An Idea to Improve the Quality of Your Life

"Life is goddess in action; let's be worthy spectators!"

Life is a goddess because we seldom rule it.  It rules us, and all we get to satisfy our ego sometimes is an illusion of power, and authority, and independence which vanishes as soon as the goddess changes her mind. Most of the problems we face in our daily life arise from this short-lasting illusion. During this illusion, we feel control, we feel impunity, we feel authority and independence, we feel power. And this is what remains with us long after the illusion is gone and we're helpless like a baby.

Improving the quality of your life depends upon how much you recognize and understand the gestures of the goddess. It has to do with the tendency to surrender and the drive to evolve. We have to make ourselves better, but we also have to understand our limits. But this is an ideal or semi-ideal situation for normal people. We generally tend to bend more towards one of the two which ultimately leads us to the extreme. We either build a strong liking for surrender and compromise, or deveope a habit of fighting what cannot be changed. The great people history and news tell us about, are all who have striked a remarkable balance between the two extremes.

Life demands us to bow before the limits it puts on us. But on the other hand, it also requires us to play the best role we can where we have been given enough ground. There is a great saying by some wise man whose name I'm not sure right now. It goes like:

"Accept what you can't change, or change what you can't accept!"

But this principle, especially the second part of it, doesn't mean that you actually have the fullest authority. It only means that you should have a deep understanding of what you limits are. In terms of daily life, you should be aware of the situations where you can't help accepting what you may not control, as well as the ones where you should be careful enough not to miss any stone unturned for your goal. Life is an intermediate place; it's neither a hell, nor a heaven. You neither have all misfortunes, nor all fortunes. You have a blend of both. And the goddess wants you to see, realize and utilize the beauty of this blend for your inner peace.

A businessman has to face the conflict between his marital and official roles. He may be independant at office, but even a minor mishandling of this freedom can cause problems at home. For instance, he may want to devote most of his time to an important project in which he sees enough earning potential. And he is free to implement this idea. But this action also entails an irritating absence from home which may not be welcomed by his wife. Further use of freedom at office may limit his freedom at home even more. This is what life typically is like!

Improving the quality of your life has much to do with striking the balance and being in a position to rather control where you want to be free and where you can afford restrictions and hurdles. It's a matter of choice which, if not used properly, can bind you to the strictest bonds you can think of. But if you learn to compromise a bit, not on your goals, but on your ways to reach them, the goddess is all yours!

Top Skills Employers Seek in Job Seekers

Good books teach you more than what you seek from them. I remember I was reading a book and the author exemplified a point by deviating to something rather off-topic. He said that rich people are rich by their character. If they lose all their assets due to some accident, you would see them regain everything in some time. The poor are poor by their disposition. Even if they win a lottery and gain more wealth than they could possibly imagine, they would end up at poverty again in some time.

Same is the case with good employees. If a man has the merits employers seek, he may fail to satisfy a typical interviewer and yet be able to get the job. On the other, the poor guys with confused minds may accidentally perform well, get the job letter and end up being fired the next week. While a good employee is seeking a job, a good job is also waiting for one at the same time.

I've often found people confused and puzzled about the magic formula that makes somebody easily get their dream job and keep going cool. Here, I'm going to share the alchemy of a being in the good books of your favorite employer. Employers usually have different choices and demands according to the specific roles that you're supposed to play, yet the values discussed below are more or less universal merits of a good employee.

Be Competitive:

Companies, departments and institutions need people not only to survive but prosper. And this is what man power helps them in. They expect their employees to be more enthusiastic, hardworking, and tough. People judge us from our looks. A good employee may be tired, fatigued and depressed, but he always successfully avoids looking like one. Your spirits must always be high. Sometimes you may not avoid certain problems, but a competitive nature not only helps you get through, but also relieves much of the tension on the employer's side.

Stay Aware:

Job seekers are supposed to be aware of what role they're going to play, what kind of environment they'll work in, and how they can serve the company. The last point is perhaps the most important and requires a certain kind of self-knowledge and self-esteem. It is the motive usually behind the trickiest of the interview questions, "Tell us about yourself." Evaluate yourself honestly before you apply for a job. Assess your merits and demerits without prejudice. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Self-aware people have more potential of benefiting from fortunes and surviving the misfortunes. This is what makes them ideal for a job.

You should also be conscious of the situations in your field. This will help you earn the job easily as well as perform optimally later on. Research your field and get as much information as you can about the company you're interested in.

Computer literacy is nearly essential for all the jobs in today's culture. Get used to the regular computer operations, spreadsheets, documents, etc. Browse the internet more often if you haven't been interested before. Stay up-to-date!

Communication, Interpersonal Skills:

If I try to be strictly logical and statistically accurate, there are more than 90 per cent chances that you have to work with at least one person to talk to daily. But generally, the situation is very much different. You have usually to cooperate with many people, report to some, and manage some as your subordinates. Most of the situations demand you to be good at conveying to people what you have to. This requires good communication skills. In addition to being a merit at office, it is one of the most important thing to be considered when you're being interviewed for the job.

Interpersonal skills can be summerized in one simple statement: Be good. You have to build a rapport with the people you're going to work with, or the even the best of your performances won't be able to save you from problems and frustrations. Try to understand people, learn to look behind their eyes, to read between the lines, to guess at what they actually want regardless of what they say they want.

Networking and Teamwork:

Networking is extending your business life to people out of your business, teamwork to your own colleagues. People don't like anti-social and homophobic people, nor do employers. You have to learn to understand people, cooperate with them for a mutual benefit, and share the credit.

Professionalism:

Look like a professional, and you're half way there. Be a professional, and you're done!

Professionalism is not about being a cold, serious, materialistic person who only minds their own "business". It's about being dedicated to your field, and behaving accordingly. Professionalism starts from power dressing, goes through regularity, punctuality, and mental alertness, and ends on the respectful and caring attitude you have towards your colleagues. Be professional so that your office life may be improved, not to damage your and others' emotional life.

Hope these humble suggestions help you start you journey to success, travel gracefully, and reach your ideal destination.

Keep smiling. It too impresses everyone, including employers!

Great Relationships Need You, Not Your Talents

Love, and be loved!

The wise have told us that people are meant to be loved, things to be used. The problems arise when we start loving things and using people.  The problems also arise when we start loving ourselves more than those around us who actually deserve our love. This leads to the natural consequence that those people around us, our relationships, also start loving themselves more than us and we are left alone to love ourselves. We deprive our relationships of our love, and they deprive us of their love. Tit for tat!

You may be thinking what loving onself actually means. Let me tell you what I mean by this expression. I have seen people who seem to imply that their relationships are built and maintained on the foundations of their financial strength, social skills, tactics, intelligence, etc. I have a friend, for isntance, who married a beautiful lady of a good family a couple of years ago. He had a great talent of buttery conversations which earned him the love of the lady. He could talk about just everything in the world, and made the lady realize that she was perfect from every aspect according to his perfect knowledge. So, they married. And after just a couple of years, both of them cannot even afford to look at each other. My friend thought his communication skills earned him a beautiful life, and he was right. But he further believed that he could maintain the relationship on this very skill, and here he was wrong.

There are many others who take relationships to be simple economic bargains. Feed your wife, and she is always yours. Take her to shopping, and you are the best husband. Keep praising everything good and bad about her, and she will worship you. Do not interfere with her personal life, and she will oblige you. Have violent sex, and you are her god. How crazy?

All this is what I call loving yourself. You love yourself when you're proud of your social status, your financial assets, your beauty and handsomeness, your intelligence.. In short, you love yourself when you're proud of none but yourself. But love robs you of this pseudo-vigor. It grants you confidence, but not in yourself, but your joint existence with your relationships. You love your people, and they love you back. This expands your existence, and you lose yourself in that expansion virtually. This is what true love is. You don't blow your own trumpet. But all the trumpets around you are blown for you!

Relationships demand something essentially different from you. They don't demand greatness, expertise, beauty, grace, money, power, authority, etc. They demand YOU... Whatever, whoever you are. Love is more puritan in its spirit than our thoughts. It knows that the real worth of life exists in the soul, and not body, essence, and not appearance, of humans. It realizes that we are what we are because we exist at a level deeper than apparently visible. It recognizes the ultimate value of the individual inside us. So, it demands that soul, that essence, that deeper, invisible level of existence, that individual inside us to be dedicated to it.

Our talents, our possessions, our merits are not more permanent and durable than our SELF. Dedicate your self to your love, because love is wise enough not to accept anything less than that!

Strategies for Marketing Your Business on Social Media Platforms

Social media is in... And it's really bad if you're a business owner and can't secure a position for it and are consequently knocked out!

Social media, with the passage of time, is become more social than our real world societies. People are getting more and more distant from their real surroundings and prefer to communicate and share their thoughts, emotions, concerns, affections, fears, greetings, love, sentiments, etc, etc, via online social media platforms. Putting off the discussion of how good or bad it is for us to a later time, let's throw some light on what effects it may have on the business and marketing strategies and how we can harness its power to the advantage of our business.

Social Media - Harness the Power for a Progressive Business

Who doesn't know Facebook? May be a two-years old! But the boost it can give to some business, whether online or offline, is actually known to few. In this case, most of the people out there are not mature enough to understand and utilize the potential of Facebook properly. Facebook, for businesses, is all about getting a good and active fan following who likes your, trusts you and is ready to take an action on your behalf, though definitely for their own benefit!

For an optimal Facebook campaign, you may need to promote your Facebook profile or page both online and offline. Accomplishing that, you may want to consider the nature and behavior of your audience a bit seriously. It is because an understanding of how much they rely on you and what kind of action they may take for you, like buying something from your site, visiting and affiliate link, or mere viewing your new blog post, and when are they most like to be the most active, will help you plan much better. You can decide easily what might be the best stuff to share with them, what the tone and diction of Call to Action should be, and very importantly, when to share what. There are many social media monitoring and strategy solutions out there. You can search Google and choose whatever suits your business best.

Twitter, called the SMS of the Web, is perhaps the most active and dynamic social media platform out there. Tons and tons of information is being received on a typical user's home feed every moment. Promoting your services and products on Twitter may be, and should be, by the way, a bit different from your Facebook strategy. Information is distributed and received instantly on Twitter, but it vanishes readily too. And then, there is the limit of conveying your message within 140 characters. A good businessman can take a good advantage of these specifications, whereas a novice is very likely to fall a prey to the very subtleties. I would suggest you to start monitoring your Twitter campaign right away. There are many great solutions for that too, both free and paid. Then, you should take some time to plan the things according to your profile's reports. Generally, it would be better to schedule your tweets for convenience, schedule the most important messages for broadcasting multiple times hourly, daily, weekly, etc, and particularly considering what effects a specific tweet or a day's activity had on your business.

Another social media platform, turned very cunningly into a web-authentication strategy, is Google+ from the Google. Many people regard Google+ to be a failed social website. But an online business is little likely to achieve its goals without being fairly active here. Google authenticates your website on the basis of the credit it gets from social media sites, and the greatest value is definitely awarded to the response gained by its own child. Your business may not flourish without Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, LinkedIn shares, but it may hardly survive if you don't have a Google+ existence.

Try to get as many followers as you can on your Google+ profile or page. Quality matters, but in the case of Google+, you can make Google happy with quantity only as well. Encourage your users to share their favorite posts on it and give your a + on it. Share every new post on Google+ and get involved with your followers. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the weight to your sites will come solely from your presence and activities only here.

LinkedIn... Better if you make your company's profile here. If you're not the only person behind your business but have a team, request your employees to make LinkedIn profiles, listing your business's profile as their current employer. There are softwares out there which make it possible for you to share your blog activity in your LinkedIn feed. Use them. Try to extend your connections beyond the ones you actually have in the real world. It will help you look into the performance of your rivals and competitors, and may also earn you some sincere partners and customers.

Hmmm... YouTube  The yummy chocolate melting and flowing with the heat of rushing information. Upload videos, but not only of the CEO, or the inauguration ceremony of your business. Nobody may be particularly interested in them until you're a popular brand. Get subscribers, and maintain them by uploading interesting, informative and useful videos about your business niche. And never forget to drop a relevant link from your site right in the start of video description. It will boost the search engine ranking of that page dramatically!

To end, social media does not end with the above mentioned websites, but they are the market leaders. You may also want to extend your marketing and promotion campaigns to other less popular or emerging sites about which I will write some time later. But it is highly recommended to pay your attention to these highly traficked websites first and take maximum advantage for your business.

Have a good day, and drop me a few words in the comment box below if you like the ideas above. I hope you won't forget to share them with your loved ones, too!

Smile - Live Richer

The wise say that we laugh when we see something odd; odd in the sense that it deviates from the norms of society and is not something we are accustomed to. Some say that laughter is an expression of pride; we're proud that we're not the abnormal person. Some others say that it all springs out of the abruptness. We find something odd and it is the unexpectedness which provokes our laughter. All these wise opinions are from people who are called gerontologists. Gerontology is the science of laughter!

But then there is smile. Gerontologists may sometimes be funny enough to laugh at smile as unworthy of their attention. But as far as I can think, despite having an apparent semblance to laughter, smile has little to do with laughter. While you laugh at something because you find it odd, you smile at the same thing when you accept the oddity. You laugh at the abnormal, but smile only when your sympathies are with the abnormality. You may laugh at something that happens quite unexpectedly, but you would only smile if you knew it and got accommodated with the fact.

Henri Bergson said that laughter is an intellectual process. It happens in a space void of emotions. As soon as emotions and sentiments creep in, regardless of their being positive or negative, laughter sets back. The case is opposite with smile. You smile when you get involved, or at worst, get involved when you smile. Smiling cannot happen without emotional involvement. You cannot smile without feelings of pleasure, love, affection, peace or calmness. It is a fact, scientifically proven. Naturally, we smile when we feel positive emotions of this sort; but these very emotions are induced by the act of smiling as well. Smile is, unlike laughter, an emotional process. It invokes the positivity inside you, as well as in your environment. Researchers have found that people feel difficulty frowning or maintaining a frown if someone around them is smiling.
As we all know, instincts are the goddesses of biological world. They keep ordaining what is best. Sometimes we obey them and benefit, sometimes disobey and lose. Mother Nature has something amazing to show us with regards to smiling faces, if we have time enough to see and think. Smile is most probably an expression built in humans. New born babies start smiling right away, mostly while in sleep. And they get attracted more to the people who smile to them. Is anyone more natural than a child who has just entered the realm of societal norms and taboos? If you agree with me in saying no, then we should agree too that smiling is one of the most natural conditions of human beings.
Have you ever wondered why Gautama Buddha had a smile on his face? Why did Mona Lisa preferred to wear a subtle smile rather than laughing with her jaws wide open so that we could probably appreciate Leonardo da Vinci's understandings of palate and uvula as well his grasp on anatomical symmetry? Smile. It is because smile connects you with everything around you. Smile gets you involved in your surroundings and robs you of the sense of individuality which is the root of all possessions and consequent crimes. It makes you pious and your surroundings sacred. On the other hand, laughter disconnects your from society and gives you an opportunity to look down upon an even from the perspective of a higher, secluded individuality.
As for the physiological aspects of smiling, it increases the level of many such hormones in your body as reduce stress, anxiety and blood pressure. It is one of the easiest and most efficient pain killer. Psychologically, your mood is instantly lifted as soon as you smile.
Keep smiling. It's lovely. It's sacred. It's beautiful. It's good!