Sunday, September 22, 2013

7 Motivational Tips to Survive in Sales



To make motivation a daily part of your life, you need practice and perseverance. Below are seven ways to stock your motivation toolbox. Use these tools daily to keep your spirits and goals on track.





1. Accept where you are. By accepting your own abilities and working within your limitations, you can use valuable energy to create positive life changes. Someone once said, "Your circumstances don't control you, they define you!" The way you are reflects the sum total of your choices to date.

2. Dare to think in awesome dimensions. When you think about what you want to achieve, do you think of your self-proclaimed limits? Why stop where you stop? Try thinking in unusual or outrageous terms.

3. Don't dwell on defeat. When you give up in your mind, your mind gives up on you. Once this happens, the rest is downhill. Remember, there is no such thing as failure; there are only outcomes. If you don't like your outcome, try changing your activity.

4. Tap motivational resources. To counteract negative memories and thoughts, flood your mind with positive input every day by listening to motivational recordings – a podcast or audio book – while working out, on the drive home, on the road, or first thing when you wake up.

5. Stay committed to your career goals. People have a tendency to be on the lookout for a better deal. Lack of personal career commitment is the greatest source of dissatisfaction with one's profession. Get committed and learn to just say no to anything that doesn't support your career purpose.

6. Do not allow setbacks to control you. If you do, then your supporters may think that you don't have the resolve to stick to your plans for success. When you face an inevitable disappointment, accept it as a learning experience and find creative ways to work through it. 


Top 10 Tips for Self-Improvement



While I do not always end up managing to put each of the following tips into practice, I do make a big effort to do so each day. This is a list of my favorite tips to improving your life. All it takes is a little bit each day and you will see wondrous changes. Feel free to add your own tips to the comments.

10. Get off to a Good Start

This means getting up early and eating breakfast. You will have much more energy throughout the day to follow the rest of these tips if you do! If you are so inclined, you can even include a little exercise in your morning routine. If you live with other people you can try to use this opportunity to get everyone together at the table to eat in the mornings. This is a nice way to start the day and a good way to ensure open lines of communication in a very busy household.

9. Keep a Schedule

It is a very good idea to write down the tasks you need to achieve in each day. As you complete them, tick them off. You should not, however, feel like you are bound to your list. If you don’t manage to do everything, it doesn’t matter – move any incomplete tasks from today on to tomorrow’s list. This is also a great help if you are a procrastinator.

8. Take a Break and have Fun

If you spend too much time in front of the computer, at your desk, or doing whatever it is that your occupation requires, you should take a break. This doesn’t mean you have to take time off work – it just means you should try to make better use of your non-work time to do something fun. 


Journaling Self Help for Busy People



When you think of self help you might picture groups of people who require urgent stress self help, self-help for depression, or anxiety self help. A self-help group may be incredibly helpful to you, and there is no need to feel embarrassed or wrong if you feel down or stressed and in need of assistance. After all, asking for help is an important sign of strength.

Self-help and recovery are important aspects of everyday life. You can actually apply small self-help techniques to help you to cope more effectively with whatever life throws at you at any given time.

An important avenue for self-help is journaling. Whether you journal on a scrap of paper or into a notebook or beautiful journal is irrelevant. What really matters is your total absorption in the moment. Writing in a journal can be your time to heal. Give yourself permission to just let go and absorb the moment. Allow yourself to feel, dream, think, create, and feel lost in the moment. Since you’re journaling only for yourself, you can ignore spelling, grammar, or propriety. For example, you can “say” things to a person in a journal that you could not say face to face.

Wake up your inner child. Can you still remember how you absorbed the world when you were little? As it happens, many busy people lose their ability to relax because of all the demands placed on them. Be it because of ever-growing pressures of responsibility or a total feeling of being overwhelmed, you can take charge of your life by journaling as self help therapy. Kathleen Adams, author of Journal to the Self calls journaling “The 79 cent therapist.” And if you do decide to work with a therapist or life coach, your journal will be an important tool to enhance the new life you’re learning.



Saturday, September 21, 2013

Tips to Improve Your Public Speaking Skills



Have you ever thought about the benefits that improving your public speaking skills could bring to your life?

Maybe public speaking is something you don’t want to or have to think about right at this moment, but there will likely be a time in the future where you will have to speak “in public” – either to a small audience (say a presentation at work) to the mother of all public speaking gigs – the wedding speech!

In this article I will look at ways to improve your public speaking skills by suggesting some top tips so that whatever public speaking activities are in front of you, you can at least approach them with some degree of confidence.

First of all I should stress that I am by no means a public speaking expert. But I have done quite a lot of public speaking and I have developed some public speaking techniques of my own to overcome the public speaking anxiety I used to experience.

This has helped me develop my public speaking skills in both my business and my personal life


  • In my business life and career this has involved presentations to customers, to suppliers, to my immediate team and to higher management. I have found that as my presentation skills have developed, so has my confidence

  • In my personal life I have made speeches at University (I was President of my Halls of Residence and am still quoted for one particularly hilarious speech involving various members of the hall and fairy tale characters), at weddings, at funerals, and as part of my social role at the local football team….


All I can tell you is what has worked for me, and in dealing with my public speaking fear, it has really helped me in other areas such as my communication skills, my presentation skills and my listening skills…. and who knows where it may lead – some people make a very tidy living out of public speaking on the after dinner circuit.


12 Productivity Tips From Incredibly Busy People



"Personal productivity is a key differentiator between those who succeed in their chosen field and those who do not," says bestselling author Brian Tracy. Leaders and entrepreneurs who are at the top of their game know how to achieve what they want in less time than others. We can learn a lot from the tactics of these successful, and incredibly busy, individuals on how to better organize our own days. Here are 12 top tips worth trying out:

1. Have a single purpose focus. 

One thing many successful entrepreneurs have in common is the ability to focus on what matters most. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says, "I keep things focused. The speech I give every day is: 'This is what we do. Is what we are doing consistent with that, and can it change the world?'" Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, has this piece of advice: "Pick one thing and do that one thing—and only that one thing—better than anyone else ever could." We can derive a great deal of power from developing a laser focus on our top business priorities. It's one of the attributes that sets apart the average businessperson from the more successful one.

2. Ruthlessly block out distractions.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova says, "I concentrate on concentrating." For those of us who don't have the willpower to be self-accountable, there are several technology solutions for blocking out distractions. For example, Rescue Time is an application that runs in the background of your computer and measures how you spend your time so you can make better decisions. Get Concentrating is another useful tool that will help you focus on important tasks by temporarily blocking social media sites. (Are you easily distracted? If so, here are six more popular programs to block distractions.)