Fashion, Fad and Fantasy and Meditation

There is a report on resilience and how mindfulness practices can help us with bouncing back, in Time magazine (June 1, 2015, page-30). Original article is titled "The Science of Bouncing Back".

In one research reported in that article, Martin Paulus (scientific director and president of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla.) trained four Marine infantry platoons in an eight-week mindfulness course and four platoons trained as usual. Then both groups took part in a very stressful series of war games.

After these exercises, the researchers checked the mental states of both groups and found out that the Marines who had taken mindfulness course proved more resilient. Brain scans even showed their brains had undergone a structural change, for the better. Another source about Marines and Meditation is "US Marines May Be Adding Meditation To Their Pre-Deployment Arsenal".

To confirm their findings, these researchers went on to train some Olympic BMX athletes in mindfulness, who went on to win at a major BXM competition the gold, silver and bronze medals.

Some more miraculous claim shows up near the end of the report:

"Another recent study shows that meditation can even help decrease expression of pro-inflammatory genes."\

Maybe soon they may claim that the Mindfulness meditation can help you fly, walk on water, cure Ebola and so on.

Change Management and Resilience for Kids

Just 3 perspectives should be enough.

Investment

A maxim in this field is, there is nothing new but history we do not know.

Military

All successful battle field commanders cannot do without a firm spiritual faith.

Entrepreneurship

80/20 Rule: If you are sure about 80% of your business or If you are sure about your business 80% of the time, you are okay. Or else, you need to do something about it, such as building a system to run your business, delegating more, or even breaking it up into smaller, more manageable pieces, etc.

Shall we teach kids change and volatility, or stability, history and the First Principles?

Good luck!

Stability, Adaptability, and Truth

"The world is changing. The times are changing. New technologies are emerging at a breakneck pace. New markets, new economies. new careers are emerging at a breakneck pace."

"A new graduate has to keep 6 or more careers before s/he retires."

"Changes are coming more frequently than in the past. And their impact and ramifications are far deeper and more wide-ranging than in the past."

"Our age is a complex system and we live in a chaotic world full of black swans and tsunamis."

Given such information, we as parents have 2 choices:

1. We can refuse to believe them.
2. Or we can accept them.

We Refuse to Believe in Chaos

Here are some examples of this line of believing

1. A proverb --- "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
2. Taoism --- The centre is so stable that it is not moving at all.
3. Drucker --- Invention of Internet is comparable to the invention of printing press.
4. Hidden Champions --- Timeless maxims, not business management fads.
5. "Breaking the Windows" --- It seperates boys from men to see which is a trend and which is a fad, a hype.
6. Steve Jobs --- New technology happens very slowly.

That 's what I mean by Truth. That the world is stable doesn't mean that it is a bed or roses. It can be stable and stably tough.

Or Believe the World is Getting More Chaotic

Then, we believe that past is more stable than the present.

Do you think times in 500 BC, 400 BC, 300 BC were more stable than out times?

Do we find the people of those times viewed their jobs as stable and static?

Did they view their worlds as stable and static?

Did they see their worlds as utterly predictable and sort of boring and plain sailing?

What do we find instead?

That 's what I mean by Truth. The world never was, is and shall be stable.

Read literature set in rural backwaters. Do those characters find their lives stable?

In that sense, the world is stable. Teach that to your children.