Personal Advancement

You probably think I’m wacko, but it’s true - stress can be your best friend! Stress is actually a positive experience to be channeled to improve your life.

For instance, let me tell you about a small moment of stress I faced a few minutes ago.

Just before I boarded my flight from Phoenix to Seattle, I was talking to my husband Wade on my cell phone. Toward the end of our conversation, he told me how someone had commented on how the kids are dressed better when I’m around.
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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Skills
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Difficult people are on the hunt for a quarrel. It’s not personal, usually. It’s just that you happen to be the most convenient target.

Difficult people are insecure. They want YOU think and live like THEY think and live. Misery indeed loves company. They feel better if you are tense and unhappy.

What can you do to instantly neutralize their negativity? You cannot stop them from being difficult and demanding. Heaven help you if you try! But you can control your own reactions through the amazing power of NowFacts.
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While war and poor economic conditions begin to affect people all over the world, more and more people suffer with depression. The more we focus on news events and the business climate, the more we are depressed. Whatever the reason you feel is the cause of your depression, the following five simple tips guarantee you reduce it significantly.

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I mentioned the value of Mind Mapping in learning new things a little while back.

Now you can get a copy of FreeMind — a free (open source) mind mapping program. Written in Java, it’s available for Windows, Mac, or pretty much anything else.

It makes an easy and interesting way to get more familiar with Mind Mapping.

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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Mindfulness, Skills
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One of the first really important steps in coaching, or indeed in anything involving getting a result is setting a goal. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a terribly good process for defining well-formed goals.

A well-formed goal is specific, positively stated, defines consequences, procedures for success testing, a time frame, an “environment check” (a process to double check that you really do want the goal), an identification of existing resources and additional resources needed, and a detailed plan.

Whew. How many of your goals tend to be like that? How many of them do you tend to get?

Here’s a detailed step-by-step process for defining a well-formed goal. This process uses several NLP techniques to get the desired result.

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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Coaching, Skills
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The people you associate with (work with, live with, spend time with, etc.) can have a profound effect on you and your life. If this effect is negative, then it behooves you to do something about it. In some cases, it may be time to reconsider being around the person. Sometimes that’s not very practical, and you have to do what you can to minimize how much they effect you.

Before you do either, you have to consciously identify just how each person influences you.

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Trying to get yourself out of a rotten emotional state (anxiety, fear, depression) can be difficult, unless you’ve taken a little time to prepare beforehand.

Take a few moments and try the following exercise:

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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Skills
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I use a lot of the concepts in these books as part of my coaching practice; I’m often asked about where to go to find out more information or get more depth on a particular subject, so I decided to put up a page for everyone’s convenience. The books and e-books presented below are books that I’ve found to be helpful in both my business and personal life, in one form or another They also specificly exclude a whole lot of other books that I’ve not found to be terribly helpful. As you peruse these books (or any others), it’s sometimes helpful to keep a couple of ideas firmly in mind — first, you sometimes have to sift a lot of sand to find the gold dust. These books represent some of the more promising areas of the stream, but many of them do require some thought, study and experimentation to seperate the great ideas from the noise. Second, and perhaps more important, the best ideas in the world won’t help you if you don’t put them into motion.

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Learning because you want to (instead of because you have to)

Chances are you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t have something you wanted to learn. You may have discovered along the way that much of that learning you “had to do” back in school didn’t leave you terribly well prepared to do the learning you “want to do” later in life. Perhaps you’re looking for methods to optimize your learning skills in order to learn more, better, and faster.

Most of us managed to get through school, with or without struggle, without really learning how to learn well. It’s likely that you had classes where the material was so obvious to you, or the instructor was so talented or engaging that it was inevitable you were going to learn it. You probably also had a least a few classes that were a real struggle to learn anything in – the material was presented badly, or it was uninteresting, and the “learning tools” you were given were inadequate or barely adequate to overcome the challenges.

The good news is that sometimes old dogs can be the best trick learners, and you can “learn to learn” faster and better than you once thought possible.

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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Skills
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