Did you miss our last webinar entitled “Highly Sensitive People, Synesthesia, and Empathy”? Here are some take-aways from the event presented by Tamra Excell and Luna Lindsey. Feel free to head over to our youtube channel to peruse the entire video!

Tamra Excell describes Synesthesia as “Different perceptual modalities that get connected and crossed over.”

There are two different ways people experience Synesthesia; either as a Projector, which is someone who physically sees these perceptual cross-overs, or as an Associator, who sees them too, but inside his/her head.

Synesthesia presents in many different ways, but here are five examples:

1. Synesthetes may have color correlations to names, shapes, notes, days of the week, etc.

2. They may experience a visual-sound correlation, like seeing a ripple in a lake, and then hearing the ripple continue in their head.

3. Tactile-sound is another example. For example, Synesthetes may feel or hear the crinkling of tin foil beneath their fingers without grabbing it.

4. Another form is called Misophonia, where sound triggers an emotion, such as fingers on a chalkboard.

5. Synesthetes may also experience Mirror Touch, which is feeling a sensation upon seeing another person experience it, such feeling the cold water running over someone else’s hand as if it were your own.

Angela Lee Duckworth has a quotient for why some students succeed and some don’t. Amazingly, the determining factor most likely to predict success is not IQ, socioeconomic status, or talent. It’s grit.

In her intriguing TED Talk entitled “The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Duckworth details the study she executed in various settings such as West Point, National Spelling Bees, and inner-city schools, trying to predict who would be most likely to graduate, excel, and persist. Time and time again, she discovered that a person’s grit was the most accurate indicator of long-term success.

Duckworth describes grit as “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals… Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Naysayers might say that obviously this grit must be combined with a good deal of talent to reap success, but Duckworth’s studies indicate that “talent doesn’t make you gritty… in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.” In other words, as quoted by many famous entrepreneurs such as Daniel Pink, “persistence trumps talent.”

What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? What is your dream? Students are asked these questions throughout their education. However, once you’ve clearly outlined your life purpose, it’s easy to think the hardest part is over. It isn’t. Figuring out what you want is only part of the picture. Figuring out how you want to get there is the other.

Too often, fear is what holds us back from living the life of our dreams. In Tim Ferriss’ electrifying TED talk on defining your fears, he recounts something the famous stoic Seneca once said: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” This is why Ferriss, hugely successful entrepreneur and writer of bestselling book “The Four Hour Workweek”, created something he calls “Fear-setting.” Fear-setting is a three page exercise he does once a quarter, and is what he attributes all his biggest successes to. Here’s how it works.