3 Simple Ways to Change Your Behavior and Take Control of Your Life

The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, once said that, "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."

Change is unavoidable, continuous, and is occurring all the time. 

Our country changes, our city changes, our neighborhood changes, our family changes, and we as individuals change. Sometimes it may not be perceptible by someone on the outside.

But, we know ourselves better than anyone else when we have changed. 

Our political views may have changed, our attitudes may have changed, our appearances may have changed, and even our faculties may have changed.

The term change itself has an even deeper significant when it is in reference to a change in behavior that represents coming to a fork in the road and having to choose one direction or another. If you're dissatisfied with your present state and want to change, that is significant. 

If you are dissatisfied with your career; if you're dissatisfied with your marriage or other important relationships; if you're dissatisfied with your lifestyle; or if you're dissatisfied with your career; a major change may be necessary. A desire to change and a willingness to do so is essential. No one can change you or your situation. It has to begin with you. It has to begin inside.

1. Some people continue to change jobs, mate, and friends, but never think of changing themselves. Don't become that person. If you feel that you are stuck in a rut and is seriously desirous of making a change in your life, don't hesitate to seek professional help. 

If you don't have a close friend who has your best interest at heart, then find a therapist that you can trust and establish a good working relationship with that particular person. 

2. Be willing to take your therapist's recommendations seriously. Just talking about your problem will not bring about the change you need. You must be willing to do homework between the sessions and talk about your efforts and experiences when you return to the session. Most people do not change because willingness to make the effort is lacking.

3. Think about change as taking control your life. Get off of the roller coaster ride where you are allowing others to affect your emotional level by what they say or do. It is about making the decision to become that person you want to be, to begin taking the necessary steps in that direction, and to resolve to continue to grow the rest of your life

 
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5 Secrets to Having Great Conversations

The 5 Secrets of  Great Conversation emphasize conversation as being an art. Just as a great artist can avoid boring topics. 

This is perhaps the one to emphasize most. To practice the art of conversation, keep abreast of current events, tune in to your fellow conservationists, and enjoy the experience.

Use these secrets whether you are a parent talking with your children, an adult talking with your spouse, or in a group of people that you are just getting acquainted with. Modify them to meet the occasion. 

Now here are the 5 Secrets of Great Conversation:

1. Avoid Boring Topics

Keep your health complaints for your doctor unless those you are talking to can be of assistance, don't talk about your personal and domestic affairs, and forget about bringing up your in-laws and pets. 

Read the newspapers online if you don’t want to buy the print editions. I buy the print editions only on the weekends. Choose two or three monthly magazines that go in depth on topics you’re interested in. And, keep current in your area of expertise.

2. Don’t Offend

The best manners come from empathy. It's feeling as though you are the other person – – put yourself in his place. They are simply expressions of the decent respect the one human being owes to another and is owed in return. Try to be sensitive to those around you.

3. Don’t Gossip

The Bible says, " Do not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Gossip, by definition, is rumor or talk of a personal, sensational, or intimate nature. 

In other words, don't talk behind your neighbors back. It reflects on your character. Spreading rumors are about as hard to unspread as butter.

4. Include Everyone In

To exclude someone from a conversation is as unthinkable as it would be for a hostess to omit serving one of her guests at dinner. Don't leave anyone out. Reach out to all. Let your eyes communicate cordially with each in turn. 

Be aware of everyone's reaction to what you are saying. Put yourself in the shoes of the other person who is feeling left out.  Make a point of setting him or her at ease.

5. Listening

"Know how to listen, says Plutarch, and you can learn from those who speak badly." Fifty percent of the talking is listening – – not just with your ears, but with all your senses; and, with your heart as well as your mind.  

Close listening for correct information is essential to good conversation, social, or business. The greatest compliment you can pay to anyone is to really listen to what he has to say. And, the way to show you have been listening is to answer responsibly.

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3 Things You Must Know About Depression

Blues or Depression?

Just about everyone gets the blues from time to time - that feeling of sadness or grief that usually
results from unpleasant life experiences.

While many people refer to the blues as depression, however, true clinical depression is as different from the blues as pneumonia is from a head cold.

Blues and Depression
The blues is a temporary and usually normal reaction to stressful life situations. Most cases don't involve physical symptoms, loss of self-esteem, or suicidal thoughts, and the negative state usually passes within a few hours or days.

Depression on the other hand, is an intense, pervasive and long-lasting disorder of mood that attacks the body as well as the mind, often resulting in serious problems in work, social, and physical functioning. 

Unfortunately, some people don't recognize depression for the serious illness it is. They think of it as a personality flaw, a sign of weakness or a character defect.

3 Dynamics of Depression
To go further in depth, depression occurs in at least 3 different dynamics:

1. People in the first category are chronically depressed. Depression is built into them and may be passed from generation to generation.
2.  The second dynamic concerns lasting grief that occurs after a severe loss. Its severity is entirely subjective but might occur with the loss of a child, spouse, or loved one, an amputation, mastectomy, a sizable career setback, or loss of functioning brought about by disease or trauma.
3.  The third dynamic involves loss accompanied by anger. People who have unresolved issues with a departed loved one often do not know that they are angry. This despair can set in after messy divorces or after a close relative or friend passes away. Since they are not able to deal with these problems by interacting with the object of their anger, they take their antagonism out on themselves instead.

Loss is the common element in all three dynamics. It could be a loss of time, an object, an idealization of an object, or a person.

Symptoms of Depression
Symptoms of depression often include disturbances with sleep, appetite and sleeping patterns, sadness nearly every day, sexual functioning, and difficulty thinking, focusing, or concentrating.

There is frequently excessive guilt, feelings of worthlessness, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, and, in severe cases, thoughts of or attempts at suicide.

Some depressions are the result of a chemical imbalance and may only be treated by anti­-depressant medication, some require psychotherapy, and still others a combination of methods.

Chronic Depression
Those with chronic depression can't be helped except by antidepressants. In these cases, psychotherapy may be of little help and a poor use of time and money. 

Time helps a person who has suffered a severe loss as well as an involved other person who listens to the aggrieved as he or she gives words to the pain. 

This does not necessarily have to be a therapist, but if there is not a strong support system, treatment is very necessary. 

Finally, only a strong guide can help people whose loss is accompanied with anger move toward slow recognition and safe expression of their real feelings. This is usually the only path out of melancholy.

The Good News About Depression
The good news is that more than eighty percent of depression sufferers can be treated successfully. If you or someone you care about is depressed, seek help now by contacting a qualified mental health specialist at (773) 614-3201.

What is your views about depression? Do you accept the difference between having the blues and experiencing depression?

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8 Ways to Know If You Are Goal Directed

A person going nowhere can be sure of reaching his destination. Don't go nowhere. Your success improves when you set goals that are specific, short-term, and challenging. 

The big goal is not a measure of your present status. Rather, it is a target -- something you mean to ultimately realize. 

What you need to focus on are smaller, short range goals which are just beyond your current ability but still within the range of present possibility.

Set Supportive Goals
Your goals should be very supportive and satisfying as they will help you build your winning streak and a foundation for successful activity. 

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that our aim is too low and we reach it. Moreover, make your commitments in bite size chunks. A house is built one brick at a time. An artist paints one stroke at a time. And, you also should work in small increments.

Set Challenging Goals
Besides setting supportive and satisfying goals, set challenging goals. Strong interest and involvement in activities are sparked by challenges. Easy to reach goals spark little interest or effort. However, unrealistically high goals can bring failure and diminished self-confidence.

It is also important that your goals are concerns that you want to accomplish and not what you want to avoid. Researchers have found that the choice of avoidant goals is associated with poor performance and distress. 

Here then are the 8 Ways to Know if You are Goal Directed:

1. Do you set long-term and short-term goals?.
2. Do you set challenging goals that are neither too easy or beyond your reach?.
3. Are you good at managing your time and setting priorities to make sure you get the most important things done?.
4. Do you regularly make to-do lists and successfully get things done?.
5. Do you set guidelines and consistently meet them?
6. Do you regularly monitor how well you are progressing towards your goals and make changes in your behavior if necessary?
7. When you're under pressure, do you still plan your day and weeks in a clear and logical manner?
8. Do you set task-involved, mastery goals rather than self-centered or work-avoidant goals?

If most of the descriptions characterize you, than you are likely to be a goal-directed individual. If these statements do not characterize you, then consider ways that you can become more goal-directed.

Planning how to reach your goal and monitoring progress towards your goal are critical aspects of your achievement. 

Researchers have also found that high achieving individuals monitor their own learning and systematically evaluate their progress toward their goals more than low-prescription achieving individuals.

Have you been to a motivational speech, gotten charged up and then felt disappointed afterwards? The key is to try and see if you can internalize it and make it personal through goal formulation.

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Secrets to Mastering the Vocabulary of any Field you Choose

Stop for a moment and do some self-assessment. What is your situation in life? What is your occupation? What are your hobbies? Who are your favorite associates?

Then ask what bearing each of these facts has on the language you speak, write, and read. Each of these pursuits, and every activity you indulge in, has a vocabulary of its own. And one of the best ways to become truly word- conscious and to make a list of words used in each of these activities.

Don’t burden yourself with too much of the apparatus of the formal dictionary – – abbreviations, principal parts of the verbs and the like. For your purpose, a simple list of interesting words and their definitions, a glossary, is all you need. Then compare your list with those your friends make up and combine them all into one master list of your very own language

Here is an example. I have an interest in Search Engine Optimization, so here are some words that I have learned that reflects this interest:

SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.

Backlink: Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.

PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important

Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your searchrankings if some of your backlinks had "weight loss" as their anchor text.

Title Tag: The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it's one of the most important factors inside Google's search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.

Meta Tags: Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.

SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It's basically the page you'll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERP5.

Keyword Density: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.

Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it's a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.

Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard" canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.street.com instead of http://street.com.


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Best Ways to Exercise Your Mind and Body for Today's Challenges

The old adage, you are what you read, still rings true. When your reading materials are success-oriented and optimistic, your achievement level will be high. 

If your reading materials are pessimistic or depicts people as victims of circumstance, your achievement level will be low. 

It seems that achievement oriented literature will help you to think in terms of goals and success. It can be most supportive of you in your pursuit of inner strength and self-reliance. 
 
1. Keep the book you never get to read either in your car, your briefcase, or your purse. If you are waiting in a long line some where, or if you are caught waiting for a tardy child, it will become an opportunity to read.

And, finally, think about a book that you absolutely loved when you were in college and reread it. Great literature is every bit as great the second time around.

2. For the body consider this. Nearly six out of ten people experience no daily exercise. However, like any other activity, it takes both choice and commitment. Walking, jogging, biking, or working out regularly on a home exercise machine such as a stationary bike can have a positive impact on your physical and emotional health. But you have to choose and commit to doing it. 

Do it even if you think you don't have time for it. It's good for the mind, good for the soul, and it doesn't have to cost you a cent. Also consider walking with a friend. It's a perfect way to do two things at once: exercise and create an opportunity for good conversation. In addition to a regular exercise routine, get extra exercise by walking up a flight of stairs rather than using an elevator.

Back to the simple home exercise machine. It works fine. Forget the fancy looking exercise machines you see advertised on television and forget joining the local health club. You don't need either before you start exercising.\

In reality, the foundation of any good exercise program needs to be no more complicated than taking a walk or a jog for free and adding a few other activities such as sit-ups, push-ups, or jumping on an exercise bike if you just want to work on certain parts of the body and to give yourself some variety. This is all that is required for you to have a positive effect on your health.

To get the maximum enjoyment from life, you need to pursue the care and feeding of both your mind and your body. Think about health as a broad goal for both your mind and your body.

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