personal development

How to get ahead at work by being smart about things

September 9, 2016 by Sam Jones Leave a Comment

The age old question of how to progress or get promoted at work. The answer is different for any company, but we can tell you what the answer certainly isn’t. Tripping up others is not a good way to get ahead at work. Even if you temporarily succeed, the chances are you will bite off more than you can chew which will eventually become blaringly obvious.

Be smart about things. Think outside the box. Genuinely invest yourself in the company and keep an eye out for things that could benefit your workplace.

How to Be a Leader in Your Industry

July 21, 2016 by Andrew Hoffman Leave a Comment

After years of growing a business, you may be thinking about taking a more central place in your industry. To meet the challenge, you’ll have to inspire others, garner respect, and act like a leader. While every successful leader is different, they share several common characteristics, such as charisma, intelligence, trustworthiness, and creativity. Learn how you can be a leader in your industry by observing the following steps.

Investing in Personal Development in Order to be a Better Leader

December 2, 2015 by Jennifer Livingston 1 Comment

No matter where you are in your personal or professional life, you can still learn and do more to become a better person. Investing in your personal development can help you be a better leader at work, a better spouse or a better parent to your children. What can you do to continually get closer to reaching and fulfilling your potential?

Never Be Afraid to Do Something Outside of Your Comfort Zone

One of the worst habits you can get into is staying inside of your comfort zone and becoming stagnant in your career or in your relationships. While there is nothing wrong with having a favorite restaurant or appreciating certain traits in a friend or colleague, you should make time to do something that you might not usually do.

Healing Through Letting Go

December 6, 2013 by Ken Myers Leave a Comment

I never thought I was a sensitive person. Practical, yes. Reasonable. Down to earth. But sensitive was not how I would classify myself. It is only recently that I have begun to realize that I am sensitive. If you are really honest with yourself we are all sensitive. What happens to us, what people say, what environment we are in does affect us. It is only when you become aware of this effect that you can gain some control over it.

At one point in my life I strove to be a robot. Emotionless, without hurt on anxiety or fear or even joy. I felt that this was a better way to live. Less painful. For a long time I succeeded to an extent. I felt nothing. I remembered nothing. You see, emotions are what make memories and without them there is nothing to anchor memories to. I have entire years of my life missing. A bad way to cope, to be sure, but one that I think many of us do unconsciously or consciously.

After finally having enough time in this manner of living a series of events in my life made me wake up. A new job with new people helped me to understand that my way of life was not normal or particularly healthy. Although I was not quite sure how to change my life I started trying to become more ‘alive’.

Starve Your Anger

October 11, 2010 by Ronit Baras Leave a Comment

On my moms’ refrigerator, there is a quote. My older sister put it there many years ago and it stayed. Every time I visit my parents and open the refrigerator, I read it. It says:

“When you get angry, you punish yourself for other people’s stupidity”

I remember myself being very angry as a kid (surprisingly, this was before my teen years). Life just did not work the way I wanted it to work – people did not behave the way I expected them and my actions did not get me where I wanted to be. Life pretty much sucked (I hope it is OK to say “sucked” in a post, because it explains how I felt perfectly).

It took me a while to understand what this quote meant, but when I did, a huge, heavy load came off my young shoulders. Realizing that anger was a poison I was carrying with me was a big revelation – scary, but very relieving. My life has been much happier since.

Winners and Losers

June 4, 2010 by Gal Baras Leave a Comment

I like to walk around our beautiful neighborhood in the morning. It is one of the things that make me happy. I do it to warm up my body and mind, get my creative juices flowing (into the voice recorder on my mobile phone) and be ready for another great day.

About half way through my walk, when I was already going at a good pace and feeling pretty pumped, I saw a young Chinese woman leaving one of the houses and saying goodbye to a young man standing on the doorstep.

Suddenly, the young woman noticed a bus at a stop about 200 meters away. She became visibly uptight, her pitch rose and she looked like she was asking the young man what to do (as I do not speak Chinese, this is all my interpretation).

The man gestured towards the bus and looked like he was urging the woman to run for it and try to catch it. She kept pleading with him until he joined her and they started running toward the bus stop.

By the time they decided to run and crossed the street, I had been half way to the bus and it was still there. There were no passengers in sight, its doors were closed and it kept waiting.

I See Good People (and you can too)

May 28, 2010 by Gal Baras Leave a Comment

In our time, pressure seems to be everywhere. There is a wealth of information like never before, which means we could find out about anything we wanted, only this takes time, so we look for “drip feeds” that will give us up-to-the-minute updates and we assume our sources do a reasonable job at finding and telling things as they are.

Reality is a bit different, unfortunately. Most of our information feeds are controlled by a fairly small group of huge profit-driven conglomerates, which make their money by selling. To sell well, they need people to “see red”, so they inspire fear via TV news broadcasts, bold newspaper headlines and various other methods.

The result of this is the general view that violent crime is everywhere, that different people cannot live together in harmony and that all too often, the only way to sort things out is to wage war on another ethnic group or country, even at the cost of “friendly” life.

So what can you do?

Feelings are Things

May 19, 2010 by Gal Baras 2 Comments

As a partner, a parent and a person, it is likely you find yourself in familiar situations, feeling the same familiar feeling and wondering how you got there. It may be as you walk in the door after a long day at work. It may be when some misunderstanding with your partner or your (teenage) child quickly escalates to an unpleasant exchange of verbal blows. It may just be when you look in the mirror.

All negative feelings are some form of fear and that fear is a defensive feeling aimed at protecting our self from being hurt. Some part of us recognizes certain words or behaviors as a form of attack raises the alert by creating this protective feeling.

The thing is, the “attack” pattern may have been saved in our mind when we were little and certainly in a particular context, both of which are longer in effect. However, our reaction is a subconscious one, which means there is no time for logic, but also that to get rid of this type of reaction we must “talk” directly with our subconscious (this is called Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP).

Projection

May 11, 2010 by Gal Baras Leave a Comment

Picture yourself sitting in an old cinema all by yourself, watching a movie. Turn your head towards the back wall and see there a big window. Behind the window, there is a projection machine. In that machine, a long, wide film is running, a film you have created.

A strong light travels through the film towards the screen. You can see the beam of light getting wider as it travels through the air, showing flickers of colors and movement inside it. Follow the beam of light with your eyes as it keeps on going and getting wider, until you are facing forward and looking at a huge screen, which practically fills your entire fields of vision.

As you look, you become absorbed in the movie, finding yourself emotionally attached to some of the characters, fearing some of the others, hating a few and getting carried away with the story.

Real life is very much the same. We become absorbed in our own story, which we project onto the world. When we interact with other people, we each look at our own “film” and can get into all kinds of trouble.

Hitting Rock Bottom to Succeed

December 14, 2009 by Ronit Baras 1 Comment

At the end of high school, my teen daughter Eden took a personal development course for teenagers and came back very disappointed. In a two days workshop, every speaker talked about hitting rock bottom before finding the light and that light, for some reason, was a way to make money.

She paced back and forth and stormed, “I never see myself not having money for food or sleeping in my car because I have no home to sleep in. I never see myself without a family to support me. All I got from these presenters was that I must get very low if I want to be successful, which means I’ll never be successful. What kind of motivation technique is this?”

I said to her, “I’m sure that’s not what they meant” and tried to convince her to find something she could still learn from her experience, but it was no good.

4 years later, I think this course has done more damage to her attitude than I thought initially (although it may still contribute to her personality and attitude towards life in a positive way).

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