6 Reasons Why You Should Be Your Own Boss

6 Reasons Why You Should Be Your Own Boss

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Mark Foo

If you’ve decided that you’d like to be your own boss, it doesn’t have to remain a dream forever. In fact, with some proper planning on your part, you can become your own boss in no time.

If you want to be your own boss you need to start your own business. Being self-employed will more than likely seem overwhelming in the beginning, but in the end many people feel that the benefits far outweigh the costs. So start brainstorming some business opportunities!

Here are some reasons why you should be your own boss:

1. You’re in Charge of Your Income. This can be seen as a pro or a con at first, but eventually the sky will be the limit as you develop your business. In the beginning, seeking self-employment might not make you as much as you used to, and you also may have to worry about issues like individual insurance coverage. The huge advantage is the fact that you keep every dime that you make and your salary is not capped by your employer.

2. You Have Creative Control. You get to make all of your decisions, no one else is telling you what to do. This is huge because many people run into boredom issues at their jobs. If you can choose the business you want, you can also pick and choose the types of jobs you accept. You do what you want, when you want.

3. You’re Responsible for Your Success. If you’re self-employed you can truly make a difference when you start your own business. This is because the success of the business lies on your shoulders. When you work for a large corporation, it’s easy to mix in with the rest of the employees and feel like it doesn’t even matter whether or not you show up to work. While you’ll still have to work hard when you’re self-employed, you really matter because you are your business.

4. You Set Your Own Hours. Setting your own hours is a huge advantage. You know yourself best and you’ll be able to build a schedule that’s most efficient for you. If you want to work really hard one day, and take a half day the next day, that’s perfectly fine when you’re self-employed. You can work all night and sleep all day if that’s your personal preference!

5. You’ll Be Challenged. Most people will find that they not only reach a salary cap when they work for someone else, but they also reach a point where they’re no longer challenged. When you embark on this new journey for yourself, it’ll be a risk and it’ll be a challenge. Also, as you keep gaining experience and income, you’ll continue to be challenged as you reach higher and higher levels.

6. You Can’t Get Fired. This is a great reason in itself. In the self-employment world you can’t get fired! You can change your mind about certain business opportunities, but that would just be shifting the focus of your business, you’d never be firing yourself. This takes a certain amount of burden off your shoulders because you don’t need to worry about someone suddenly taking away your income just because of cutbacks even if you’re doing a superb job.

Remember that there’s always a certain amount of risk associated with making a major change in your life. It’s never easy when it involves income and the future of your family. However, if you want to be your own boss, you can certainly do so. It may end up opening many doors to better your financial future.

Posted by Mahdi at 12:13 AM

How to Create the Habit of Daily Meditation

How to Create the Habit of Daily Meditation

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Mr.SelfDevelopment

Someone e-mailed me the other day with the following question, they said:

“I would love to start meditating daily, but I can never seem to find the time. After I get home from work, I have dinner, one thing leads to another, and I never get to meditate; any suggestions?”

I want to answer the above question in this particular article. However, let me begin by defining “meditation.” After I define meditation, I’ll explain the benefits of daily meditation as well as how you can easily form this very important habit.

What does it mean to meditate?

To meditate means to purposely engage in “thought” or “contemplation,” it means to think, especially in a calm and deliberate manner. My favorite definition of the word “meditate” is to plan in the mind, or to intend. I like that, to plan in the mind, or to intend something; to lay a blueprint in your imagination.

The Benefits of Meditation

“Meditation brings wisdom; lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.” – Buddha
Meditation is a way of clearing your mind; it offers you the ability to enter new levels of relaxation, it’s also a technique that can help you conceive new ideas.

I believe everyone should practice meditation daily in order to recharge their body and reignite their focus. Meditation is a way to get clear on what you really want from life, and if you meditate on your desires long enough, you will discover a way to manifest them.

Meditation (as far as I’m concerned) serves four main purposes:

• It serves to clear your mind
• Relax your body
• It also serves as a way to generate new ideas, and
• It helps you manifest your intentions

1. Let’s discuss the first purpose of meditation, which is to clear your mind. After a long day at work, it’s essential that you take time to relax your mind and reduce your stress. I like to say, time-out is better than burn-out. Meditation affords you the ability to significantly reduce your stress-levels because it gives you a much needed break from the hustle-and-bustle of life.

2. Meditation also relaxes your body. Through meditation you can leave your suburb or apartment and transcend to the shores of Hawaii. Just doing this for a few minutes a day will give you a higher-quality of life by relaxing your body and changing your mood.

3. The third purpose of meditation is to generate new ideas, if you’re struggling with a particular problem; meditation is a great way to come up with new ideas to solve your problem. How do you do this? Just think about your particular problem for a second; then begin to generate ideas in your mind to solve that problem, let your mind run free until it finds a solution to your problem.

4. Finally, meditation is a way to create your future. If you can believe what you see in your mind, your mind will also give you the instructions on how to attain your vision. Meditation is a great way to attract the life you intend to live.

Finding the Time to Meditate

You don’t need to meditate for hours, although that would be nice. You can accomplish everything that I mentioned above with just 15 minutes of daily meditation. We all have 15 minutes to spare!

Here’s what I suggest you do. Tomorrow after you get home from work, following your “first” major activity (maybe it’s having dinner, et cetera.), dedicate fifteen minutes to meditating in a quiet place. You can:

· Clear your mind of all distracting thoughts and go away to a beautiful island (in your mind), or

· You can imagine your future the way you would like it to be, or

· You can focus your mind on a problem that you would like to solve, et cetera

Fifteen minutes a day is a small enough commitment to convince yourself that you have the time to do it (if you have time to go to the bathroom, you have time to meditate). Once again, you should meditate immediately after your first major activity upon arriving home; you’re going to do this for two reasons:

1. So that you don’t postpone the task any further, and
2. So that you can connect this new habit to an existing habit

Forming the Daily Habit

In order to experience the benefits of daily meditation, you need to first form the habit of daily meditation. It may be a little tough to start the habit initially, so here’s what I suggest:

“Force yourself into the habit for the first week. Just do it. Commit to meditate for 15 minutes a day as soon as you get home from work, or at a convenient time that works for you (be sure to setup a reminder as well).”

Often times we have the time to meditate, but because we’re not in the habit of doing it, we don’t. Just go ahead and “swallow that frog.” If you can just spend fifteen minutes a day meditating, you’ll quickly find that you want to spend more time in this meditative state. However, start with fifteen minutes (it’s an easy commitment) that will help you form the habit.

Some psychologists suggest that over 90 percent of what we do everyday derives from our habits. From the way we brush our teeth, to the way we eat our dinner, including the activities we perform after we finish our dinner. If you start spending fifteen minutes a day meditating after dinner, daily meditation will be become second nature to you. Soon, you will be experiencing a more relaxed and fulfilled life.

In closing, daily meditation is a life-changing experience so be sure to do it.

Thank you for reading!

Posted by Mahdi at 11:58 PM

15 Web Tools to Enhance Language Learning

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Karen Schweitzer

With the world becoming more culturally diverse everyday, it is becoming increasing important for everyone to learn a new language. Whether you are learning for your career, education, or just want to increase you knowledge of other languages, the Internet provides a wide variety of tools that can enhance your learning experience. Here is a list of 15 free language learning tools to explore today:

Popling – Popling is free online web software that is great for practicing language vocabulary without any real effort. This unique software works by having a window (flash card) pop up at certain intervals on your desktop. You can either click on the window to study the full flash card or ignore it and the window will disappear.

Radio Lingua Network – The Radio Linga Network offers free online podcasts that you can use to enhance listening comprehension and language learning skills for 20 different languages. The podcast episodes range from one-minute quick lessons to longer, five-minute lessons.

Livemocha – Livemocha is a free community language learning tool with online interactive lessons, user created courses, and language partners that are ready to practice with you. The language partners are a great way build your language confidence though conversations with live native speakers. You have the option of either using conversation exercises or submitting text and audio files to native speakers for corrections and edits.

Palabea – With this large international language learning community, you can interact with native speakers, find audio and visual learning aids, improve writing and grammar, and even find native speakers in your hometown. Through these tools, Palabea gives everyone the opportunity to learn or study their foreign speaking skills on an international web platform.

Freelang.net – Freelang.net offers free language dictionaries, translations, blogs, and forums to help you increase your language skills. These tools are an excellent way for you to improve your reading, writing, and speaking skills in the language you’re studying. This site also provides links to other translation software, learning tools, and more.

ForiegnWord.com – This site features four different tools that foreign language learners can use to translate text, find language links, and gain access to 265 online dictionaries. Just one of the tools featured on this site, Translate Now, provides access to 28 translators in over 38 different languages.

Lingro – Lingro is a free site with open content dictionaries that provide free online learning in 11 different languages. With this site, you can increase your language comprehension and understanding through online translations, word lists, games, a collaborative dictionary, and more.

Babbel – The Babbel site is a free online learning portal for Spanish, English, German, French, and Italian. Within this site, you will find multimedia learning methods and tools that are easy and fun to use. Babbel also offers a language exchange community with more than 400,000 registered users.

Transparent Language – Transparent Language provides language software that has helped millions of individuals worldwide with language learning. On this site you can find several free resources and tools, including language software, blogs, games, articles, and learning communities to enhance your language skills.

Open Culture – This free site provides podcasts for learning 37 different languages. The podcasts cover everything from Arabic to Yiddish and are perfect for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners. You can listen to lessons instantly on your computer or download them in MP3 format for listening on the go.

SharedTalk – SharedTalk is an online language learning community that provides tools to practice and study a multitude of different languages. With this site, you can use language partners, voice chat, text chat, and email to enhance your language skills while helping other people to enhance theirs.

Lang-8 – This site encourages language learners to practice writing skills by writing in the language they are studying. Once your writing assignment is complete you can send it to a native speaker for editing and corrections. This site also works as an online exchange community–you will be asked to read and correct the writings of others who are studying your language.

Digital Dialects – Digital Dialects offers free interactive learning games for 58 different languages. The games provide practice with beginning phrases as well as vocabulary builders to help language learners increase their knowledge. The site is updated regularly with new material.

Translation2 – With four free online translators, Translation2 is a good site for increasing your understanding and comprehension in language learning. Translation tools include a text translator, dictionary, text to speech translator, and an IM translator. The text to speech translator is an excellent way to practice pronunciation and can be embedded in emails or web pages.

Posted by Mahdi at 8:20 PM

You Are Neglecting Your Most Important Relationship

from PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement by Ali Hale

There’s one crucial relationship in your life that I’m pretty sure you’re neglecting. And if you’re one of those people who gives a lot of themselves to others and always drops everything to give a friend a hand, you’re definitely neglecting it. Nope, it’s not your relationship with your partner, your mom, or even your kids. Important as those are, this is even more crucial. It’s a relationship I can guarantee you’ll have from the day you’re born till the day you die.

It’s your relationship with yourself.

So often, the one person in life who we criticise, judge, condemn and ignore is ourself. We decide that our needs don’t matter. If everyone else in our life walked out, this one relationship would be all we had left. And when we disregard our relationship with ourself, all other aspects of our life suffer: however hard we strive for success, things will always feel empty.

There are three key factors in your relationship with yourself that you need to pay attention to:

Acceptance and Love

Think of a person who you love. Maybe your partner, or a close friend. Do they have faults? Is there anything about them that irritates you at times? Of course… but that doesn’t stop you loving them, does it? They’re not perfect – no-one is – but you accept that, and you love them, warts and all.

So why don’t you treat yourself the same?

Most of us have a negative, critical internal voice that berates us for being less-than-perfect. We beat ourselves up over little mistakes … that birthday we forgot, that silly typo in an email, that time we were late, the hasty words we didn’t really mean. And we fail to recognise the many, many times that we get things right.

When we try to adopt new habits, we’re very quick to blame ourselves for not succeeding overnight. When we have big dreams and plans, we dismiss them as unrealistic.

Would you treat your partner like that? Your best friend? Your kids? Then why do you treat yourself that way? Do all the harsh things you say to yourself help you to improve your life … or do they make you feel unhappy and low in confidence?

Quality Time

I’m sure you make the effort to spend time with the people you love. You nurture your relationship with them by going out to dinner, or watching a movie, or playing a game together. We’re all familiar with the phrase “quality time”, and we know how important this is to our relationship with our spouse or kids.

When did you last spend any quality time with yourself?

If you’re an introvert like me (and like 50% of the world), you get your energy from being on your own: being around other people constantly can make you feel in need of some alone time. And even extroverts need some time to simply be themselves – away from the rest of the world.

How about going for a walk on your own, or going to a movie on your own? Could you take yourself out to lunch or for a coffee – without family or friends in tow? What activities and hobbies do you enjoy that are purely for you?

Don’t be afraid to be selfish. If you don’t nurture yourself, and take time for your relationship with yourself, it’ll show in your relationships with others.

Exploration

The final key to having a good relationship with yourself is exploration. In your friendships and romantic relationships, you enjoy learning about the other person. You hear their history, you get to understand what makes them tick, and you watch them grow and develop.

How well do you know yourself?

Ways of exploring yourself could include meditation, prayer, learning a new skill, or reading about personal development. Exploring who you are might lead you to conduct experiments to see what habits and structures suit you best: are you a morning person? Do you like to be alone at lunch, or in the evening? What dreams do you have? What’s your mission in the world? What contributions can you make?

Taking serious time to reflect and explore the workings of your mind can lead you in new directions. It can help you discover a hidden passion. You might find that your potential is far greater than you realised. You may well have to do some work to destroy some of your preconceptions; those statements about yourself that start with “I always…” or “I never…” or “I can’t…”

What’s your relationship with yourself like? If you’ve been neglecting that relationship – and almost all of us have – how are you going to start restoring balance in your life?

Posted by Mahdi at 8:02 PM

The Science of Getting Rich

http://www.pickthebrain.com

“Abundance” – courtesy of Geeart.com

If you don’t read any other book this decade on financial prosperity, you must read “The Science of Getting Rich.” The Science of Getting Rich is a great (short) book which was written by Wallace D. Wattles back in 1910. It provides a basic roadmap teaching on how anyone can become financially free.

I will briefly share with you the major points of the book in this article.

The book starts off discussing how there are:

• Smart people that are rich, and
• Blockheads that are rich
• Intellectually brilliant people that are rich, and
• Mentally slothful people that are rich
• Big spenders that are rich, while
• Many frugal people remain in poverty

The authors point in making these observations is to note that riches are not contributable to luck, the right family, or the right neighborhood; but something else.

This article will recap the basic principles taught in “The Science of Getting Rich,” so that you can start practicing the science today, even if you’re a blockhead.

Here are the 4 major principles that the book teaches:

Principle # 1 – Visualization and Though Control

“Greatness is attained only by the thinking of great thoughts.”

The book tells you to take time daily to visualize what you want in great detail. The book states: …”do not do this as a mere dreamer or castle builder…,” but you must do it in faith knowing that your vision is going to become a reality.

The book requests that you do this whenever you have spare time throughout your day. It also asks that you be very specific and detailed in your visualizations.

My commentary: I recommend that you think about specific pre-meditated events that you want to occur in your life, and try to visualize them for at least 30 minutes a day. You have to pre-play your future. This will provide you with the motivation needed to accomplish your vision. Motivation is the fuel to any destination you want to reach.

You have to see it, before you can have it. As it is written, “without a vision, the people perish.”

Principle # 2 – Right Action

“Every day is either a success or a failure, and if every day is a success, you cannot fail to get rich.”

The book states that you should give 100 percent effort in your daily actions, and tells you to complete an honest day’s work every day. However, the book also states that you should never over work, because it’s not the number of items that you complete, but the importance of each item that matters. If you complete enough important items you will succeed.

My commentary: Whatever your goal, be sure to give 100 percent effort towards it every day. Complete the items that are sure to take you to your goal, postpone the busy work.

Never let a day go by without getting closer to the goals that you want to achieve!

If you have “a passion” to achieve a goal, then you have the power to achieve it. Passion is power.

Principle # 3 – Avoid Bad News

“If you want to become rich, you must not make a study of poverty. Things are not brought into being by thinking about their opposites.”

The book says you should diligently avoid all bad news.

My commentary: Avoid all negative media, videos, TV and movies showing poverty, doom, gloom and lack; you should also avoid conversations that include the above mentioned. There is no reason to fill you mind with all of the negativity in the media. Garbage in, garbage out! You will become what you constantly give your attention to. I recommend you give your attention to what you want to become, and to avoid that in which you do not want to become.

The book says that you should only talk of prosperity and the great possibilities when you speak. Speaking of lack and poverty only hinder your ability to create prosperity…

Principle # 4 – Gratitude

“…faith is born of gratitude. The grateful mind continually expects good things, and expectation becomes faith.”

Finally, the book states that you must remain in a state of gratitude at all times; for everything that you have.

My commentary: Always speak, think and feel grateful throughout your day for all of the “good” that’s in your life. Place things in your environment which remind you to be grateful. A grateful heart will attract great things.

These are the four principles taught in the Science of Getting Rich, memorize them, and put them into action; they will change your life.

About the author: this guest post was written by Mr. Self Development. Please support Mr. Self Development by subscribing to his blog at mrselfdevelopment.com; Mr. Self Development is a motivational author that offers a practical guide to success and wealth.

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Posted by Mahdi at 7:55 AM