Are you People Smart?

How you interact with co-workers can make or break your career. This is known as Soft Skills, the interpersonal abilities in successful employees.

Soft doesn't mean Easy
Soft skills are the glue that connects people, according to Nancy Vader-McCormick, a professor of speech at Delta College in University City, Michigan, Soft skills, sometimes calledLife or Strategic skills, typically are defined as skills that are not technical or task oriented. Examples include communication, conflict resolution, honesty, anger management and trust, among many others.

Sue Mackey, founder of the Mackey Group in Issaquah, Washington, trains people about the importance of soft skills and how to use them. Mackey says one of the biggest complaints from employers is a lack of practical knowledge and relationship building.

She sites Donald Trump's popular show The Apprentice and says the well-educated contestants usually get fired because of soft skill deficiencies. Mackey believes people who stay in dead-end jobs often are there for the same reason


Start With You
Amy Yoakum, a Kansas-based human resource professional, has 15 years of experience recruiting employees and training leaders. Yoakum believes effective communication is one otf the most important skills for an employee to have.

Succeeding as a customer service representative or a team player requires this skill. She also looks for people with a strong work ethic.

Taking comments at work personally can cloud your vision and your response. Life coach Bob Levy of Life Works in Marshal, Michigan, says, "My premise is there is no possibility to access soft skills without clarity. Be clear about yourself, your values and your relationships - all other (skills) flow from there."

Don't Get Mad
Mackey agrees, and says anger, one of the most difficult emotions in the workplace, can be managed through soft skills. Mackey explains, "A lot of anger we have about someone or a situation is because we fail to ask, "What do these words mean?" We think about things in our own terms. Ask "What can I do for you?" That stops negative dialogue.

What if you lack good soft skills? Can they be learned? Soft skills may come more naturally to some people than others. However, there are ways to improve your soft skills. Levy, who has taught this topic extensively, feels soft skills such as compassion, clarity and understanding can be develooped.

He explains, "With a math test you read the questions fo you understand what is being asked. In life ask, "What is needed?" We often see soft skills as being outside of us. Truly it happens inside of us."


Fine-Tune Your Attitude
Vader-McCormick suggests starting with a self-assessment of your skill levels. Learn about different soft skills and how they can be applied. Then practice. Video tape yourself and ask for feedback from others..
Most people, when they understand soft skills and how they work, want to use them because they help you in the world.

Mackey stresses that soft skills are not stand-alone skills. For instance, problem-solvers utilize many skills including trust and communication. Likewise, conflict may not always be resolvable, but it may be managed by using a variety of skills together.

"Integrate all of the steps," advises Mackey. "You have to know who the stakeholders are and the outcomes."


What Do Others See
Interviewers can learn techniques to analyze a potential employee's soft skills as well.. Yoakum says, "The key to finding out if someone has soft skills is to ask behavioral -based questions. One of my favorites is, "tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a supervisor." Ask questions about how they handled it."
These kinds of questions help interviewers dig deep to see the connection between an event and the skills the potential employee used. Yoakum finds this type of interviewing often reveals qualities that the interviewee may try to hide.
Interviewers can use scenarios and questions that create situations to assess how the potential employee performs. Vader-McCormick says, "Ask for concrete examples, both positive and negative, of conflict and communication situations."
Improving soft skills can move your career in the right direction and make you a valuable employee and leader. Levy says, "most people, when they understand soft skills and how they work, want to use them because they help you in the world.

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3 Reasons Beginners Should Choose an Internet Marketing Affiliate Program over Product Creation

My focus today will be on how to begin your business. I will share with you what's taken me too much time and too much money to learn. My hope is that my experiences will save you many years and many dollars.

I've spent several years studying Intenet Marketing. And it troubles me to hear one of the "Guru's" in the industry say that to be a success, you've got to have your own product-that is So Not True!

Product creation is overwhelming to me, and probably you too, if you are just beginning to explore Internet Marketing. I've studied what goes into product creation-the time, knowledge, money, experience.. I've purchased Ebooks, courses, and audios with enticing titles such as "How to Create Your Own Information Product in 30 Minutes." Not Possible for the Average Joe!

Maybe these "courses" work for people who just want to make a little quick cash and don't really care about quality or long term success. Or maybe they work for really experienced marketers to whom product creation is easy. But that's not what you hear. The big name marketers always talk about the chaos the week before a product launch. About being up all night. And, inevitably, about how their server crashed on launch day or how Paypal cut them off after they brought in too much money.

I've been a part of more than one Internet Marketing Affiliate program. I've also taken steps towards Product Creation. I've found three reasons beginners should choose an Internet Marketing Affiliate Program over Product Creation.

A Good Internet Marketing Affiliate program is FAST, EASY, AND FREE!

Product Creation is Time Consuming, Hard, And Costly.

Which one sounds like an easier and less stressful path to successful marketing?

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• Go To Clickbank
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Affiliate Internet Marketing Is EASY.

You don't have to come up with the product idea. You don't have to figure out how to create an Ebook or how to produce and deliver a physical product. You don't need copywriting skills. You don't need the technical ability to put up a website. It's all done for you. How much Easier could it be?

Affiliate Intenet Marketing is FREE.

There's no cost to sign up with an affiliate program. There's no cost to create, set up, and host a web page, or to hire someone to do it for you. It's all done. Product creation involves all of these costs. Even if you're good, you can't realistically do it alone. You'll need to pay people to help with some aspects of the creation, promotion, and launch of the product.

If you are new to the Internet Marketing business, start with the fast, easy and free method. Your chances of Affiliate Marketing Success are way greater than your chances of Product Creation success. Save that for when you are making a little money, able to quit your job, and have some time on your hands and some experience to ease the pains of product creation.

Too many people quit trying to make money online because it "Doesn't Work". The fact is, they just didn't know HOW to make it work. They didn't follow the Fast, Easy, Free Method that can result in Affiliate Marketing Success, with just a little persistence.

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The Truth About Wii Fit And Weight Loss

Fitness videogames might be able to keep players in shape--but not if they don't play them.

BURLINGAME, CALIF.--Nintendo's exercise game Wii Fit is still flying off retail shelves eight months after its U.S. release last May. The all-in-one instructional tool, weight tracker and fitness coach advertises itself as a painless way for the whole family to get healthy thanks to the game's "balance board," which measures players' movement. Offering a selection of activities--from running to push-ups to yoga--Wii Fit is now in almost 1.5 million homes across the country.

But is anyone actually using it?

Not really, says Brian Crecente, managing editor of the popular gaming blog Kotaku.
Despite optimistic predictions that Nintendo had unleashed a new era of videogames, Crecente calls Wii Fit little more than an exercise fad that's bound to come and go like any other. "I don't know a single person who has bought the game who uses it routinely after a month," he claims, stressing that getting results from the game requires dedication and real physical exertion. "What Nintendo did is they tapped into that desire people have to be healthier... Everyone wants to work out, but nobody really wants to put the effort into it."

One of the things that's made Wii Fit so popular is the excitement Nintendo has stirred up with people who don't normally play. For Crecente, that excitement--and the let down that often comes with it--hit home. "My mom and step dad both tried Wii Fit before it came out," he says, "and like every other middle-aged American, they loved it." In fact, they loved it so much they went out and bought a Wii of their own. Months later, though, when Crecente stopped by for a visit, he didn't need to ask if they'd set foot on their balance board. Their Wii had never even been set up. So much for physical fitness.

Don't blame Nintendo for people's sloth, observers say.
The company has marketed its new cash cow brilliantly, and it's not responsible for whether consumers play the game or not. Nintendo declined to comment for this article, but Wii Fit creator Shigeru Miyamoto has previously gone on record and said that the game is less about people losing weight and more about broadening the videogame market. Still, it seems a little disingenuous for Nintendo to heavily market a fitness tool that's sitting in more than a million American living rooms collecting dust.

That's not to say Wii Fit doesn't work--if you play it. Brian Ashcraft, another Kotaku editor, tried the game out faithfully for a month when it was first released in order to review it. The results: He enjoyed the yoga, and started to feel more in shape. But the novelty wore off, and Ashcraft admits he hasn't picked up the game in a long, long time.

Not everyone, however, is prepared to give up on Wii Fit. Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence, Scott Owens, a professor of exercise science at the University of Mississippi, has started a six-month study to uncover whether placing Wii Fit in a home will actually improve a family's physical fitness. By donating the game to local participants for three months at a time, then taking it away for another three months, Owens will be able to observe how the game impacts cardiovascular fitness, flexibility and balance. How often families use Wii Fit will be up to them.
Of course, the overall goal of Owens' study isn't to question Wii Fit's effectiveness--it's to provide more insight into the American obesity epidemic. Right now, Owens speculates that playing traditional videogames might be a contributing factor because it's a sedentary activity. Results of his study are expected to come out this June.

In the meantime, gamers like Crecente remain skeptical about the Wii Fit hype, predicting that this, too, will pass into fitness fad history. When a neighbor mentioned heading out to buy a Wii Fit recently, Crecente's advice was simple: Don't do it. "I have to keep reminding people," he sighs, "even though it's a videogame, it's still exercise. It might be fun a little bit, but it's work."

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