Secrets to Developing Emotional Mastery

If you master this skill, you can achieve anything! Great advice from Brendon Burchard:)

The Ultimate Advice For Every 20 Year Old

Great advice from Gary Vee. Don't worry about other people. Concentrate on yourself, your goals, and put the work in!!

The 6 Habits of Financial Health

By Cunera Dieker

"Never spend your money before you have it" - Thomas Jefferson

From the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep, you make constant choices. Should I eat the salad instead of the burger? Should I go jogging after work? And much much more. Over time we form habits, good and bad ones. Every day, we constantly try to implement more good habits in our daily routine. "Running on Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday; High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) on Monday and Thursday", those are mine with few "Should I go and grab a coffee with a friend and skip the HIIT for today?". Of course, the better your lifestyle is the better your physical fitness will be. 

Financial fitness, like physical fitness, is mostly about good habits. Here are the 6 habits to adopt for better financial health.

1. Know how much you make and how much you spend 

Knowing how much you make every month is where you should start. If you have a fixed salary, it is easy. More difficult if your salary depends on commission. Even harder if it is purely based on them. If you work in a cyclical business, then you will probably have highs and lows throughout the year. You should average your last two to three years income, excluding special bonuses.

"A penny saved is a penny earned" - Benjamin Franklin

2. Spend less than you earn 

This habit is at the core of all good financial management. It is how rich people get rich. When you spend less than you earn, you save. And what you save becomes wealth. First, you need to know how much you spend. You need to start to register all your expenses. Starbucks, Movie ticket, Milk,... , everything goes into it. The first three months should be taken as "survey months", I am sure you will be surprised on how much you actually spend on certain things. If you carefully register each of your expenditure without intervention, it will be easier for you to take actions.

"Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put by not less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family" - The Richest Man In Babylon

The first law of gold in the amazing book "The Richest Man in Babylon" Says to save 10% of your income. The 50/20/30 rule for minimalistic budgeting is a proportional guideline that can help you keep your spending in alignment with your saving goals. This rule allocates 50% to your essential spending, 30% to your personal spending. The remaining 20% is for saving. More "extreme" and frugal people will save up to 80% of their income. Your personal situation and commitment play a role in your saving percentage, however, do not go below 20%. To achieve it, follow this simple rule: 

"Play Yourself First". As you receive your salary set aside 20% and do not use it.

3. Stay Insured 

A study done at Harvard University indicates that Medical Expenses are the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the States. A good health insurance can protect you. However, one of the interesting caveats of the study I just mentioned, shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance. My own take is that you need to select an insurance that is personalized to your needs. If you have dependents you would need a different insurance compared to your single friend.

4. Be prepared for the unexpected 

One year ago I lost my job, my monthly salary went from five figures to zero within two weeks. With today's mind, I can say that being laid off was probably one of the best events for my career. When that happened I was emotionally devastated. Before I started a new adventure in the special place I am right now, I spent few months without any income. I was able to sustain my previous lifestyle with few adjustments, thanks to the money I had saved. Most will call this "rainy fund". I much rather call it "Opportunity fund". Rainy fund brings the memory of scarcity, whether opportunity fund is something full of optimism. I had to use some of my funds during my unemployed days, and having a positive mindset helped me go through that difficult time.

"Make all you can, Save all you can, Give all you can" - John Wesley

5. Develop a long-term financial plan 

If you do not know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. Your financial future is much more important than your next holiday. My work colleagues are always busy planning their holidays, if you do the same, channel some of that energy and focus on what your long term plans are. Write them down.

6. Earn more 

Your income matters. Saving 20% of 1,000 is different than saving 20% of 10,000. Everyone has the opportunity to tap into their free time and find something that could produce extra income. Baby-sitting, tuition, music lessons,... The only limit is your imagination. It may be awkward and difficult at first, but with time and persistence you can succeed in developing one or more sources of extra income

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The Secrets to Self-Mastery | Interview with Dr John Demartini

Fantastic interview with Dr John Demartini. Covers so much ground and is the master of human behavior and in my opinion the leader in the personal development field.

How To Reprogram Your Mind (for Positive Thinking)

Really like Brendon's content and style to his videos.

How To Improve Interpersonal Skills With Social Intelligence?

By: Sandeep Atre

All relationships are based on that all-important connect’. And just the way, to establish a contact, two persons need to share factual information, in the same manner, to establish a connect’, two persons need to share emotional information. And the best part is that the desire to connect’ is so deeply woven into each one of us that people keep sending emotional signals all the time. 

The only difference is that more often than not those signals are subtle, in the form of gestures, postures and expressions. And that is the realm of social intelligence’. So, how successful you are in connecting to people primarily depends on how well you can understand what is going on inside them. People’s behavior is eventually a reflection of their emotions. So if you can connect emotionally then you can synchronize behaviorally and thus excel interpersonally. 

We define Social intelligence as Observing nonverbal behavior and understanding emotions for greater interpersonal effectiveness and self-management’. Thus, it is a skill backed by conceptual depth. It helps you observe a person’s gestures, postures and expressions in the light of the emotional counterparts.

We all know that humans are social animals and the basis of our social being is interpersonal communication’. One look at our evolution and it becomes absolutely clear that we are wired to connect, because there is no other way we would have survived all that we did. But are we connecting anymore? Look around and you would find that if not destroyed, the very basis of our social being is surely under serious threat.

At homes, fathers are busy staring at their smart-phones, mothers are busy watching television, kids are busy with their videogames and teenagers are tuned into a song in the I-pod. Similarly, at workplace, bosses are busy looking at laptops and employees are either logged into their company’s intranets or some social networking sites. Even the education hasn’t remained unaffected. Teachers are looking at their PowerPoint Presentations rather than at students and students are also preferring online videos to learn from.The scene in business is no different either. Customers are choosing e-commerce websites over a real shopping experience and Customer Care Executives are busy checking out customer records in CRM software rather than relating to the very same persons standing in front of them.

Yes! We are looking less at people, listening to them less, being less mentally-present in conversations and are paying lesser attention to their reactions. Those speaking silences and subtle interactions of the past are today struggling in the impulsive hands of Poke, Ping & Post’. And with decreasing attention span and declining face-to-face contact, people are finding it hard to relate to each other, connect with each other and hold on to relationships.That’s what makes social intelligence such an important virtue to develop. We, at Socialigence, define Social Intelligence as observing nonverbal behavior and understanding emotions for greater interpersonal effectiveness and self-management’. Yes! If we develop renewed interest and caliber to pay attention to people and to what they are conveying without saying it, then this simple change has a potential to enrich our lives as social beings to a great extent.

For instance, while interacting with a family member, a relative, a friend or a colleague, this skill can help you gauge from his or her gestures and postures whether the person’s emotional state is negative or positive’ or that of appeal or avoidance’. Then you can zero in on the exact emotion by observing the face.

This knowledge can be utilized to then prepare the most apt response on your part based on the context and setting. Now, the best part of social intelligence skill is that once you have responded in the chosen manner, you can observe if that response has generated the desired effect as the effect can again be observed by the change in that person’s gestures, expressions or postures. 

Now, what makes this skill even more important for interpersonal success is the fact that in the contemporary world, all relationships are overwhelmed by the need to stand strong in the onslaught of unprecedented speed of change! It makes an even more strong case for creating stable and supportive relationships.

And what damages a relationship most is unresponsiveness’. And that unresponsiveness is and ability to observe’. This skill of social intelligence’ and the knowledge associated with it builds an interpersonal bridge by reviving one’s focus towards the importance of paying attention to people and then strengthening their skill-set to do it competently mostly born out of disinterest. And that disinterest is mostly a side-effect of less willingness. 

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