9 Things You Should Do Every Day Before 9 A.M. The morning is enormously important. It’s the foundation from which the day is built. How you choose to spend your morning can be used to predict the kind of day you’re going to have. When I awake in the morning, my mind gradually gathers, and I begin to move as the early morning light is just starting to seep through the windows. I stretch, have a glass of water, start the tea kettle, and practice a gratitude meditation for ten minutes. Once my family awakes, I pause to join them for a short time and we follow some simple morning rituals together too. This is just a rough sketch of my mornings, and they make me happy. It wasn’t always this way though. I’ve changed my mornings, so they work for me and not against me, with just a few simple rituals. 1. If your mornings are chaotic, the simple solution is to get up a little earlier than the chaos. Adjust gradually, wake up just 10 minutes earlier each week for the next 6-9 weeks, and you’ll barely notice the change from day to day. 2. 3.
How successful people beat stress This post originally appeared at LinkedIn. Follow the author here. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe they can make things happen and those who believe things happen to them. The first group are convinced that the outcome of their lives and careers is more or less in their own hands, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. The second group take more of a Forrest Gump approach—they sit around and wait for the bus to take them somewhere. University of Florida psychologist Tim Judge and his colleagues have shown overwhelmingly that people who feel that they control the events in their lives (more than the events control them) and are confident in their abilities end up doing better on nearly every important measure of work performance. In Judge’s studies, these individuals—we’ll call them “the Empowered”—were found to do the following: In good times and bad Of course, when good times are rolling, nearly all of us believe we have the world by the tail.
Inspiring Morning Routines What are my unique selling points? When a company is determining how to advertise their products to consumers, they focus on its unique selling points (USPs) - the things which make the product different from any other. It may be that it is smaller, lasts longer or tastes better than its competitors. The same principle applies to you when you are applying for a new job. You need to think about your unique selling points. Employers can receive hundreds of applications for each vacancy, so it is important that you make your application stand out and get short listed for an interview. Here are a few ways to help you to identify your USPs: What are your skills? Put yourself in the shoes of your clients or colleagues. What's your benefit? But, employers don't just buy skills: They buy solutions. For instance, perhaps you are a project manager with a number of skills including software, hardware and management. "Seasoned project manager who excels at identifying and solving problems" Add strength to your skills
Magical Mornings: How to start your day with more creativity, serenity, and insight Each morning our return to waking life is marked by a unique mental state. In those first minutes of our day, our minds are in an estuary between the dream world and 3rd dimensional consciousness. Like an aquatic estuary, it’s ripe with nutrients and lifeforms that you can’t find anywhere else. This in-between state of the mind can be used for greater creativity, serenity, and flow. For many years I squandered these golden minutes. Like an engine, or a muscle group, your mind runs a lot smoother if it’s allowed to gradually warm up. Inversely, going from sleep to mental sprinting can send the nervous system into Fight or Flight mode. Meditation has become quite popular in the business world for it’s ability to train the mind towards clarity of thought. Hypnotists do their work by getting subjects to enter lower frequency brain waves states. By paying attention while waking up, we can bridge the gap between waking life the creative unconscious. I started doing Morning Pages 292 days ago.
8 Collaboration Tools to Improve Your Content Social Media Examiner Are you part of a team that collaborates on content? Want tools to make the collaboration process more efficient? Whether you’re working on blog post or creating social media updates, the more people involved, the richer the results can be. In this article I’ll share eight collaboration tools to improve your productivity. Discover eight collaboration tools to improve your content. Listen to this article: Listen now: Play in new window | Download #1: Map Out Content Using MindMeister MindMeister is an effective brain-mapping tool that allows you to visually break down complex concepts and show how each idea flows into another. Map out ideas visually with MindMeister. MindMeister is browser-based and available on mobile apps. Price: Free plan gives you access to three maps. #2: Brainstorm in Real Time With Scribblar Scribblar is an educational tool that can also be used for collaborative brainstorming sessions. Do collaborative brainstorming in real time with Scribblar. #3: Compile Research on Cyfe
7 Things Happy, Healthy People Do Every Morning When you get up in the morning, think of what a priceless privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to learn, to love – and then make the day count! The morning is extremely important. It is the foundation from which the day is built. How you choose to spend your morning can be used to predict what kind of day you are going to have, and thus, what kind of life you are going to live. Each morning truly is a brand new opportunity. The happiest, healthiest people I know embrace this truth and use it to their advantage. 1. In other words, they start the day with love in their hearts and minds, and are truly appreciative of their life and all of its priceless idiosyncrasies. From the research and coaching Angel and I have done over the years, we’ve found that the more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic. 2. They know it’s a brand new day to start over and do something different. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Related
The Condensed Guide to Running Meetings We love to hate meetings. And with good reason — they clog up our days, making it hard to get work done in the gaps, and so many feel like a waste of time. There’s plenty of advice out there on how to stop spending so much time in meetings or make better use of the time, but does it hold up in reality? Can you really make meetings more effective and regain control of your calendar? Paul Axtell, who has worked for 35 years as a personal effectiveness consultant and wrote Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations, says that this is a major pain point for almost every manager he works with. “People are absolutely resigned. 1. Of course, there is no magic number. The challenge with large meetings isn’t just that everyone won’t have a chance to talk, but many of them won’t feel the need to. This isn’t to say that your 20-person meeting is doomed for failure. 2. Both experts agree this is a good idea, for two reasons. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
The 7 Step Morning Ritual That Will Make You Happy All Day We read a lot about this or that morning ritual that will make you productive. But what about one that makes you happy? Research shows that being happy actually makes you more productive. So let’s kill two birds with one stone and focus on smiles. What’s the first step? 1) Have Something To Look Forward To Happy mornings start the night before. Research shows anticipation is a powerful happiness booster. Got nothing you’re looking forward to? Via The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want: People prone to joyful anticipation, skilled at obtaining pleasure from looking forward and imagining future happy events, are especially likely to be optimistic and to experience intense emotions. (To learn how to be happier and more successful, click here.) Okay, you’ve got something you’re anticipating planned for the next day. 2) Manage Your Mood Research shows your mood in the morning affects your mood for the rest of the day: What makes you happy early in the day? Sum Up Tags:
Disabled workers in Great Britain: What now? 22 May 2015, by Emily PfeferGuest in Labour market The TUC released a comprehensive report today revealing just how little progress for disabled people in the workforce was achieved under the 2010-15 government. The headline employment and unemployment rate figures paint a picture of essential stagnation since before the last recession; the gap between disabled and non-disabled people’s outcomes on these measures has remained about the same. The apparent worsening since the Q2 2013 is likely due to a change in the disability measure used by the Labour Force Survey (LFS), as explained in the report. In a way, this is welcome. However, the shape of the picture depends on how deeply you look. To put a finer point on it, the employment rate for non-disabled people in Great Britain is 79.1 per cent. Our research also demonstrated the dual or intersectional disadvantage faced by disabled women.