[ email | Criticism/analysis of society | Travelling | Projects | Goncharenko centre: Talks/discussions » Talk/discussion: Goncharenko centre Lviv, 2025-11-10: Doing effort to improve your life ]
Post event notes (such as clarifications, additions): These are in blue, mixed with the prepared text.
Translation: auto translation of this page into Ukrainian
Part 1: Pictures from various countries:
For this section I had not prepared any text. I showed a number of pictures, from the above links. First some pictures from the Netherlands, including bicycles near shops. One guy said about that, that that used to be the same during Soviet time in Ukraine! Wow, interesting! He mentioned, in a bit different words, what I stated with this often used saying: "What is old is new again"... [ this is used about situations becoming as before, and for ideas that are reintroduced, old type of machines are updated and reintroduced, etc. ]
Further some pictures from Hungary, Poland, the UK. In Poland everything that is somewhat interesting seems built by Germans, as my friend from Wroclaw told and he pointed to buildings and old bridges, while on a trip by car. The UK has cool buildings, colourful buildings, and shops decorated with flowers on the outside, very similar to what you see in many Ukrainian cities (I have seen that in for example, Lviv, Kharkov and Kremenchuk this year and last year)
Then I showed interesting places, buildings, bus stops in Ukraine.
I asked which cities in Ukraine had attendees visited. Related to this I mentioned I was in Uman once for several days and the first day there was a fest, and a banner said : "Uman, cultural capitol of Ukraine". I said it is really Kiev, but to me it was an interesting bit of 'optimism' :)
And one attendee said she was from the Vinnitsya region, and suggested I visit her city, Shargorod (Шаргород), for for example the religious custom of walking a route of/with Christ. I have not found yet any web page on this. Who has a link?
Part2: Psychological topics: One of the attendees is studying psychology. This led to a 'distraction' of a different topic (but one that I talked about in Kremenchuk). I then said that "I have to say that generally psychologists don't understand people well enough". She responded that it depends on the situation what you understand of a person, but I said that psychologists should be able to understand everyone given enough background information. I can do it, why can't they? I mentioned that in books, research articles and videos on youtube it is always the same. I told, as an example, and as a test of her understanding, about the woman whom I visited in 2018 in Kharkov, who seemed autistic from certain type of behaviour (such as just walking out of stores and not saying "thank you" to sellers who did effort to find something suitable), but not from dealing with her students and also not from telling me what she noticed in a conversation with the parents of a guy with whom I got acquainted via my bicycle website, about the wife (which was a disapproving look to her husband): He told us something that she didn't want her to tell us. This was a contradiction if one assumes that she is autistic (then she would not notice/understand such facial expressions and their meaning). So what was the solution? What could the cause be? Think about it... Here is the answer: She told me more about her mother and then it was clear: Her mother told he things like to not hug people, and caused her to be emotionally repressed... Contradictions are what show you that you lack information/understanding, and in science it shows a problem in theories and thus also a lack of information/understanding, namely about reality. I asked her (the woman in the meeting) whether she knew why people go study psychology. She said: Often to better understand themselves. Indeed, that is the main one, and the problem is that if you don't understand yourself when you are 18, that is not going to change in 4 years. [ because it means lacking emotional understanding and that cannot be fixed in 4 years, if ever. See psychopaths who are psychologists: see my criticism of Patric Gagne (meeting of 2025-7-27) (see also the meetings of 2025-6-22 and 2025-4-6) and what I said about the guy who interviewed 'Kitboga' (meeting of 2025-4-6): Both of them have a pathetic ability to understand people. ]. It will lead to theoretical understanding only, not able to apply that knowledge quickly and their understanding/abilities are not complete, and as a result they are not able to apply knowledge of one situation to other similar situations either. I mentioned that there are psychopaths in psychology and psychiatry and I dealt with that a bit in the meetings in Kremenchuk [ that woman Patric Gagne and the guy who interviewed 'Kitboga' (= nickname/handle on youtube). ]
She mentioned about this study, that a lecturer said that you need to improve your empathy. [ This you should already have! I would say instead that you need to improve your ability to analyse... Only that will improve the ability to understand other people. ]
Another example with question: I mentioned that earlier this year I watched a video of a woman who had published papers on psychology, sexuality etc. who theorized that the reason men look to the side to talk to women comes from evolution, from in the past having needed to keep a look out for zebras [ that was her example, generally it is about any prey ]. For women a good conversation is looking into the eyes, for men the essence of the talk is important, not looking into the eyes. So, I asked everyone whether her theory is true or not. One woman thought: not true, the rest thought: true. I mentioned this example in a meeting in Kremenchuk: This is not true and she could have asked men why they do it. There must be men self aware enough, as I am, to know the reason and who can then tell her. But you can also use reason to show it is false, namely in this way: Assume that the theory is true, what would the consequences be? If it is true then this same looking to the side, into the distance, would happen in any other situation. It doesn't always happen, it happens only sometimes, because this is about something else, namely about needing to concentrate... I did this once in a conversation with a woman and I realised during the conversation that I did it and I thought "she may not like it but I need to do it to concentrate". One woman then said this maybe it (I then said that what I said is definitely the reason :) ), because she had had this during the first meeting: because of translation in her head, and that everything was new, she needed to concentrate and did the same... I mentioned further an interview with a Russian guy about the war where this was very obviously going on. You need to be careful what you say in Russia, you can be arrested for saying the wrong things. So, an interviewer asked questions and each time the guy looked at the interviewer while the interviewer posed his question, then when answering the question he looked up into the sky, down to the ground, then briefly back to the interviewer, then back at the sky etc. He did this, obviously, to concentrate (the interviewer is also a guy, so it is not about interactions between men and women, but it is about concentrating). [ That it doesn't happen with women, or at most rarely, is because men cannot deal well with distractions due to a different type of thinking. ]
What else came up is influence of the environment. I mentioned that generally the biggest influence is your initial built-in personality [ note that people are not born with a blank slate, they are different from the start, and you can see that that is the same with animals, such as cats. ]. You can clearly see this for example in criminal families where all but 1 became criminals, yes, they were influenced by the bad examples, but if they didn't have an inclination towards criminality they wouldn't be a criminal as you see from that 1 person in that family not being criminal, which the rest is, despite having the same environment.
Part 3: Procrastination, not having enough time for tasks, cramming for tests: I mentioned cramming for tests is possible but not optimal. You may find out that you don't have enough time to study what you need to study because you make an estimation of the minimal time needed and start at that time that you think can finish it before going to sleep. What if you need more time? Work into the night, get up early, or just accept that you haven't fully studied everything as well as you would want?
It is simply better to start earlier, so that you can deal with needing more time, but beware then of finishing too early as I did with a tax return: I thought that I would get it done quickly so that it would no longer be on my mind, but I forgot something as I realised a few days later, so I had to do extra work and send in a correction later. Start early but don't rush to finish...
Hello and welcome to the tea club!
Plan for the 2nd meeting:
I mentioned in the first meeting that I like for example bus stops with mosaics in Ukraine, buildings with colourful roofs and more and attendees had not seen them so I will start with pictures that you might find interesting: from Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, with from Ukraine amazing bus stops, mosaics on bus stops and buildings, interesting and beautiful entry signs to cities and villages, and more.
After that, continuing with the topic of doing effort for yourself and avoiding procrastination.
Note: These meetings are essentially about improving your life, by providing insight and methods. So I thought we can add something: Think about something in your life that you want to be different, maybe changing your mindset could help this become reality. Or perhaps you have problems dealing with some people? We can discuss many more ways of changing your views of life (than just stopping procrastination and doing more effort for yourself), and how to deal with people in later meetings, using what I explained in my "List of life"...
If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, you can email me or send a message via Telegram. See the bottom of this page for contact details.
Note: The full text of what I prepared will be added to this page after the meeting.
Start with this if possible before the 2nd meeting:
Watch these short youtube videos on procrastination. Do you think the methods work? Why or why not? Does anything else stand out? (Such as, it may make you think: "this is insightful", or the contrary: "this is nonsense", perhaps something else?)
My recommendations from meeting 1, to improve concentration, remove distractions and force yourself for 1 task to concentrate on finishing it even if you don't like that task:
Continuing with preventing wasting your time:
Do this every day:
Negative emotions are signals that you need to make a change in your life (change = take some action, or change your thinking).
How to look at the past, and not have regrets: Each time you think about the past:
How to look at worrying (with a 'problem'), each time you have problem:
Worrying has been reduced to having a 'problem', so then we can continue: How to look at 'problems' as not problems but challenges, so not something negative but simply life, something to which you need to find a solution, nothing more. No negative feeling.
There are 3 stages to go from seeing 'problems' to 'just something I need to deal with':
You can also look at negatives as positive. A woman whom I knew years ago made a comment once about love: "If you love someone then you will love someone's bad qualities". I later realised it was correct, and it is not just accepting bad qualities, but it can be actually appreciating them, which may seem strange but these are examples with which I feel it:
Note that the 2nd point does not mean that I want to smell cigarette smoke all the time! :) I mean that the occsasional smell of cigarettes walking on the street is negative for me in NL, and positive for me in Ukraine...
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Copyright W.H.Scholten, 2025. To contact me you can email or send a message via telegram (via phone +31648816383), or via vk.com (https://vk.com/w.h.scholten, which I don't really use but I will get notified of messages from there). I don't use: facebook, linkedin, twitter. |