Be positive and enjoy life

Do you find it hard to be positive and always fear the worst? are you always anxious? People who are positive tend to enjoy life more and be happier than those who are negative.  Those who are positive are also usually more successful in business and life in general, things tend to work out better for them, indeed sometimes being positive even seems to have had a bearing on whether someone lives or dies and how well they recover from serious illness.

Many people these days are negative thinkers, though this is hardly surprising with the level of issues such as unemployment, financial problems, housing issues, family breakdown etc and the rate of those suffering anxiety and depression is on the rise with fewer and fewer health and social care resources and support available to help them due to funding cuts to health authorities and local council’s social services and mental health budgets.  

Let's look at some of the reasons why you should try to be as positive as you can ….

1. Positive thinkers aim high and are more likely to reach their goals.  Negative thinkers often don't believe they will reach them and because of this belief they often don't.  If you want to have high goals and succeed at reaching them then it certainly helps to be a positive thinker.

2. Positive thinkers can be better at handling failure and using it to their advantage, they are not so easily crushed and more likely to bounce back than some negative people, though I do not for a moment doubt the courage of those who tend to be more negative by nature and sometimes this negativity is born of realism and experience. Rather than being negative, they are being real and know that they cannot at least for now have or do what they want, to be real and be accepting and being content where you are and with what you have can give peace of mind at least. Many years back I had to accept that I could not and would not be leaving school to go to University, now at the age of 57 I am studying for a BA Social Sciences with The Open University.

3. Positive thinkers can have a happier outlook on life while negative thinkers often see the worst in a situation. Being positive attracts positive into your life. Also, positive thinkers spread their positivity to those they meet.

4. People who are positive attract other people to them.  People want to be around positive people; they don't want to be around negative people that have constant negative attitudes.  It tends to be the positive people that are popular and have lots of friends because people enjoy being with them. I have spotted that this can be especially true of Facebook, which is a very useful tool for job-hunters ...unless that is you flood it with tales of woe and despair about your job and financial situation and stories about your problems with getting welfare , Facebook IS a useful tool for job seekers and entrepreneurs but on the whole people like and use Facebook to be happy . It can be frowned on too, to pour out too much of your life story on Facebook. Also, if you are a job seeker, please do remember that increasingly in recent years’ employers on receiving a resume / CV are looking up the applicant on social media to check them out.

5. Positive thinkers believe in themselves, can have greater self-confidence and a belief that everything will be ok … Everything’s gonna be ok !! this too shall pass are favourite sayings of a positive person I know fighting serious life threatening illness.    Even when faced with difficult challenges positive thinkers remain positive that they will learn from those challenges and improve themselves and their lives from their experience.  They won't let a challenge bring them down, but they will push on through and know that they will come out a better person at the end.

6.) I am not saying at all that a faith in God or any other creed is essential, many people who do not have a belief of this kind are very positive people, but it can help because there is a sense of being able to trust in a higher power that whether the outcome be good or not so good, a higher power by whatever name you call it is there and in control ...that it is God’s will and God will provide and see you through ….

These are just some of the advantages to being a positive thinker, others include benefits to health such as lower blood pressure …. Everyone faces difficult moments in their life; it is how you deal with it that decides whether those moments ruin your life or whether they are an experience to learn from and turn into a positive.

Valerie Hedges

Summary Sunday: Communicating Your Value - by Hannah Morgan on May 8, 2016

Summary Sunday: Communicating Your Value -: 5 articles about money, maximizing your personal brand and social media to help improve how you communicate your value

Thank you to Hannah Morgan @ http://careersherpa.net/

Summary Sunday: It's A New World. Update Your Job Search -

Summary Sunday: It's A New World. Update Your Job Search -: Staying current with new technology and industry trends isn't enough. Job search is different too. Let go of any assumptions you have about work and how you will find your next job, wherever you may be on your career path. These posts should help!

Summary Sunday: Get A Grip On Your Career

by Hannah Morgan on April 24, 2016

 

Summary Sunday: Get A Grip On Your Career -: Landing a job isn't the end of your job search. The new reality requires you constantly grow and learn- and network! You're going to want to get a grip on your career and how you manage it! These 5 posts should help!

Job hunting online

 

With the advance through the years of the internet, it is some while now since job hunters relied on newspapers and cards in shop windows to find a job. Indeed, I got my first job by one of the most traditional methods of all used for generations of school leavers, my mother. I had wanted to be a teacher and for years imagined myself with proud parents as I went off to university. However, it dawned on me through my school years as I grew and became far more aware of my background, that this was not going to happen for me.

My mother made it clear to me that she stayed with my father only as long I was attending compulsory school and that she needed me independent. She herself born in 1927, had won a scholarship to grammar school but with her mother unable to afford the uniform, she was unable to take it up. I often wonder why children in her position were even made to sit for an exam that someone must have known would only set her them up to failure and disappointment…. She later wanted to be a hairdresser, but yet again her mother was unable to afford to pay for her training and so she followed the same path as many young 14-year-old girls of her era, she left   what was called Wandsworth Central school and went to work in an office, bitterly resentful and terrified of the bombs from the blitz falling down around her as she did so …it’s difficult to imagine that only two years before she had been seen as a child and evacuated to the country, but in those days children from poorer families , which was most of the families my mother grew up with, grew up fast and work started at fourteen.  

Apart from my mother desperately wanting me financially off her hands and no longer the responsibility of her and my father, from whom she wanted a divorce but felt that she had to stay with him as long as I was of school age, while every day she reminded me of it and made me pay for it emotionally and physically, she also was of a very firm opinion that what was good enough for her was good enough and indeed going to be the same for me …

It may sound incredible to some that this was the 1970’s and we were supposed to have already had the swinging sixties. I was born in 1959, but the sixties certainly did not swing for me and for my family, indeed they did not swing for most average people as Cilla Black told in her documentary Cilla's Unswung Sixties

My parents and the parents of quite a few of my contemporaries at school were born to parents who were born in the Victorian era. My mother’s mother told me stories of Queen Victoria’s funeral day, this my maternal grandmother was in service before she married, my mother was born in 1927, she grew up at the end of the 20’s and in the 30’s, raised by Victorian parents and in the years of depression in the UK. she didn’t have influences on her that encouraged her to swing, one of five children, money was very tight and her mother took in washing to help make ends meet. When the 1960’s arrived my mother was already in her thirties, the war had only been over for fifteen years and I was born to a mother who was already exhausted and barely had the energy to live, never mind swing …

Things were somewhat better for my father ...born in 1920 and in Bethnal Green East London, from what one hears of the east end of London, one would have expected him to have had an even worse time of it than my mother did in Wandsworth. However, things were better for his family than for many as my paternal grandfather had his own business, a bacon stall in a market and was known as the bacon king of Bethnal Green. My father was old enough to serve in the army in World war 2 and unlike my mother aged only 14 and terrified as she went to and from work with bombs dropping around her and precious little sleep after a night in the air raid shelter, my father who saw Greece and Italy and North Africa described the experience as the best years of his life ….However, he didn’t exactly swing either, his music tastes were more along the lines of George Formby when I’m cleaning windows and Gracie Fields The Biggest Aspidistra in the World….my parents were products of their times.

The sixties certainly did not swing for my parents and not for many other people either and the seventies were still an era where many parents stayed together miserably but apparently for the sake of the children and an era when they desperately needed the children to be working and financially independent. While I was at school at Mayfield in Putney South west London, the earliest age at which a child could leave school was raised from fourteen to fifteen, my mother had assumed and banked so much on my being working when I was fourteen, so desperate was she that she beat me when I brought the letter home from school, believing that I had typed it myself so that I could stay at school and said that she was going to write to the school to request that I be allowed to leave , until I managed to convince her that the rules were not going to be changed for me , even this did not stop her from accusing me of being a lily livered lizard, hiding in school afraid to go out to work and telling me that I should have gone to work in the bombing like she had to do because it would have given me some backbone, which since I wanted to go to university, I clearly lacked.

Instead of university and teacher training college I found myself where many young People before me had found themselves, in a job found for them by their mother or father.  In my case my mother had done most of the application for me before I went for the interview and at seventeen I was working in a children’s day nursery and living in a bed sitting room in a shared house, my parents having separated. I do believe that the savage cuts that the governments of the UK and the USA and indeed other countries too have made to welfare and education budgets will see a return to many children being forced by their parents to leave school at the earliest opportunity and take whatever job they can, because the household needs the income and / or the parents cannot and will not even try to continue to support them financially ….

However, some things have changed the job market since my parents time and when I was first starting out to work , newspapers do list jobs, and local ones especially can be very useful, as can national ones for executive positions, but with the vast number of resources, not just job boards but CV and resume advice and templates and advice on the job hunt itself plus interview skills, the computer is the way to go when looking for that job.

 
The use of a computer and the web for looking for and applying for jobs has now become the norm, with e-mail, web searches, CV and resume and covering letter examples and templates as well as other job-related products. Also, the advent of the internet has given people choices, some people choose never to work for any employer and start up their own online business at a very early age. If I was raising children now I would do everything in my power to help them to get a money making venture up and running because it may well be the making of a lifelong career and keep them in employment …

http://www.mytopbusinessideas.com/teenagers/

http://www.pennyroll.com/pennyroll-home/small-businesses-for-teens/

http://www.millionaire-kids.com/jobsfor13yearoldsebook.html?hop=pennyrolls

http://juniorbiz.com/teen-money-making-ideas

Google online businesses for teenagers, for many more ideas and remember that these are not all limited to teenagers, as many of them require no experience and are good ideas for older people looking for money making opportunities as well, as for teenagers, the Saturday job and newspaper round have come a long way!!!

  

With the advent of job boards such as Monster, Total, fish4jobs, Reed and Indeed and many, many more, companies publish employment opportunities to a vast reach of possible applicants, while at the same time job hunters can find many job opportunities that would not otherwise be known to them and submit applications online. Also as most of these sites have online CV storage as part of their services, you can be headhunted by recruiters looking for your skills, who may contact you. There are advantages and disadvantages, because jobs are advertised online there are far more people seeing them and applying, hundreds of people can be chasing any one job, but an advantage of online job hunting is of course the number of jobs that you can see and apply for.

A geographic advantage is that with the internet applicants are not limited to knowing about only jobs in their own locality, if they are in a position to consider employment further away. In fact, the internet removes many restrictions for the job hunter including that job searching and applications can be done on any day of the week at any time, not just Monday to Friday during business hours.

An often less well known feature of the jobs market is the hidden job market as opposed to advertised jobs. 

 One of the best ways to bring yourself to the attention of employers who may have a job available or know of jobs, or indeed freelance opportunities, is through your social networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I guess this version of the hidden job market, letting your social networking contacts be aware that you are looking for a job or earning opportunity is not so different from the days when you often got a job because your parents had mentioned to their own bosses, to people that they knew or even in the pub, that you would be leaving school soon and needing a job!!!

However, it is vital that if you are looking for employment opportunities, you keep your online presence respectable and clean and protect your online image. 

There are many groups online for all kinds of interest from relatively harmless interests such as books and music to more explosive ones such as politics, and increasingly in more recent years’ potential employers on seeing your resume, have then checked out your social networking profiles. Wanting to shoot or blow up your government leaders and raving about various political issues is not helpful and can be very risky when you are hoping to get a job, as can photos of you half naked with your tongue hanging out or drunk ...watch those selfies!!!