{"id":14071,"date":"2009-12-10T14:40:03","date_gmt":"2009-12-10T21:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stage.headlessnauedu-b6hgdzckfdgxgzhe.westus-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=14071"},"modified":"2015-08-17T14:50:39","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:50:39","slug":"teaching-students-to-lose-themselves-to-find-themselves-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/teaching-students-to-lose-themselves-to-find-themselves-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching students to lose themselves to find themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you don\u2019t lose yourself, you might not ever find yourself, warns\u00a0Heidi Wayment<\/strong>, a Northern Arizona University professor.<\/p>\n

Wayment, who teaches positive psychology, is teaching her students some of the same techniques she uses in sports competition to help them become more competitive in life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worry about today\u2019s young generation not experiencing the feeling of being totally absorbed in anything. Many spend a great deal of time being social on internet outlets such as Facebook, and overall, this type of activity leads to a more harmful form of self-focus. It\u2019s about \u2018How do I look? How am I presenting myself?\u2019 meanwhile these activities may take away from time they could use to extend and develop themselves,\u201d Wayment says. \u201cPart of the learning process required to do well in school and life is to have the kind of patience to get lost in the material. To learn to do this, students need to train their ability to focus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wayment played professional women\u2019s basketball for more than 20 years and recently joined a senior volleyball league made of retired semi-professional and professional athletes. She also coauthored the book,\u00a0Transcending Self-interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I stand up by the volleyball net and get lost in the game, it\u2019s like being out of time. I don\u2019t know where I am or how old I am, I just know I am on the court. It is such a relaxing and wonderful feeling,\u201d She says. \u201cIn competition and performance of any kind, the trick is not worry about how you are doing. The minute people start worrying about that, it interferes with their performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says to get into the flow of things, start minimizing self-talk. She has her students learn to quiet their ego by engaging in a hobby, developing a skill that satisfies them, reading for at least two-three hours at time and by spending enough time to get absorbed in something long enough to complete tasks or projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether it\u2019s for sports, a job, music or art, we tend to be more successful when we sort of lose ourselves,\u201d she says. \u201cOnce you learn how to focus, you can adapt that experience to other situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wayment, who has taken informal surveys of her students, says the time students spend being creative or reading is \u201cminuscule\u201d compared to former generations.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology and instant gratification that has been available to the younger generation since they were tiny and is causing a big cultural shift and attention spans are too quick,\u201d she says. \u201cIt turns out that hobbies and creative activities are important for people\u2019s sense of well being, but developing a skill is not going to happen fast, and that\u2019s something I am trying to get across to my students.\u201d<\/p>\n

To help impart the notion of becoming absorbed in work, Wayment teaches \u201cFlow,\u201d a theory promoting success through learning how to savor the moment created by author and world-renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you don\u2019t lose yourself, you might not ever find yourself, warns\u00a0Heidi Wayment, a Northern Arizona University professor. Wayment, who teaches positive psychology, is teaching her students some of the same techniques she uses in sports competition to help them become more competitive in life. \u201cI worry about today\u2019s young generation not experiencing the feeling…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":14075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}