QiWei (Amy) Chen's blog

This blog introduces how to get motivated and productive in the morning by following appropriate and efficient morning rituals. As demonstrated, many people are aware that morning is a great time for setting things right for a smooth flow in the next hours, but indeed repeat the rushing and feeling dispirited because of tiredness. Following the seven given morning routines can be a great help to get out of the dilemma, including getting exercise, practicing daily goal setting, improving oneself, doing the most result-yielding task in the first place, etc.

Relating to Chapter four – Theories of motivation, there two types of motivators, intrinsic motivators, which is a person’s internal desire to do something, as well as extrinsic motivators that come from outside the person and includes such things as pay, bonuses, and rewards. The blog generally talks about intrinsic motivators: a productive routine should be gone through in order to managing oneself, producing outstanding results, and wishing to live a successful life.

Under the subtitle of “review your life”, it argues the significance of practicing daily goal setting and visualizing one’s dreams. If people spend time envisioning things they want to accomplish, then they will get motivated to work on their goals because they want to feel good about the achievement. This can be applied to expectancy theory, which is the theory that individuals act based on their evaluation of weather their effort will lead to good performance and be followed by an attractive outcome.

The section of “first things first” suggests people do the most important and result-yielding task first so that they feel lighter and complete other tasks more easily once the ugliest task is already done. Meanwhile, the goal-setting theory says that specific and difficult goals, with feedback, lead to higher performance, which develops on the idea of “difficult ones first”.

I found this blog interesting and practical since it indeed provides several useful tips to get motivated in the morning and creates an optimistic atmosphere for pursuing dreams.

word count: 332

Continue reading #6 Motivation in morning rituals

In one’s lifetime, he or she would meet countless number of people and make different friends at different stages of life. As being a close person of somebody, have you ever imaged how you two would be like in the future and considered the potential impact on your mutual relationship by the outside world, for example, the impact of distance, after all there is often a high probability that two people, no matter buddies or couples, have no choice but to be apart for an unknown period of time.

Each individual owns a unique value system, which is defined as “a hierarchy based on a ranking of an individual’s values in terms of their intensity”. More importantly, according to Rokeach value survey, everyone’s terminal values, which are “goals that individuals would like to achieve during their lifetime” differ due to genetic differentiated personality traits as well as the influence by what they see and experience. When two people are separated by distance, it results in a difference in the view they see, the people they see, and also the incidents they come across, which could further lead to conflicts and misunderstandings easily and negatively affect a relationship.

Our generation is known as millennials in the workplace, who grew up during prosperous times and have life goals more oriented toward becoming rich and famous, which might be an original cause to have the wish of studying abroad or seeking job in huge and international cities other than hometown, therefore long distance relationship occurs more in this generation than in the past. On the other side, millennials take technology as granted and tend to be electronically networked, which makes maintaining a relationship through communication online possible.

It is also worth noticed two theories of motivation. The third hierarchy of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, which refers to social, is required to be satisfied after physiological and safety needs being satisfied, whereas a long distance can be a threat to completely meet each other’s needs of belongingness, acceptance and friendship. In McClelland’s theory of needs, the accomplishment of need for power: “the need to make others behave in a way that they would not have behaved otherwise” can be influenced by geographic factors due to lack of direct communication and understandings.

Relating to Shunan Jiang’s blog, which talks about that lack of communication and differences in values make long-distance relationship hard, it is interesting to read because it reveals a societal difficulty from OB’s perspective. It reminds me that, to maintain such a relationship, high emotional intelligence is necessary because of how important the value of emotional stability is.

word count: 436

Continue reading #5 How geographical factor plays a role in a long-term relationship

Recently a breaking news quickly attracts attention of international students in Canada.

At midnight of February 7, two Chinese international students in the streets of Toronto quarreled, and soon it upgraded to physical altercation. Before 1:30 am, they fought fiercely in the southwest corner of Yonge Street and Finch Street. At 2:00 am, after the police received the report and arrived, the 19-year-old Max has been wounded in the brain and was unconscious. February 8 at 1:00 or so, the hospital announced the injured head serious injuries, rescue invalid, and stopped for him to continue to supply oxygen. Meanwhile, Kay, attending the court’s first hearing, was charged with murder charges.

Police says that the two Chinese students were 19 years old, Wang (Haozhi Wang) and Boqiao Fan (transliteration), who are called Max and Kay in English names. It is reported that the reason behind the fight turned out to be a girl called Kiki, who is also an 18-year-old international student. Informed players claimed that Kiki was at the place during the fight and was involved in instigation, cheating Kay that she was bullied by Max and inciting Kay to fight Max even harder, and that Kiki is indeed the one who betrayed. It caused audience to sigh a lot because the dead loved Kiki so much that his posts on social media are all relating to Kiki. The boys are outstanding teenagers because of good-looking appearance, ideal family background, and mild personalities, but their lives are destroyed early due to the girl they love.

From the perspective of OB, the altercation occurred because their attitudes and values are against of one another. The situation, including time and setting, also played a role in the incident. The murder Kay does Muay Thai for approximately 7 years but never harmed others. Many people show sympathy for him though he killed the other since he is told by friends that he is modest and humble in daily lives. When we look into the causes of his mistake, it is worth noticed the attribution theory that when we observe that seems like atypical behavior by an individual, we attempt to determine whether it is internally or externally caused. In this case, the internal attribution is Kay’s physical power and personal dislike toward Max while the external attribution is his girlfriend’s encouragement. Kiki’s actions can be related to “bad” motivation in terms of reward system and verbal motivation.

word count: 403

Continue reading #4 Man, 19, charged with second-degree murder after fight, with the other died

Subbiah, a criminal for tremendous volume of sexual assault and one of Canada’s worst sex offenders, was ultimately convicted in December 1992 and January 1997 of 75 crimes, including 26 counts of sexual assault against more than 30 victims, four of whom were minors and one as young as 14. After being painstakingly interviewed, 120 out of 500 women who survived from the sexual assault by Subbiah agreed to go to the court. “The offences involved you luring and grooming the female victims using deception and manipulation, subduing them with intoxicants allowing you to have full control over them while they were incapacitated, and sexually assaulting them. You also took pornographic pictures of the victims while they were nude and unconscious,” which is the disturbing tactics revealed by a 2014 Parole Board of Canada review of Subbiah’s case, which indicates that the difficulty of defending or even fighting back during the attack and the seriousness of the issue.

As Chapelle, who is a survivor, claimed: it is never the fault of the survivor for being attacked regardless of how she behaved, what she said, what she was wearing. I strongly agree with the statement since a lot of comments on website today are criticizing the female victims in terms of what they were wearing or the effectiveness of the way they revolted, which is significantly ridiculous to me since the crime of sexual assault is, without doubt, the fault of the offender, and there is no way to blame a victim in any kind of case. As previously mentioned, a lot of the victims chose to keep silent because they were harmed and felt shameful to speak out, which is understandable but not encouraged. Analyzing from the aspect of an individual’s value system, especially instrumental values which refers to preferable ways of behaving, part of the female victims chose not to go to a court to accuse the offender and remind other women and instead kept silent due to their values and personal attitudes; they prefer to hide their dark experience from people around them as well as the public.

Also, Hodgson’s general moral principles, which refer to ethics, are noticeable. Ethics is the study of moral values or principles that guide our behaviour and inform people whether actions are right or wrong. Clearly, the offenders of sexual assault are against ethics and have a lack of moral values so that we can of course indicate that their actions are clearly wrong and are worth being blamed and boycotted.

word count: 419

Continue reading #3 Survivor of one of Canada’s worst sex offenders explains why she kept silent

The definition of a group is two or more people with a common relationship while the definition of a team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. The process of development from a group to a team is worth devoting time and effort and is remarkable.

Our group of COMM292 has formed for approximately one week, and the due date of our first group fantasy project Is approaching. At first, we are distinct individuals with diverse values and personal traits; by combining and relating to each other strongly, I am confident to declare that our team has already been successfully formed. Our group name is Outliers, and creating our own sense of identity in the vast and open world is what we do. We are undoubtedly differentiated; but as a team, we are together one sole beam of power.

By doing the icebreaker and charter assignment, we have set up a list of rules and established regular meeting times for group interaction, built trust and commitment, closely understanding each other through communication. We are accomplishing all the factors involved in managing a real team.

Each of us, sharing the common target, are clear about what needs to be done and take initiative to play a useful role with our differentiated skills and merits to together achieve our goal. With every team member satisfying role expectations, our meeting ran smoothly. In terms of stages of group development and accompanying issues, including forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, we gradually moved from being independent to working interdependently with group members. From getting to know and understand each other in terms of personal information as well as life goals to performing the task at hand with each one taking a role that he or she is good at, the process of becoming effective is considered complex but meaningful.

I would like to mention my classmate Bamboo’s blog indicating the diversity of her team since my team is also relatively diverse, which will ultimately lead to harvest and success of this course, as Bamboo believes.

word count: 361

Continue reading #2 Groups and Teamwork

Around January 27, Air Miles made the move of quietly lowering the value of points in the reward program without informing its collectors, which surprises and angers the collectors. One of the collectors declares that she felt like Air Miles had stolen over $2000 of available travel to her, pointing out the unfairness form the collectors’ perspective. On the other side, Air miles made its different claim that the adjusting of price for vacation packages is due to the fact that it is a “subsidized” rewards category requiring a higher level of consumer support, emphasizing its original roots of its actions and defending itself from the criticism. While Peter believes that Air miles is doing this in order to make up for lost profits since its owner Toronto-based LoyaltyOne just canceled its expiry policy, Air miles insisted that it is their policy to be able to change their program at any time without notice to the collector, which explained its action of hiding the change, and that it hasn’t lower the value of miles in any other category but without indicating what it would do to make up the shortfall, which from my point of view is not responsible and not showing sincerity to solve the problem.

It seems to me that the news is related to what we learned in Chapter 2: perception, personality, and emotions. People have different perception of a single situation since they have different attitudes, motives, interests, experience, expectations, and different targets. In this case, the collectors are angry toward the situation because they care about their own profits and lost; they see the dropped values caused by Air Miles in the first place because they consider it from a collector’s point of view. Meanwhile, Air Miles also care about its own earning and lost; the adjustment looks fair to them, or at least claimed to be fair by itself is because they consider the benefit brought by it to be more significant than the comparatively slighter harm to its collectors. They have opposite expectations in terms of values, therefore holding distinct opinions and perception, which results in disagreement and conflict.

In the group of collectors, consensus occurs since almost all of them are against what Air Miles did, including lowering the values, hiding its actions as well as not showing motives to remedy afterward.

Lastly, in my personal opinion, what Air Miles did is understandable but not acceptable since it is to me against the business ethics, and weather taking responsibility or not can really represent the firm.

word count: 424

Continue reading #1 Air Miles quietly drops value of some points, angering collectors