Distraction arises when the mind leaves a wholesome object that supports well-being and gets entangled in thoughts that stimulate desire, aversion, indifference, or delusion.

When you can recognize distraction as it is arising, you create an opportunity to make a wise choice.

Take time to deeply reflect on and understand the primary mental causes of distraction such as cravings, aversions, obsessive thinking, and delusion. When you recognize how these impulses drive distraction, you can catch them sooner. Analyze your personal triggers for falling into states of distraction.

Understanding the Causes of Distraction

<ul><li>Cultivate greater meta-awareness to recognize distraction as it is arising before getting fully carried away. </li><li>Pause and consciously name the distraction, how it makes you feel, and what caused it. </li><li>Even a few mindful breaths of noticing when your attention drifts can help counter distraction.</li></ul>

Noticing Distraction as it Arises

When you notice distraction starting, remind yourself you have a choice. In that moment, consciously choose to redirect your attention in a more positive, meaningful direction rather than giving in to the impulse. This builds the mental muscle over time.

Making Wise Choices 

Strengthen your basic attentional skills through ongoing practices like mindfulness meditation, concentration exercises, and focusing fully on one activity at a time with intention. Just as physical exercise builds muscles, mental exercises build focus.

Training Your Powers of Attention 

<ul><li>Cut down on physical and digital clutter in your work and living spaces that scatters your attention in too many directions.</li><li> Implement organization systems and structures that support clarity and efficiency.</li></ul>

Reducing Clutter for Clarity

Reflect carefully on your priorities and the most meaningful use of your limited time and attention. Then let these priorities consciously guide where you place your attention, rather than reacting to emotional impulses. Cultivate daily and weekly habits and routines that support consistent focus and presence, including sleep, exercise, healthy eating, social connection, recreational activities, and taking regular breaks to recharge.

Balancing Priorities over Impulses : Habits and Routines

The book Beyond Distraction by Shaila Catherine offers Buddhist-inspired strategies to improve focus and productivity. It provides practical tools to overcome distractions and cultivate greater presence.

Learn how to overcome distraction in meditation practice and develop clarity in your relationships, work, and activities with this new guide from a beloved meditation teacher. The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind. Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddha’s pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path. Following the Buddha’s pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind: 1. Replace unwholesome thoughts with wholesome thoughts. For example, if you find yourself thinking thoughts of ill will toward a person, try thinking instead of their good qualities as an antidote. 2. Examine the dangers of distracting thoughts. Weigh the costs of allowing thoughts of ill will, lust, greed, and so forth to obsess your mind. The costs of dwelling on distracting thoughts nearly always outweigh any supposed benefits. 3. Avoid it, ignore it, forget it. Develop the skill to turn your attention away from habitual distractions. Remove the fuel and let the fires of distraction die out. 4. Investigate the causes of distraction. By understanding the conditions that perpetuate habitual thoughts, you can learn to free yourself from those patterns. 5. Apply determination and resolve. Supported by wisdom, you can make a firm decision to stop dwelling on patterns of thought that are not supporting your deepest values and goals in life. Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. You’ll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities. And ultimately, you’ll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

meditation

Meditation

Shaila Catherine

Beyond Distraction

The average American woman consumes 48 pounds of added sugar every year.Eating too much sugar significantly raises your risk of life-shortening obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.A study found that people who exceeded the recommended daily limit of 10% of total caloric intake increased their risk of death due to heart disease by 30%.With some smart sugar strategies, you can significantly reduce your sugar cravings and take back your health.

Death By Sugar

<ul><li>We crave sugar for a variety of reasons, from hormones to habits to the psychological impact of simply seeing a decadent donut or a drizzle of caramel</li><li>The preference for sweet-tasting foods is innate.</li><li>That means sugar cravings are drilled into our bodies at an early age.</li><li>Because humans enjoy sweets, it is difficult to cut them out entirely and doing so can sometimes lead to feelings of deprivation.</li></ul>

The Sugar Craving Explained

Cravings are intense, urgent, or abnormal desire or longing.However, just because you're having a craving or want something sweet doesn't mean you have to eat sugar - or even pop a sugar replacement, such as a piece of fruit - on impulse.Buy yourself some time.Drink a glass of water, take five deep breaths, or go for a short walk. If you are truly hungry, it's okay to reach for a snack.

Be Aware Of Your Craving

<ul><li>If you notice a sugar craving at 3 p.m. daily without fail, add a protein-filled snack at this time to power through the day.</li><li>Identify your favourite foods</li><li>Pick two go-to breakfasts, 2-3 lunches, and 2-4 dinners and have those ingredients on hand so you can stay consistent.</li><li>Spice things up with spices that don't contain added sugar, such as cinnamon and red pepper.</li></ul>

Pay Attention to Patterns

While it helps to have enjoyable staples to turn to, getting curious in the kitchen can provide a fun outlet and instill healthy eating habits. Explore recipes, <a href="https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/g28556528/healthiest-vegetables/">eat some new vegetables</a> and fruits you’ve never tried before or combine different ingredients to create new dishes. By switching up what you’re eating from day to day, you might find a new delicious dish that gets you excited about dinner.

Be Adventurous

<ul><li>While most people will support your get-healthy mission, there will be a few who try to derail your efforts.</li><li>You should definitely tell your friends, family, coworkers and significant other what you're trying to accomplish, and actively ask them for their encouragement and cooperation.</li></ul>

Make People Help You Keep Off Sugar

Craving something sweet? Try:<ul><li>Sliced apples with nut butter</li><li>Fresh berries with a handful of nuts</li><li>Whipped ricotta with roasted cherries</li><li>Baked cinnamon apples</li><li>Herbal tea that has a sweet note such as vanilla</li></ul>Craving something salty? Try:<ul><li>Guacamole and cucumber “chips”</li><li>Veggies or crackers (without added sugars or refined flour) and hummus</li><li>Biltong (an air-dried beef jerky) or turkey or salmon jerky</li><li>A handful of nuts or seeds</li><li>Dishes using eggs!</li></ul>

10 Foods that Help Stop Cravings

Here are 8 ways to stop a craving in its tracks and the snacks will help you satisfy a sugar craving. You'll have a trimmer body and a healthier heart.

food

Food

health

Health

Stop Sugar Cravings Now!

Halal food generally refers to what's allowed under Islamic law. It's the opposite of haram, which means unlawful or prohibited. Meat can be halal or haram, depending on how the animal was slaughtered. Halal meat is usually labelled as such in most non-muslim countries, and fruits and vegetables are always halal.

Understanding halal food

For meat to be certified halal, it must be slaughtered in a manner known as dhabiha. It means cutting through the jugular vein, carotid artery, and windpipe in order to drain all blood from the carcass. Consuming blood is considred haram. During the process, a Muslim must recite a dedication known as tasmiya or shahada. Carrion, when an animal dies of illness or natural causes, is also considered haram. Some animals are always haram to eat, such as pork, donkeys and horses, fanged animals (cat, dogs, bears, etc), birds of prey, reptiles, and animals such as donkeys.

Halal meat

Vegan food is alway halal except if it contains alcohol, which is considered haram. Vegetarian food, such as dairy and eggs, depends on one's interpretaion of Islamic law. This is because:<ul><li>Dairy and eggs are often produced by methods involving non-halal animal slaughter. Cheese could also contain non-halal animal rennet.</li><li>Some animals are often fed non-halal products as part of their diet, such as pork by-products.</li></ul>

Halal food

Observed by millions of Muslims worldwide, Ramadan is an interesting mix of austerity and celebration. Read on to find out why it’s so important to the Islamic faith

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Communication

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

travel

Travel

Ramadan: Islam's holiest month

Halal meat could be defined as Controversial. Why? Find out more about what Halal means on Fine Dining Lovers.

What Halal food means? | Fine Dining Lovers

Videos are becoming major marketing assets. They can get your products noticed by a wider audience, build your brand awareness and bring in sales. This is why understanding video SEO is so helpful to modern marketers.Product videos are also a powerful way to boost your conversions by demonstrating your products in action.So how to optimize your video content to turn it into an effective marketing medium? Here are all the steps.

The Product Video

Run your target keywords in tools like SE Ranking and go through those keywords to identify those that may benefit from a video explanation.SE Ranking will alert you of keyword difficulty (i.e. how hard it is going to be to rank your content on the first page) and generate the SERP snapshot showing some recent movements.<a href="https://seranking.com/blog/keyword-clustering/">Keyword clustering</a> is a solid technique that will help you identify topics behind those keywords and optimize your future video for a group of search queries rather than an individual keyword string.

Step 1: Research Your SEO Opportunities

Start small and simple and enhance your tactics going forward:<ul><li>Create explainer videos using tools like Zoom</li><li>Create video animations using tools like Animatron</li><li>Put together video slideshows using tools like PlayPlay</li></ul>In fact, there are lots of tools that can make it easy for anyone to create useful and professional videos. These include iMovie, VideoLeap, etc. None of those tools requires any serious training or money investments.

Step 2: Create Your Video

Youtube is where video marketing should start (and in many niches, end).<ul><li>Youtube is a discovery platform of its own. If you do your job right (more on this below), Youtube will start suggesting your videos to people who want similar content or like similar topics. This way, your products have a chance to be discovered by someone who never knew they needed you. This is powerful because Youtube is an insanely popular platform.</li><li>Youtube ranks well! I don’t have any official stats to support this but from my own observations, 90% of videos in those video carousels come from Youtube.</li></ul>

Step 3: Upload Your Video to Youtube

Google has got much better at indexing video content and understanding what the video is about.Yet, textual context still matters for organic rankings, as even Googlers admit that text content is still important for the algorithm to rank pages:

Step 4: Create Text Content Around It

<ul><li>Focus your video title around the keyword you identified in the very first step of this article</li><li>Don’t forget to add your URL on top of your description to make it visible before the click</li><li>Add hashtags to the video description to help Youtube categorize your video</li><li>Create a clickable table of contents using Youtube timestamps.</li></ul>

Optimization Ideas

While text is important, backlinks are still key to ranking anything in organic search. While those backlinks will hardly help a video rank inside the Youtube platform, they are crucial to getting your video ranked inside organic search carousels, and those views will help it do better inside Youtube as well.<ul><li>If you are losing the point, let me make it simple for you:</li><li>You need backlinks to rank your videos in Google’s search</li><li>Google will send views to your video</li><li>Those highly-targeted views will help your video gain more visibility on Youtube as well.</li></ul>

Step 5: Link to Your Video Page and Share Around

Engagement is crucial for Youtube visibility as the platform wants to surface content that provokes discussions and shares. So what you really need for your video success is engagement in the form of likes and comments. But the next step is engaging back. You need to be regularly there to reply to comments and share your videos again.

Step 6: Come back Often to Reply to Comments

Video optimization is an important part of any SEO strategy, and it is also one of the most doable ones. You don’t need huge budgets to launch a video strategy for your brand, and the smart SEO-focused approach it will yield solid results within a couple of months.

Final Thoughts

Tips from Video SEO expert Ann Smarty on how to expertly optimize your own videos for search, even on a modest budget.

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Marketing & Sales

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Society, Arts & Culture

Video SEO: How to Optimize Your Videos for Search - SharpSpring

There are two central processes that shape brand flagship platforms:<ol><li>Consumer crowdsourcing and crowd-sending of products; and</li><li>Content</li></ol>

Central Processes That Shape Brand Flagship Platforms

Crowdsourcing refers to consumers drawing value from platform participants like the brand, other consumers, or third-party businesses. Crowd-sending refers to consumers providing value to there platform participants.According to a study, these two manifest in various interactions on flagship platforms. We can group these interactions into five key platform building blocks: transaction block, community block, benchmarking block, guidance block, and inspiration block.They argue that brands should assemble building blocks and functionalities based on a common overarching consumer goal.

Crowdsourcing vs Crowd-sending

<ul><li>Ad-Hoc: consumer crowdsourcing and crowd-sending intensity is limited and interactions are focused on the brand's core product</li><li>Capitalizing: intense consumer crowdsourcing  while integrating value creation</li><li>Catalyzing: intense consumer crowd-sending with the implication that consumers are integrated in the value creation process</li><li>Nurturing: consumers engage in intense crowdsourcing and crowd-sending</li></ul>

The 4 Different States of Consumer-Platform Relationships

Just like anything else in the industry, brand flagship platforms show the risk of dilution of the core brand due to the inclusivity of third parties, platform hijacking through consumers, and high operational costs.

Risks of Brand Flagship Platforms

Flagship platforms shift the market focus from products to entire category spaces, require measurements that extend beyond brand performance to interaction quality, and demand new resources and skills that enable the ongoing orchestration of interactions and relationships.

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Technology & The Future

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Business

product

Product & Design

Why Product Brands Should Build Their Own Platforms

At its core, Vipassana is a meditation technique that helps you “explore the nature of reality”. Vipassana can be translated as “Iisight,” a clear awareness of exactly what is happening as it happens. By learning to observe our ‘reality’, and practice non-reaction to sensation, we begin to intimately understand the nature of life as impermanent, the root of all human suffering and remove the walls of illusion, craving, and aversion.
The practice of Vipassana suggests that we can only TRULY know through experience. This is now something you can apply to Product Management. Do not underestimate the power of doing. It allows us to go beyond conceptualizing, to a much deeper, more impactful level, ingraining themselves in our mind in a way that superficial processing can not.

Vipassana: Immersion

Stepping back is a practice we can take for granted. 
Observing thoughts, memories, emotions, or situations — whether retrospectively or in the moment — gives you, as a PM the ability to understand and empathize with your customers more deeply and to be kinder to yourself.

Gaining Clarity And Perspective

As Product Managers, it can be easy to get caught up in success or wallow in failures. But your products have little momentum of their own. 
By recognizing the impermanence of your products, you can be more pro-active in ensuring they continue performing, or turn around a sinking ship.

Impermanence

Deep thought work is crucial to the Product Manager mindset. With your work, no stone is left unturned. Multiple iterations and approaches must be thought through. 
Training that muscle will heighten your ability to go deep, to think more clearly and more deeply than ever before. And this, perhaps, is the most vital skill a product manager can have.

The Focus Muscle

Product Managment and Meditation: An Outstanding article.

Can you meditate your way to better Product Management? Paul Wissam honed his product management skills by attending 10-day mediation retreat.

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Career

mindfulness

Mindfulness

Meditate Your Way to Better Product Management - Brainmates - Championing Product Management

Mindfulness has various mental and psychological benefits like increased concentration, better memory, better self-control and a decrease in emotional reactiveness, allowing us to handle our problems in a calm manner.
However, the focus of a mindful person is inward, and that can translate into increased egotism and selfishness in some people.

Mindfulness And Selfishness

Broadly speaking, eastern cultures(India and China) which gave birth to Hinduism and Buddhism, have more independent-minded people.Western cultures, on the other hand, are more interdependent. A series of experiments involving mindfulness exercises showed that self-perception and self-concern were heightened among the participants.

The ‘ME’ in Meditation

The original Mindfulness practices from the east might have been corrupted, diluted or taught incorrectly by western teachers, morphing it into yet another technique to boost productivity and performance. The original practice of mindfulness does not focus on doing or performing but simply being. The concept of non-doing is alien to most people in the western part of the world.

Mindfulness Or Mindlessness

Mindfulness, which has now gone mainstream courtesy of the various apps, books and online courses, may be increasing selfish behaviour and triggering anxiety attacks, stuff that is never mentioned anywhere. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The Risks Of Mindfulness

Instead of practising the broken Americanized versions of ancient practices of the east, one can start with:<ul><li>Basic breathing exercises to improve clarity, and allow us to live in the present.</li><li>Increasing our love, compassion and kindness with everyone around us, including strangers.</li><li>Practising mindful listening with attentiveness and care.</li></ul>

The Way To Start Mindfulness

Mindfulness may have many benefits – but the latest research shows it can also make some people more selfish.

How mindfulness could make you selfish

Peak performance requires body and mind training, something known well to Olympic athletes. They employ various mental strategies to increase their focus, endurance, resilience and to handle the intense pressure.
Olympic athletes utilize meditation to be calm from within, not being disturbed by the noise outside.

Do What Olympic Athletes Do

<ul><li>Many of us scoff at the word meditation as we cannot think of just sitting idly with our eyes closed, doing practically nothing.</li><li>There are various misconceptions about what meditation is and are the root cause of agitation and the inability to meditate.</li><li>Most misconceptions arise because we think of meditation as an activity, something we have to do.</li></ul>

Meditation: Heard But Never Practiced

We need to forget all we have learned about meditation and:<ol><li>Start small by stopping a few moments to close our eyes and take a deep breath.</li><li>Remove any prejudice of what meditation is supposed to be.</li><li>Don’t expect any grand result.</li><li>Create your own version of meditation that can be relaxing and empowering.</li></ol>

Creating Your Meditation

To meditate actively:<ol><li>Focus on your breath and the rhythm of the current movement.</li><li>Feel completely present in your mind and body, not being carried away by random thoughts.</li><li>Breathe in and take four steps, followed by breathing out and another four steps, resisting the mind's need to distract itself with thoughts.</li><li>Daydreaming can also be a good meditation, when we visualize a positive outcome with utmost detail, helping us align with our goal.</li></ol>

Olympic Style Active Meditation

<ol><li>The speed of our daily work increases, along with the quality.</li><li>There is an increase in resilience along with a decrease in emotional turmoil in case of failure.</li><li>Meditation helps our mind rest and restore itself, reducing stress and anxiety(but we knew that already!).</li><li>Only a few weeks of meditation can provide us with renewed energy and a refreshed perspective about life.</li></ol>

Benefits Of Meditation

Even if you can’t do a cartwheel, you can learn a lesson from Olympians about mental fortitude and focus.


Beyond Distraction

Stop Sugar Cravings Now!

What Halal food means? | Fine Dining Lovers

Video SEO: How to Optimize Your Videos for Search - SharpSpring

Why Product Brands Should Build Their Own Platforms

Patrick Blair