• Search for:
    10May, 2021
    10 Best Self-Improvement Classes in 2021

    Even during the midst of a pandemic, self-improvement is still a crucial aspect to our lives today. There are tonnes of articles that you could be reading from our site or from others. However, the articles aren’t able to provide the depth and the growth you need when compared to courses or programs. 

    So if you are looking to step up your own self-improvement and invest in yourself and the life you want to lead, here are some of the best self-improvement classes to consider. 

    But before getting to that, here is the criteria that we use to determine these courses. All of these qualities have been present in the best self-improvement classes we could find: 

    • Little commitment – All these courses can be done in the comfort of your own home and at your own pace as well. Most of these courses recommend spending a few hours each week on their material. 
    • Prestigious – These courses are done by recognizable institutes with good reputation on their education quality. 
    • Leverage on skillset – Each of the courses focuses on one area of your life, however it also helps develop other areas of your life at the same time. 

    1. Lifehack Mastercourses & Free Fast-Track Classes 

    Lifehack isn’t just a blog but rather a hub with all kinds of resources at people’s disposal. You may already be familiar with our particular workbooks, but we also provide courses of our own. 

    The first set of courses are free courses that are designed to teach you about your full life skills – the Fast-Track Classes. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on skills that multiply your time, energy, and the overall quality of your life. There are four courses that are about 20 minutes long each ensuring you have the tools and resources you need to achieve your goals fast: 

    Our second set of courses are the courses where we help you break free of your limitations to become the best version of yourself. These courses aren’t free, but each course goes into extensive detail on everything from motivation, overcoming challenges and staying focused to improving your overall learning capabilities, controlling your emotions and mindset: 

    2. The Science Of Well-Being 

    Yale University has been around for over 300 years at this point and one of the most popular classes in that time span is this one: The Science of Well-Being. After all this time, Yale is providing this course to everyone for free. 

    In this class, Yale Psychology Professor Laurie Santos introduced this class as “Psychology and the Good Life” in spring 2018. The class was designed to help students in navigating anxiety, depression, and stress in their lives. The class at the time was so popular that roughly a quarter of Yale undergraduates enrolled in it that spring. 

    Going into more detail about this course, this 4-week course is designed to provide a step-by-step process for boosting happiness. The course heavily focuses on positive psychology – what misconceptions we have about happiness and what has been scientifically proven to make us happier. 

    3. Learning How To Learn 

    Another notable course to consider is the Learning How to Learn course. On the platform Coursera, it is one of the most popular and loved courses on the platform with nearly 2 million students enrolled since it’s been there. It’s taught by the distinguished professors Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski. 

    The premise of the course is what you’d expect, the goal of this course to teach you to learn more. It’ll ultimately lead to you training your brain to effectively process information and learn complicated subjects even. All of this is done through various tools and methods – from stories to goofy animations like surfing zombies, metabolic vampires and an “octopus of attention”. 

    4. Mindshift 

    Another course developed by Dr. Barabara Oakley is this course: Mindshift. If you’re planning to take the course Learning How To Learn, this one builds off of that popular course. Overall, it’s meant to help learners boost their career and life by shifting their mindset to a learning one. 

    Dr. Oakley firmly believes that any person can train themselves to learn at any stage in life. She believes that from personal experiences but also how this course is designed. Through this course, you learn how to be seeking out mentors to learn from, how to avoid common learning pitfalls, career ruts, and the general ruts in life. 

    By the end of this 4-week program, you’ll have access to new tools and strategies to face any career challenge and seek better methods to surmount new learning curves. 

    5. De-Mystifying Mindfulness 

    Mindfulness is something that we’ve all been trying to obtain in recent years and people are noticing it. Whether we strive for this for therapy, lifestyle choice, or for other technology, many of us consider this a pastime we do in solitude at this point. 

    But despite the number of us practicing mindfulness, not many of us fully grasp it. De-Mystifying Mindfulness is a course designed to help people get up to speed with it through various methods. This course gathers information from various disciplines in science, social sciences and humanities to help unlock and understand mindfulness in its various forms. 

    This is a truly unique course as it’s rooted in experiential learning mixed with evidence base of what mindfulness can do to people. And a conceptual base of what mindfulness might actually be. 

    6. Achieving Personal And Professional Success Specialization 

    The best way to explain what Achieving Personal And Professional Success Specialization is. is that it’s four of the most popular courses taught by Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania wrapped into one Specialization. Through these four courses, you’ll be able to maximize your potential and be more successful in both personal and professional life. You’ll learn various techniques and exercises that this school teaches. 

    Going into more detail the four courses consist of these four: 

    • Success – learn about defining goals, understand how goals connect to long-term images of yourself. 
    • Communication skills – tools to improve communication with others. You’ll also learn to take other people’s perspectives, where trust comes from, and build relationships. 
    • Leading the Life you want – skills that allow you to lead in the four domains of life: work, home, community, and private. 
    • Influence – how to develop it and become more effective in achieving organizational goals. 

    7. Think Again 

    Reasoning is another important aspect of life. Think Again is all about teaching you how to reason and argue well with people without raising your voice and getting flustered. It’s four short courses that explore the logic behind arguments, how we construct arguments and deconstruct them, how to identify and evaluate arguments, and what makes a good argument. 

    Specifically, you’ll learn about the vital rules to be following in thinking about any topic at all and common and tempting mistakes that people fall into all the time when providing reasoning. 

    8. Neuroplasticity 

    Amongst the scientific and psychology circles, this has become quite the buzzword: Neuroplasticity. The concept promises to rewire our brain and improve everything from health and mental wellbeing to our quality of life. Gregory Caremans teaches the concept of Neuroplasticity and how you can take action and use this to your advantage in the course Neuroplasticity. Through it, you can develop mental flexibility, change habits, stop procrastination and even alter memories. 

    Gregory is a psychologist with a Master’s in communication and is specialized in Neurocognitive and Behavioral Approach. And even though he comes from a complex field, his course is instructed in such a way that you can easily use this information and apply it in your daily life. 

    9. Become A SuperLearner® 2 

    Similar to Learning How To Learn, this Udemy course Become A SuperLearner® 2 is all about learning faster and unlocking the vast potential of your mind. This course is different though in that it focuses more on improving your ability to learn new skills, provide advanced memory techniques, long-term retention and application of information. 

    Another way to think about this course is that it looks into cognitive and neurological factors that make learning easier and more successful with longer retention of information. 

    10. Get Beyond Work-Life Balance 

    The final course on the list is Get Beyond Work-Life Balance. As this course suggests, this is all about getting skills that help you to achieve balance and have effectiveness in both aspects of your life. This applies to both people in leadership roles and for individuals. 

    The course focuses a lot on the importance of inclusive leadership in creating flexible and productive work environments. Beyond this, the course provides a lot of research and real-work examples from various situations to deliver information and strategies you can apply in your life. 

    Final Thoughts 

    There are all kinds of courses that you can use to further enhance your life – be it personal or professional. And the beauty of personal development courses is the fact they are designed to be applied in your life more readily. You can begin to see the impact and change when applying this information from courses to real life. 

    As such, we encourage you to try out these courses. They could very well change your life. 

    3May, 2021
    5 Technology Trends You Need to Know to Work in Any Industry

    If you’ve been following the news on exciting tech trends like artificial intelligence, then you’re probably aware that emerging technologies are changing the way we work and interact with others. In fact, with things like machine learning and touch commerce becoming increasingly popular across every industry from banking to healthcare, technology is revolutionizing the way we do business and making high-tech approaches an integral part of our lives. 

    Here are the top five technology trends you need to know to work in any industry. 

    1. Internet of Things (IOT) 

    One of the biggest tech trends to emerge in recent years is the Internet of Things. Simply put, the Internet of Things (abbreviated IOT) is the idea that all technological devices can be connected to the internet and to each other in an attempt to create the perfect marriage between the physical and digital worlds. How will this impact you? It depends on your industry. For example, for those who work in marketing, advertising, media or business management, IOT could provide a wealth of information on how consumers engage with products by tracking their interactions with digital devices. In turn, this data could be used to optimize marketing campaigns and user experiences. 

    How it’s affecting industries: The really cool thing about IOT is that it’s not only changing the way we do business but also the business models we use to do it. For example, pay-per-use models are becoming increasingly popular across all industries as new customer data becomes available. 

    2. Machine learning 

    Another exciting emerging technology is machine learning, which is essentially a computer’s ability to learn on its own by analyzing data and tracking repeating patterns. For example, social media platforms use machine learning to get a better understanding of how you’re connected with those in your social network. They do this by analyzing your likes, shares and comments and then prioritizing content from your closest connections, serving you that content first. 

    How it’s affecting industries: In addition to shaping your day-to-day interactions with friends on social media, machine learning is also changing the way companies do business with customers. Companies like Google are using machine learning on mobile devices which can continue learning even when offline. The result? Machine learning is reshaping the way businesses interact with their customers in a big way by helping them anticipate and meet customer needs more easily. 

    3. Virtual reality (VR) 

    Remember watching movies about virtual reality and thinking how cool it would be if it was actually like that in real life? Well, it’s about to be. Although VR has been around since the 1950s, until recently the technology wasn’t able to deliver the fully immersive digital experience users have been craving. That’s about to change with recent improvements to both hardware and programming, and the effects are going to be felt across almost every industry from retail to education. 

    How it’s affecting industries: Virtual reality has been a popular component of video games for several years and this trend is continuing to expand. In addition to video games, VR is likely to affect companies across the board as they adopt the technology to help them engage customers more effectively and optimize their sales and marketing efforts. It’s also a potentially useful tool for learning and is increasingly being adopted by educational organizations. 

    4. Touch commerce 

    Being able to buy anything you want with the touch of a finger may have seemed like a fantasy a few years ago, but it’s now a reality. Merging touchscreen technology with one-click shopping, touch commerce allows consumers to buy products easily from their phones. After linking their payment information to a general account and enabling the feature, customers are able to buy everything from clothes to furniture with just a fingerprint. 

    How it’s affecting industries: This is one of the biggest things to hit eCommerce in recent years with purchases of this type expected to increase by 150% this year alone and retailers in almost every industry anticipating an increase in sales directly related to this new technology. 

    5. Cognitive Technology 

    Cognitive technology is in the same vein as machine learning and virtual reality except that it’s a broader concept. For example, the cognitive technology umbrella includes things like natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition. Combined, these different technologies are able to automate and optimize a lot of tasks that were previously done by people, including certain aspects of accounting and analytics. 

    How it’s affecting industries: Although cognitive technologies have a broad range of applications, one of the industry sectors most affected by this trend initially will be the software sector. Automated analysis of user data and experiences will be particularly useful for software companies hoping to scale. 

    With emerging technologies changing professional industries including banking, eCommerce, healthcare and education, staying up to date on the latest trends will give you a better understanding of your chosen industry and make you a more competitive candidate. Best of all, this knowledge might open up new doors within your field and others. 

    Source : https://www.wayup.com/guide/1-5-technology-trends-need-know-work-industry/