Successful Blog

Ideas & Infographics: So You Thought Your Mobile Habits Were Harmless?

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by Mihaela Lica

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Getting Smart about Smart Devices

These days, if you are not heavily heeled with smart devices and wired into the social web, your business is probably suffering. This is no big secret. However, the habits and devices you use may have adverse affects on you that are seldom publicized. Does your neck ache? Ever get blurry vision? Read on.

Have you ever thought about just how your body is positioned while using your iPad or other smart device. Probably not, that is unless your eyeballs get so red from bad positioning your friends think you have a hangover. The infographic below reflects on how smartphone or device use can mimic the improper wearing of eyeglasses.

[Click the image to see the isolated infograph and again to see it full size.]

[Created by Mezzmer Eyeglasses]

The advances in mobile technologies and the ever increasing adaptation of them by us poses not only huge benefits, but sometimes very bad consequences. Smart devices, like any tool designed to accelerate or enhance our abilities, should be used properly.

If you are a habitual smartphone or pad user, maybe you should consider refining your habits? Or, maybe a pain in the neck is your cup of tea?

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Author’s Bio:

Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.

You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

Thanks, Mig! Thank you also to Mezzmer.com!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Empower Yourself!

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by LaRae Quy

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It’s an Inside Job

Someone needs to tell the political candidates that personal empowerment is not about power over others. Rather, it is understanding that you are in charge of your own life.

People who are personally empowered know that happiness is an inside job. They don’t wait for someone else to make them happy and they can take care of their own needs for affection.

You Are Responsible For Your Own Actions

In other words, there is no finger pointing and blaming others for your lack of performance. You are willing to take responsibility for your actions. OK, so now it’s very obvious that most political candidates have no personal empowerment—they are just power hungry.

I make this distinction between power and personal empowerment because they are two very different things and people often assume that to be empowered is to be powerful.

Wrong.

Empowerment is a process where you do something, reflect on your actions, assess whether you made the right choice—and why—and continue on. This progression is a very important piece of the puzzle because personal empowerment acknowledges complete responsibility for self and the choices that are made. It is strong enough to look at itself and say, “Badly done, Emma. Badly done,” and then move on, taking with it lessons learned from the experience.

Personal empowerment is not for wimps. It takes a strong character to look at oneself with honesty and decide what to keep and what to throw out.

Where To Begin?

Life unfolds in phases. As we look back over time, we can see when we felt empowered and when we did not. Each time period has it’s own characteristics.

We all spent time as students when our lives revolved around classes, teachers, and other students. The academic calendar was central to all of our planning. Life as a student is a unique time.

Similarly, we are always in different phases of life as we mature and circumstances change. Life is a series of interconnecting phases. So when we stop to take that honest look at ourselves, we will be empowered only to the degree to which we understand what phase of life we’re in.

Our life is bigger than a single moment. The things that we cherish, the goals that motivate us, and the issues we wrestle with are connected to the period in which we currently find ourselves.

We feel lack of personal empowerment when we are unable to make choices that are always in our own best interest. Indeed, it is impossible to feel empowered if we cannot identify the issues that hold us back. We feel out of control when we try to live up to the expectations of others. We give power over our life to others when we allow them to define success or achievement.

But when we let others generate ideas and solutions for our issues, we are no longer taking the lead.

We become the ultimate follower when we are no longer the leader of our own life.

Dig Deeper Into the Now

As an FBI counterintelligence agent, the first phase of a recruitment operation was to identify the target. This meant collecting as much information as possible about the target’s past and current situation, as well as aspirations for the future. Every investigation starts with understanding the nature and character of the NOW phase.

Here is a list of typical questions used in FBI recruitment operations to help agents get clarity about the issues and specific needs of the person we’re investigating. These same questions may also help you define the phase of life you are now living in. It is impossible to attain personal empowerment without understanding the nature and character of your current phase of life:

  1. When did this current phase begin? Identify the boundary that separates this phase from previous phases. The boundary may be a transition (a new job, relationship, or a new city), an event (marriage, divorce, death, children), a discovery, or a decision (a different career or going back to school).
  2. Who are the key people in your life during this period? What role does each play? Which relationships are satisfying? Disappointing? Why?
  3. What events characterize this phase? They may be personal or professional events.
  4. What are the major opportunities and responsibilities that characterize this phase? How do you spend your time? What interests you most? Least? What is most creative about your life during this phase? Most demanding?
  5. What characterizes your inner state during this phase? How would you describe your spirituality? Reflections? Feelings? Do you journal?
  6. What is your physical state during this phase? Are you healthy? What are your health challenges?

To attain personal empowerment, it’s important to understand the key issues in your life and decisions you are being asked to make during this phase.

What kinds of thoughts, impressions, experiences, etc. came to you during this exercise? What are some key insights in this phase of your life? How do these empower you?

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Author’s Bio:

Larae Quy

LaRae Quy was an FBI agent, both a counterintelligence and undercover agent, for 25 years. She exposed foreign spies and recruited them to work for the U.S. Government. Now she explores the unknown and discovers the hidden truth via her blog Your Best Adventure. You can find her on Twitter as @LaRaeQuy

Thanks, Larae!

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Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Ideas & Infographics: Is Social Media Ruining Our Minds?

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by Mihaela Lica

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Social Networkers and Social Conversations Everywhere

Social media is going stronger than ever, Google + now seizing the forefront of all our frontal lobes, or at least resting on the minds of networkers everywhere online. The power of that so called “conversation” we all adopted as a fact of life though, does not come without a price. Along with the profound positive effects Facebook, Twitter, and g+ afford us, there appear to be some “less than positive” effects you may not be aware of.Scientists now believe social media may impact cognitive function and development negatively. From multitasking to other focus oriented skills, it appears a sort of transformative process is occurring – in short, our brains may be adjusting. The infographic courtesy Assisted Living Today below is demonstrative of this theory. You may want to investigate this.

[Click the image to see the isolated infograph and again to see it full size.]

Let’s Move Some Ideas at a Human Pace

As you can see, How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds opens up a bit of a can of worms where knowing what’s good for you on the web goes.

What?

Did we all assume pecking away at our keyboards, smacking those barriers with a slingshot and Angry Birds, endless hours of looking at crazy or not so crazy video would have no effect? The bigger question is, “Just how rewired have you become?” Our attention spans have become so short (perhaps) that soon a friend will have to get even the most “fuzzy” feelings across in microseconds. I don’t know about you, but I like my kindness and consideration delivered at a leisurely pace. That goes for absorbing other wonderful things on and off the web. Of course, those pesky “scientists” don’t know everything yet. Let’s hope so anyway.

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Author’s Bio:

Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.

You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

Thanks, Mig! Thank you, too, to Assisted Living Today!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Beach Notes: Surf carnival

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Surf carnival at Tallebudgera, Queensland, with surfboats ready to race. The surfboat, with a team of rowers and a sweep, used to be part of the basic surf rescue setup on Australian beaches. They were used when individual lifesavers on long reel lines could not get beyond the breakers for a rescue or for mass rescues.

These days they have given way to inflatable rescue craft. Now the surfboats are used for feats of strength and skill and have become the centre of a flourishing sub-culture within the volunteer surf lifesaving movement.

The surfboats were traditionally crewed by males only, when the surf lifesaving clubs were male only. There are now many all women crews, although we have noticed sometimes, when we’ve seen women crews practising locally, that they have a male sweep on board.

Man or woman, a surfboat is no place for the faint-hearted. There is an old joke that when surf clubs were choosing their boat crews they would line up the contenders and throw bricks at them: the ones who didn’t duck got to be on the crew.

How do you choose your crew?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Dos and Don’ts of taking a much needed break while writing for web

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A Guest Post by
Rahil Muzafar

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So, you’re on the verge of completing this extensive e-book and feeling desperate for a short break, so you can stretch out those tense muscles. Shoulders aching, eyes paining, head spinning, all you can think of is to somehow finish the damn thing and get some much-needed rest!

Finally! The moment arrives, you’ve completed the entire thing, and you are ready to take a break. But what do you do? Browse the social profiles of your friends, watch some funny videos posted by one of your contact, chat with friends, and surf the web aimlessly? If that’s how you spend time when taking a break from your writing job, then sorry to break it to you but that’s adding more stress to your system. In other words, it’s more destructive than constructive.

What I’ve described above is the typical, “taking a break” scenario where bloggers or fulltime freelancers don’t realize that it’s not only damaging their health but productivity as well. This article will be focusing on freelancers as they are the people who are more at a privilege of taking a break every now and then. And because they are not sitting in a restricted environment of an office, most of the time they end up taking a break the wrong way, thus creating more stress and exhaustion than the needed relaxation.

Following, you will find some general dos and don’ts for freelancers to help them take what can actually be labeled as break. Of course you can come up with your own definition of break via comments, but first, my take on the topic.

The Don’ts –Doing It the Wrong Way

Despite having the advantage (spare some time to think of the misery of office workers!) of getting a break every now and then, freelancers waste it away by doing the following.

Spending time on Facebook, YouTube and the likes: Dude. If you’ve done your work, get up! Don’t stay sitting in the same weird posture and browse your Facebook page for the umpteenth time. Stop checking the continuous stream of Twitter updates. Curb the urge to comment on all status updates or image uploads by your friends.

Chatting With Friends Online: Most of the time, the half an hour break taken for a quick chat can lead to hours of useless debates or gossips. Just because Internet allows you to get in touch with your friends from any place at any time, doesn’t mean you must be in touch all the time.

Watching TV: A few minutes ago, your eyes were literally aching, right? So, why are you watching the TV now? Rest your eyes, after hours of working continuously on PC, the TV’s glaring light and noise will add to the stress even if the show is enjoyable.

Doing Household Work: Taking a break doesn’t mean washing the dishes, going to the market or cooking in the kitchen. These are household chores that should be done before or after you start working, not during your work break.

Eating Junk: Eating a packet of potato fries, or scoops of ice cream, while still remaining seated on your desk is NOT recommended at all. That’s unhealthy for many obvious reasons, so you must avoid getting indulged in any such practices.

The Do’s – How to Take a Good Break

It’s a known fact that sitting consecutively for hours in one place leads to serious health problems. After an hour of working, you should get up and take a 5 – 10 minute break. If you are working from home, that shouldn’t be a problem. So, here’s what you should do when taking a break.

Meditation: If you want some kind of mental peace; this is one hell of a thing to do for the sake of your mind. You can try playing some soothing music and just sit back, thinking of positive and happy things in life, in fact you can think of anything except what you are going to do after the break.

Sleep: Many freelancers prefer to take one long break after 3 -4 hours instead of 5 minute break after an hour. If you’ve worked for 4 – 5 hours and feeling stressed, what’s better than taking a short power nap of 30 to 40 minutes, just to relax your state of being. If you’ve been awake and working hard since morning, then an afternoon nap would be just perfect.

Go talk to your Family: We are not talking about the online socializing; instead you should spend some time with your partner, kids, or anybody living with you. You’ll find yourself infused with positive energy in next to no time.

Eat something Healthy: Keep a tray of fruits by your side. Avoid pastries, cakes, sweets, chips, coke etc. Oh and when talking of food, always keep a water bottle nearby. Consume as much water as you can while working. It’ll keep you hydrated, activated and will provide the necessary breaks in form of nature’s call.

Take a Stroll: A ten minutes stroll around the block is one of the most refreshing breaks you can take. If it’s too sunny outside, then walk around your apartment block! This is not only a good form of exercise, but will also help your mind to think out of the box.

Author’s Bio:

Rahil is an online entrepreneur, he manages a coupon code website listing coupon codes and discounts for purchases like 1and1 and Network Solutions. You’re welcome to avail these coupons at 1 and 1 coupons and network solutions referral codes .

Thanks! Rahil!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!