This is a guest post by Michele Wahlder. Michele is a Life & Career Coach, the founder of Life Possibilities, LLC and author of Alphatudes: The Alphabet of Gratitude—26 Solutions for Life’s Little Challenges.
You might fall into a career that you love by chance or you may have known since you were a child what you wanted to do when you grew up and ended up loving your chosen profession. For many of us, though, finding a career we love is not so easy.

Most of us have gone through the trial and error process, but it’s not a very strategic method for the activity you’ll be doing for forty hours a week until you retire. Considering the amount of time we spend comparing brands at the supermarket or researching vacations, shouldn’t we put a little more time and research into our career choice too?

If you’re contemplating a career move, reassessing your mid-life career choice or just entering the job market, consider working through the Three E’s to Finding the Career You Love: Exploration, Evaluation, Execution.

EXPLORATION

Before you start your job search, the first thing you’ll want to do is assess your work values. Ask yourself what you need in order to be happy in your work environment. Prepare a standard set of questions to ask on an interview based on the values you are not willing to set aside. These values provide a template for what any career you pursue should look like.

Then, assess your strengths. Once you have defined what you are naturally talented at, focus on how you can optimize those strengths and write a competitive edge statement that explains what makes you unique, different and valuable.

The final step in the Exploration stage is to find the common “golden” threads that run through your interests and brainstorm careers that would incorporate them. For example, you may find that most of your interests tend to be individual activities that allow your mind to go somewhere else, such as reading, cycling, and playing computer games.

If you thrive working alone and enjoy the “escape” of everyday life, then think of careers that might let you use those interests. Perhaps, you’d enjoy being a writer, a truck driver, or a computer programmer. Write down all the potential careers based on your interests. Don’t edit or censor at this point, jot it all down, everything from a vague interest or silly idea to a dream job.

EVALUATION

Once you’ve explored and discovered your work values, your strengths, your interests, and brainstormed career options, it’s time to evaluate what jobs may actually be suitable for you.

Take your list of jobs and compare and contrast it with your work values and your strengths. You may find that even though being a truck driver aligns with your interests, one of your values is to have the option to work from home. Or, you may not be a very good driver. Narrow your list down to the jobs that fit with your values, use your strengths, and include some of your interests.

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, do a little “on the road” evaluating for your top three job choices—job shadowing, internships, web-research, and informational interviews.

EXECUTION

Now that you’ve learned about your options, pick the one that is the best fit for you. Then find out as much about the industry and the opportunities within that career field as you can. Re-write your resume to position yourself for this career or begin building the foundational components of the new business you would like to start.

Connect with professional organizations in your industry, take any training or educational courses you need to be competitive, and get out there and submit your resume or start that business.

Congratulations, you have arrived at a career choice that will utilize your talents, skills, and passions!

Here is a bonus video to help you get the job of your dreams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh3VV90v5po

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This is a guest post by Jon Rhodes. Jon is a very successful clinical hypnotherapist from the UK. If you are interested in self improvement, you can read the details of his very popular therapeutic hypnosis mp3 sessions. Charisma can help you in many aspects of life. It can help you win friends, be popular with the opposite sex, and even land that new exciting job. There is almost nothing that charisma can help you achieve.

For some, it is very natural to be charismatic. They just seem to have that ‘X-Factor’. However it is comforting to know that charisma can also be developed. Here are four top methods to help boost your charisma:

1 Have goals you are working towards. There are a lot more followers than leaders, so if you want to stand out then be a trailblazer. There is nothing wrong with being a follower, but people are naturally drawn to leaders.

Set yourself goals to work to. Have a sense of purpose and a vision – a big goal that you are working towards. You may or may not succeed to meet your goal, or it might change over time, but if you always have one, people will naturally feel drawn to you as you present the possibility of an exciting future. Don’t simply pretend to have a goal as people will quickly see through you and you will lose all credibility. In any case it is far more satisfying to spend life attempting to meet realistic goals.

2 Love yourself. If you don’t like yourself, how do you expect others to like you? Unknowingly you constantly give out thousands of small subconscious clues on how you should be treated, and it all begins with treating yourself right.

You need to learn to appreciate that you are a unique and valuable human being. Accept yourself as you are. It’s fine to have some flaws. You can work on improving them. However it must be remembered that the most charismatic people on earth are the ones with flaws. Someone who is perfect is not really all that interesting anyway. People are drawn to people, not robots. Be happy with who you are, wart and all. Love yourself and others will soon follow suit.

3 Be honestly interested in others. You must have met many people who talk incessantly about themselves? This may be OK at first, but after a while it becomes very tiresome and you just want to avoid them.

Charismatic people appreciate other people just as much as they appreciate themselves. Relax and listen properly to what other people are saying. Give them space to talk. You will learn new things, and they will notice and appreciate that you actually listen to them. The Chinese have a saying: “You have two ears and one mouth – use them in that proportion.”

Some people struggle concentrating on listening to others, and become anxious that they may forget what they are thinking next. This causes them to not listen properly to what the person was saying, as they struggle to remember what they want to say, then immediately respond to what they say with something totally irrelevant.

This will not win you too many fans, and is irritating to the recipient. Relax, allow that thought to disappear, and listen. This thought will return if it is still relevant. If it is so important, you will remember it again some time in the future. With a little practice listening becomes much easier, and you will enjoy far more productive two way conversations.

4 Model someone who you consider very charismatic. Hypnotherapists and NLP practitioners often utilize this technique very successfully. It could be a friend, a celebrity, or even a fictional character that you model. You may wish to be like James Bond for example. Don’t try and copy them exactly, just consider how they would act in the situations you face.

You have to sometimes be careful with this as it may not be appropriate to blow up the whole building up with your watch, or do a flying kick to the face a la Bruce Lee! Get a ‘feel’ of a certain character, and how they work on the inside. Try to catch their essence, rather than exactly cloning them. Done with thought and care this can significantly raise your charisma levels.

So remember you should have goals that you are working towards, love yourself, listen to others, and model other charismatic people. Try to be charismatic, but don’t try too hard. Watch other people and observe what they ‘get right’ and what they ‘get wrong’ in the charisma game.

This will greatly increase your awareness over time, and help hone your skills. Pretty soon you will notice huge strides in charisma levels, and your success and enjoyment of life will also soar. Now get out there and wow the world with your new charming charismatic self!

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The psychological aspect

There are hundreds of books about weight loss and dozens of diets, and yet people keep searching for that ultimate diet. The one that will actually work. The problem with diets is that they focus only on the physical aspect and you can’t diet forever. Once you quit you gain the weight back and often even more than before.

So what works? The answer is changing your life style. It works because it’s permanent. Before changing your life style, it’s important to understand why you chose it in the first place. I’ll give you a couple examples:

1 Mary was molested when she was a teenager and ever since she thought that being attractive is dangerous and therefore she gained weight to protect herself. Usually such thoughts are unconscious meaning she isn’t even aware she thinks them. To change her behavior she will need to change her beliefs.

2 When John was little his mom offered him cookies every time he felt sad. With time John linked pleasure to eating and ate every time he felt sad or depressed to comfort himself, often regardless of his actual hunger. In many similar cases a vicious cycle is created. People feel bad because they’re obese so they eat to feel better; and the cycle is perpetuated.

These examples illustrate that it’s vital to understand the psychological reasons in order to successfully lose weight. It’s also important to understand your rules and their hierarchy.

Each of us has rules like I have to be nice to people, or I should clean the apartment once a week. The difference between should and have to rules are that should are rules that you prefer to do but you don’t link pain to not doing them, and have to are rules that you feel obligated to do because otherwise you’ll feel pain.

One of the differences between obese and slim people are their rules. often slim people have a big list of I have to rules like: I have to exercise four times in a week, I have to eat healthy, I can’t smoke, I can’t use drugs, etc and a short list of I should rules.

Obese people on the other hand have a long list of I should rules: I should exercise,eat healthy and so on, and a short list of I have to rules like: I have to eat, sleep eight hours, and so on. If you want to lose weight you have to make it a priority, change your I should to I have to rules. This will not mean that you’ll do something against your will, it just means that you’ll make it a high priority because you’ll understand that the current condition can’t last.

Using NLP to lose weight

Lets say you have two conflicting parts. A part that wants to lose weight, we’ll call it part X and a part that sabotages part X, we’ll call it part Y. What we want to do is to establish a communication between the parts and to reach a mutual agreement.

The following techniques are from a book called Reframing : neuro-linguistic programming and the transformation of meaning by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.After reading them choose the appropriate one and do it. It won’t help if you just read it.

These techniques include the term reframing which I want to explain first: Just like when you change the frame of a picture and suddenly everything fits and the picture looks great, Reframing in NLP means to view a situation from a different perspective. This is done to to help accept the situation and deal with it better.

Negotiating between parts

Six Step Reframing

The following videos will help you lose weight using hypnosis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svh7r96WXJg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubz8ngcP5_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAEyYSJ7YrE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFVw4F7nObw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pREKX_-0NyI

The physical aspect

It’s important to understand that the changes I offer are for life, it’s not a diet. As you know changing your psychology isn’t enough. To lose weight you have to eat less calories than the body consumes. To do so you’ll have to do two things: cut back on your calories and exercise.

Eat healthy

The easiest way to cut back on your calories is to eat less fat. Don’t eat: butter, milk with high percentages of fat, gravy for salads. Eat: lean meat, lean chicken (without the skin) and vital fats like: avocado, salmon and almonds. Of course in the right amount.

Although controlling your calories is essential it’s not enough, it’s equally important to control your hormones. The hormones manage the body’s metabolism. Repressing the hormones that are responsible for fat accumulation will result in a large quantity of fats that can be burn in activity.

To effectively manage your hormones you need to manage your Carbohydrates, because consuming carbohydrates elevates the levels of insulin in the body. Insulin is a hormone that interferes with decomposition of fats. Not all the carbohydrates are the same. Simple carbohydrates like the ones in white bread, white rice, potatoes and some cereals elevate the insulin very fast and therefore should be avoided. On the other hand complex carbohydrates like the ones in whole wheat bread, oats, yam and beans should be in your daily menu.

Calories and hormones determine whether the nutrition will be used to build muscles or to build fat, While the number of meals during the day affects the general metabolism. Every time you eat the metabolism increases slightly. If you’ll eat six times in a day your metabolism will increase six times.

It’s a way to lose weight without eating less. It doesn’t mean that you need to eat more, on the contrary you will need to eat less in each meal and chew slowly because it takes approximately twenty minutes before the brain signals the body that you’re full.

Drink a lot of water. The following video explains more about the benefits of drinking a lot of water.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xQyldIzFZk

Exercise

Do aerobics (exercises for improving the body’s oxygen intake ). Aerobics include running, swimming, dancing, walking fast, yoga and so on. To produce a benefit, aerobic training must raise the heart rate (pulse) to the exerciser’s target level for at least 20 minutes and include at least three sessions a week.

Aerobics has three benefits: it improves your cardiovascular fitness, it burns calories and it influences your hormones. Aerobics elevates the norepinephrine hormone that helps burn fats. it’s best to do aerobics in the morning before eating breakfast for an hour max.

Do anaerobic exercise (exercise intense enough to trigger anaerobic metabolism). Anaerobic exercise includes: heavy weight-lifting, all types of sprints (running, biking, etc.), jumping rope, hill climbing, interval training, isometrics, or any rapid burst of hard exercise.

Besides making you stronger and improving your cardiovascular fitness it will improve your metabolism and stamina. To lose weight a good combination would be to do aerobics four times in a week and Anaerobic exercise twice in a week.

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True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost — Charles Caleb Colton

I’ve really struggled with relationships when I was growing up. Only after high school I started to understand what people like, what works and who I wanted to become. In this post I want to share some of the key principles I believe are important to maintain your friendships and to make new friends.

1Be honest. There is only one reason to lie when you meet people and that is the fear that they won’t like you the way you’re. of course lying won’t help you because even if they like the character you created it’s not you and sooner or later they’ll know it. Furthermore there is no such thing as brutally honest there is only brutal or honest.

2Don’t judge. When you judge someone you instantly change your relationship, it’s as if he can feel it. Moreover if something really bothers you then it’s a sign of an unresolved issue. Maybe you acted the way he did in the past or maybe you believe that you’re not allowed to act the way he did. Whatever it is it’s not related to the other person.

3Don’t gossip. There is only one exception to this rule, you can only gossip if it’s funny. If it’s not funny then it’s probably mean. You probably think that the people you’re telling are enjoying it, well maybe they do but they also think that if you gossip about other people you probably gossip about them too and they’ll be reluctant to open up to you.

4Don’t criticize. If something bothers you it’s best to talk about it instead of keeping it inside until you explode, but unless you’re someones boss criticizing won’t help. People tend to remember compliments because it makes them feel good. For instance if your wife has made you an omelet with onion and you don’t like onion instead of telling her how much you hate onion try telling her how much you love her omelets and that you prefer them without onion. It’s simple and it works.

5Make people feel good. Half the time people aren’t going to remember your words but they’ll always remember how you make them feel. With time they will associate your face with the feelings you make them feel, In NLP it’s called an anchor. This is the reason you smile when you see someone you like, you remember the feelings.

6Be genuinely interested in other people. Can you guess what interest people the most? That’s right themselves. If you’ll ask people about themselves they will be happy to answer and they will become interested in you, after all you must be interesting if you’re interested in them right? There is something you can learn from everyone you meet, often it’s things that you can’t learn from books.

7The world doesn’t revolve around you. Unless they want revenge for something you did, people usually don’t try to hurt you on purpose. Most of the time people just act the way they do because of their childhood programing. Remember that It’s not personal and they probably act this way to everyone they meet.

8You teach people how to treat you. When people first meet you they don’t know what to expect, so they assume that everything they’ll do is ok. They assume that until you tell them differently. It’s your job to tell people how you want to be treated.

9Learn to be a good listener. We all want to feel important and by really listening to someone you can help them feel it. A good technique to show people that you listened is to wait until they’ve finished talking and then repeat their general idea with your own words. For example they say something and then you say: ” so you mean that…”

10Relationships are a two way street. Think about relationships like a bank account, if you want to withdraw you have to deposit. In other words if you want to ask for favors you have to invest in the relationship first. The investment doesn’t have to be a favor, it can be a compliment or anything that makes the other feel good about himself.

The following video explains about rapport and the next video explains how to establish it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvp-cVz_ANM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beXd_e39Uqc

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