new resolution. And if our resolution is something that, down deep, we don’t really want to change, our conscious mind is very adept at coming up with convenient excuses and rationalizations. “Hey, I’ll start that new diet tomorrow.” And then that tomorrow never comes.
So ask yourself if you are truly committed to change. Only if the answer is “yes” can you overcome those powerful winds and currents that can drive you off course.
Another surprisingly powerful influence on what we do comes from environmental cues that trigger behaviors unconsciously, without our realizing it. The behavior of others, for example, is quite contagious, and we can “catch” it through our daily contact with other people and even through social media.
If our Facebook network connects us to overweight, depressed, lonely, cooperative, or happy individuals, even if we don’t know or interact with them personally, we ourselves are more likely to be those things, too. And TV and other media ads affect us in the same way: We tend to eat more when we see food ads, and teenagers tend to drink more alcohol the more alcohol ads they see. 

By acknowledging these unconscious influences on us, we actually increase the amount of free will that we have. If we deny these effects exist, then we are at their mercy and have less actual control than we think. But what’s even better is that once we know how they work, we can turn these unconscious forces to our own advantage.
Decades of laboratory research as well as practical demonstrations in real-life settings have revealed the power of conscious “implementation intentions.” How do they work?
They often take the form of “When X happens, I will do Y.” You make a clear, concrete plan that includes where, when, and how you will carry out the intention. You tie your desired future behavior to a highly likely event or situation. Then when that future event actually happens, you will more often than not find yourself starting to do the very thing you wanted to do, even if you’d forgotten you wanted to do it.

This essay is adapted from Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do (Touchstone, 2017, 352 pages).

I used this technique myself to block the carryover effects of a bad day at work. First, I set an intention—to let go of the negative stresses of work when I get home and show my family I am happy to be with them. Then, I came up with an implementation plan, which I tied to a reliable future event: The moment when I get out of my car after driving home from work, and am standing in my driveway (that’s the when and where), I remind myself to take a deep breath, forget all about the office, and be happy to be home with my family (that’s the how). After I did this for about a week, it started to become a new habit that I carry on to this day.
Or, what if you want to start exercising, but keep forgetting to? One idea is to make an implementation intention: When you go into your bedroom (that’s the where) to change out of your work clothes, you will immediately put on your running clothes and shoes (that’s the how). Once you do that, you’d look pretty silly if you didn’t go out for a run, right? 


Implementation intentions have had great practical success, such as helping nursing home residents to take their many medications, on which their lives can depend, without fail over a long period of time. And they’ve helped people to keep on track with their goals, even when facing interruptions or negative influence from others.
The other side of the same coin works for unwanted behaviors. The latest research on self-control has actually shown that people who have the most self-control—who in fact tend to be happier and healthier, make more money, have more friends, and be more successful in life than the rest of us—are not those with the strongest willpower. They are those who set up their personal worlds to remove cues to unwanted behaviors, preventing the temptation from happening in the first place. So, just don’t buy that bottle of wine or yummy dessert. It won’t be there at home in the evening to tempt you. 
This trick can also work at the societal level. Self-control researcher Wendy Wood has pointed out that the great reduction in smoking that we have achieved over the past 30 years was accomplished not through people using willpower, but mainly through smoking bans, taxes, eliminating cigarette and tobacco ads from TV and magazines, and forbidding cigarette displays in stores. Getting rid of the environmental cues to smoke helped those who wanted to quit far more than other factors.
This new scientific evidence should give us hope. If we want to increase good habits, we can tie them to a regular place and time and give ourselves reminders to prime our unconscious mind to support these habits. If we want to rid ourselves of certain habits, we can remove cues and opportunities from our environment, and replace our unconscious impulses with positive, conscious messages.
In this way, we can use the power of our unconscious mind for good…and have a much better chance of keeping those New Year’s resolutions.

The Science of the Story

Jeremy Adam Smith

UC Berkeley

 We know in our gut when we’re hearing a good story—and research is starting to explain why. 

 Stories are told in the body.

It doesn’t seem that way. We tend to think of stories as emerging from consciousness—from dreams or fantasies—and traveling through words or images to other minds. We see them outside of us, on paper or on screen, never under the skin.

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But we do feel stories. We know in our gut when we’re hearing a good one—and science is starting to explain why.
Experiencing a story alters our neurochemical processes, and stories are a powerful force in shaping human behavior. In this way, stories are not just instruments of connection and entertainment but also of control.
We don’t need the science of storytelling to tell a story. We do, however, need science if we want to understand the roots of our storytelling instinct and how tales shape beliefs and behavior, often below conscious awareness. As we’ll discuss, science can help us to defend ourselves in a world where people are constantly trying to push our buttons with the stories they tell.
The better we understand how stories unfold in our bodies, the more equipped we are to thrive in the story-rich environment of the twenty-first century.

Punched in the gut

Imagine your attention as a spotlight. When someone tells you a story, they are attempting to control that spotlight. They are manipulating you.
We all do this every day, all the time. You try to hold attention as you tell a story to coworkers over coffee; I’m trying to hold your attention as I tell the story of the science of storytelling.
There are many different ways to draw the spotlight of other people’s attention—and all of them instinctively or deliberately tap into basic human drives. Here, for example, is a very short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

How does this story make you feel? I can speak for myself: When I first encountered it as an undergraduate, my attention was instantly captured. And when I realized, after a beat, what it meant, I felt punched in the gut.
The story works because it triggers our natural negativity bias—that is, the hardwired human tendency to focus on the bad, threatening, dangerous things in life. It specifically activates the fear and despair we’d feel if our child died, even if we don’t yet have one of our own.
We’re really good at focusing the spotlight of our attention on what might hurt us—or hurt those close to us, especially our children. What happens in our bodies when we throw the spotlight on a threat? We get stressed out.
And what’s stress? That’s a tool nature gave us to survive lion attacks—in other words, stress mobilizes our body’s resources to survive an immediate physical threat. Adrenaline pumps and our bodies release the hormone cortisol, sharpening our attention and boosting our strength and speed.
But unlike other animals, humans have the gift and the curse of being susceptible to stress even when we don’t face a direct physical threat. This we do by telling ourselves, and each other, stories. They are the best way we have to communicate potential threats to other humans—and help each other to prepare for overcoming those threats.
Most of us will never face a flesh-and-blood lion, yet in stories we transform lions into potent symbols of beautiful death. That’s the essence of many stories: facing and overcoming dangers, which will persist, multiply, and mutate in our minds and, in some cases, become metaphors for more-immediate dangers. 
As Neil Gaiman writes in his novel Coraline: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
When someone starts a story with a dragon, they’re harnessing negativity bias and manipulating the stress response, whether they intend to or not. We’re attracted to stressful stories because we are always afraid that it could happen to us, whatever “it” is—and we want to imagine how we would deal with all the many kinds of dragons that could rear up in our lives, from family strife to layoffs to crime.
But we don’t necessarily need dragons to capture attention, right? At the very beginning of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, she slowly introduces us to a babe, alone in the world, under constant threat. We instinctively take the side of the “boy who lived” because at the beginning of the story, he’s so vulnerable.
Most of the Star Wars films take another approach, by trying to inspire a sense of awe—the emotional reaction to something so vast we can’t immediately grasp it—which research shows triggers behaviors associated with curiosity, like turning to other people for answers.

How stories unfold in our bodies

While authors can capture our attention in many different ways, sooner or later a villain will appear and a conflict will develop. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone may start gently, but Lord Voldemort looms in the background. As the action rises and Harry’s society of witches and wizards slides toward civil war, our attention sharpens and our bodies release more cortisol. If that doesn’t happen, a story loses us. Our spotlight turns to something else.
But cortisol alone isn’t enough to keep our bodies engaged with a story. The conflicts in Harry Potter and Star Wars grab our attention—and the settings can inspire awe and wonder—but they wouldn’t involve us nearly as much if they didn’t also include characters we come to care about.
As we see fictional characters interact, our bodies tend to release a neuropeptide called oxytocin, which scientists first found in nursing mothers. Oxytocin has subsequently turned up in studies of couples and group-bonding—indeed, we find oxytocin whenever humans feel close to each other, or even just imagine being close. That’s why stories trigger oxytocin: When Princess Leia finally told Han Solo that she loves him in The Empire Strikes Back, your body almost certainly released at least a trace level.

That’s not all that’s happening as we become involved in a story and its characters. The brain activity of both storytellers and story listeners starts to align thanks to mirror neurons, brain cells that fire not only when we perform an action but when we observe someone else perform the same action. As we become involved with a story, fictional things come to seem real in our bodies. The storyteller describes a delicious meal and the listener’s mouth can start to water. When the characters in the story feel sad, the listener’s left prefrontal cortex activates, suggesting that they feel sad as well.
As the plot thickens, the good author pushes the characters we care about into conflict with the villain. Our palms sweat, we grip the hand of the person next to us—who is likely having the same reaction. We might feel the tension in our neck. Our body is braced for a threat, but the threat is completely imaginary.
That’s when the storytelling miracle comes to pass: As the cortisol that feeds attention mixes with the oxytocin of care, we experience a phenomenon called “transportation.” Transportation happens when attention and anxiety join with our empathy.
In other words, we’re hooked. For the duration of the story, our fates become intertwined with those of imaginary people. If the story has a happy ending, it triggers the limbic system, the brain’s reward center, to release dopamine. We might be overcome by a feeling of optimism—the same one characters are experiencing on the page or screen.
Where do we end and where does the story begin? With the most intense, involving stories, it’s hard to tell.

How stories bring people together

At the beginning of the series, Harry Potter is extremely vulnerable. This inspires protectiveness in the reader.

Why in the world would evolution grant us this ability? Why would nature actually make us crave stories and make transportation a pleasurable experience?
I’ve already suggested part of the answer: We need to know about problems and how to solve them, which can enhance our survival as individuals and as a species. Without a problem for the characters to solve, there is no story.
But there might be other reasons. Recent research suggests that this process of transportation in fiction actually increases our real-life empathic skills. Studies published in 2013 and 2015 exposed people to literary fiction or high-quality TV—and then gave them the “mind in the eyes” test, in which participants look at letterboxed images of eyes and try to identify the emotion behind them. In the 2015 study, participants who watched Mad Men or The Good Wife scored significantly higher than did those who watched documentaries or simply took the test without first watching anything.
In other words, the empathic skills we build with stories are transferrable to the rest of our lives: They are advantageous in real-world situations where it helps to have insight into what another person is thinking or feeling—situations like negotiating a deal, sizing up a potential enemy, or understanding what our lover wants.
All these qualities make stories adaptive, in evolutionary terms. They’re not just nice to hear. They can actually increase our chances of survival.

How stories change behavior

Research finds that stories shape our behavior in other ways that can help us to thrive.
Study after study after study finds that stories are far more persuasive than just stating the facts. For example, one found that a storytelling approach was more effective in convincing African-Americans at risk for hypertension to change their behavior and reduce their blood pressure. A study of low-performing science students found that reading stories of the struggles of famous scientists led to better grades. A paper published last year found that witnessing acts of altruism and heroism in films led to more giving in real life.
Indeed, stories actually seem to trigger the neurochemical processes that make certain kinds of resource-sharing possible. This biological activity can lead to profound behavioral changes, including costly acts of altruism.
When Claremont Graduate University economist Paul Zak and colleagues showed a dramatic film of a father and son struggling with cancer, they found that both cortisol and oxytocin spiked in nearly all of the viewers—and that most of them donated a portion of their earnings from the experiment to nonprofits. This didn’t happen in participants who watched a simple film of the father and son wandering around a zoo. In fact, the researchers found that the more cortisol and oxytocin released, the more likely participants were to make charitable donations—and in one experiment, Zak found that hormone levels predicted donations with 80 percent accuracy.

This is the neurochemical process that makes fundraising and taxes possible—and inspires people to mobilize large-scale support for enterprises like political campaigns, churches, universities, libraries, or, for that matter, the United States as a nation. Stories enable us to form relationships with strangers and ask them to make small sacrifices for something that is larger than themselves.
I picked Star Wars and Harry Potter as examples because those are “master narratives” that have been embraced by, without exaggeration, billions of people. There’s something awe-inspiring about the idea that those stories have changed so many people right down to the molecular level, all of them together feeling that spike of cortisol when Darth Vader appears or that soothing flow of oxytocin when Hermione throws her arms around Ron after they escape some Death Eaters, our bodies resonating with each other across time and distance. These global narratives don’t just entertain; they also impart ideals of heroism, compassion, and self-sacrifice.

The dark side of storytelling

But this process has a dark side. Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort do not exist in our world, but there are certainly people who wish us harm—and, as the story of Anakin Skywalker so well reveals, there’s a shadow-self inside all of us that is capable of wishing harm on someone else.
A spike in cortisol can make us aggressive—one half of the “fight-or-flight” response we hear so much about—and oxytocin has been implicated in competition between groups. People dosed with oxytocin in the lab show strong preferences for their own in-groups, however defined, from school bands to fraternities. Oxytocin appears to play a role in trying to take what out-groups have. People dosed with oxytocin are also more likely to indulge in group-think—going along with collective decisions even when they believe those decisions are wrong.
In short, stories form groups, a process enabled by oxytocin. It is no accident that communities—fandoms—have sprung up around Harry Potter and Star Wars, sometimes in (mostly) playful competition with each other. It’s harmless fun for fans, but not all stories are as benign as these, in intent or outcomes. Stories can carry us toward ideals that are destructive, especially to out-groups. Stories are a form of power over bodies, but it’s a power that we can use or misuse.
Take a look at this video, below, contrasting the speeches of two political leaders—both expert communicators—about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. And as you watch the video, think about their intentions. What emotions are they aiming to stir in their audiences? What kind of emotions do they trigger in you?

I’m not trying (here, at least) to tell you who to vote for in November. But given the power of stories, it’s dangerous to hear them without asking ourselves what reactions they are triggering in our bodies. Mr. Trump’s speech causes my stomach to clench and my mouth to go dry; in asking me to put my own group ahead of others, he triggers anger and anxiety. I believe that’s his intent. President Obama’s speech urges me to reflect and to think compassionately about all of humanity. His words lift my heart, just a bit—and, again, I believe that’s intentional.
I can feel their words in my body, but I’m not helpless against them. Research also suggests that people are more than capable of defending themselves against the power of stories. We can cognitively override the emotional identification and transportation stories trigger by trying to balance them against the facts. In cultivating awareness of the impact of a story, we can tell a different one, or revise the story to fit the facts or our own experience. We live in an story-saturated world—coming at us through screens as well as through pages and performances and music—and today, I think it’s essential for us to understand all the ways in which leaders and organizations are trying to manipulate us into believing what they want us to believe.
A lot of psychotherapy these days involves getting people to pay attention to the stories they tell themselves. In therapy, we are told to ask ourselves: Am I telling myself a story that helps me to grow and flourish, or is it one that diminishes my life’s possibilities? We need to do the same to stories other people tell us.
More than that, we need to look at our own responsibility for the well-being of others, and cultivate awareness of the impact of our own stories, of our own power over the bodies of other people. What intentions do we bring to the stories we tell? Are we using our power to lift people up and help them to see solutions to the problems we face as individuals and as groups? Or are we using our power to reveal the worst in ourselves, and so pit people against each other? Do we communicate things that make us feel good about ourselves—or that make us feel worse?
Stories bring us together, but they can also tear us apart. They can bring us joy but they can also incite hatred. We are all born with the power to tell stories. It’s a power we need to learn to use well and wisely.
This essay is based on a talk for the Berkeley Communications Conference, delivered on June 1, 2016.
Original text : https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/science_of_the_story

Three Emotions That Can Help You Succeed at Your Goals

David DeSteno 

 A professor of psychology at Northwestern University and editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion.

Willpower and grit aren't the best route to persevering at our goals and achieving success; the key is emotion.

(David DeSteno | January 12, 2018)

 We’ve all wished for more willpower sometimes. If only we had more self-control, grit, or the ability to delay gratification, we would be more persistent in pursuing our goals. But there’s a problem with this scenario: Willpower doesn’t usually work. Willpower alone can’t ensure that you’ll delay gratification or resist temptation to achieve your long-term goals. It will fail, and probably just when you need it most.       

Some of you may have already discovered this to be true. Think of the diets you’ve started and stopped, the work assignments you put off to hang out with friends, or the extra beer you had when you wanted to stop at one. These are all instances when willpower failed you.
The problem is that when we are faced with choices between pleasure now and reward in the future, we will often choose the former. That’s because making hard choices is costly in terms of our cognitive resources: The more we have to resist temptation, the more primed we are to give in to it. And the more uncertain we are that our current efforts will pay off, the less likely we are to make the wiser decision. Sacrifice in the present works if future rewards are guaranteed, which they rarely are—and they seem even less so if you grew up in a difficult environment.
So what does help us?
In my new book, Emotional Success, I propose that you cultivate the positive emotions of gratitude, compassion, and pride. Why these emotions? Because they evolved to help us act in “prosocial” (kind and helpful) ways, effortlessly bringing out our better natures and encouraging a long-term view of our present-day actions. And these emotions have three advantages over reason, habits, and willpower: Their strength doesn’t wane after repeated use, they can’t be hijacked to favor immediate rewards, and they improve our decisions in different areas of life at the same time.

Gratitude

My own research has focused on how stimulating gratitude affects behavior, and I’ve found it to be very helpful for self-control.
In a study that was an adult version of Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow test,” we asked people to recall a time they felt grateful, happy, or neutral. We then asked them to make several choices of the form: “Would you rather have $X now or $Y in Z days (where Y was always greater than X, and Z varied). We found that feeling grateful almost doubled people’s self-control—they were more willing to wait for the future reward than those who were feeling happy or neutral. These findings mirror a more recent study showing a connection between daily gratitude and greater average patience and self-control. 
Gratitude’s benefits for self-control also extend to being willing to sacrifice to help others. In one experiment, for example, we made some people feel grateful by having an actor come to their aid in solving a problem we had rigged in the lab. After leaving the lab, participants were asked to help out another person with a project that involved doing hard problems. Those who had experienced gratitude volunteered to persevere with the problems longer, in spite of not being watched or paying a price for doing so.
Gratitude leads to perseverance in other contexts, as well. For example, researcher Alice Isen found that doctors who were nudged toward feeling grateful were more willing to spend the time necessary for a proper reading of a patient file, which led to more accurate diagnoses. Other experiments have shown that gratitude helps people be more future-oriented and exhibit more self-control. And, unlike willpower, gratitude doesn’t require much effort—people seem to enjoy it.
How can you increase your gratitude? Keep a gratitude journal, where you write down and reflect on a few things that you are grateful for. Two or three times per week is enough, and it’s useful to reflect on smaller, more frequent things—such as a modest bit of help from a friend or coworker.

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If you have problems being grateful—if you feel that your own hard work was responsible for any success you’ve experienced—try recalling events that were integral to reaching your goals. Maybe you had good mentoring early in your school or work career, or someone helped you financially, or you happened to be in the right place at the right time. Even luck, when reframed in this way, can lead to a feeling of gratitude.

Compassion

While gratitude stems from realizing that others have offered us something of value, compassion is caring about others without having received benefits. Interestingly, compassion also has a prosocial side that seems to help us prepare for a better future—especially if we can direct it toward our future self.
In one study, researchers used face-modeling software to create older versions of young participant faces and then interviewed the participants about their goals in life while they were looking at either their current face or the older version. After the interview, they were asked how they would respond if handed $1,000. Those who had seen their future selves decided to save twice as much for a retirement fund as those who hadn’t (rather than spend it on immediate pleasures). What’s more, the motivation to save increased as the older versions of their face were made to look sad—a change that would induce empathy and compassion.
So compassion for our future self can help us make wise about difficult choices. More compassionate people also seem less reactive toward others.
In one experiment, participants who had played an economics game were given a chance to punish cheaters, and they did so aggressively—something that serves no purpose but vengeance. But if primed to feel compassion first—not for the cheater, but for another participant—they didn’t act out aggressively. This type of self-control stops the normal tit-for-tat that often spirals out of control and causes people to lose out in the long run.
Similarly, self-compassion—compassion directed at oneself—has been found to be motivating, too: Self-compassion results in greater perseverance when people have to solve problems, make moral choices, and face personal weaknesses, compared to simply feeling high self-esteem.
How do we encourage compassion? Meditation can be an effective way—particularly types that focus on compassion and self-compassion. Long-term meditation practice leads to more compassion, but even short-term training can produce a more compassionate response: In one study, participants were more willing to give up their seat to a person on crutches after eight weeks of meditation than those who were waiting to take the meditation class.
Similarly, experiences with other people where we synchronize our movements or goals—such as singing in a choir, dancing together, or competing together—can help build compassion for them. Simply trying to look for commonalities with others, as opposed to emphasizing differences, will go a long way. And, when you are struggling, it helps to show yourself compassion rather than shaming yourself for failures.

Pride

Though perhaps more nuanced than either compassion or gratitude, pride can also help us to achieve our goals—as long as it doesn’t turn to hubris.
Pride is a natural response to successfully accomplishing your goals and being recognized by others for your abilities. When it is authentic, it signals to others that you are a capable and reliable person, which is how it evolved in the first place—as a way to raise one’s status in a group. People with greater authentic pride tend to attain their goals and have higher self-control.
People who are induced to feel pride significantly increase their efforts working on difficult tasks, including the demanding job of being a salesperson. And recent findings showed that when people experienced pride, they reduced their discounting of future rewards in a manner similar to when experiencing gratitude.
But pride can have a downside: It can lead to arrogance if it takes the form of false pride.
We can encourage authentic pride in ourselves and others by recognizing the importance of a growth mindset: the belief that we learn from our mistakes and that effort matters. Praising others who show effort—rather than simply success—can help protect them against hubris, as well.

The real keys to success

While positive emotions like gratitude, compassion, and pride can encourage us to be more persistent in reaching our goals—and help us stay away from immoral behavior—they all have another benefit: nourishing our social relationships, which leads to more success and happiness. In fact, this is the primary reason socially oriented emotions that build self-control exist in the first place: They foster social connection, which often requires cooperation and self-sacrifice.
Cultivating these states in ourselves will increase our motivation to act in ways that benefit others, including our own future selves. So, if you really want to persevere, stop trying to push through with willpower. Instead, start practicing gratitude, compassion, and pride. You—and those around you—will be glad you did.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/three_emotions_that_can_help_you_succeed_at_your_goals

How to Help Students Develop Hope

By

Vicki Zakrzewski, Ph.D.

  the education director of the Greater Good Science Center.

According to research, hope is key to academic achievement--and it's a skill students can develop over time. Here's how.

“I hope I get an ‘A’ on this test!” How many times have teachers heard these exact words from their students? Goodness knows, most teachers would certainly love for their students to get an A, too!
Well, for teachers eager to help their students get more A’s, research suggests they should help their students get more hope.
Though it may seem like a simple, wishy-washy emotion, research suggests cultivating hope is actually a complicated process—but there are significant rewards for those who make the effort.

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Researchers have found that students who are high in hope have greater academic success, stronger friendships, and demonstrate more creativity and better problem-solving. They also have lower levels of depression and anxiety and are less likely to drop out from school.
But does this mean hope causes these benefits—or couldn’t success in school and in making friends just give students more hope? In fact, studies suggest that having hope may actually predict a student’s future academic achievement more than having feelings of self-worth or a positive attitude towards life actually do.
So how do teachers know which students are high in hope? Easy: They are the students who don’t take failure personally. Instead, they use it to improve their performance next time. They’re also more optimistic, and, in the face of obstacles, they tell themselves, “I can do this. I won’t give up.”
Thankfully, scientists have found that the majority of students in the United States are very hopeful. But what about those who aren’t? Oftentimes, students lose hope as a result of their family circumstances. For example, one study found that students who had witnessed violence against a family member or friend were less hopeful.
The good news is that hope can be cultivated, even among students who are at risk for losing it. But first we have to understand what scientists mean when they talk about hope.
Hope doesn’t mean wishful thinking—as in “I hope I win the lottery.” Instead, a person who is high in hope knows how to do the following things.

• Set clear and attainable goals.
• Develop multiple strategies to reach those goals.
• Stay motivated to use the strategies to attain the goals, even when the going gets tough.

For educators who want to help their students build these skills of hope, here are five research-based guidelines.
1) Identify and prioritize their top goals, from macro to micro. Start by having students create a “big picture” list of what’s important to them—such as their academics, friends, family, sports, or career—and then have them reflect on which areas are most important to them and how satisfied they are with each. Keep in mind that the goals must be what the students want, not what their parents or schools want. Otherwise, as studies suggest, they will quickly lose their interest and/or motivation, especially as they come up against obstacles.
Next, using this list, teach students how to create goals that are both specific and take a positive, solutions-oriented approach. Their goals need to focus on accomplishing something in the future rather than avoiding something now—for instance, “I want to play on the basketball team” is a more effective, motivating goal than “I will stop drinking soda.”
Finally, students should rank their goals in order of importance. Researchers have found that this is particularly vital for students with little hope, as they often attempt any goal that comes to mind, which distracts their focus and energy from the goals that can have the greatest impact on their overall well-being.
2) Breakdown the goals—especially long-term ones—into steps. Research has suggested that students with low hope frequently think goals have to be accomplished all-at-once, possibly because they haven’t had the parental guidance on how to achieve goals in steps. Teaching them how to see their goals as a series of steps will also give students reasons to celebrate their successes along the way—a great way to keep motivation high!
3) Teach students that there’s more than one way to reach a goal. Studies show that one of the greatest challenges for students with low hope is their inability to move past obstacles. They often lack key problem-solving skills, causing them to abandon the quest for their goals.
So teaching them to visualize different paths to their goals will help them get beyond insurmountable barriers. Perhaps most importantly, teachers need to make sure that students don’t equate those barriers with a lack of talent; instead, they need to be reminded that everyone faces obstacles. Success usually requires creative ways to overcome these obstacles, not avoiding them altogether.
4) Tell stories of success. Scientists have found that hopeful students draw on memories of other successes when they face an obstacle; however, students with low hope often don’t have these kinds of memories. That’s why it’s vital for teachers to read books or share stories of other people—especially kids—who have overcome adversity to reach their goals.
5) Keep it light and positive. It’s important to teach students to enjoy the process of attaining their goals, even to laugh at themselves when they face obstacles and make mistakes. Above all, no self-pity! Research has found that students who use positive self-talk, rather than beating themselves up for mistakes, are more likely to reach their goals.
Helping our students cultivate hope might be one of the most important things we do for them. Not only will it help them get more A’s in the short-run; it’ll give them the confidence and creativity to reach their long-term goals in school and in life.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_help_students_develop_hope 

PUNCAK PUKATAN A CREATIVE TOURIST OBJECT IN KAMPAR REGENCY

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Puncak Pukatan is only  an ordinary hill, one of the hills among dozens of clusters of hills that adorn the road  along Riau-West Sumatra journey. But with the creativity of a group of local youth, it became  a beautiful tourist attraction, visited by hundreds, maybe even up to thousands of visitors on holidays. Examples of creativity that need to be imitated

The location of Puncak Pikatan is in  Tanjung Alai village, about 2 or 3 hours drive from Pekanbaru by car to West Sumatra, ahead of Stone Dog bridge. It is a beautiful village because from there we can see the view of the lake formed by Koto Panjang PLTA.

Because of the beauty of the scenery, the local community set up stops for tourists who want to rest, enjoy the scenic beauty while sitting in relax accompanied  by  coffee, coconut water and snacks such as super noodles, soup and so on.

Across the row of taverns, a bit of a hill is about 50 meters high and steep. I often pass by there. But a few months ago at the top of that hill I saw there is a tower of view as I have seen in the tourist attraction Kalibiru Lembang Bandung.

That is Puncak Pukatan, a new recreational object of the work of mutual help of local youth who change the hill of mediocrity into the favorite tourist attraction today that is loved by old and young.

To climb to the top of the steep,  the manager of the object  makes the stairs are quite steep and requires a good energy and stamina. From the peak of visitors can enjoy the panoramic beauty around, cross roads Riau and West Sumatra winding like a long snake that creeps. Kampar River dammed with surrounded hills  look very exotic.

Unfortunately the view tower is only one  so we take  pity to  see the crowd of visitors who queued to selfish photography  there. More attractive and rise adrenaline that is a swing “nirvana” because half swing already exceeded the top of the hill then as if we swing in the sky away from the surface of the earth. Very fascinating. But once again to gain opportunity to swing here also must queue because of crowded visitors.

To rise to the top of the manager only picked up five thousand rupiahs. We hope that managers do not raise this entry tariff  because they see a lot of visitors. And we are sure the peak of this hill will be more crowded in the future. But it's good to climb to the top not one just through the stairs as it is now it is better to  provide a path for those who like the challenge of climbing using a rope like Rock climbing.

Please, rather than nothing to do  in Pekanbaru, let us  look for a place of sightseeing, let's visit to Puncak Pukatan village Tanjung Alai district XIII Koto Kampar