When he was a school going boy, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. He is said to have dropped out school at an early age as teachers considered him nearly retarded and a waste of time trying to teach him.
That was Thomas Edison who turned out to be one of the most innovative people of his generation. His intelligence was legendary.
Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 United States patents to his name.
We can learn key lessons from this great man and others who have made huge contributions to the development of mankind as we continue on the journey of increasing our IQ.
Keep a Journal
A study of the habits of 300 geniuses discovered that they were all “compulsive” diary or journal keepers.
Thomas Edison wrote three million pages of letters, notes and personal thoughts in hundreds of personal journals throughout his life.
Think of a journal as an extension of your brain. Keeping a journal does not just allow you to record your ideas, it will also help you to develop and refine them.
Encourage your child to keep a journal of outlining his/her ideas.
Cultivate Your Emotional Intelligence
For a long time a lot of emphasis was placed on certain aspects of intelligence, such as the following:
• Math skills;
• Logical reasoning;
• Spatial skills;
• Verbal skills;
• Understanding analogies; and so on.
It is not enough to have a high IQ. A high IQ is just potential. The question is what are you going to do with that potential? You need to ensure that whatever your IQ happens to be, make excellent use of it.
And one of the best ways to ensure that you make good use of your IQ is by developing your emotional intelligence.
It has become clear that a lot of people waste their potential by thinking, communicating and behaving in ways that hinder their chances to succeed.
Emotional intelligence is being recognised as an ability which will allow you to take full advantage of your other talents and skills.
Take a little time with yourself before acting, speaking or doing anything that later in retrospect you will think, “that was stupid”.
One of the best ways to help your child improve his emotional intelligence is by way of mid-brain activation.
Engage All of Your Senses
Research has found that the human brain learns best through multi-sensory association.
Children and adults learn best when they are engaged in a learning activity that uses sight, sound, tactile feedback, spatial orientation, emotions and even smell and taste.
For instance, a child who is given the definition of the word “weightless” in verbal format will get that information through one channel: the audio channel.
Here is a way of increasing learning and retention:
• If you show the same child a video of an astronaut floating in space while you say the word “weightless,” it becomes a two-dimensional learning experience: the child sees and hears the word.
• To further firmly implant the definition, you can have the child bounce up and down on a trampoline and calling out “weightlessness” when the child is up in the air and the definition now becomes embedded more firmly.
This method of learning applies to adults too.
If there is information that you are trying to learn, use as many different channels as possible, and engage as many of your senses as you can, in order to make learning and retention easier.
Reading
This is especially essential if you want to boost the IQ of your child.
The fact is that reading will stimulate thought and when learning new vocabulary, more neuro-pathways are necessarily created.
Reading helps train your child to use abstract thinking, as they have to imagine other places, people and things they cannot see but can only imagine while reading.
This proves incredibly helpful general problem-solving tasks.
The author is the founder of Peak Performance International, a human potential development firm.
coach@peakperformance-int.com
