Brainstorming is a technique that can help in generating ideas and finding solutions for various problems. I’ve participated in many brainstorming sessions, with different people and for different purposes. Of course, part of them was cool and productive; the other part was simply a waste of time. Either way, there is always a room to improve, so if you want to enjoy more productive and creative brainstorming sessions, next time apply following advices. I’m sure they will enrich your creative process.

1. Clearly define goal

Whether you want to generate some ideas or solve a problem, everybody involved need to know where to focus his or her brain.

2. Select a chairperson that will lead the session

Many brainstorming sessions turns into chaos or simply lose their focus, when there is no person who leads.

3. No criticism

All ideas are invited, even wildest or dumb. There are no penalties and there are no useless ideas.

4. Quantity, not quality

Brainstorming is one of those things where quantity counts more than quality. Don’t aim for the best, as it can limit your effectiveness.

5. Capture all ideas.

This is no-brainer. Try using different solutions. Take notes on computer, use mind maps, write everything on whiteboard or paper, and draw sketches.

6. Have fun, not fear.

You all should enjoy this process. If anybody feels fear, then that person is almost useless as he or she is afraid of sharing ideas that in the end might be very good.

7. Take a break

I think that about after an hour of brainstorming our creativity can really drop. Take a break. Give time to your brain. Let it work in your subconscious. Meantime do some exercises. Drink a green tea or water. Get some fresh air. Sleep. Run another session tomorrow.

8. Invite new people

…but it doesn’t mean: invite everybody!.

9. Use inspiring materials

Prepare before session or look for it during brainstorming. These might be books, images, newspapers, and advertisements. Browse web and RSS reader, use search engines, dictionaries, flickr, youtube; watch TV, listen to radio, chat with people. But there is a pitfall you must be aware of. Don’t spend on this process too much time. You must use your intuition there and focus your attention only on things that you really think can help you. Otherwise you will waste a lot of time, losing focus from your target.

10. Use mindmaps

Mindmaps can damn well stimulate our minds, making us more creative and focused. It is also a great way for capturing your ideas, as I mentioned in one of above points.

11. Switch mindset

Approach your goal with different mindsets. For example, start with being peaceful. Try to find a solution or idea that fits your mindset. Good, smooth, nice, warm. Talk, negotiate, and be honest with your goal. Then try something else. Be aggressive, violent. Attack your problem with all forces, show no mercy. Seek for the most devastating ideas. Nuke ‘em all!
Got the point?

12. Engage all senses

Write your ideas down. Visualize them in your mind. Draw. Try to hear the solution. Listen to that voice in your head. How this idea smell? Can you feel the texture? Remember that said it should be fun? Don’t think only in images or even worse, only in words and sentences.

13. Apply these inventive principles
14. Practise

The more you practise the better your are. Find what works for you, learn and eliminate mistakes.

15. Share this post with others

photo credit: sindändùne

Emotions influence people’s decisions. Analysis of consumers’ behavior shows that most people buy under influence of emotions. Same story with investors.

Our decisions are often influenced by emotions, usually greed and fear. The better we are at controlling them, the better decisions we make and thus we achieve better results. Mastering our emotions is like half way to success. If we are very good at this and we still lose money, then there is something wrong with our investing strategy. But for now, I want to help you how to control your emotions.

First of all you need to know that depending on term of your investments; emotions appear in different form and frequency.

For example, if you are a day trader, you experience a lot of emotions during the day and you have to act quickly, making decisions really fast. On the other hand, day traders usually close their positions at the end of day. They can sleep calmly without fear of unpredicted events that can influence the price at the beginning of the next day.

When your investments are long-term, you are less vulnerable to daily changes, but you can start getting nervous when your portfolio gets significant loses for a longer period of time. You start thinking about closing positions and reopening them after loses. This is the point where your emotions are dangerous.

Below I briefly described few of my favorite methods that can help you keeping emotions under control. They are very simple yet quite effective. Don’t try to apply all of them simultaneously. Find what works for you, what fits to your investing strategy and stick to it.

Have predetermined investment plan.

Prepare precise investment plan before taking any actions. Set when you want to open your position on certain asset (for example: at what price level, at what signal) and when you want to close it.

Write in diary all your transactions.

It is great idea. Also, take notes on what influenced your decisions. Why did you buy and why did you sell? In future, you will be able to review your transactions and compare results. It will also help you to detect stimuli based upon which you made good and bad decisions. Being conscious of them, you can avoid those stimuli that have definitely bad influence on your decision-making process.

Plan all your transactions at fixed time.

This one of course doesn’t work for day traders as well as for some short-term investors. Otherwise, set fixed time when you perform all your analysis and make your decisions. This way you will avoid making hasty decisions during the day influenced by random stimuli.

Remember about the big picture.

If you have a good strategy that performs well in longer period of time, don’t stop following your rules because you experience some temporary loses. It is very likely that by making even small exception from your strategy, you will lose more. Even if you were lucky one time, another time you can fail and if you have already broken one of your rules it is very likely you would do this again. It is next to impossible to make profit on every one of your investment. So, remember about big picture. If you have good strategy, you will finally enjoy success.

Think. Think twice. Then think one more time.

Reconsider all pros and cons, possible gains and risk. Why do you want to take this decision? What is pushing you to do so? Maybe it is better to wait more time and look for stronger signal? Is it high-risk investment? Ask yourself many questions or even prepare a list with such questions and always go through it, just before taking any actions. It is not always about giving positive answer, it will give you more time to calm down, think more and make better decisions.

Invest less money.

If you are experiencing overwhelming emotions about some of your assets, it is possible that you invest too much. Next time, put there less money and you will be steadier about it. With time and experience you will be able to move your comfort zone further and further (and invest more money while keeping emotions under control).

Use diversification and stop loss.

Both techniques help to manage risk. Lower risk means less emotion. Use stop losses and you will always close your positions at desired level. Diversification won’t allow you to bet everything on one card. It is not a casino. We don’t like gambling and emotions connected to it, do we?

Relax.

Breathe. Meditate. Exercise. Practice yoga. Listen to relaxation music. Have sex. Find a way that will help you to master your emotions. Additionally, these things are simply pleasurable, very likely they will influence in a positive way your health as well as other aspects of your life.

Do you have your own, effective method how to control investing emotions? Share it in comments.

photo credit: Sebastian Fritzon

Rewarding yourself after achieving a goal works very well as a motivational booster. Why? Reward gives you feeling you work on something you want to do. Achieving a goal is like going from point A to point B and you place your reward in B. You strongly desire to enjoy the state of mind connected with your reward and this desire works like a force that pushes you into direction of B.

Of course, in many cases reaching a goal is a reward itself. Then it’s great, but sometimes we really need additional way to motivate ourselves. Remember to reward yourself wisely.

What does it mean?

When I talk with different people (friends, family and co-workers) about rewarding yourself, they usually come with one idea. Spend a lot of money in a really bad way, most times it is unnecessary shopping and/or unhealthy, expensive food.

What is wrong with that?

Well, on the long run it can really hurts your budget. Keep tracking your expenses and after a year you can find yourself shocked how much money you spend rewarding yourself splurging.

Quite often such rewards are against your goals. If your goal is to save/earn some amount of money, it is stupid to spend any part of them just to reward yourself. If your goal is to lose weight, don’t reward hard training at gym with dessert. That is really awful.

Reward yourself wisely.

I don’t mean that you shouldn’t spend any penny on a reward. Spend money, but do this wisely.

First of all, set the reward proportionate to the difficulty of your goal.

Don’t change the rules during the game. A lot of people don’t obey that. They increase reward while moving from A to B or right after finishing their goal. It is not the way to go. You set your reward when you are in A and when you reach B, you get exactly what you put here, while you was in A.

Look for rewards that will help you in achieving further goals. It is like reinvesting. For example, I earn some money thanks to good investing picks, then I can buy myself book about investing that will increase my skills and knowledge. After losing certain amount of weight, you can reward yourself with new clothes, which will give you a very important feeling of comfort and will always remind you about your success. Find such situtations when reward push you ever further, beyond your initial goal.

Of course the reward must be somehow important for you. Otherwise it won’t motivate you enough. It must be something meaningful and those things vary among people. You must find what works well for you.

For interesting, frugal ideas I’m recommending a short post written by Leo of Zen Habits on how to reward yourself without spending a lot.

Finally, remember it is wrong when you focus only on how to get your reward. It should help you to increase your motivation; it definitely shouldn’t replace your main goal.

I hope since now you will reward yourself in more conscious, wiser way.

If you have any favorite rewards that you use to motivate yourself, write about it in comments. I will really appreciate it.

photo credit: jillclardy

You have a lot of tasks on your to do list planned for today and you need some strategy how to handle them. Here we go!

Quite common advice is to start the day with the toughest task and since there everything is going downhill. All your next tasks are easier, simpler and more pleasurable to execute.

If above approach works well for you, then it is great. You probably don’t need to read this article farther, just go back to your work. Thank you for your attention.

However, I know a lot of people (including myself), that sometimes get stuck in front of this unfriendly task and simply can’t move forward with their work.

Have you ever experienced such a deadlock? You start feeling bad emotions about this task. You try to switch for a while to a different one, and then you return still being unable to push it forward. You are getting more exposed to different distractions: food, chat, senseless surfing on web, checking inbox and other timewasters. System halt.

Looking for solution I decided to try opposite strategy. I queued my tasks in reverse order, starting with the easiest one and putting the toughest task on the end of the list.

How does it work for me? First tasks are quite simple so it is not difficult to engage into work and finish them. This gives momentum to work on next tasks and as a bonus there is a feeling that at least something has been done.

Quite important point is to keep in mind that one last task. Knowing that there is something difficult and less enjoyable at the end of the list causes that all preceding tasks looks relatively easier. To make this hack works better, think that today you have to do only your last task and then, just distract yourself with other planned tasks in order to avoid executing the last one. I bet you experienced this pattern in past, but you could be unconscious how exactly it worked.

As an example I can tell you how it worked when I was writing my master thesis. Somehow I didn’t like working on it. Almost everyday I planned to push forward my thesis; I always did a lot of other jobs only to move away my main task. As you can suppose, I did a lot of things that normally I wouldn’t do. At first I wasn’t so conscious about this exploit and I did a lot of senseless, timewasting activities. Later I started to use it wisely by putting some other important tasks, before working on my master thesis.

This is less or more how it works for me. I can’t guarantee you would be successful with this method. Try it. Hack your mind by distracting work on toughest task with other, relatively easier tasks. As simple as this.

Ok, but what about the last task?

I don’t say this is perfect hack for solving all your tasks. It has both advantages and disadvantages. Among most important advantages is that it should engage you into work and allow finishing most of your tasks.

The disadvantage is that you finally have to face this last task. If you have enough momentum, finish him like you beat the super boss on the very last level of your favorite platform game. You have already done so much; you don’t want to leave something unfinished.

If above doesn’t work, postpone it. Of course, only if today is not the deadline for this task. But remember that you can’t do this infinitely. Finally, you have to close this task.

If it is really so hard, than you can’t even bite it in any possible way, then….well this is actually a good topic for another post.