Food for Thought: Brain-Friendly Food

Just a short post today from me. Here's a list of food that are just simply GREAT to keep your brain in fantastic shape:

1. Food rich in Vitamin B eg oats.

2. Eggs - rich in choline, which the brain uses to make the neuro-receptor acetylcholine.

(Low levels of acetylcholine are found to have a negative effect on memory and are associated with Alzheimer's.)

3. Fruit and fresh vegetables, rich in Vitamins C & E - These eliminate free radicals in our bodies.

4. Fish, a primary source of Omega-3 fatty acids eg DHA.

5. Lots of water - removes toxins from the body, including the brain.

6. Beans, nuts and legumes.

Noel Tan

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)

Dealing with School Pressure: Which School of Thought do you belong to?

As a parent of a school-going 7-year-old in the pressure-cooker environment that is the Singapore education system, as well as a family life educator, I've discovered that there are different schools of thought, when it comes to dealing with school pressure.

'Swim' school

Parents who belong here believe truly that 'Life is tough' and hence, school is the the induction into life. How does the learner deal with pressure? The simple message is 'Hard luck, kiddo. deal with it, because I dealt with it'.

'Live-the-moment' school

If life gives you lemons, parents who belong here are likely to say 'Make lemonade'. They accept that schooling is tough and competitive, but they emphasise to their learners to look beyond the negative and enjoy the ride.

'Cram' school

Given the exam-centric nature of the system, parents over here tell the learners to 'Forget about the Fun, and Focus on the Facts'. Learners are seen to have coped with the pressure by getting extra doses of brain work at tuition centres and other enrichment courses.

'The-road-less-travelled' school

How to cope with pressure? Parents in this school of thought believe that there IS an out-of-the-box way: be it homeschooling, boarding school overseas including the option of emigration. 'Pressure? What, pressure? (..when you have an alternative, that is)'

Simplistic, though, these labels may be, they are useful for helping us see the messages that we transmit, consciously or otherwise, to our children when they face pressure from school. They also bring out the underlying assumptions about pressure and schooling experiences as well as their respective educational outcomes.

Is there one best approach? I doubt it; the effectiveness of any approach will rest greatly on the child, how well his parents understand him and their relationship together.

Noel Tan

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers)

Role-modelling EQ: A Reflection

In the middle of the year, we were part of a consortium that recently completed a pilot project with a school to develop Emotional Literacy skills in a group of Sec 2 Normal Tech boys. Social and Emotional Learning research suggests that with enhanced EQ, students' academic performance improves.

When my facilitation team and I first met the participants, we primarily saw 2 key behaviours on display - aggression and passivity. Clearly, these belied the lack of confidence and esteem that are otherwise found in resilient kids. We saw as our primary task to model the EQ competencies which included the need to engage in thinking about consequences, recognising and harnessing emotions etc.

One pitfall in modelling EQ skills is in not knowing where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. We found that however clear the behavioural expectations were and however much we reiterated these expectations, these would obviously not be met by a few individuals. We also discovered that no matter how much we shared amongst ourselves what these expectations were and what would we all do if they were not met, ultimately different people have different thresholds for unacceptable behaviour.

So the key lesson through our own debriefing as a facilitation team was to have each facilitator share and account for their individual response to unacceptable behaviour. Knowing the logic for our responses allowed each facilitator to move towards a 'normed' response that everyone would adopt in the event.

Role-modelling EQ also meant that we had to come to terms with our own lack of these EQ competencies. Not being able to explain why we react a certain way when we feel stressed or fatigued, may mean that we may have limited reach into the child's life when debriefing his behaviour and feelings under stress or fatigue.

On hindsight, there is great potential in terms of impact on these kids who in their home life, have not had positive models of EQ. We showed that while we were there to model the competencies, we also had our own thresholds for negative behaviour and had to deal with them firmly. Through our positive management of our emotions, we showed them that they could too.

Noel Tan
(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)

Sometimes the Journey is more important than the Destination

What's a Singaporean doing in Idyllwild, California anyway? That was a question I asked myself, as I woke up to a knock on my motel room door; a world away from busy Singapore. Bleary-eyed after a 30-hour journey, with my body clock all topsy-turvy, I awoke to the lesson that the Journey is sometimes more important than the Destination.

1. Suspending Judgement

New situations unfold themselves fully only when one suspends judgement and the urge to criticise or even to compare. By immersing all your senses, you begin to allow every neuron in your brain to make connections. I had never previously been to a desert, but stepping out of the airport at Palm Springs that morning in June, gave me a sense of what near 40 degree Celsius feels like. On the ride up to Idyllwild, I made a mental note of not complaining too much about the humidity in Singapore so easily.

2. Physical space parallels Thought Space

My last trip to the US was in 1992, en route to a leadership conference in the Bahamas. I remember being boggled by the size of the continental US, as I flew from San Francisco to Philadephia. This time, almost in juxtaposition, I lived in Idyllwild, a small mountain town of 2000 people, where almost everyone I met there, didn't want to live life, as they call it 'down the Hill'.

These were people who were shocked by the amount of exposure the American media placed on the exploits of Paris Hilton, and who were concerned about issues like the state of the family, education and global perspectives. Yet no matter how wide the diversity of opinions, there was a parallel respect for the other person's right to his opinion. This was manifested in the way even businesses in the town's Chamber of Commerce settled issues through dialogue to understand the perspective of the other. As I exchanged Singapore for Idyllwild, I began to see the truth that the plurality of thought does parallel the physical space.

3. It's more interesting when one is not in stasis

All of us have a propensity to want stability, to conserve what they have. A journey keeps us away from our comfort zone, on our toes as it were; just enough to tip us off-balance, so that in our search for a new equilibrium, we are open to every element in the journey. When finally we achieve a new stasis, then as travellers, we would have considered and assimilated elements of our journey. All this adding to the fact that the Journey is more important than the Destination.

When I reflect on my learning journey to Idyllwild in June 2007, I remember being thrown slightly off-balance when I responded to the knock on my door, only to hear Spanish from the chamber-maid who was there to clean the room. Jet-lagged, I surprised myself by being able to blurt out 'un momento" to her. Then, I knew that the journey to Idyllwild would hold many lessons for me.

Noel Tan

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)