April 2023 - Page 2 of 9

3 Ways Remarkable Leaders Put Themselves First

Remarkable leaders put themselves second. But only fools sacrifice their future to make transitory purchases. It’s deadly to put others first when you should put yourself first.

Normal folks transform into remarkable leaders when they practice three neglected habits. Thankfully you don’t need good looks, high IQ, position, or organizational authority.

3 ways remarkable leaders put themselves first:

#1. First to reflect and grow.

Normal folks obsess about others. They ruminate on disappointments and struggle with offenses. You circle the black hole when you worry about things others do to you instead of actions within your control.

Remarkable leaders look inward before they act outward. And look inward again after they act.

Questions provide structure to self-reflection.

Who do you aspire to become?
How do you want to show up today?
What’s giving you energy? Draining?
What obstacles most frustrate you? What will you do to address them today?
What comes easily to you but brings great benefit to others? How can you do more of that?

Remarkable leaders avoid the seduction of success that becomes a rut.

#2. First to invest in their leadership.

Normal folks neglect their development and repeat behaviors to the point of frustration. Remarkable leaders consistently invest in the future by investing in themselves.

Connect with mentors.
Hire a coach.
Build relationships with people who have unique genius.
Seek advice.

The key to investing in your leadership is openness to growth. You don’t know it all yet.

#3. First to manage their energy.

Take breaks. Don’t work to the point of exhaustion.
Respect your golden hours. Do what matters most when you’re at your best.
Express gratitude.
Manage your schedule around personal energy.

Hard work contributes to success, but neglected practices like structured self-reflection, investing in yourself, and managing your energy propel you to remarkable leadership.

Which of the above practices is most relevant to success? Why?

What neglected practices would you add to the above list?

Still curious:

The Unalterable Law of Energy

20 Questions You Can Use to Audit Personal Energy

4 Questions to Ask at the End of the Week for Self-Reflection

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection (hbr.org)

The First Step Toward Self-Knowledge is Realizing You Don’t Have It

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How to Format a Blog Post in 6 Simple Steps

We recommend WordPress with Hostinger for most people because it’s easy to set up and it’s easy for beginners to use. Get started with Hostinger today for just $2.99 per month.

Formatting a blog post is easy enough to do. But when you’re trying to piece together a lot of information from across the internet and other sources, it can feel a lot more complicated than it is. In this guide, we’re breaking down the best way to format any blog post in six simple steps, so you can confidently write posts that are optimized for search and easy for your visitors to read through.

How to Format a Blog Post in 6 Simple Steps

The 3 Best Blogging Platforms for Formatting a Blog Post

When you’re formatting a blog post, it helps a lot if you’re already using a good blogging platform. It’s even better if that platform has an easy-to-use interface, drafting features, and access to plugins for checking SEO-approved formatting, like Yoast.

Here are our favorite blogging platforms from the many options available to you:

To find out the pros and cons of each platform in detail and more information about blogging, read our full post reviewing the best blogging platforms and blog sites.

Format a Blog Post in 6 Easy Steps

We’ve broken down the process of properly formatting a blog post into six simple steps. Follow our guide and your posts will be formatted well for SEO and general readability every time.

Get Started with Hostinger
Do SEO Keyword Research
Write Your Title
Write Your Headings
Finalize Your Outline
Add Images

For this tutorial, we’ll be…

Cold Water Immersion Rewires The Brain’s Emotion Centres (M)

Neuroscientists find that cold water immersion changes connectivity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex.

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7 Indignities of Youth – Leadership Freak

7 Indignities of Youth

Elders flaunt the indignities of their youth to validate their superiority to younger generations.

50 years ago you could listen to your neighbors’ phone conversations on the party line. The trimline phone was an innovation. The closest thing to privacy was a long telephone cord that allowed you to hide in the hall closet and whisper to your friends.

Life was hard.

When I was young the Internet wasn’t even a twinkle in DARPA’s eye. I guess we can thank the military for email and TCP/IP. Social media was passing notes in school. Facetime was Dick Tracy’s sci-fi watch.

Image source: Dick Tracy Tweets, after Chester Gould | Mike Licht

7 Indignities of my youth:

Spellcheck was Webster’s Dictionary.
Searching online was the World Book Encyclopedia.
Eating breakfast and dinner as a family every day.
Raw milk, red meat, eggs from chickens not the store.
Paper maps.
TV’s had rabbit ears and tin foil.
10,000 steps a day was achieved by getting up to change the TV channel. (There were three choices.)

My youngest son experienced his own indignities of youth. He had to get off the Internet to use the phone. Our dial-up modem pumped information at 14.4 kilobytes per second (Not megabytes or gigabytes).

Life is hard. The benefits of difficulty include:

Personal growth.
Empathy.
Adaptability.
Grit.
Gratitude.
Humility.
Work ethic.

Every generation whines about its own indignities. Difficulty makes some delightful and others repulsive. The way you face challenges shapes who you become.

PTG (Post Traumatic Growth) shows up in five ways.

Appreciation of life.
Relationships with others.
New possibilities in life.
Personal strength.
Spiritual change.

Tip: One key to PTG is meaning-making. Reflect on who you are becoming based on your responses to the indignities of life.

What do life’s indignities teach us?

How might you maximize your current experience for growth?

Still curious:

Tom Rath on Getting the Most From Adversity

4 Surprising Times to Express Gratitude

Why Purpose Matters: The 7 Powers of Purpose

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Top 5 Best Ecommerce Analytics Tools of 2023 – In-Depth Review

Our recommendation for the best ecommerce analytics tool is Optimizely because it combines analytics and marketing into an all-in-one solution. Sign up for a free demo to see how Optimizely can work for you.

Knowing who buys from your web store and what they do on your site can help you target their needs better, thus generating more sales and creating more lifelong customers. Ecommerce analytics tools collect data you can use to track customer behavior and learn more about their needs and preferences.

We spent days researching dozens of the most popular analytics tools for ecommerce sites to find the best of the best and break them down into the in-depth reviews you’ll find below.

The Top 5 Best Ecommerce Analytics Tools

The best commerce analytics tools help you track customer behavior and website traffic to optimize your site for greater sales. Optimizely is our top recommendation overall because it seamlessly blends marketing tools with site-improvement features. Sign up for a free Optimizely demo.

Check out detailed reviews of each company below, along with the best matches for specific use cases that may be relevant to your situation.

Brand logos for best ecommerce analytics tools.

Match Your Scenario to the Right Ecommerce Analytics Solution

Tools for ecommerce analytics can vary widely in their features and what they do best, so there are certainly no one-size-fits-all solutions. Here, we dissect a few specific needs for ecommerce website owners when they’re looking for an analytics tool and pinpoint the top two options for each use case.

You’re handling a high volume of sales

Best Option: Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics tackles your entire sales funnel, helping you save time when moving customers…

2 Personality Traits Linked To Chronic Anxiety

The two personality traits can interact with each other to produce chronic anxiety problems.

People who are both neurotic and introverted are more likely to experience anxiety problems, research finds.

Signs of introversion include preferring to be in a quiet, relaxing environment and having a rich mental life.

Neurotic people have a tendency towards sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.

The two personality traits can interact with each other to produce chronic anxiety problems.

It may be because people who are both introverted and neurotic tend to pay more attention to things going wrong, rather than to potential rewards.

Over the years, focusing on problems rather than rewards may condition people with these personality traits to experience more anxiety.

This is hardly surprising if all a person sees is problems everywhere.

Another contributing problem could be that introverted and neurotic people are less likely to get help from others, the study’s authors write:

“…perhaps an introverted neurotic person is prone to experiencing greater anxiety because of a lack of social support to aid in the amelioration of such anxiety (an introverted person may not seek much interaction with others).

Thus, an introverted person may not have the coping strategy of seeking social support as an option, which then maintains and potentially exacerbates anxiety…”

The conclusions come from a study of 466 young adults who were assessed twice over three years.

The results showed that those who were both neurotic and introverted were more likely to be experiencing high levels of anxiety issues three years later.

The study’s authors write:

“Low extraversion and high neuroticism relate to greater susceptibility to negative affect, less susceptibility to signals of reward, greater susceptibility to signals of punishment, and higher vulnerability to arousal and anxiety.”

On their own, being neurotic or introverted may not cause a major anxiety problem.

For example, people who are highly neurotic, but also outgoing and extraverted, may be protected from anxiety, the authors write:

“Even if an individual is highly neurotic, this same individual with high extraversion would more likely also be sensitive to signals of reward, which may offset or mask feelings of extreme anxiety.”

People who are just introverted, but with a stable personality (non-neurotic), were no more likely to be anxious, the study found:

“…even if an individual is highly introverted, this same individual with low neuroticism and low emotional reactivity would be less likely to react to signals of punishment with negative affect such as anxiety.”

The study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Gershuny & Sher, 1998).

Keep reading here

The #1 Quality of Leaders Who Inspire Us

You don’t need rank, title, or formal authority to inspire people.

I’m inspired by anyone who sweats to reach high. I’m inspired when I see our kids and grandchildren striving to master sports, music, art, math, marriage, parenting, or work.

People who struggle to make a difference take my breath away.

Aspiration combined with perspiration makes you beautiful. Apathy offends your potential. But there’s more.

Inspiration:

Inspirational leaders enable people to try new things, achieve new goals, and become their best selves. Average leaders get conformity. Inspirational leaders breathe life into the world.

Inspirational leaders:

Stir the embers of belief into flame.
Feed innate desires for meaning.
Bolster courage to climb new mountains.
Enable pursuit.

Table stakes:

7 qualities to earn a spot at the table where inspirational leaders sit.

Courage.
Vision.
Quiet grit. Glitter is optional. Quiet grit is essential.
Love. Hate makes you ugly. Serving the best interest of others makes you delightful.
Vulnerability. Fakers offend us; they can’t inspire.
Engagement. Standing aloof disgusts people doing real work. Get dirty.
Humility.

The #1 quality of leaders who inspire us:

Self-sacrifice inspires people.

Self-limiting cliches include, “I have to take care of myself,” and, “I have to do what’s best for me.” There’s a bigger truth. Inspirational people take care of others and do what’s best for the community.

The needs of the community surpass the needs of individuals. What’s good for the community outweighs what’s good for an individual.

Selfcare is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Take care of yourself SO YOU CAN take care of others.

Toes are important, but apart from community you’re a toe without a body.

People who serve the greater good inspire us. People who serve themselves and neglect others build small lives, even if they get ahead.

What quailities of inspirational leaders might you add?

What quality is most important to you?

Still curious:

How to be the Inspirational Leader you Aspire to Become

3 Reasons People Follow You

How to Be an…

HostPapa Review – What Makes HostPapa Great and Where HostPapa Falls Short

HostPapa delivers web hosting under a wide range of scalable plans. Tap into their options for shared, WordPress, VPS, and reseller hosting, with additional services that include managed hosting, plus domain acquisition and a website builder.

This company mostly caters to small businesses spinning up or maintaining their web stores or business sites. HostPapa guarantees a 99.9% uptime and delivers hosting management that is supported by a user-friendly interface and an excellent support team. That said, there are a few caveats to be mindful of when considering this hosting option, like HostPapa’s limited data center coverage, lack of automatic backups, and often expensive pricing.

HostPapa Compared

Because of its serious caveats, HostPapa didn’t make the cut on our list of the best web hosting providers. While it isn’t a bad option, I find Hostinger to be the better choice for most people because of its greater affordability for similar reliability and fast speeds. Get started with Hostinger for just $1.99 a month.

Want to know more about these alternative options to HostPapa? See all of our recommendations for the best web hosting companies.

About HostPapa

HostPapa is a Canadian web hosting company founded by Jamie Opalchuk in 2006. It’s headquartered in Burlington, Ontario and operates using strategically placed data centers in North America and Europe.

Today, it hosts hundreds of thousands of sites while remaining a privately-owned company that provides customers with full-featured web hosting packages. The service operates globally, from Canada and the United States to the United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, and beyond. Interestingly enough, HostPapa has a surprisingly strong fan base in New Zealand and Australia…

3 Reasons People Stay In Abusive Relationships

The most common form of relationship abuse is psychological.

Women stay in abusive relationships due to a combination of low self-esteem, poor alternatives and how much they have already invested in the relationship, research finds.

Despite being abused, many women (and men) find it hard to leave their partner.

Only 12 percent of the women in this study who were abused — psychologically or physically — left their partner within two months.

Many women felt they were not worthy of something better.

Their low self-esteem was sometimes the result of experiencing childhood abuse — this appeared to raise their tolerance for abuse.

The conclusions come from a study of 323 women, all of whom reported at least one incident of abuse, whether physical or psychological.

Psychological abuse included things like “called me fat or ugly” or “insulted or swore at me”.

Most of the abuse reported in the study was psychological.

The results showed that 88 percent of women were still with an abusive partner over two months later.

The authors write that:

“…women experiencing high levels of psychological distress may not feel efficacious in their ability to leave their partners.”

Childhood abuse was an important contributory factor, the authors write:

“…women who were abused in childhood were more satisfied with their current relationships than women who were not abused in childhood.

It is possible that women with childhood abuse histories are more satisfied in their relationships than women without childhood abuse histories because they have more tolerance for mistreatment based on early life experiences and resulting interpersonal schemas.”

Being abused had an unusual effect on women: it encouraged them to work harder at their relationship.

“…the more psychological abuse women are exposed to, the more energy and effort they put forth to resolve the conflict, thus leading to increases in perceived investment.”

And the more women invested in their relationship, the more likely they were to stay in it.

The study was published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (Edwards et al., 2010).

Keep reading here

5 Questions That Trigger Positive Thinking

Imagine lying in the mud repeating, “I’m on top of the world.” Positive thinking won’t get you out of the mud. You have to get up. But mindset is crucial to success.

Positive thinking is useful when it feeds action.

5 questions that trigger positive thinking:

#1. What’s the worst that could happen?

You may discover that the worst isn’t that bad. You might upset someone. Maybe you’ll be embarrassed. You probably won’t die from embarrassment.

#2. What’s the bravest thing you could do today?

Only fools believe lies. You know you’re lying to yourself when you say, “I’m brave,” when you’re shaking in your boots.

Challenge yourself with the ‘bravest question’ instead of lying to yourself.

Don’t judge your response. Just go do it. Action feeds optimism.

Warning: Busyness is an escape when you avoid what you fear. The bravest thing you can do today is face fear, not avoid it.

#3. What am I good at?

Take the VIA Character Strengths Survey. (Click here and look for the yellow button in the upper right. The location of the free version is valid on 4/24/2023.)

#4. What have I accomplished in the past?

You forget your accomplishments when darkness clouds your thinking. You learned to wipe your own bottom and read.

How might past accomplishments apply to present challenges?

#5. What can I learn from this challenge?

Life is a learning experience.

Begin an ‘I’m learning journal’. You might begin with hard truths like, “I’m learning that I’m discouraged.” There’s no sense denying reality.

Bonus: What am I grateful for right now?

Are you eating buttery popcorn? Be thankful for tastebuds. Life is filled with small benefits. You say, “Thank you,” when someone holds the door for you. Put that on your list.

Which of the above questions seem useful to you? Why?

What questions that trigger positive thinking can you add to the list?

Still curious:

How to turn Negative Rumination into Useful Reflection

How to Resolve the Negative Realities of Positive Thinking

The Quick Path from Negative to Positive Emotion for Leaders and Teams

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