Paths to Success
 The summer is now in full swing, and although it's easy to slip into the slow-moving relaxation mode of 'summer break,' this is actually the best time of year to make some effective life changes, while the pace is a bit slower. This doesn't mean that you'll need to spend your
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summer sitting behind a desk contemplating your life strategy and missing out on outdoor fun at the cottage or beach, but summer is a great time to recognize that small life upgrades can make a big difference in the successes you enjoy for years to come. Read on to learn more, and while you're at it, check out the latest course offerings at Almeda University by clicking here.
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As always, we encourage you to e-mail us with your comments, suggestions or contributions about our "Paths to Success" e-letter, including your ideas for possible story topics, news items and advice for novice students - anything you think would help us bring you relevant and timely information that's useful to you! Ideas can be e-mailed to submit@almedauniversity.org. |
 Money & Finance:
Grow Your Own Vegetables for Better Physical and Financial Health
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Your body and your wallet can benefit from one simple outdoor activity this summer as long as you get started now. It's not too late to get some tasty, healthy vegetables into the ground this year, and it's the perfect time to plant some of the foods that won't pop up until next year (asparagus, for example).
You may have missed springtime, but there are a variety of fast-growing veggies that can reward you with a fabulous harvest before the summer is over if you start your planning today and your planting tomorrow.
It won't take you long to discover that not only is cultivating a vegetable garden good for your health, but it's also good for the spirit, not to mention the wallet. After all, a vegetable garden allows you to eliminate or control chemicals that you find in grocery store produce, you get more nutrients when you're eating veggies right off the vine, and you have the perfect excuse to get fresh air and exercise.
Even better is the fact that vegetables simply taste better when they're coming from your garden instead of the market.
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And there's nothing like sitting at the dining room table knowing that you grew the food that fills your plate!
When you consider the price of seeds that provide you with veggies all summer long and you compare that to the price of your produce purchases all summer, you'll see an enormous difference in the wallet. Furthermore, you can make sure that you always harvest all of the vegetables once they ripen (instead of leaving "extras" on the vine to rot) and freeze what you cannot eat right away. This simple effort will save on your winter grocery bill as well. Properly stored, vegetables can keep for months in your freezer.
Vegetables that freeze well include:
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Asparagus |
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Green beans |
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Yellow beans |
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Corn (once removed from the cob) |
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Hot peppers |
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Sweet peppers |
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Crushed tomatoes |
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Pumpkins |
If you also grow herbs in your garden, you can dry what you don't use (unfortunately, freezing does not work with herbs). Drying home-grown herbs will keep your spice rack full, but won't cut into your grocery budget.
A modest vegetable garden in your back yard can save you money year-round, while providing healthy, nutritious, colorful and flavorful meals for you and your family. And it will save on gas, too, with fewer trips to the grocery store!
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Home & Family Life:
Provide Your Kids a Fun Summer While Helping Them Continue to Learn
If your kids are like most children, summer vacation is their favorite part of the school year. However, as much fun as it is, it can also be the time of the year that your child loses the most information, skills and abilities that were learned within the classroom.
But if your children are offered the right experiences and opportunities this summer, they can still take in some great educational fun that will allow them to explore their community, discover lots of new information, and hopefully retain most of what they learned in school.
Here are some resources you can use to make sure that your kids maintain sharp and interested minds during the summer months:
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Public Library - the public library in many communities offers summer programs for kids that help them stay interested in reading. Many schools also keep their libraries open during the summer to give children an incentive to read. Libraries are a terrific learning and socializing opportunity for kids, with features such as story time, computer classes, movie clubs, teen book clubs, music programs and other youth-oriented groups. |
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Museums and Science Centers - summer programs are very common in these organizations when it comes to helping kids continue to learn throughout school's 'off season.' Even zoos often have low cost options for a variety of intriguing classes for all ages. |
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Do-it-Yourself Activities - if classes and camps aren't within your summer budget, you can always adopt a do-it-yourself approach. You might visit the library and browse the boundless shelves of information, read books together, learn backyard science, and even camp out in the yard. And why not visit a myriad of places within your local community, even if it's just enjoying a picnic at a city park and discussing what you see. Use the Internet as a resource, too. You'll likely find that there are rich nuggets of information about your own community, including historical sites and events, and local ghost stories and traditions. |
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Hiking - go for hikes and bring a book along with you that will help you identify birds, plants and animals within the area of your hike. Get a closer look at bugs, aquatic life and leaves. Learn to recognize the "do not touch" plants such as poison ivy and poison oak. |
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Revisit Topics Covered in the Classroom - amidst all the summer fun, take advantage of some fun ways to help your youngsters brush up on topics they learned about in the classroom so that they'll be up to speed when the new school year starts. |
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Thanks to the Internet, a refresher or two can be done from anywhere - even at the beach. You might want to try a new online resource, www.QwizzysWorld.com, whereby kids can input material themselves and create fun quizzes for themselves and their siblings. Additionally, there are online tutoring resources for those who may need a little more help during the long summer break. |
Even your vacation can be a learning and skill developing experience. When you reach your destination, give your kids a copy of the city map and see if they can plan the cheapest or most efficient travel plans or tourist activities. Give them a budget to work with so that they know their boundaries and let them loose. You can even give them a monetary incentive if they find a truly fun and inexpensive adventure.
No matter what your plans are this summer, you can always make them fun and educational to keep that competitive learning edge alive within your child, even if he or she doesn't happen to be sitting in a classroom at the time.
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Career Success:
Health Care for Your Computer: New Trend Keeps Business from Crashing
You've worked hard at earning a degree, determined and secured your career path and have even launched your very own small business. One minute your business is humming along smoothly - the next, one computer can't print, another is stalled from spam, and a third won't stop flashing an error message. A small business can be startled with I.T. bills that range from zero dollars a month to thousands of unbudgeted dollars. This isn't healthy for any career or new business, but what is one to do?
There's actually a new trend in computer maintenance that seems to be a viable solution for small business owners, and that is the concept of paying up front for the security of knowing your computer will not stumble when you need it. Many computer consulting firms worldwide are now offering what the industry calls "managed services," a sort of health insurance for small business computer needs.
For a flat monthly fee, I.T. experts handle all regular maintenance and take care of any computer problems. Technology consulting firms used to get paid when computers broke down.
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Now, more and more, these firms are reporting that clients prefer to pay a predictable monthly bill to keep their computers healthy.
Companies that are large enough to have I.T. departments can deal with the occasional computer crash, but businesses with 25 or fewer employees tend to contract out their computer repair and maintenance.
Smaller businesses are actually the ones that can least afford to have computer trouble, and the 'little guys' really depend on their staff being productive all the time. This new crop of I.T. businesses typically fix everything from virus infections to server crashes, and some even offer 'no downtime' guarantees.
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This new concept is different from what most would think of as traditional I.T. service, because instead of paying an I.T. technician when your computer is broken, the I.T. technician gets paid to keep it from breaking in the first place.
New advances in technology equate to more ways to keep a small business up and running, and some technology consulting firms are able to install software so that I.T. service is paged when the computer system gets too hot or gets infected. And sometimes, the I.T. consultant knows about problems before the client does.
Small and medium sized businesses are finding it more cost effective to pay I.T. repair companies to keep their computers working, rather than paying when they break down. This maintenance strategy might be the perfect way to keep your career and your small business on the fast track to success.
Article courtesy of Chip Reaves, National Director of Computer Troubleshooters, www.comptroub.com |
Personal Growth:
Getting Out of Your Own Way
The room is silent as you ready yourself. You plot out your battle strategy as you slowly and methodically place each piece of your armor in its proper place. You steady yourself under the weight, as you rise to face your skillful foe. You know every movement and every thought that they know, for you have battled this opponent day after day. Your opponent has a name that you know, oh, so very well. That name is your name. That name is YOU!
There are plenty of challenges in our lives, and some of them are of our own making. Okay, I'm being kind here. Most of them are of our own doing. We undermine ourselves and make assumptions that restrict choices in our lives and allow our fears to stop us from even trying to reach our goals and dreams. Like a pig that is unaware of the mud that he is wallowing in, being stuck in old ways of thinking keeps us blind to the many opportunities that surround us outside of that mud hole.
How can we get unstuck? How do we get ourselves out of the mud we so readily find ourselves playing in? It won't occur by thinking and doing things the same old way, but by shedding the negative thoughts and self-defeating actions that we have found we are so predisposed to in times of difficulty.
Every day of our lives we have thousands of thoughts that race through our heads, some positive and some negative. For some, there is a tendency to dwell on the past and overanalyze what we could or should have done. "Analysis equals paralysis" as the old saying goes. If those thoughts are not supporting you, you will no doubt have trouble getting the results you want and overcoming challenges along the way. Being able to manage your thoughts is at least 80 percent of the battle in being successful.
The very first thing that needs to be accomplished when we are ready to change and 'move out of our own way,' is to recognize that we are the ones blocking the doorway.
There are ten 'Forms of Paralyzing Thinking' patterns that perpetuate obstacles and cause us to get in our own way! Most of us live with these thoughts day in and day out, playing them out over and over again like a broken record. For some, we have developed ways to influence our thoughts and act on them with positive results. Discover which of the following forms of paralyzing thinking infuses your mind and robs you of the motivation to get out of your own way. Just becoming aware of and observing these thoughts will weaken their grip:
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All-Or-Nothing Thinking:
You see things in black-or-white categories. Anything short of perfection is seen as a total failure in your eyes. You make one mistake and it becomes a deal breaker. You have a slice of pizza and think, "I've blown my whole diet," and then polish off the entire pie. When this plus or minus type of analysis occurs, it's usually because of all-or-nothing thinking. |
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Overgeneralization:
You know this is happening when words like "always" or "never" enter your thoughts. |
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You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. A sales person hears "no" from a prospect and thinks, "I'll never get a sale." You look at situations as 'universal facts,' i.e. "Everybody knows this is the best sales strategy." These overgeneralizations blind you from seeing new, different or even better possibilities. |
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Mental Filter:
You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on and analyze it exclusively. As a result, your vision of reality becomes gloomy, like a clear day turning cloudy. For example, you receive many positive comments about a sales or marketing presentation you made, but one person says something a bit critical. You obsess about his reaction for days and ignore all the positive feedback that you did receive. You attend a sales meeting and focus on what is wrong with the meeting's facilitation, missing the positive aspects of the meeting. |
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Discounting the Positive: You discount positive experiences by saying they "don't count." You do a good job and minimize it by thinking you could have done better, or that anyone could have done as well as you did. This extracts the pleasure out of life, and makes you feel inadequate and devalued. |
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Magnification: You exaggerate the significance of your problems and shortcomings and you minimize the value of your desirable qualities. One time after a seminar, I was working with a participant regarding his fear of presenting to his co-workers. I asked him to shut his eyes and imagine himself doing a presentation to his co-workers. I could visibly observe that he was anxious, so I asked him what thoughts were going through his mind. He replied, "Every single one of my co-workers is thinking I don't know what I'm talking about." Every one of them, I asked? This was a classic case of magnification. |
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Labeling: This is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of saying, "I made a mistake," you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." You might also label yourself "a fool" or "a jerk." This labeling is totally irrational because what we do is not who we are. These labels are useless thoughts that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration and low self-esteem. |
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Emotional Reasoning:
You assume your emotions reflect the way things really are. "I feel uncomfortable asking for a raise, so it must be an inappropriate thing to do." Or, "I feel a deep sense of inadequacy, and if they want excellent service, they should go to my competitor." Our emotions are like the weather. They can change day to day and moment to moment. Our emotions are valuable, because they point to our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. |
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To equal measure, they are often not reflective of what's really going on. So, we need to be careful about how we respond to our emotions by examining the evidence with our intellect. |
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"Should" Statements:
You tell yourself that things should be the way you hoped for, or expected them to be. "Musts," "ought to's" and "have to's" are similar offenders. These statements reflect rules that we have adopted either explicitly or implicitly. When these statements are directed against ourselves, they lead to guilt, frustration and storytelling. When directed toward others, they often lead to anger, frustration and jealousy. They rarely put you in a practical position to change behavior. Instead, they will often make you feel either rebellious (and give you the urge to do the opposite) or hopeless (and make you want to do nothing). |
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Personalization and Blame:
Personalization occurs when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event that is not entirely under your control. A classic example is the person who regularly takes the blame for others' unhappiness or anger. Although we may be able to influence other people's feelings, we certainly are not responsible for them. We can only keep our side of the street clean, not theirs. Another example is when a mother finds out her child is having difficulties in school and thinks, "This shows what kind of mother I am." Personalization leads to guilt and feelings of inadequacy. Some people do just the opposite. They blame other people or their circumstances for their problems, and they overlook ways that they may be contributing to the problems in the first place. "The reason I have such difficulty at work is because I have an unreasonable boss." Blame doesn't work because other people will resent being the scapegoat and will toss the blame right back in your court. It's like a game of hot potato. No one wants to get stuck with it. |
Becoming aware of these types of thinking is the first step to creating change. Once you're aware, you can begin to "shift" your thinking and engage more rational responses to the events you encounter. Then, as you condition this new way of thinking, you'll notice a significant improvement in how you feel about and respond to these types of triggering events.
There is a wonderful and effective strategy to assist in overcoming these 10 forms of paralyzing thought patterns. Please contact us at info@thepowerofthanks.com to learn about "The Intention Loop" program that Trans-World Dynamics developed.
Brad Stevenson
MBA, Almeda University |
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