Inspiration: The Hidden Stories of Your Soul

Don’t Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. ~Don Miguel Ruiz

Do You Take Things Personally?

When you take something personally or are offended, you are inadvertently agreeing with what has been said about you.

Does this ring true or are you still having a hard time grappling with this concept?

If you are still wrestling with this statement, it could stem from not being able to take responsibility for your own thought streams and self-identification.  I know this sounds a bit harsh but if we are going to effectively tackle self-worth issues; we need to get our hands initially dirty so that we can give them a good scrubbing.

Complete Honesty is Required

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation. ~Moliere

When someone insults you it is only the tip of the iceberg to what’s lying underneath.  When you feel slighted you are actually supporting the view of your counterpart because it has touched a nerve.  If your nerves are being twisted, you know there is something more to the perceived insult that meets the eye.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. ~Carl Jung

The person doing the insulting is only reminding you of something that needs to be taken out within yourself to have a good, long and hard look at.  Although you probably won’t want to give them a gold medal for their efforts, I assure you that some people are in this life to push your buttons.  Although this may seem unloving, they actually give you the opportunity to reconsider your belief structures – a chance to turn your trash into treasure.

Taking a Look at the Opposite Pole — Confidence

If someone tried to hurt you, or perhaps even unintentionally, says something to you that you don’t agree with – no problem – you usually brush off this kind of ‘offense’ because it really doesn’t bother you.  It could be an area in your life that you are 100% sure you have waxed.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies. ~Roderick Thorp

So for instance, you are a rocket scientist and someone calls you stupid, the chances of you having a wobbly melt-down in the public lavatory are going to be slim. But let’s take another example, perhaps one that we all have had to deal with in one way or another.

Vanity Fair or Foul?

Let’s say you are happy with your appearance and feel you are a fine specimen, someone passes by in a vehicle and shouts out, ‘hey, freak!’

It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to. ~W.C. Fields

Do you agree with that or not? If you are 100% confident that you are a perfectly dashing human being, just as the Universe intended, then you would most likely shrug the comment off and have a good chuckle about it. Why? This is because you whole-heartedly disagree with the statement.

However, if you are someone whose confidence peaks and troughs daily, you will probably instantly go into depression.  The nerve that has been struck is your internal agreement about yourself, not what the other person has said.  All they have done is ignited the spark on the BBQ that you are going to make sure you roast on.  It is a form of self-torture.   To agree with anyone over anything stemming from feelings of lack is disempowering.

Re-examine all that you have been told…dismiss that which insults your soul. ~Walt Whitman

We live and we learn, we travel within and we discover who we are.

And if you enjoyed reading this post, feel free to share it – Sharing is Caring and Wisdom Never Decreases by Being Shared.

This article was written by Cherie Roe Dirksen. Cherie is a self-empowerment author, multi-media artist and meditation music composer from Cape Town, South Africa.  

She has weekly blogs on her site www.cherieroedirksen.com where she discusses practical and insightful perspectives on taking responsibility for your actions and ultimately living the life you came here to experience.  

She also devotes a weekly blog to creativity and the artistic process. You can follow her on Twitter (@cheriedirksen) and Facebook (The Art of Empowerment)

http://www.purposefairy.com/8318/the-hidden-stories-of-your-soul/

Non-Traditional Education: How MOOCs will shape the future of higher education

How MOOCs will shape the future of higher education.

Heather Hiles

February 04, 2013Sharein

MOOCs are sweeping the land. It’s the Next Big Thing and folks in both Silicon Valley and academia are abuzz. But is the hype deserved and sustainable, or is this just another sign of a venture capital-fueled tech bubble?

Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCs – look to be the real deal. Companies like Udacity,Coursera and edX provide a teaching, course management, and enrollment platform where professors from top-flight universities can offer their most popular courses. From Stanford to MIT to Harvard, most of the heavy-weight universities have skin in these particular games. So yes, these hot-hot-hot start-ups have taken a lot of foundation or venture capital money (or both), but they also have a whole lot of substance going on.

These companies are also attracting and enrolling a huge number of learners of all ages. It helps that at this stage most of the available courses are free, but it is also an indication of the hunger out there for high-quality online learning opportunities that are also highly accessible (no admissions review or process) and affordable.

Considering the next big debt crisis will be centered on student loans, and with the ever-escalating cost of a traditional four-year degree education, more and more students are looking for ways to learn without necessarily incurring the costs of a traditional education (or a least a full four or five years of a college education).

But beyond even all this, these platforms are a response to a much larger trend, which is the slow upending of traditional classroom-based education. With the torrid growth of Khan Academy, a non-profit provider of instructional videos for K – 12 students, and the increasing ubiquity of alternative “universities” such as TEDed and Lynda.com for lifelong learning, the availability of high-quality instruction at no or a low cost has never been higher.

“Americans are going to start thinking about higher education not as, you know, a traditional college, necessarily, or even a traditional night school, but as something that’s sort of moves beyond these traditional barriers of time and place,” said Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman Foundation in a recent NPR story.

A secondary and more nascent trend is the concept of “credentials 2.0”, which is born of the need to document alternative learning accomplishment and mastery. While everyone recognizes the legitimacy of a bachelor’s degree from an accredited four-year college or university, evaluators don’t quite know what to do with claims that courses were completed via Khan Academy or edX or TEDed. While some provide certificates of completion – more commonly referred to as badges – others do not yet, and those that do may not offer versions that are downloadable or otherwise portable.

In response, Mozilla has been at work building a badge platform called Open Badgesspecifically targeted at both traditional and non-traditional learning environments so students and lifelong learners have a way of verifying a course of study has been completed to a third-party evaluator. And companies like Pathbrite (where I am CEO) are building portfolio platforms that enable the collection and presentation of “artifacts” that can include earned badges, digital versions of transcripts and traditional diplomas, and all manner of work product demonstrating competency.

Though MOOCs may sound gimmicky and faddy and even silly, they are the real deal. They’re spawning a supporting ecosystem. And they just may be the future of education.