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Self-regulation is a person’s ability to adjust to environmental stimuli such as tactile, auditory, visual and oral input in a way that integrates them into their surroundings fostering productive interaction with the people and things in it. For most of us, this process is rather seamless. We enter a venue, public or private, and our brain assimilates us into the surroundings with such speedy accuracy that we do not realize the complex neural process it takes for us to be able to interact with

Many of the memories I have of my Grandparents’ house are centered around the kitchen. I would come home from school in the afternoon, and my Grandmother would be preparing dinner. I remember sneaking into the kitchen to grab raw egg noodles off the counter, and then covertly devouring them while I watched cartoons.

Separating the signal from the noise is never easy in the B2B ecosystem. With infinite channels to choose for marketing news and miscellaneous thought provoking topics, you can never be too confident on where your eyes should land.

In the eyes of many young people, the highlight of October is Halloween — the night where they get to dress up, knock on neighbor’s doors, and get a bunch of candy, happily generating a dental bill for mom and dad. Around our house being a Christian family, we are rather conservative about Halloween. We allow our children to dress up, though not in anything too scary. We knock on a few doors; and, this year, we may attend a fall festival or two held by local churches. To top off our Halloween fe

We live in times of unprecedented change. Partnership and collaboration are paramount. The global challenges — and opportunities — we face are too big and too complex for one business, NGO or government to tackle alone. Looking beyond our own borders, working pre-competitively across sectors, engaging in stakeholder dialogue and mastering stewardship of natural resources, are all fundamentals of business success. And the UN Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs), our blueprint for a sustainable world, will only be met through collective effort.

I’ve met people whose smiles / remind me of hospital beds / asking me to ‘stay’ / I’ve worn eyes that remind you / of solicitation letters: / father, lend me your name / mother, do you have a moment? /

The 17th October will mark a day of lobbying for colleges, organised by the Association of Colleges (AoC). So what exactly can you expect? Education unions are organising a march on the Houses of Parliament from Pall Mall. Principals, staff and students are expected to arrive in Westminster from 10am and the Methodist Central Hall for registration with the march expected to begin at 1230. This is likely to be followed by speeches and meetings with MPs. AoC staff will spend the latter part o

Translated into 37 languages, Wild Swans tells the story of 20th Century China from the last days of Imperial China to the Japanese Occupation, Civil War, Revolution and post Mao era. Jung Chang narrates the biographies of her grandmother, Yu-fang, her mother Bao Qin and herslef. It begins with the tale of how Yu-fang was married off as a concubine to a high ranking general, and eventually married a doctor in Manchuria. Bao Qin joins the Communist Party at the age of 15 and eventually meets W

Every morning, I made the hour-long drive through rural Wisconsin to get to my summer job at the cheese plant. I typically woke up with eyes wide shut, groping in the dark to turn off my alarm, and would be on the road by sunrise. I would watch with sleepy interest as the familiar green pastures and red barns passed me by...

Sustainability can be pretty confusing. There’s so much going on, it’s hard to know what to make of it. What do recycling and overfishing have to do with each other? What are the sociological implications of the bicycle? Where does gardening overlap with politics? Because it’s not just about coal plants and solar panels, although they’re certainly part of it. It’s about how we structure our lifestyles, and weather or not we can continue them for as long as we need no. It’s actually pretty simpl

Everyone knows that emissions are a problem. So where do they come from? This graph gives us a good break down of the situation , and we can see that about half of them come from energy production. So if we’re going to make meaningful reductions, that’s a good place to start. So where do we get our electricity? No, whoops, I mean burn them, To transform them into electricity. Not through the magic of fire, But to boil water, to make steam, Just to boil water, to make steam, to spin a turbin

The following story was written in 2012 during a phase of my life when I decided to walk 2,000 miles across the United States. These words reflect a state of mind that has long passed in my life. But I have always loved the sentiment behind these words which I wish to share alongside a variety of other stories left unwritten and unshared…until now. That journey has continued to haunt me, changing the course of my life in subtle and unimaginable ways...

Both poems appeared in The Birds We Piled Loosely Issue 10, January 2017.

On September 2, 2018 I wrote this note for the Suicide Awareness Month (which was featured by Mental Health Is Trending on their Warrior Wall.

What you are is more than meets the eye: you are more than the parts of you that no one claps for, more than a medical abstract, more than your fixations and your passions, more than your appearance and intelligence, more than all the qualifications, strengths and weaknesses you list on your resume. You are more than your limitations. You are so so much more if you just let yourself be you, bravely.

With the Victorian Senate about to vote on a Voluntary Assisted Dying scheme which passed the lower house, the debate around this intimate issue has once again been reignited. And once again, conservatives (religious and otherwise, but mostly religious) are weighing in to urge a “no” vote. What’s become apparent this time around, are the similarities with the Same Sex Marriage debate. The irony of conservatives demanding the government regulate the most intimate parts of a persons life are too

The “No” camp has done a pretty good job of changing the terms of the debate. From a simple question, to a much wider conversation about freedoms, children, schools and so on. But it doesn’t matter. You want to make it about freedoms? Fine, let’s talk freedom. What are you not free to do? You can marry, right? You can still be wed to your spouse? No one is prohibiting heterosexual marriages. That is still totally and absolutely a thing which definitely exists. Can you discriminate against someo

Which has a more defining influence over our character: Nature or Nurture? This eternal debate is the central theme at the core of this book. It begs the question, what even is ‘our character’? Is it the way the we interact with the world, or is it the way the we feel within ourselves? By what is our true identity measured? Two puppies were mixed up at birth. A family of poodles (Mrs Poodle and her children Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh La La, and GASTON) seems to have overlapped with a family of French

There are a lot of problems with this book. First, the concept of going on a bear hunt and being excited about it. Who on earth wakes up in the morning and says “Yay! We’re going to hunt a bear! We’re going to track down and kill some megafauna for fun!” And if you say “Well, they don’t mean literally a hunt., they mean going to go and find a bear”, then don’t use the bloody word “hunt” then. It’s violent, and if it’s not done for food is actually sadistic. Now, the one thing this book does ha

WWF is in the business of saving life on Earth. And even though we don’t like to put a price on nature, we can. Every year, the services that nature delivers, such as freshwater, pollination, soil fertility and climate regulation, are worth an estimated US$125 trillion to the global economy.

When I was a preteen (more than 30 years ago), the school I was attending at the time was located near a school for “special kids”; at least, that is how it was explained to me when I asked questions about them after noticing that they were different than the children who went to school with me. These “special” students would eat in the cafeteria of my school the same time I did; but, they were never allowed to mingle with us. Over time, I learned that most of these students had Down Syndrome. S

We all struggle with our base desires. In many ways our lives are defined by our ability to resist our impulses. That can make or break our careers, our social lives, our finances, our marriages. It’s something that kids especially wrestle with as they feel their way through the world. Watching them struggle to not do the thing that every bone in their body is crying out to do can either be good for a laugh, or one of the most agonisingly suspenseful experiences in the world. We all want to be

There are no politicians pushing for Sharia Law in Australia. There aren’t even any Muslims in parliament. There aren’t many Muslims in general in fact, they make up less than 2% of the population. There are more Buddhists. Representationally, this would mean you’d expect there to be at least 2 or 3 at either a state or federal level in government. But there are none. Well, in 2002 Adem Somyurek, a non-practising Muslim of Turkish descent, was elected to the upper house of the Victorian parliame

Every Content Writer Needs To Master Onpage Optimization Content creation is hard. It is one of the reasons I view content creators as super humans imbued with the powers of creativity and creation. Coming up with an idea, researching said idea and turning it into an article/video/image that others can use or learn from is a normal thing for many content creators. Starting out, the focus for many content writers tends to be on creating original articles only.

For a lot of new writers, the point of view you use might be a detail quite easily overlooked. This could result in a point of view error or mix that can completely pull your reader out of the story. Point of view (or PoV for short) is the lens through which the reader experiences the story alongside your protagonist. See it as the ‘camera’ through which you tell the story and reveal things with the narrative. Some PoV structures work better than others for certain genres, ages, and stories. P

Stories are powerful. They command our emotions, remind us of our values, inspire us to act, and even transcend time and space.

A monk started to prepare his simple lunch of rice, vegetables, and broth. After meditating for hours, he grew hungry and wanted a delicious meal. He looked inside a wooden vat of fermenting miso made from soy beans and wheat that he had prepared the winter before. All that was left were dredges that had seeped through the bottom. Curious, the monk decided to reach with a wooden spoon. As he raised the utensil to his mouth, the aroma wafted into his nostrils — toasty, caramel, and acidic...

Entrepreneurs are not born; they are made. Managing director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet, not only gave this invaluable insight but also broke down a strategy for launching and accelerating startups in a Bootcamp in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July.

Entrepreneurs are not born; they are made. Managing director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet, not only gave this invaluable insight but also broke down a strategy for launching and accelerating startups in a Bootcamp in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July. The MIT Innovation & Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in Rio gathered 122 participants from all over the world. They came to learn from Bill Aulet and other distinguished experts how to develop world-changing and sustaina