Improving Your Interpersonal Skills

What are interpersonal skills? These are the skills that enable you to work efficiently with others without any personality conflict. These skills will help you build good working relationships with your clients, employees and business associates. Working well with others involves understanding and appreciating individual differences. Therefore, interpersonal skills play an important role in determining how well you manage your interactions with customers and employees. How you behave with them can determine your success or failure. Try the following helpful tips to improve your interpersonal skills:

o No one wants to be around someone who is always morose and frowning. Maintain a positive, cheerful attitude about work and life. Practice smiling often.

o Be generous with praise and words of encouragement. If you let others know that they are appreciated, they'll want to give you their best. If you have to criticize, do it gently and give suggestions for improvement.

o Pay attention to people. Make eye contact and address people by their first names. Ask them for their opinions and suggestions. Really listen to what they have to say.

o Keep your promises. If you tell your customer that you will have the item in stock by the end of the week, make sure it is there. But make promises sparingly and do not commit to doing something that you cannot accomplish.

o Treat everyone fairly and do not play favorites. Avoid talking and discussing others behind their backs.

o Keep an open mind. Remember there is always room for discussion and compromise.

o Learn how to be an effective mediator and help sort out differences. By taking on such a leadership role, you will garner respect and admiration from those around you.

o Pay close attention to both what you say and how you say it. Your body language and tone of voice will give you away. Think before you speak and avoid misunderstandings or hurt feelings.

o Most people are drawn to a person who can make them laugh. Use your sense of humor as an effective tool to enhance your interpersonal skills.

o Try to see things from another person's perspective. Empathy is about being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understanding how they feel.

o There is nothing worse than a chronic complainer or whiner. Do not talk about your problems, instead focus on the other person's problem and try to help out.

To run a successful business as well as enjoying a fulfilling personal life, it is necessary for you to establish a good, comfortable relationship with:

o your customers - nothing puts off a prospective client more than an unhelpful attitude and surliness.

o your employees - to retain good employees, you have to be seen as a positive, cheerful boss.

o your business associates - networking is one of the keys to good business. By being known as a caring, cheerful person, you are likely to make more friends in your business circle.

Improve Your Self by Changing Your Psychology

Are you the one of those who are afraid of failure? Do you always see the negative aspects of the situation? Are these negative aspects preventing you from doing something new and innovative? Are you scared of self improvement? Then cheer up and don't be tense since psychological self improvement will help you out in this condition.

Firstly, prepare yourself to face every failure in your life. You should keep in mind that life is always in the cycle of ups and down, success and failure. If no one can be permanently up then it is also a fact that no one will be permanently down. Every person has to face this cycle. It has been seen that the person facing the failure knows the sweetness of the fruit of success.

Basically we should learn from these failures. We should not avoid them. We should determine how to overcome these problems. We should find out how to handle the problems for our psychological self improvement. Handle the problems carefully and find the ways of dealing with it. If we take the solutions of these problems seriously, they will help us in training ourselves for mental self improvement.

Here are some tips which can help you in preparing for self improvement:

Always view the positive side

Always think the positive results. Just know the importance of these positive results and tries to find the ways to add something new and innovative into them.

Focus on someone else in your situation

While picturing somebody else in your situation, picture yourself in a less suitable position. It will motivate you in the way, "If this individual can handle the situation why can't you".

Think of the worst situation

Always make a thought of the worst situation which can be the result after the psychological self improvement. Find possible solutions to it and indicate all the weak aspects of it. If you are able to determine more than one reasonable solution, then feel relax as there is no risk and self-improvement can't be powerful than you are!

Thus self improvement can help you in various ways. It proves to be beneficial to you. Remember, something can happen in order to make you free from the humdrum, so instead of being amazed and scared of change, you desire it with all your heart. Handle negative changes and learn from these changes and applied them in your next event. This would be your final psychological self improvement.

Can You Learn From Your Mistakes?

One of my favorite metaphors that I use in teaching the Art of Change Skills For Life involves a guy whose daily life requires that he walk down a dark road. There's a hole in the road. The first time he walks down that road, he doesn't notice the hole, and he falls in. It hurts like heck to fall in that hole. He's in deep, and it takes a while, but eventually he manages to climb out go on.

Next day, he is walking down that same dark road. Somehow, he fails again to notice the hole, and falls in. It hurts, even more, because he remembers that this happened before. He climbs out and keeps going on his way, cursing at himself along the way. Next day, he's walking down the dark road, and he gets distracted at just the wrong moment, and the same thing happens, he falls in. And the day after that, and now he's really cursing out loud about it.

It really burns him up inside. He gets mad at himself, mad at the hole, mad at the road, mad at the dark. But his anger doesn't protect him, and neither does feeling bad about it after the fact. Somehow, he keeps falling in. Only this time, when he is going down that dark road, he is aware that there is something to be careful of. But he guesses wrong about the hole's location. And, he falls in again. And the next day. And the next.

One day, he's walking down the road and he knows there's a hole in it, and he notices there's a hole in it just in the nick of time. He stops. He looks in. And as he stands at the edge looking in, he somehow still falls in. He climbs out. He's furious. And the next day, notices it. Falls in. And the next day.

And then one day, he notices the hole, goes right up to the edge of it, gets a really good look at it, and almost as if he's seeing it for the first time. And he doesn't fall in. He stops just short of it, just in the nick of time. And he goes around it. So now he can go down that road any old time and not fall in.

Nobody changes because they feel bad. But wrong is instructive. Wrong is nature's feedback mechanism, a way of signaling to you, THERE IS A HOLE IN THE ROAD! NOTICE IT, AND YOU HAVE NEW CHOICES TO MAKE.

Our nation keeps going down a dark road and falling in a hole. Our leaders form committees and make policy about falling in holes. People talk about the holes around their water coolers. You'd think, with all the discussion, we would go around the hole for a change. We're in a dark road right now. There's a hole in it.

How do you keep from falling in a hole? How do you keep from repeating the same mistake over and over again? Notice it. Pay attention as it happens, or right after it happens. Be grateful/glad for the feedback, because that feedback is part of our self correcting mechanism for remedial change. Glean feedback from this, learn from this, extract the value of it. Appreciate your ability to learn from your experience (nature's design for you, for all of us). If you get another chance, commit to a new course of action.

Buckminster Fuller spoke of the value of NO answers, the kind of answers we get from life when we make bad choices. He said we actually increase our development more from these NO answers than we could from YES answers (from positive choices) because the NO answers give us valuable feedback that we can learn and apply. When we get YES answers, they may cause us to think we're successful when in fact we are merely lucky. The result is no learning can occur.

The more you have screwed up in life, the more mistakes you have made and learned from, the smarter and stronger and more functional you can be.

SO join me in celebrating the many blessings in our lives that we have gained from our mistakes, and then, as we go down this dark road together, you and me, a couple of real screw ups, let's notice the hole and go around it this time.

Dr. Rick Kirschner is a bestselling author, coach and edu

The Secret of Focus

The secret of focus can be expressed in many ways. Below you will find key points about the secret of focus to help you achieve the genius of your dreams:

1. Where focus goes, energy will flow into.

By simply looking in a direction physically, we are allowing the energy to flow in that direction. The energy will flow through all the channels of energy which that structure you are observing has in place.

2. Where focus goes, more energy will flow.

The difference with the above is that more energy is going to flow if you focus on the same thing. There are two effects here: A/ The energy will expand through you, which means it is your conscious mind which is expanding B/ When the consciousness expands, more energy can flow through it, meaning more energy can flow through the structure of the energy field as in 1. The practical correlation of this is that you therefore not only see more results, but you have more ideas as to how to expand things further.

3. What you focus on, you become.

If all I do is watch TV, I will become a TV watcher and have a disposition to watching TV.

The three points above stress the importance of specialising in our lives and having one focus to which we are aiming. The more eggs we try to juggle around through lack of focus, the more likely we are to miss a catch and break an egg. It is therefore wiser to keep our eggs altogether, but to keep our eyes on it at the same time to make sure nothing breaks. When we have one focus, we become much more productive and allow the 3 effects above to come into play.

Move in the Direction of Your Dreams!

"Know that you can make a difference in the world by being true to yourself, and moving in the direction of your dreams!"

As I spoke this sentence to a client of mine, I made the profound realization that I was speaking as much to myself as I was to her. I realized that my life long goal of making a difference in the world centers around my ability to be true to who I am and allow myself to move toward my dreams utilizing everything that makes me who I am today.

You see, I am no different than anyone else. At times throughout my life, my search to find happiness left me wandering and unfocused. All too often, it was easier to get caught up in a whirlwind of lack and limiting beliefs rather than to take action that moved me forward. The result was that for many years I felt lost and in need of some direction. What I came to realize is that I have that ability, I along with each and every one of you, possess an internal compass that will guide me in the direction of my dreams as long as I listen to it.

Do you ever feel as though you have lost your way? Perhaps for you it is as if you are going in circles and don't know what to do. Maybe you are just tired of the same old grind, or know you were meant for so much more. When people say their lives are a mess, they often begin looking for the thing that caused everything to slip away. Was it their finances, their jobs, their relationships, their stress level? Was there really a "cause" at all? Have you ever been in the car with someone who won't admit that they are lost? It's frustrating, knowing that if only they would acknowledge that they don't know which way to go, they might be able to find their way. Life is so much like that.

Without exception when people are frustrated with their lives, they can trace it back to a point of time when they consciously stopped being true to themselves and quit following their internal road map. They may have done it a piece at a time or all at one powerful moment, but without exception there is a moment in time when things shifted, and the result was "derailing". Finding our way when we are off track doesn't have to be a painful experience, it is often as simple as having the courage to admit that we are lost, and searching for the truth in any situation.

Remember that we are all given the ability to live the lives our dreams, and in turn make a difference in the world around us. So the next time you feel "off", take a moment and ask yourself which path are you on. Identify how you feel and make decisions based on what is true for you. When we all live in our own brilliance and truth we can't help but make a difference in the world around us.

Choose to Live in the Now

Belief Systems and Reality We are what we believe. Our belief system is based on our past experience, which is constantly being relived in the present, with an anticipation of the future being like the past. Our present perceptions are so colored by the past that we are unable to see the immediate happenings in our lives without distorted limitations, To experience this sense of total freedom it is important for us to detach ourselves from past, future preoccupation and choose to live in the now. We all want love but many of us can never experience it. Our guilty fears from the past block our ability to give and receive love in the present. Fear and love can never be experienced at the same time. It is our choice as to which we want to choose.

When we perceive another person as attacking us we feel defensive and find a way directly or indirectly to attack back. Anger always stems from fear and guilt. No one attacks unless he/she first feels threatened and believes that through attack he can demonstrate his strength at the expense of another's vulnerabilities. Attack is really a defense mechanism and actually only escalates the problem. The only way to make any attempts of change is to shift our perception and see the others attacking us out of fear. Fear is a call for help and therefore a request for love.

It is apparent then that to experience peace we must recognize that we do have a choice in determining what we perceive. I believe deep down this is why loved ones find it so hard to leave their alcoholic family members. Many of our attempts to correct others, even when we believe we are offering constructive criticism are not really attempts to attack them by demonstrating their wrongness and our rightness. Peace of mind comes from not wanting to change others, but by accepting them as they are.

Read Any Good Economics Books Lately?

Okay, so the other day a good friend of my at our Think Tank asks me if I had read any good economic books lately, not a question anyone would generally ask, after all, why would anyone go out of their way to read an economics book? Well, I am one, and the book I recommended to him, is one I would also recommend to you:

"Econopower: How a New Generation of Economists is Transforming the World" by Mark Skousen; Published by John Wiley and Son, Hoboken, NJ; 2008.

This book demonstrates how everything we see, buy, own, do and dream of is indeed governed by economics. Our decisions, our religions, or politics, is all about economics. Education, science, history, law and finance, he show evidence of the reality that economics is the way we do, whether it is about the individual, the leaders, societal changes or the movement of America at a national level. Even more interesting is the fact as the author shows that the US is exporting these ideas, the same ideas initiated by Adam Smith.

Health Care, Education and even crime all are governed by economic theory in one way or another, perhaps even without reading this book you can understand the similarities through a little thought and understanding. This author takes that and develops it into a deep and interesting researchical study of all we are, all we have built and all we think that we know.

And just to let you know this author is no dummy, he formerly was an analyst for the CIA, wrote for Forbes Magazine, past President of the FEE (foundation for economic education), he also has a PhD in economics from George Washington University. The man has credentials and the information in the book and the thinking and philosophy is extremely interesting and worthy. I recommend this book to anyone.