December 2023 - Page 3 of 9

Don’t Rush to Set Personal Goals for 2024

It’s a waste of time to set personal goals before you define personal success. Goals need to serve something higher than achievement.

Define personal success:

The biggest failure in goal setting is making a bunch of goals. Goals are a collection of ‘shoulds’ when made before you define success. My coach tells me to stop ‘shoulding’ on myself.

What is success for you? Forget about your inner critic for a minute. Forget about doing stuff. How do you define meaningful living? Here’s a hint. A meaningful life is more than money, fun, and losing weight.

Pursue meaning if you want to be happy.

Choose personal goals that affirm who you are:

Relationships matter to you, set relationship goals. Date your spouse twice a month, for example. If you’re an introvert quiet-time goals make sense. If you like organizing your life, make long-term plans. If you are spontaneous, don’t lock yourself down too much.

Goals that align with character energize.

Choose personal goals that express who you aspire to become:

Who you become is more important than what you do.

Listen to your inner critic for a minute. Is she shouting that you’re too stressed? Make aspirational goals about dealing with stress. (Click here before you make a dumb goal about less stress.) Is your inner critic saying you worry too much? Set a goal that answers worry. How will you learn to trust people?

Aspirational goals require discipline.

The worst thing you can do is ask what you want to do before you define who you aspire to become.

Before you set personal goals for the new year:

Define personal success.
Choose goals that affirm who you are.
Choose goals that express who you aspire to become.

Do you set goals for the new year?

What process do you use?

Still curious:

4 Ways to Lead Yourself into a New Year

Hurbert Joly is the ret. CEO of Best Buy and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard. He says The Vagrant will, “inspire a transformation in every leader who reads it.” Check it out here: https://amzn.to/3YE9Bzz

Like this:

Like Loading…

The 2 Best Ways To Lower Your Blood Pressure

Two simple activities that can lower your blood pressure.

Half-an-hour of brisk walking in the morning can lower blood pressure, reduce the risk of heart disease and keep you healthy, research finds.

Morning exercise at a moderate-intensity level such as 30 minutes brisk walking or walking on the treadmill can lower blood pressure for eight hours of the day.

By adding frequent breaks from sitting during the day, you will increase the effect of morning exercise on lowering blood pressure, the study found.

Older adults participated in this study, who were overweight or obese.

Average blood pressure — especially systolic blood pressure — was reduced in participants who did half-an-hour’s treadmill walking at moderate-intensity in the morning.

The effect lasted for a period of 8 hours afterwards.

Systolic blood pressure is the top number of the two blood pressure readings and diastolic blood pressure is the second number.

Systolic blood pressure is more important of these two as it is an indicator of cardiovascular disease.

In this study, the benefit of lowering blood pressure lasted throughout the day when the morning walk was combined with three-minute breaks from sitting every half hour.

These three-minute frequent breaks involved casual walking (light-intensity physical activity) during frequent breaks from sitting throughout the day.

Mr Michael Wheeler, the study’s lead author, said:

“For both men and women, the magnitude of reduction in average systolic blood pressure following exercise and breaks in sitting, approached what might be expected from antihypertensive medication in this population to reduce the risk of death from heart disease and stroke.

However, this reduction was greater for women.”

The combination of exercise and breaks from sitting benefited women more than men in regards to lowering blood pressure.

This might be because adrenaline (epinephrine) increased in men but decreased in women.

The other factor is that women were post-menopausal, which is a time when women are at greater chance of cardiovascular disease.

About the author

Mina Dean is a Nutritionist and Food Scientist. She holds a BSc in Human Nutrition and an MSc in Food Science.

The study was published in the journal Hypertension (Wheeler et al., 2019).

Hello, and welcome to PsyBlog. Thanks for dropping by.

This site is all about scientific research into how the mind works.

It’s mostly written by psychologist and author, Dr Jeremy Dean.

I try to dig up fascinating studies that tell us something about what it means to be human.

You can get free email updates with more articles like this from PsyBlog by clicking here.

Keep reading here

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

Many B2B companies like to call their clients business partners—especially if you’re able to meet each other’s needs at the end of a sale.

At the same time, companies can get into a pattern of siloing themselves off from those very same partners. It’s easy to share a CRM link with a colleague on your team, but your clients may never end up accessing it or understanding how much work went into a demo.

Enter Dock, a SaaS solution that connects the people working outside your company, including prospects, clients, distributors, and more.

Who Dock Is For

Dock works best for B2B companies that need to unify their sales, onboarding, and delivery—all while being more transparent with clients. It allows you to be more open, even if a client expects one of your products to magically be part of their infra the moment after purchase. It’s kind of like opening a bank account online and getting a glimpse of all the steps you’ll have to complete before getting the approval and receiving the plastic in your mailbox.

B2B companies that have to manage sales and revenue, project management, and service delivery all at once will profit from Dock, too. Doubly so if you’re working with a remote team spread out over different time zones. If you’re familiar asking questions like:

Is a…

Mastering Reddit for Brand Awareness & Reputation Management

First, think of how vast the internet is, and how impossible it is to reach every crack, corner, and crevice.

Now, imagine a place where millions of people endlessly sift through this vastness, promoting what’s worthy of the front page and removing what’s rubbish.

That’s Reddit.

If you’ve spent only a few minutes redditting, you may be thinking it’s a place for cute cats and ridiculous memes…

However, Reddit is also a place for the president, for customer support, and just about anything else you can imagine. Reddit pulls at least two billion unique visitors a month and normally powers thousands of active communities per day, ranging from science, music, and politics to specialties like tech support and homebrewing.

If you are not paying attention to your niche subreddits, you don’t know your audience.

But there is more to Reddit than its own huge audience you need to be listening to. Reddit is getting a huge visibility in Google’s organic search.

Reddit is becoming an inevitable part of just about any buying journey. Just about any brand triggers [PRODUCT/BRAND NAME REDDIT] suggestion in Google’s Autocomplete results:

[Reddit] comes up in many brand-driven Google’s Autocomplete suggestions prompting consumers to search it even if they didn’t initially intend to.

There’s also a new SERP feature for Reddit called “Discussions and forums”:

Not being on Reddit means missing this huge organic search opportunity and failing to control this narrative.

Four More Reasons to Use Reddit for Digital Marketing

1. User-testing and New Product Feedback

Do you have a new website or product coming out soon? Is there anything in the beta stage?

Reddit is a great place to get quality (and free) feedback.

Continuing from the previous example, find the proper subreddit relevant to your business. Make sure you are operating within the subreddit rules and guidelines before submitting anything. If you’re unsure, consult one of the moderators by sending them a private message.

Here’s an example:

Further down the comment section, we see real feedback:

Boom! Redditors are happy to help each other in more niche subreddits – pretty cool right?

2. Extend Customer Service Reach

In the same vein, we can extend our customer service efforts by researching threads where our business or product is mentioned.

Be optimistic – sometimes Redditors are complimenting your service! Find them, thank them, and contribute to the positivity. This ties into increasing brand reputation as well.

A word of caution: do not jump head-first into the comment sections, especially if you’re representing a company. Instead, get your feet wet…

Continue reading here

How to Leverage Weaknesses – Leadership Freak

How to Leverage Weaknesses

Weaknesses reveal potential strengths.

Worry:

Worry obsesses about the future. The potential strengths behind worry…

Planning.
Risk assessment.
Preparedness.
Attention to detail.
Empathy.

Anger:

Angry people are control freaks.

Assertiveness.
Self-reflection.
Conflict resolution.
Motivation to change.

Pushy:

Persuasiveness.
Conviction.
Grit.

10 weaknesses with potential strengths:

Blunt – honesty.
Rigid – discipline.
Picky – analytical.
Indecisive – flexibility.
Workaholism – responsibility.
Impulsive – courage.
Lazy – efficient.
Fear – situational awareness.
Day dreaming – imagination.
Timid – discretion.

Today is a good day to reflect on untapped potential. Consider anger as an example. Anger is destructive when unmanaged. How might you use it to advantage others? Nelson Mandela found forgiveness behind anger.

Train yourself to maximize weaknesses by discovering an untapped strength.

What weakness/strength pairings come to mind for you?

How can people hone the edges off weaknesses to create strengths?

Like this:

Like Loading…

Social Media Posts Can Reveal The Signs Of Depression

Posting this type of image online is linked to depression.

People who are depressed can be identified from their social media photos 70 percent of the time, research finds.

Depressed people have a tendency to post (literally) darker pictures.

They are also more likely to use a filter to convert their images to black-and-white.

Dr Christopher Danforth, who co-authored the study, explained the signs to look for:

“Our analysis of user accounts from a popular social media app revealed that photos posted by people diagnosed with depression tended to be darker in color, received more comments from the community, were more likely to contain faces and less likely to have a filter applied.

When they did select a filter they were more likely to use the filter that converted color images to black and white.

People diagnosed with depression also posted at a higher frequency compared to non-depressed individuals.”

The relatively high rate of accuracy is impressive.

Especially given that it is a considerably higher rate than general practitioners, who only manage the correct diagnosis 42 percent of the time.

Dr Danforth imagines an app that will suggest a check-up when it detects you might be depressed:

“With an increasing share of our social interactions happening online, the potential for algorithmic identification of early-warning signs for a host of mental and physical illnesses is enormous.

Imagine an app you can install on your phone that pings your doctor for a check-up when your behavior changes for the worse, potentially before you even realize there is a problem.”

The study included 43,950 photos from 166 users of the social media app Instagram.

Around half of them had a clinical diagnosis of depression.

The photos were then analysed by a computer program to see if it could work out who was depressed.

Dr Andrew Reece, who co-authored the study, said:

“Although we had a relatively small sample size, we were able to reliably observe differences in features of social media posts between depressed and non-depressed individuals.

Importantly, we also demonstrate that the markers of depression can be observed in posts made prior to the person receiving a clinical diagnosis of depression.”

The study was published in the journal EPJ Data Science (Reece & Danforth, 2017).

Hello, and welcome to PsyBlog. Thanks for dropping by.

This site is all about scientific research into how the mind works.

It’s mostly written by psychologist and author, Dr Jeremy Dean.

I try to dig up fascinating studies that tell us something about what it means to be human.

You can get free email updates with more articles like this from PsyBlog by clicking here.

Author: Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology….

Keep reading here

Many Big Businesses Use a Calling Line ID. Should You?

The short answer is yes, you should use a calling line ID. This is the technology that allows you to see what phone number a customer is calling you from, and it’s also what allows you to choose what phone number people see when you call them.

Customer call-answer rates are notoriously low—usually around 2-10 percent, depending on what study you’re looking at. At the same time, however, answer rates for local numbers are much higher—as much as four times higher in some cases—so it just makes sense to use a calling line ID that gives your calls a local appearance. That’s if you want a better chance of success with cold calling, of course.

But the benefits of a calling line ID go much further than that, as they can also help you keep your customers happy and increase the efficiency of your customer service and sales departments.

Inbound vs. Outbound: Why You Need a Calling Line ID for Your Business

Inbound Calling Line ID

Most people think about the benefits of calling line IDs in terms of outbound calls, but they’re actually very useful for inbound calls as well. This is because a calling line ID doesn’t just let you decide what phone number a customer sees, it also gives you information about the customers who call you. This lends itself to a number of helpful byproducts, from call screening and routing features to improving your customer service.

Screening

The more time your agents spend taking calls from unqualified leads or spam numbers, the less time they spend talking to the people you actually want them to be talking to. Calling line ID can help solve this problem by automatically screening calls as they come into your office phone system. This way, you can…

5 Ways to Think for Yourself

You can’t think for yourself when you’re worried what others think.

Leaders have a mind of their own.

5 ways to think for yourself:

#1. Don’t rush to research.

Instead of exploring research, explore your own thoughts. Write a few paragraphs describing what you believe and why – before you seek outside input.

“The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’” (The Art of Thought by Graham Foster)

When you don’t know your own mind most any idea sounds right.

#2. Consider how others could be right.

Create three reasons the opposite could be true. You haven’t thought well until you understand more than one side of an issue.

Write a paragraph or two explaining why another person is right.

#3. Reflect on who you’re making happy and why.

People pleasers don’t know themselves. I’m not saying good decisions always make you happy. Some decisions are painful.

The need to please clouds brains.

Please note: All success requires pleasing someone (not everyone of course).

#4. Judge slowly.

Judging is easier than thinking.

Quick minds hinder leaders. You decide and defend in an instant.

A judgement made is an omelet, hard to unmake. Openness ends and defending begins once you make up your mind.

#5. Try something.

Some ‘brilliant’ ideas are stupid. When you aren’t sure try something. Clarity comes with action.

How are you learning to use your brain?

What idea in this post could you use today?

Still curious:

How to Think Like a Leader

The Power of Wishful Thinking

Like this:

Like Loading…

What Is MCI And Why Do 99% Of Physicians Underdiagnose It? (M)

MCI is typically diagnosed when people have age-related problems with memory and thinking, but can still live independently.

Keep reading with a membership

• Adverts removed
• Cancel at any time
• 14 day money-back guarantee

Members can sign in below:

Author: Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. He is also the author of the book “Making Habits, Breaking Habits” (Da Capo, 2013) and several ebooks. View all posts by Jeremy Dean

Keep reading here

GoDaddy Web Hosting Review (Updated for 2024)

GoDaddy is one of the most well-recognized names in the web hosting industry, servicing millions of customers worldwide.

They offer a variety of services ranging from website builders and professional email, to domain registration and web hosting.

Normally $6.99/month
24/7/365 U.S. based support
Free domain and 1 year of email
Guaranteed 99.9% uptime

Get a 33% discount

But despite their stellar marketing campaigns, are they all that’s cracked up to be? Luckily, we’ve done the work to find that out for you.

This review covers all of GoDaddy’s hosting plans, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of using GoDaddy for web hosting.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on whether or not GoDaddy is the best web hosting provider for your website.

The Benefits of Using GoDaddy Web Hosting

Strong uptime rates

Uptime refers to the time your website is up and running for visitors. That’s why it should be a priority consideration when looking at web hosting services.

If your plan can’t deliver strong uptimes, then you better start looking elsewhere.

One of the reasons why GoDaddy has done so well over the years is because their uptimes definitely deliver. You can expect to see a 99.9% uptime rate on average throughout the year.

Sure, a couple of months might fall below average, but you’ll even mix in a few 100% uptime rates.

I recently saw a test that said the average monthly downtime rate for GoDaddy is about 13 minutes. That’s hardly enough to have a major impact on your website.

Fast loading speed

You’d think that cheap web hosting means…