How to Motivate: The number one thing you must do to motivate people

Here's a great video on motivating staff.  Paul McGee provides some great insight applying concepts of differentiation as a means to ignite the power within your people.

Educating South Carolina: In Beaufort, clothes make the gentleman, and the l...

Educating South Carolina: In Beaufort, clothes make the gentleman, and the l...: Approaching three hundred years ago, the sons and daughters of South Carolina's elite had private tutors and governesses to teach them e...

Positive Discipline Strategies Yield Quick Results

7 Good Reasons to Give Back

Improve Your Health and the World Around You

  -- By Leanne Beattie, Health & Fitness Writer


According to the Giving USA Foundation, charitable giving in the United States reached an estimated $295 billion in 2006—a new record. The record-setting donations included $1.9 billion from Warren Buffett, paid as the first installment of his 20-year pledge of more than $30 billion to four different foundations. But you don’t have to be rich to make a difference. Millions of ordinary Americans—people who you pass on the street every day--also gave to charity, for the sake of making the world a better place, one dollar at a time.

Whether you donate money or time, giving back is beneficial--and not just for the recipients. Research has shown that the old adage, “it’s better to give than to receive” is true after all.

A Gallup survey on volunteering in the U.S.A. found that 52% of volunteers do it because they like doing something useful and helping others. Another 38% said they enjoy doing volunteer work and feeling good about themselves.

Besides feeling good about yourself for doing something for others, giving back is also good for your physical health. In a Canadian study, 85% of Ontario volunteers rated their health as "good," compared to 79% of non-volunteers. Only 2% of volunteers reported "poor" health, one-third the amount of non-volunteers who reported the same health status.

Still other studies have shown a relationship between volunteering and increased self-esteem, with volunteers reporting both greater personal empowerment and better health. Doing for others may stimulate the release of endorphins, which has been linked to improved nervous and immune system functions, too.

Many people report a “high” from volunteering, similar to the good feelings that come from exercise. Others have found that volunteering can help fight depression. Helping others can help take your mind off your own problems and enable you to see the bigger picture. Once you see the difference you can make in another person's life, your own problems can seem smaller and more manageable.

As more research is showing that people with fewer social contacts have shorter life spans than people with wide social circles, regardless of race, income level or other lifestyle factors. If you are lonely or live in an area far away from friends and family, volunteering is one way to build a social life and improve your emotional and physical health at the same time.

Here are 7 More Reasons to Volunteer:

1. Develop new skills. Gaining skills, knowledge and expertise are common side effects of volunteering. Giving others your time brings you interesting and challenging opportunities that might not come along otherwise. This experience can be added to your resume and could result in a better paying job in the future.

2. Make social connections. Loneliness and boredom are common among retirees, students, and transplants to a new city. Volunteering can relieve this sense of social isolation and help you fill empty hours in the day.

3. Give back to your community. Doing something for the community you live in and returning the favor to those who have helped you are strong motivators. Everyone, rich or poor, takes from society, and volunteering is one way to show a sense of appreciation.

4. Develop and grow as a person. Volunteering is an excellent way to explore your likes and dislikes. If you’re interested in a new career, volunteer in the field first to see if you will actually like it. You may find a totally unrelated field is a much better fit for you, one you’d never consider if you hadn’t volunteered there first.

5. Gain a new perspective. Life can be hard and when you’re feeling down, your problems can seem insurmountable. Volunteering can offer a new perspective—seeing people who are worse off than you are, yet still hanging in there, can help you see your life in a whole new light.

6. Know that you're needed. Feeling needed and appreciated are important, and you may not get that appreciation from your paid work or home life where the things you do are expected or taken for granted. When you volunteer, you realize just how much you are truly needed. Meeting people who need your help is a strong incentive to continue—people are depending on you. If you don’t do it, who will?

7. Boost your self-esteem. Many volunteers experience a sense of increased self-esteem and greater self-worth. Helping others makes you feel good about yourself, because you’re doing something for someone that they couldn’t do for themselves.

Research has shown that the good feelings you experience when helping others may be just as important to your health as exercise and a healthy diet. But it’s the smile from a child or thankful person that shows you’re really making a difference in someone's life. And that’s the greatest feeling in the world.

Stumbling Toward Success

Trial and error works! 

by Michael Neill
 
Recently, my son introduced me to one of his favorite websites – www.stumbleupon.com. The basic idea, he explained to me, is that you click on a number of categories of things you find interesting, from movies to world politics to games to oceanography. You then “stumble” onto a website chosen at random by the website's decision engine, and after viewing the page you click “I like it,” “I don't like it,” or you can express your indifference by not clicking anything.

The decision engine takes these refinements into account, and you are gradually channeled towards more and more sites that you enjoy and away from those that hold no interest for you. The more you stumble, the more accurate and enjoyable the websites you will stumble upon.

At first glance, this seemed like one of the biggest time wasters imaginable, and my efficiency trained brain rejected it as yet another attempt to exploit my attention deficit until it became a full blown attention recession (or worse still, a depression). Yet after playing on the site for awhile, I've come to see that it is a fantastic metaphor for how it seems to me that people succeed in the “real world.”

 We all know how we’re supposed to succeed, don’t we? We set clear goals and objectives, make a plan, and follow that plan to the successful achievement of our goals.

While this kind of logical, linear approach to life looks great on paper (literally), in my experience life has far more say in how things turn out than many of us would like to admit. And in my formal and informal interviews of happy, successful people over the past twenty years, I’ve noticed that even if they made plans for specific, short-term objectives, when it came to the bigger picture of their lives, the “plan” these people have followed was not so much created as unfolded from the inside out.

In other words, they picked a direction that appealed to them and took their first few awkward, stumbling steps in that direction. Along the way, they bumped into people and circumstances and challenges and opportunities. If they liked what they found, they kept stumbling along in that direction, making more and more refined distinctions as they went. If they didn't like what they found, they stumbled off in a different direction, following their inner sense of desire to mark the path that was appearing in front of them as they went.

 Did they occasionally stumble a bit too hard and fall on their faces? Inevitably. But because they were so enjoying their adventure, they would simply pick themselves up, lick their wounds as needed, and stumble on in the direction of their own fascination and curiosity.

And this same approach is available to all of us at any time.

 Do you think you might want to write a novel?

Put pen to paper, allow yourself to write some absolute drivel, and see what story and characters begin to emerge.

Do you have what it takes to succeed in business?

Take your first, tentative steps in the direction of what you think you might want to do and you may be surprised and delighted by what you stumble upon.

 Now if your rational brain is throwing up a stream of objections to this seemingly random and disorganized approach, you can either give it the day off or perhaps appease it by showing it the “secret strategy” behind stumbling towards success:

Acknowledge the things that work for you and do more of them. 

Acknowledge the things that don't work for you and do less of them. 

When in doubt, stumble! 

And if that doesn’t seem like a good plan to your rational brain, perhaps it’s not as rational as it thinks it is….

 Have fun, learn heaps, and happy stumbling!

 Michael Neill is an internationally renowned success coach and licensed Master Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

The Power of Journaling

Before you can achieve your potential, you have got to make strides on identifying that one thing which you could work at every single day of your life. I am not a person who believes in chance. I once saw a roulette wheel come up black 14 consecutive times. Figure out the odds on that one? I believe we are here for a purpose and part of our task through living is to determine that purpose. Dreams are one tool given to us, built right into the DNA of every living person to help us identify our life's purpose. And there are examples all around us of others who are living life fully, others who have discovered their purpose.

It is not uncommon to have difficulty finding one's purpose, finding our potential. The concept of reincarnation and multiple lives for our friends in the Buddhist faith seems to be a reasonable explanation to why many of us live our entire life never finding our purpose. It is after all, the quintessential question on this planet, "Why are we here?" I want more than anything for you to find your potential but first I have to help you better organize your dreams, and proper organization begins with tools. Just think about it, any master artist: carpenter, craftsperson, surgeon has a myriad of tools at their disposal chisels, brushes, hammers, nails. Even the surgeon has a scalpel or cutting instrument of every shape and size.

I want to encourage you to expand your tool-box for organizing and identifying dreams. This is where achieving our potential begins. One of the most powerful tools for self-examination and understanding is journaling. If you want a better you, a life more fulfilling, full of happiness and joy, that sense of accomplishment every single day then get yourself a journal. All of the major booksellers have an entire section of empty journals ready for you to fill up. These journals are beautiful, and pricey so remember that once you start journaling that book is eventurally going to fill up and need to be replaced. If cost is an issue, and most book store journals are in the line of $9-$20, go with an effective inexpensive substitute. A very basic journal book can be picked up from Staples, Walmart or Target for as little as .99 cents. For the books that I write, I use these low cost journals and 3 of them filled up completely, equals a 70,000 word book.

So commit to yourself, begin journaling today. Sandy Grason wrote a wonderful book entitled Journalution: Journaling to Awaken Your Inner Voice, Heal Your Life and Manifest Your Dreams. I recommend you read this book, and watch the interview posted below. You can follow this link to her book here http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577314832

Should You Tell Others About Your Goals?

If you are interested in actually achieving the goals you set for yourself in 2011, you should not tell anyone about your specific goals! When you tell others your brain receives a degree of social gratification. This social reward makes you less likely to follow through with the steps leading toward success. As you develop goals for 2011, DO NOT SHARE THEM WITH OTHERS. Instead write down these goals and review them before bed. Goals are precious, guard them as if each would occupy a room in Fort Knox. Keeping goals private will help you understand internally that you still have more work ahead. Remember this is a crucial step that cannot be missed if you want move from the Goal Creating stage to the Core Action stage.

Make this world a better place by finding your true potential; 2011 is going to be your year.


Listen to Derek Sivers, creator of CDbaby.com discuss this phenomenon: