General Article

Unemployed Or Unemployable?

Unemployed Or Unemployable?

Your entire school experience is centered on getting a job instead of creating a job. If you did really well in school then you are probably the type that requires structure, you may even Love structure. And that’s great as long as it works for you. Or until your employer downsizes or someone above you in the corporate hierarchy decides that they really don’t want all of a sudden that structured environment takes on the shape of a life trap: Why have I spent my life here? What’s wrong with me? I’m better and smarter than most of my bosses, how come I’m NOT the boss? Why am I just getting by, I wanted to be rich!?

Well here goes, You spent your life there because it was safe. What’s wrong with you is that you have just figured out that your life was in someone else’s hands, not your own. You are not the boss because you have been taught to follow instead and not to lead. And finally, you are not rich because you were happy just getting a pay cheque for your time. Instead of finding what you will be happy to spend time doing and find a way to make that into a pay cheque.

How do I fix this?! If you have read this far then you have already started. The decision to find information and educate you is the first step. The next step is to convince yourself that you are in fact everything that you used to think you were.

How many teenagers are smart enough to run the country? If I recall being a teenager correctly, the answer of them. Can you remember having all of the answers to life’s mysteries, but now as an adult they seem a little fuzzy. While teenagers may not always have the correct answer, the attitude of “I can do anything” is RIGHT ON THE MONEY.

The future is wide open when you are a teenager, so why does that change?Did you stop having a future?

Is there no tomorrow for you once you are out in the world?Everyday has a tomorrow on the way.

How can you do anything you want?Simple! You can because you believe that you can. When you believe, you find a way! Self Confidence is the first thing that you need. If you don’t believe in yourself and your own abilities then nobody will. The “can’t” belief has been hammered into you for so long that now you believe it.

People will tell you that you can’t do something simply because they do not have the ability. Therefore, you can’t either!! Their rationalization for this may make sense, after all, you’re not as good, or as smart, or as experienced, you don’t have the money to just jump in.

Hey, maybe if you are over 35 you have lost the ability to learn new , that’s what happens!!! How many people will tell you that responsibility that weighs you down? The routine. The day to day living!!! Hey folks all that stuff that is bringing you down is your life, your actual existence is preventing you from attaining your dreams? What a load of garbage!

What happened to your dreams????? Whose life is this anyway? Are you going to do better in your next life?

Just when are you going to start making your daily life what you want it to be? Based on the fact that you are here right now, I guess it’s today.

GOOD FOR YOU! You happen to be in a very small and special are a doer, not just a talker!

I have been hearing a saying for most of my life, and I’m sure that you know this one as well. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” Ya, that’s nice, but so what!

What if you can teach yourself to look at every new day as a new opportunity?

An opportunity to make one part of your life better; An opportunity to learn something that you have an interest in; An opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help; An opportunity to make more out of your life, in whatever way that makes sense to you.

What if you got up every day and looked at your life as a wonder and approached every person and every thing with that same sense of awe. WOW!! WHAT A DAY!

All of a sudden the simple things are incredible, the sky is a more vivid blue, and clouds take on all sorts of shapes. Kind of like when you were a kid and the world was this great big playground. Remember being a kid? That kid is still inside you, even if you don’t let them out to play anymore.

What a shame it is to grow old and stuffy and set in your ways. Would you rather grow old while still being “cool”, “full of life”, “open to new things”?

“Stand in wonder and awe of the simple things and life will not pass you by” MF McDougall

I am certain that if you can do this, you will approach every day with the same enthusiasm.

I am writing this on a Sunday morning while my wife and kids sleep. The uninterrupted quiet time is nice, but what is really cool is having something that gets you feeling that good about what you are doing and keeps you juiced up even early on a Sunday you want that kind of excitement about work? How about just daily living? Do you want to be excited just to be alive?

Ask yourself this question. Why can’t I? Now give yourself the answer.

Too hard, too far, not smart enough, too tall, too lazy, too dumb, no money, too old, too young, etc.

Now ask yourself this question. How can I? Now give yourself the answer.

It gives you a different feeling right? Why? Because it is not a negative question, which by the way, will always give you a negative answer. Look for words that help you take a positive action. Say things like, “I’m going to”, “How can I”, “Is there a way”. Once you get your mind to focus on positive ideas that feeling that comes with taking action will follow. But even better than that feeling of “I’m not smart enough, or good enough” starts to get replaced by thoughts of “I can do this”.

So the first thing that you have to change is the attitude of reaction as opposed to taking action.

What exactly does this mean? Let’s say you knew a tree limb could fall on your car in the driveway. You can park on the street until the branch falls on its own. That would be reacting. Or you can get your lazy butt up there and cut the offending branch off. This allows you to park in your driveway under your terms. No more waiting around for Mother Nature and gravity to do its thing. You took action!!

Yes, that is an overly simplistic example. How many people do you think have branches waiting to fall?…Probably millions. How can you take this example and use it in your own life? Metaphors are merely a way of beating around individual issues. So take a minute and think about things in your life that need tending too.

Just start today with one thing. Tomorrow, what the heck, try two things! By day four you will feel the weight of the world has been lifted from your shoulders…Because youtook action!!

Start Now! Get back to your GET YOUR LIFE BACK!!

General Article

Sky’s the Limit: Tutoring Adults From Home

Sky’s the Limit: Tutoring Adults From Home

When we think about being tutored, we most likely think in terms of school-aged kids getting help from teachers 1:1, from a tutoring center, or from peers. We conjure up the image of what many contract centers have created: one to one adult-child tutoring, in a professional environment, with a built-in reward system for obtaining higher grades. Yes, this is a positive experience, so we should never trivialize the power of a system such as this. However, kids are not the only ones who benefit from one to one assistance. Adults can benefit greatly, too.

The sky is really the limit when it comes to adult home tutoring. Adults can be assisted with adult education courses they take part-time. Many adults return to the classroom after years of just working and no schooling. Study skills could certainly be in need of a brush up, and many home tutors can provide help with those skills. Sometimes adults need assistance with time management (kids even need that nowadays). Tutors can also show other adults a system of organizational skills to help them better organize their home and business lives. Some adults need help with a myriad of other things as well. Tutors can go into the home and show adults how to set up a home budget and how to complete their income taxes. I bet many of my readers are saying “Wow, I never thought of that…hiring a tutor to show me how to do my taxes”. In fact, can you imagine the money you can save if you get a tutor with an accounting background show you how to claim as many write-off as you can without paying a professional tax facility to do them for you? You can save thousands over a period of 10-15 years.

So adults can really benefit from being tutored from home in a variety of life’s little problems. Also, although adult tutoring can also be done at a learning center, many adults have limited transportation and really cannot afford expensive long-term contracts. Home tutoring provides that niche for adults to better their daily lives, at an affordable cost. In addition, when another adult comes into the home, the added benefit of building a community advocate or developing a friendship arises. All of us can use a friend in need sometimes. In short, a friend in need is an extra great tutor indeed!

Education Information

Self-Healing Is Energy Healing

Self-healing begins with the mind, which can generate energy to accomplish the task of healing. Self-healing is energy healing.
According to the laws of physics, there is energy in everything, and everything gives out invisible energy, including the sun, the moon, and the human body. As a matter of fact, everything is some form of energy, which is either positive or negative. For example, your thinking, too, involves energy, without which the mind cannot function. If you “think” you can heal yourself, your mind sends out positive energy to your body for self-healing.
According to Chinese medicine, your body is composed of energy, and, therefore, your body will respond positively or negatively to other energies within and also around you in the living world. In other words, everything within you and around you is all inter-connected through energy.
Energy healing began in China more than 5,000 years ago. At that time, some soldiers who received minor wounds inflicted on their bodies soon discovered that their physical pains and ailments had miraculously disappeared, and that led to the discovery of energy healing. The ancient Chinese physicians began to believe that there was an energy system in the human body, within which there was energy communication between different cells and organs. For centuries, the Chinese have believed that “qi” (the internal life energy) is responsible for transmitting energy information within the body. Accordingly, the smooth flow or stagnation of “qi” accounts for health or sickness.
Your life is a journey through which you make many choices – some good ones and also some ones — that build your health or the illnesses that are part of your experiences in this lifetime. Life has a purpose with a unique destiny for each individual. Therefore, it is important that you know yourself, and self-healing is “knowing the self” as a part of your destiny. Sometimes and somewhere along the journey of life, you may hit rock bottom and begin to despair. You may even ask the frequently-asked question: “Why me?” But that may be a time of self-awakening for you. You may begin to question how you may have found yourself in that difficult and despondent situation. True self-awakening will make you take a different path — a detour from that journey you have been prodding along.Taking a different path creates the energy for healing.
Your self-awakening can be physical, such as a change of diet or taking up an exercise regimen. Your self-wakening can be emotional or spiritual, such as self-awakening to the power of love. For example, through the self-healing power of meditation, you may be awakened to a new awareness of reality, a new consciousness of who you really are and what your priorities in life are. Self-awakening may give you the intention to heal, precipitating in changes that will ultimately heal not just the body but also the mind. Your very intention to heal is healing energy for the body and the mind.
If you know yourself, you will empower yourself with knowledge to heal yourself, and that empowerment generates energy healing. If you know yourself, you will make more right choices, than wrong ones, regarding your health. In making those choices, you are creating energy healing to bring about self-healing.
Unfortunately, many of us place the responsibility of healing on our doctors. We readily relinquish our own responsibility to know ourselves to bring about self-healing. As a result, we remain sick and unhealed. Dr. Felix Marti-Ibanez, M.D., hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Only by knowing the healthy man can we cure him….. To be a doctor, then, means much more than to dispense pills or to patch up torn flesh and shattered mind.” What Dr. Marti-Ibanez meant was that you need to know yourself in order to be healed, because nobody knows your health better than yourself. Only you yourself can create that energy healing.
Self-healing begins with knowing yourself through self-awakening. Knowing yourself will empower you with knowledge for self-healing. The very process of empowerment generates energy healing.
Copyright (c) 2011 Stephen Lau

Education Issues

The Word Knowledge ASVAB Test – What You Can Expect

If you’re about to take the ASVAB test, then it’s a good chance you’re considering joining the United States Armed Forces. The ASVAB or Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Test consists of nine sections, which consist of subjects like arithmetic reasoning, mechanical comprehension, automotive and shop information, general science, paragraph comprehension and more. But it’s the word knowledge ASVAB portion of the test that typically gives potential recruits the most anxiety. If you are stressed out about taking the word portion of the test, relax. By understanding more about the ASVAB and the word portion of the test, you’ll be much more relaxed and worry free in the days leading up to test.
ASVAB Scoring
Before you start freaking out about the word knowledge ASVAB or about any other portion of the test, you should understand why the test is taken and what test scorers are primarily looking for. Just like the SAT test, the ASVAB is timed and is primarily offered at high schools and other learning institutions all throughout the country. The test is meant to determine where the potential recruit’s strengths would lie as far as military job training and placement are concerned. If you get high scores on the word knowledge ASVAB test, for instance, you may qualify to go into linguistics or some other language based field. Of course, you might score higher in math or science based fields, which could alter your results drastically. But you won’t know until you take the test.
The Dreaded Word Portion
Now that you understand more about the test, it’s time to get over the fear of the word knowledge ASVAB portion of the test. The questions you’re likely to encounter with this portion of the test might include something like:
1. A souvenir is a great way to remember your vacation once you arrive home.
A. sacrifice
B. Emblem
C. Memento
D. Symbol
In this case, C. Momento would be the right answer. So you see that you only need to brush up on your vocabulary to tackle this portion of the test, but you have eight other categories to worry about. You can’t just focus on one aspect of the test, hurriedly trying to memorize the dictionary for fear that they’ll throw a word at you that you don’t know. Your best bet is to just give the test everything you’ve got, including the word knowledge ASVAB. Your strengths will shine through, whether they’re in mechanical engineering, computers or some other field. You’ve just got to have faith that the test will reveal the career path you were meant to follow once you actually do enlist.

General Article

Lifelong Learning Keeps Your Brain Working

Lifelong Learning Keeps Your Brain Working

I can think of no better way to keep your brain active that to commit to lifelong learning. So many of us finish school, college or university and don’t give further learning another thought. It’s unfortunate that we forget all about the joy of learning.

It’s also true that many of us never saw learning as a joy in the first place and this can color our memories of our early educational experience. However there is a vast difference between learning as an adult and learning when you are younger. To start with you are not being forced to learn. This gives you so much more freedom than you would have felt when you were younger.

When you embark on a path of lifelong learning as an adult you have much more choice in what you learn. This gives you the freedom to choose exactly what subjects or skills you want to develop and at what level you are prepared to learn. You may choose to take on the seemingly daunting task of studying at university level or you may prefer to enroll in a community class so that you can learn about something enjoyable in an environment where you have the support of other learners.

You’ll probably find that once you start more formal learning it can be hard to stop and you’ll want to learn more and more. Learning makes life so much more interesting. It can expand your interest in a whole lot of other things that are going on around you. They don’t even need to be related to what you are learning. This probably occurs because you’ve started to develop a thirst for knowledge and suddenly you can’t get enough. You’ll come across a random topic and find that you are searching for more information on it simply because it interests you, whereas previously you may have just let it pass.

Another great side effect of lifelong learning is that it often promotes tolerance of others. If someone puts forth an idea you’ll be more likely to weigh up the pros and cons of the idea to decide how you feel about it rather than jumping to an automatic conclusion. You may still reject the idea but this type of analysis brings respect for the person putting it forward regardless of your opinion of the topic.

I hold great belief in distance or online education because it enables you to learn even if you don’t live close to the learning institution and it means you can often learn at a time that suits you. Distance education spreads learning opportunities far and wide. It opens a new world to those who may not have had access previously. Through it I hope that many others will see the benefit of lifelong learning.

Current Events In Education

Self-Discovery Through Teaching Yourself Tarot Mastery

There are as many ways to read Tarot as there are people who do. Tarot does not have to be a parlor game, does not have to be the one-card-at-a-time sophomoric routine, does not have to be New Age fluff. Mastering tarot by introducing it to yourself will take time and effort but has the same advantage that teaching yourself how to cook has: The recipes are uniquely yours.
The Rider Waite deck is the only serious one. The books that give you meanings are all written by idiots. If you want a book to ‘give you a leg up,’ Eden Gray’s “The Tarot” is useful, especially the part where she has paragraphs on the meanings of the cards based on the pictures on the Rider Waite deck. Her page-per-card writing on each major arcanae is a priceless shortcut to understanding Tarot. Ignore all reversed meanings, keep your cards upright. (The whole Middle Ages do-it-backwards put-it-upsidedown thing was a counterreaction to the dictatorial power of the Roman Catholic church at the time.) This mastery of tarot by teaching it to yourself project is going to be a long haul, something that is ‘not for everyone.’
Remember algebra: There can be only one unknown in an equation if you are to solve it. That is why asking questions you know the answers to tells you the meaning of the cards.
So, you will be asking only questions you know the answers to. You will use the whole deck for each of those questions because you want to know what the cards mean, and using the whole deck involves each of the cards in that subject matter. You want to discover how the same idea is expressed using different combinations of cards. On each Rider Waite card is a picture of a situation, out of which its meanings arise. That is why I want you to read Eden Gray’s descriptions of the cards. Always remember that your meaning for a given card in a given spread may involved any aspect of the story the card pictures. (You could be the one outsmarted or the one outsmarting.) You look to the rest of the layout to see what parallels there are, to apply that one card.
Use a spread that is equally divisible by 78, the number of cards in the deck. ( I used 13, modifying the Celtic cross layout by putting three cards across where the last card is.) Write down every spread of every question in a notebook and review those notes regularly. Yes, this is drudgery. Mastery involves that, haven’t you noticed?
Pay attention to cards that have the same meaning as you study your notes of what you have done. These are theme cards: very important. They establish the dominant meaning, and you choose meanings that agree with them for the rest of the cards in your layout. When you see them, as you become proficient, you will be able to identify a repeating theme in your answer. That repetition indicates accuracy. You will learn to look for these theme cards first to identify your answer more quickly.
Some things that may happen as you delve into tarot:
(1) Some cards will appear three dimensional. Don’t let that disturb you; it is your subconscious saying this card is important to this message.
(2) Once in a while, the pictures will seem to make a movie. This is the stage in which you are beginning to put things together and get an overview.
(3) You begin to read combinations of cards as they glom together modifying one another: This is tarot expertise, you are on your way.
Certain parts of the layout pair the cards. The Cover/Cross in the center (the second and third cards you put down) relate to one another closely, and may be the reading in microcosm. The cards on either side of those, commonly called ‘Behind’ and ‘Before’ are paired, with the one to the left representing the past and the one to the right representing ‘right now’ or ‘just ahead.’ The card below those is called ‘Foundation’ and the one above paired with it is called ‘Future.’ The positions affect the meaning of the cards occupying them. You will get the hang of that gradually. These seven cards form the first sentence of your three-sentence layout; and the sentences are accurate to the degree they repeat and support one another! This is a discovery.
Next sentence is the three cards going up, commonly called ‘The Tower,’ because of the Celtic background of this layout-style. The bottom card there is the second Self card. (The first Self card is the first card you put down, before the Cover/Cross combination. I don’t put it UNDER the Cover/Cross as the books suggest; I put it opposite the last three cards.) The second card going up is called ‘Others,’ which is self-explanatory. The last one going up is the turning point, or the point of conflict, commonly referred to as ‘Hopes and Fears.’
In the standard Celtic cross layout, there is only one card above those three. To use the entire deck evenly, add two cards and make three across there. All of these blend together to be the Outcome.’ And the Outcome is the third sentence.
The idea of the three sentences you will not find anywhere but here. And the idea that the theme cards establish accuracy when they appear in each of the three sentences in the spread is also unique. I discovered this, I did not ‘invent’ it–that is, I did not decide that’s the way it’s going to be.
As a beginner, you may prefer using only three or four cards at a time to answer the question. This works. Don’t try to use the whole deck that way; only some of the spreads will be clear answers.
The difference between just reading the cards and being a master of tarot is being able to blend combinations of cards (not just pairs of cards) into a single meaning. When you are proficient and are no longer asking only questions you know the answers to, you will see that, when you have a long session on the same subject, combinations of the same cards will link together and appear in spread after spread standing for a concept introduced earlier in the session. They will do this no matter how you shuffle. It is a shorthand. Occasionally, many or even all the cards in the whole layout blend into a meaning. When you can see that, you have arrived.
Let me here note that, like everything you do, there will be good days and cussed days in your Tarot Mastery Endeavor! And let me also note that when you tune into a confused person or situation with Tarot, the confusion is reflected in your spread: It is accurately describing something contradictory! Allow for that!
When you have mastery, you have truth, you have facts. Now you can ask questions about your own life that are more personal than you would want to share with anyone else. You can discover your own motives at your own pace. You can psychoanalyze yourself, something any good psychologist will tell you not to do. (But they aren’t looking!)
And then perhaps you can go on to do the same to other people, and to the people those other people are dealing with–if you want to.