How do you know, really KNOW, if you are in the wrong job, if it’s better for you to change jobs or stick with the one you have? How do you know you’re not just in a slump at work, that it’s not temporary boredom or frustration?

You know you are in the wrong job if …

1. No matter how much you are being paid, you still hate your job. You don’t want to get up in the morning and you don’t look forward to your day.

2. Your day passes and you’ve learned nothing, you are just stagnating.

3. You don’t get positive feedback from your bosses. You feel like you are of no value and have no purpose. You often ask yourself, “Why am I here?” or “Why am I doing this?

4. You feel underpaid for the quality and quantity of work you do.

5. You and the company are too different. The environment is too formal or too relaxed for you.

6. You dislike management/your boss so much that it has become the focus of your work day and your time off.

7. You feel angry and overwhelmed a large part of the time.

8. Your stress levels are always on high alert. You find yourself often sick from stress related illnesses. Headaches, stomach aches, insomnia, etc.

If you are experiencing these situations, you need to find your career passion. Something interesting and that, at times, will completely absorb you. Once you find your passion most of these will not happen. However, you will still need to find the specific job that meets your specific needs and suits your specific character.

If you now know you’re in the wrong job, nobody but you can change it. So do something about it now!

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Those people that are ambitious enough to have lots of goals, will agree with me that no matter how many you have over the course of your lifetime, they all go straight into one of the four distinct categories I’m going to mention below. Achieving a goal is not always easy, because sometimes it requires high levels of energy even for the smallest success.

Desire for happy relationships

We all wish to be respected, to be loved and to love those that we interact with. It’s in the human nature to desire happy relationships with other people, be it business or pleasure. We get involved with our community to meet people to give and to get something back from the society we live in. Isn’t it true that we always love to have a harmonious family life without any fights and negative discussions?

Passion for your work

Many times I am confronted with people (mostly young fellas) that think their biggest achievement at 25 or 30 years old is to have a promising career and to work with important people. That’s very true, because you feel like somebody if you made it to a successful career.

The need to be healthy

Though we disrespect healthy eating and don’t take proper care of our bodies, we all have a common goal. We want to be healthy because we don’t like pains or illness. The feeling of well-being brings a very enjoyable flow of energy. My advice for such a goal is to not take health for granted until something bad happens. Prevention is better than curing.

Financial richness

Don’t we all wish it? Is it a bad thing to desire a comfortable life without the worries for “tomorrow”? Of course not. As long as you are financial independent you are extremely lucky, because you can take decisions knowing that money is not a problem. A person that has enough money in the bank, feel less worried and less stressed.

It’s goals that we need, that we desire to achieve, that motivate us to keep going, to work or to love, and if you will think positive the will come true sooner or later.

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If you’re like me, you’re sport adverse. OK, I was sport allergic. You might like to watch a specific sport on tv or even attend a live event but participating sounds like torture.

However, there are good reasons to actually get up out of the chair and do the P word. Participate.

1. Physical

The most obvious, and most talked about, reason is the health benefit. It will make your heart healthier, improve your circulation, help with weight loss. It improves balance, strength, co-ordination, flexibility, endurance, motor control and cognitive function. If you continue to do sports later in your life all these pluses will allow you to maintain your independence and avoid relying on assistance for a longer period of time.

2. Energy

Exercising in any way causes you to breathe more. The more you breathe, the more oxygen that circulates through your system. The more oxygen, the more energy.

3. Socialization

Participating in a sport gives you the opportunity to socialize. Be it a team sport or a one on one competition, you are still interacting with other people. This helps you develop better communication skills and can help in learning teamwork.

4. Psychological benefits

Sports improve self-esteem and lend to a positive self-concept by accomplishing/learning a new task. Studies have shown that people that participate in sports, or any physical activity, have a more positive outlook on life in general and an increased belief in themselves.

5. Stress Reduction

Physical activity has been shown to reduce stress levels. While competitive sports may temporarily increase those stress levels, it is transient.

6. Fun

This is probably the most important. Sports are fun. Find something that you love. Baseball, bowling, dancing, swimming, soccer… If its not fun, it’s not for you!

Get out there and find a sport that’s right for you. If you haven’t been active for along time, take it easy to start. You don’t want to hurt yourself and you don’t want to shock your couch potato body too much, it might not react well!

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There is little that is more condescending and arrogant than a person that is constantly late. Not only is being late rude, it is disrespectfully of other people. Try these tips to break yourself of the late habit.

1. Never assume that being late is all right. Never allow yourself the luxury of saying to yourself, “It’s only a few minutes,” “It’s only half an hour.” You are not more important than the person you are meeting nor is your time more valuable. Never be so arrogant as to expect other people to adapt their lives and schedules to your timetable.

2. Use an agenda. With everyone having at minimum a cell phone and at best an electronic agenda there is no excuse for completely forgetting or being late for an appointment. Enter the appointment time PLUS travel time and time to finish with whomever you are previously meeting. Not giving yourself enough time between meeting is a surefire way to repetitively be late.

3. Assume that what will go wrong usually does. Allow yourself “crisis time” so that if you do run into traffic or your previous meeting runs over, you will have the extra time to make the next meeting as scheduled.

4. Don’t overbook yourself. Setting back to back meeting gives you the impossible task of being on time. Leave time between meetings. Not only will this allow for travel time but it will also give you time to reflect and process the information from the previous meeting and to prepare for the next.

5. Prioritize!!! Don’t say yes to someone when you that you don’t have the time to accomplish what they are asking of you. Force yourself to learn how to say “No, I’m sorry but I don’t have time to do that today but I have time available tomorrow.” Be firm and don’t let them convince you that they only need a few minutes of your time as it is rarely the case.

6. Slow down! People are often late because the forget. They forget because they are functioning at such a hectic pace that their mind is always working under stress. You are only ONE person with a set number of hours in the day. Don’t set yourself a schedule that is physically impossible for you to accomplish.

Those are a few tricks to help you be on time. I believe the most important is attitude. If you remember how insulted you felt when someone made you wait after them when they were late, how disrespected you felt, then chances are you won’t treat others in the same manner.

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image via Flickr

You have a favorite movie star, singer or some other celebrity that you would love to meet and spend some time to ask the questions you need to get answers to, I suggest you read below to see what you can do to approach a VIP so that you don’t get kicked out of a discussion.

First of all you should understand that celebrities are people, too, and they need their time off, get mad and need food just like all of us. Assuming that their days have more than 24 hours and that they should be nice anytime they meet someone is wrong, but if you do get the chance for a face to face meeting here’s what you should do or shouldn’t do:

1. Talk about the present. I’ve seen it so many times that people praise tend to talk about the past. You meet Woody Allen and you tell him how much you’ve enjoyed his movies in the `80s which may bring the question in the guy’s mind: “what about my work since 1980, don’t you remember it ?”. Take you for example. Would you like people to congratulate how good you looked in 1975? No, it would be nicer if they would say, you look great in 2007. VIPs are the same. Talk about last elections if you’re meeting a politician, talk about the latest album or movie if you met your favorite singer, actor or movie maker.

2. Tell your opinion. Now that you know what you should talk about, it’s more important how you do it. Saying that “Your last album was such a big success, thank you!” will make them think “who you are to comment how the latest album was”. Usually celebrities enjoy hearing personal opinions, they like to see what people think. “I want to tell you how relaxed I feel when I listen to your last album, it makes my body vibrate. Thank you!”. You’re speaking from your own perspective. It’s his work seen from your eyes.

3. Do not ignore the companion. Let’s say your favorite actor is Tom Cruise and accompanied by his wife, Katie Holmes, he’s at the same party you are. You get a chance to talk with him for a few moments. Now is the time to talk to Katie, too, otherwise she may get frustrated. If we take the general example, if someone is with a celebrity or a VIP then obviously this may be an accomplished person and you should address comments at least.

4. Do not ask them to perform. Let’s consider you’re into interior designing and you get invited to someone’s house, at a party. You go there to relax, meet friends, have a few drinks and some quality time. Would you enjoy if someone would ask you to put your outfit on and repair the walls? No you wouldn’t, because you don’t want to go to a party and work, which is what a celebrity would be doing if asked to say a few words on their latest novel, or a few words from the latest song.

I am sure you understood by now that celebrities are people like you or me, so you should understand that those 4 tips above works well with any people you know, not only with celebrities and VIPs.

On many occasions I have heard people spew their beliefs that permanent memory is…permanent. That everything we learn is etched into “stone” in our brains. When we wish to remember an event, experience or information we simply ‘play back’ the information or experience like a DVD would. Well, if this was the case, why do we forget more often than we actually remember?

Sigmund Freud, a pioneer in the field of psychology, believed that everything we learn and experience is never forgotten. Somehow our subconscious ‘remembers’ everything even if our conscious does not. This could result in physical manifestations of our subconscious memories. An example of this would be forgetting that you were bitten by a dog but every time you see a dog you manifest symptoms of anxiety and fear.

So then, what is permanent memory if it is not permanent?

Experiencing something and learning information does require the storing of this information into what we call the ‘permanent memory’. Sometimes this information is easily forgotten because it was never encoded strongly enough from the working memory into the permanent memory. Sometimes the information is overwritten by new information and finally, sometimes the encoding was faulty to begin with. This can be related to installing a new program onto your computer to find that the program doesn’t work. You might need to reinstall the program meaning you may need to relearn the information making sure the encoding progress works and is strong.

So, just because you read a textbook once, or saw that phone number on a wall and recited it a couple of times, does not ensure you will remember this information later on. There is no proof that all information that we learn is stored “somewhere” in our brain and that if we think about it hard enough we will remember it. I have fallen into this trap many a times; sitting at a desk writing a test saying “I know I read this! It’s somewhere in the chaos of my mind!” Fact is, this is not true. It is very rare that I have remembered any information this way.

Experiences and information have been proven to shape our behavior however. As with the example of being bitten by the dog. Our behavior has changed for reasons that may be unknown. This is what psychologists call learning.

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Your entire day’s productivity revolves around many factors. One of the most important factors is getting a good night’s sleep. Here are some simple, yet essential steps to getting that sleep.

1. Establish a Sleeping Habit. Don’t binge sleep. Skimping on sleep during the week and power sleeping through the weekend doesn’t work and results in you feeling more fatigued. Establish a habit, try to go to bed at the same time throughout the week and get the same total hours of sleep each night. Aim for between 7 and 8 hours a night. There are studies though that suggest sleeping multiples of 1.5 hours. R.E.M sleep cycles are 1.5 hours so 7.5 hours is a good balance.

2. Avoid caffeine, smoking and alcohol before bed. As tempting as a nightcap before bed is, avoid it. All three of these are stimulants and get the body, and brain, pumping. This is not something you want when you are trying to relax enough to fall and stay asleep.

3. Avoid TV. Television has long been used as a crutch to avoid thinking about problems. Watching it is a mind numbing experience that easily lets you avoid dealing with the stresses of the day and the tediousness of planning tomorrow. As pleasurable and necessary as that is at times, doing it just before bed will rob you of a good night’s sleep. You will lie there with all those “problems” running through your head.

4. Make your To-Do list before bed. In conjunction with point 3 if you don’t make your “plan” for the following day, before bed, chances are your brain will be doing it will you are in bed. Your goal is to leave the brain with as little to do, once you’ve gone to bed, as is possible.

5. Exercise regularly and avoid exercise. The body needs to expend its excess energy and needs to feel healthy. Exercise will do this for you but not if you are doing it in the 4 hours before bed. You can’t be expected to achieve a restful enough state to fall asleep if your adrenaline levels are peaking or you are coming down from an exercise “high.”

6. Don’t eat. Eating before bed is not only unhealthy and lends to weight gain but impedes a good nght’s sleep. You are forcing your body to work over time to digest without and physical activity to help. Don’t eat in the 3-4 hours before you go to bed to give your body the time it needs to fully digest.

7. Take a bath. Our Moms knew what they were doing when they gave us a nightly bath just before bed. A warm bath relaxes the muscles, slows down our metabolism and makes us drowsy. Your body tends to fall asleep when there is a drop in body temperature. Having a warm bath artificially raises your body temperature so that the resulting drop tells your body it’s time to sleep. Take a warm bath as opposed to a hot one. A hot bath will raise your temperature for a longer period of time making it harder to sleep within the next couple of hours.

8. Buy a new bed. Experts say that a bed should last no more than 10 years and that’s if you bought something of quality to start. Lumpy, uneven beds will cause you to toss and turn to try and get comfortable. Not only will a new bed decrease sleep disruption it will also help avoid potential spine damage.

9. Seek medical attention. If you’ve tried everything and still aren’t falling asleep or are sleeping poorly go see your doctor. There maybe an underlying medical reason for the problem. At the very least, you can get a prescription for a sleep aide as a short term solution.

Getting a good night’s sleep helps make you a healthier, happier more productive person and should be a top priority so “get sleeping”.