Introduction to Psychology by Asif Osman

To another interesting topic by a very interesting speaker we all love to listen to Brother Asif Rahman. Most of you know him, but just for tradition's sake I'll be introducing in.

A this is just briefly Brother Asif Hussum.

I'm the one time President of Bahrain and the UAE with experience in management across four industries, travel, loyalty, marketing, training and e commerce gateways including online payment processing. He is a consultant who has been presenting customized interactive workshops since 2002 to audiences in Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi, Oman and a few other Middle Eastern countries. His passion to solve people problems has brought his clients less conflict, improved productivity and and an increased effectiveness in the workplace. Brother Azif has 25 years of experience as a senior executive in the travel training, payment processing, loyalty and marketing industries. He has traveled widely and managed multinational goods as a soft skills trainer. He has delivered various talks and courses for SMEs in the GCC, various businesses, professional groups and conferences units of warranty organizations. His expertise has also been exercising customized personal training sessions for students, managers and leaders. His energetic, humorous and interactive presentation style provides his workshops with a variety and pace which makes the atmosphere conducive to retentive learning. Currently he is unemployed, therefore spends much of his time learning as he believes learning never stops. Today's topic is also very important and I'm sure today.

Brother Adil, are we okay with this? That's fine, a little bit up. So first of all, what a boring introduction. Why do people have to introduce others with so much hype? They just say so and so. Just two lines is enough. I try to tell them that but they don't really want to listen. They want to go the formal way with all these long introductions. So Jazakallah Khair first of all, for most of you who have come in on time and that speaks a little bit about the psychological aspect about your minds and we are going to talk about human behavior. And what is human behavior? It's psychology. So first question that should come to your mind, if it hasn't already, is who is this guy who's going to tell me about how my mind works or how my other friend's mind work? Am I an expert? No, I am a student of psychology. I started learning about psychology about a couple of years ago and hopefully I'll share a few of the certificates that I got. No big deal, anybody can get them. And most of what I learned I learned online. And I'll tell you a little later about why is it that I got into learning about psychology and why Am I doing this presentation here today? I'd like to share that reason with you as well. First of all, psychology, I feel, is such an important but neglected subject. Why is that? I'm not going to count how many people are here. There's roughly about 40 people in here. And what the psychologists researchers are telling us that about 20% of all of us require some sort of treatment throughout our lives. 20% of people on this earth that we live in suffer some sort of mental illness during their lives. Now, when we say the words mental illness, don't think of the word crazy, because that is the usual word that comes to mind. Mental illness equals crazy. No, we're going to talk about mental illnesses and what are really mental illnesses. But don't think of the extreme. The guys who go and bang on people's heads or start jumping up and down, take off their clothes and things like that. That is also mental illness, but that's another extreme. But there are lots and lots of people suffering mental illnesses. And there is a stigma in this world that we live in no matter where we go. And in some places it's more, some places it's less. That do not inform anybody if there is a mental illness in the family. Try to suppress that. Unfortunately, mental illnesses do not get cured because there is a stigma in the society. So this is one of the things that got me interested in learning about the field of psychology. It's an ongoing process. I'm still learning. I'm a student. When I started learning, what did I realize? Can anybody tell me? I realized I know nothing, That I started learning and found that out. Some subjects you start learning and you feel you know a lot. But I started learning and realized I know nothing. Now, as is usual with the presentations that I've done here before, my presentation is not going to be with just me doing some talking. My presentation, I hope to make it interactive and interactive in a way that you can ask me and interject at any time. This is my own personal style. I don't ask you to do that in every speech over here. But at the same time, I'm going to request you that if I am in a train of speaking, I'm going to say, hold off a minute, I'm going to answer that later, okay? Because I might not be able to finish every question. All right? And once in a while, I'm going to stop and say any questions, okay? So shall we move on? Everybody's alive. Very good. So can I ask all of you guys, who's got a nice little Mobile phone to put it off or on silent if you haven't done that already. You have an old one. It's not nice. Can you give it to me? Okay, so some diseases. Aids, cancer, flu, tb. Here's where it gets interactive. Some of you, please tell me some other diseases I've got. You started. Aids, cancer, flu, tb. Let's hear a few more. Ebola. Ebola, Malaria. Malaria. Diabetes. Cholera. Cholera. Cholera. Huh? Depression. Depression. Finally. This is what I was looking for. That. Who is going to mention a mental disease? Because we do not normally think of mental diseases. When we say diseases, we do not think of mental diseases. But there's a lot and lot of mental diseases. And I think our brother is a smart man because he thought he realized what am I up to. Am I right? Very good. So here's Wikipedia. You know who looks at Wikipedia? Who doesn't look at Wikipedia? Ah, there's a not so smart guy in the end over there. Of course. As long as you don't realize that Wikipedia is absolutely correct. Because did any of you try to go and edit Wikipedia? Very good, very good. Excellent. I've done the same. I'm curious. When they say I can edit something, I want to edit it. So I've gone and edited something and once I did something bad and I changed a good word into a bad word. Of course, the next day I went and changed it back. I just wanted to see how it works. So this is the way Wikipedia works. Not to say that there are no people monitoring it, because a few days later I got a nice little email from somebody who is an administrator in Wikipedia editing, okay? Saying you've done this. By the way, we are monitoring all this, okay? Okay. Anyway, Wikipedia, and do not call it Wikipedia. All nonsense list of mental disorders. Now just look at a. Just see the number of diseases. Any one of you could have said, I don't want you to look at this. It's out of focus. I don't want you to look at this. But if you are looking at Wikipedia or Wikipedia, you will see a list. I don't want you to bother with the number of diseases or the type of disease. I just want to show you the sheer number of diseases there are. So this is just a. Just a few. Okay? Very often. By the way, excuse me. For the past two, three days I've had a cold. And yesterday I was to the point that I might actually not make it today, but I felt much better today. So Alhamdulillah, I'm okay, but my voice is not the best and their speaker system isn't working. So all you're hearing is not the amplified voice. So this is just my voice. Okay? So you're gonna have to put up with it if it's not loud enough. So mental illness is caused by personal weaknesses. Some people actually believe that there's something wrong with that guy. He's a little. People say that there's something wrong with that. You know, he behaves very strangely. You hear that a lot, right? And we do say that sometimes. But actually, mental illness is something that we have to take seriously. We have to realize that some mental illnesses of people, we do not realize that that person cannot do anything about it. If you had diabetes, how would you feel if you. If somebody told you it's your fault, you have a lousy lifestyle, you don't take care of yourself, you just got diabetes. And you say, I exercise, I watch my food, but I'm sick. Is that a fair statement for somebody to say, how did you get this? It's not fair, right? Because it's not your fault. The same way with mental illnesses that it's not very often is not somebody's fault. Okay, So this gets me to, why am I doing this presentation today? How it started is I talked to Zuhair about some of the courses that I'm doing, and he said to me, it sounds very interesting. Can you do a presentation about this? I said, why not? I can do that. And the motivation for me is that when you learn something and you talk about it to other people, what happens? You learn more, you become better with the subject. This is my intention, but there is another reason for this. And I've got to a point where I've learned quite a bit about the introductory part of psychology. And what I've realized is this subject is so important for all of us. All of us should be learning this, or at least scratching the surface, as I have done so far. And it doesn't take a lot of effort to do that. So I want to try to convince you this is the objective of my presentation today. So every presentation should have an objective, right? So the objective of my presentation today is that when you go home today, tomorrow, you want to say, I want to learn a little bit more about this psychology subject this guy talked about. I want to do maybe some of those courses, and there are no costs for some of the courses that I've done. It's absolutely free. All you have to do is spend some time. So people are so, so different. If you look at this room, there's so Many nationalities here. There are so many different backgrounds here. And if you look at the country at large or the world at large, so many different types of people. The way they look, the way they think, the way they behave, the color of their skin, the language that they speak. We are all so different. Allah subhanahu wa ta' ala has created us so that we know each other. So difference should never be a hindrance. We accept each other, especially we accept each other because. Because of the common belief in the one God and the acceptance of the one true prophet. So when we look at diversity, don't look at it in a negative way, look at it in a positive way. How many of you married in here? Or let me ask, how many unmarried in here? You're half married? Because when the hand goes up like this, maybe I think, okay, he's half married or something. Okay, okay. So loneliness, you know, mankind, they say, has suffered lots of setbacks. We've suffered earthquakes, floods, diseases, AIDS. H1N1. Behavioral scientists are telling us that there is an epidemic coming. And this epidemic is called loneliness. So it's a disease of the mind. And if you think about it, how long do you think the smartphone has been in existence? The smartphone? 10 years? About 10 years, right. Okay, so the smartphone could be pointed as. As one of the reasons for this. Not the only reason. One of the reasons, especially if you look at the Western world, people have started to live alone. They move away after a certain age, and they want to live all alone. They want to be by themselves. There's a high degree of individuality. In the east, it's not so much in the west, it's very high. People want to live alone, and then they live alone, and then they start feeling lonely. Am I saying this is a problem only in the Western world? No, it's everywhere. But it's a little bit more on that side. To compound that, what happens, you have things like your smartphone where you do not communicate with your loved ones anymore by voice. People can't see the body language. People can't see the eyes. If I wore this and spoke to all of you guys, can you see my eyes? You can't see my eyes, right? Does it make a difference? It makes a difference because they say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and it's no joke, you know, when you're not able to see the eyes, you're not really able to make a connection. So when you have communication primarily by text messaging, and you're not making a connection with the other person physically, can't see the body language, can't see the smile, can't see the eyes. Then you tend to become lonely by choice because you want to be alone, you want to have the comfort because it's a bit difficult to be confrontational with. They don't want to, they want to avoid that. So they like the texting part. So sometimes you see people spend a lot of time texting, texting their friends, texting their mother, texting their father. And the father or the mother have no choice but to text back because at least let them talk to me in this way. That's what the father and mother is thinking, right? This is the tragedy of our times. And unfortunately it's become so common that it has become accepted. You know, previously technology was such that many 50, 60, 70 year olds would reject it, say, I don't want to do that. I don't want to use the VCR, I don't want to use the CD player. But now you see 60, 70 years old guys are using the smartphones, they got no choice, they got a text. So loneliness is the next big thing to hit us. And that's a assumption made by behavioral scientists. Any of you seen a movie called Side Effects? Hands up anybody who's seen Side Effects? Nobody? Okay. Side Effects is actually a movie about usage of drugs and the side effects that goes with that. I don't recommend anybody watches it, but there's a couple of elements of that that I would have liked to share. Now if you look at this, this I got last week from an organization called Statista. They send me emails every day about statistics. So, world's biggest consumers of antidepressants. Anybody know what an antidepressant is? If you'd watched that movie, you would have known. Antidepressants are when you're depressed. Yes. It works to fix you. Right. You've seen the movie. Okay, so one person who's seen the movie. Okay.