The next step is to ask several of your friends and colleagues to say which words they associate with you. You can do this by directing them to the following URL:-

http://kevan.org/johari?name=AUDIOMIND

To watch how your Johari Window changes, and get HTML results to paste into a journal or email, bookmark the above URL:-

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Everyone makes mistakes and the busier you are, the more mistakes you will make. The only question is, IS “How well and how effectively do you deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life?”

There are two ways people generally look at the world: the benevolent way and the malevolent way. People with a malevolent or negative worldview take a victim stance, seeing life as a continuous succession of problems and a process of unfairness and oppression. They don’t expect a lot and they don’t get much. When things go wrong, they shrug their shoulders and passively accept that this is the way life is and there isn’t anything they can do to make it better.

On the other hand, people with a benevolent or positive worldview see the world around them as filled with opportunities and possibilities. They believe that everything happens as part of a great process designed to make them successful and happy. They approach their lives, their work, and their relationships with optimism, cheerfulness, and a general attitude of positive expectations. They expect a lot and they are seldom disappointed.

When you develop the skill of learning from your mistakes, you become the kind of person who welcomes obstacles and setbacks as opportunities to flex your mental muscles and move ahead. You look at problems as rungs on the ladder of success that you grab onto as you pull your way higher.

Two of the most common ways to deal with mistakes are invariably fatal to high achievement. The first common but misguided way to handle a mistake is the failure to accept it when it occurs. According to statistics, 70 percent of all decisions we make will be wrong. That’s an average. This means that some people will fail more than 70 percent of the time, and some people will fail less. It is hard to believe that most of the decisions we make could turn out to be wrong in some way. In fact, if this is the case, how can our society continue to function at all?

The fact is that our society, our families and our relationships continue to survive and thrive because intelligent people tend to cut their losses and minimize their mistakes. It is only when people refuse to accept that they have made a bad choice or decision [and prolong the consequences by sticking to that bad choice or decision] that mistakes become extremely expensive and hurtful.

The second common approach that people take with regard to their mistakes, one that hurts innumerable lives, is the failure to use your mistakes to better yourself and to improve the quality of your mind and your thinking.

Learning from your mistakes is an essential skill that enables you to develop the resilience to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. The person who recognizes that he has made a mistake and changes direction the fastest is the one who will win in an age of increasing information, technology and competition.

By remaining fast on your feet, you will be able to out-play and out-position your ‘competition’. You will become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances.

Now, here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

1) First, imagine that your biggest problem or challenge in life has been sent to you at this moment to help you, to teach you something valuable. What could it be?

2) Second, be willing to cut your losses and walk away if you have made a mistake or a bad choice. Accept that you are not perfect, you can’t be right all the time, and then get on with your life.

3) Third, learn from every mistake you make. Write down every lesson it contains. Use your mistakes in the present as stepping stones to great success in the future.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
– Albert Einstein, physicist

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

– Mark Twain

By the definition below, it’s going to be difficult to “express interest” in a job listing for anything dealing with ‘technology’, listings that are often loaded with specific qualifications (i.e. “Perl, JavaScript, Quark, MS Office, Photoshop, PHP and Doom 3 experience”). I’ve never been to an interview for a job I eventually landed where I met 100% of their qualifications.

Furthermore, let me get this str8……….in order to get a more diverse and random selection of applicants, we’re going to shrink the qualified applicant pool by making it more difficult to apply for a job? Can someone please explain to me how this is supposed to increase diversity? I would think that if you want a more diverse selection, you would want to increase the qualified applicant pool so you have more people to choose from.

Thank you idgut US Federal Government for helping define and regulate racism, sexism, and all other forms of ‘diversity’. When the government actually starts letting companies hire employees on the basis of what they can do or what they can learn to do, rather than their sex/race/’future ability’, let me know…..until then I’m keeping half an eye open for that small little cottage on sale on Jupiter…

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/06/news/economy/annie/annie_0206/index.htm?cnn=yes

Friends, be warned: If you’re hoping to find a new job through a job board or other online channel — or if you’re an employer seeking candidates on the Web — the world just got a little bit more difficult.

New federal guidelines meant to standardize how employers track data on the diversity of their job-applicant pool are taking effect starting today for jobs at federal contractors — and similar rules will kick in later this year at U.S. companies with more than 50 employees. And resumes and search approaches that worked perfectly well before may no longer do the trick.

In the new system, federal regulators will be checking to see that companies are keeping diversity data on all applicants, according to a new, more uniform definition of “applicant.”

According to this definition, an applicant must “express interest” in the job, whether by sending in a resume, applying on the company’s site, or whatever other means the company requests, says Gerry Crispin, founder and principal of CareerXRoads and a long-time Internet job hunting expert.

That “expression of interest” must show that he or she has all the qualifications for the job listed in the company’s job description (not just some or most of them) — and those qualifications must be specific and measurable.

The applicant must be considered for a specific current or future position, and “never remove himself from consideration for the job,” says Crispin. For example, “if I have a job opening in Boston, for example, and you’ve specified that you want to work in Chicago, I can infer that you’ve removed yourself,” he says.

To comply with these new rules and get the most diversity, employers will have an incentive to keep the pool of applicants for each job relatively small and as random as possible. To make sure you’re considered now, you’ll have to:

Follow the company’s instructions. “If an employer says that, to apply for a given job, you must go to their web site and enter a certain code number, then do that,” says Crispin. “Otherwise your resume will never be seen.”

Spell out your qualifications clearly. “Pay very close attention to the specific qualifications an employer lists for a particular job, and make sure your resume contains those exact words,” Crispin says.

For instance, if a job description includes the words “three years of credit accounting experience,” put “three years of credit accounting experience” on your resume. “Don’t just list a credit-accounting position with the dates you had it and assume someone will figure it out,” Crispin advises. This may mean you have to rewrite your resume for each job opening you apply for.

Keep your resume up-to-the-minute current. “The rules allow companies to pick a random pool of applicants by searching the job boards for ‘most recent’ qualified applicants,” Crispin notes. “In those cases, no one will even look at a resume that is more than two or three weeks old.” Yikes.

Target specific companies and visit their web sites often. “The first announcement of a job opening very often appears on a company’s own site before it is posted anywhere else,” says Crispin. If enough applicants turn up on the site, the employer is unlikely to look any further. “Companies really do not want 500 or 1,000 applicants for each job,” Crispin says. “If they get 30 who are qualified, that’s a reasonable number for a hiring manager to consider and select from.”

If someone is referring you for a job, make sure you — and they — understand how to do it. About one-third of all new hires now come through employee-referral programs, and companies are still permitted to run these however they like, as long as they follow a consistent policy. So if your pal at Ostrich Corp. wants to refer you for a job, know what Ostrich’s policy is (whether via the company web site, having your friend submit your resume for you in a particular way, or what-have-you) and follow it to the letter.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the new rules will actually increase diversity in companies or just create extra work for everybody. Either way, if you’re looking for a new job, you can’t afford to ignore them.

SPERM FACTS

A single human male ejaculation releases about half a teaspoonful ( 2.75 ml) of semen containing anywhere between 180 to 400 million sperm.

If this number falls below about 20 million sperm, a man is considered clinically infertile.

A single sperm is about 40 microns (0.0016 inches) long and carries 23 chromosomes. Sperm swim at about 30 inches per hour and can survive in the female reproductive tract for up to three days.

So……if I had $1000 and a need for a good digi SLR camera with at least 7mp of ‘strength’, good color/white balancing, with minimum ‘noize’, what would you suggest?

Yes, I know I’m being vague.

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060130/full/060130-13.html

Expecting the worst may not make you feel any better when faced with a disappointment, say psychology researchers who have tested the age-old advice.

Most people believe that mentally preparing for the worst outcome in an examination or race will soften the disappointment if we flunk or flop – and heighten the joy if we succeed. But the idea has rarely been put on scientific trial.

Margaret Marshall of Seattle Pacific University and Jonathon Brown of the University of Washington, Seattle, did just that. They first asked more than 80 college students to fill in questionnaires that measured their general emotional outlook on life – whether bright or gloomy. The students then practised a set of moderately difficult word-association puzzles on a computer. Based on this, they rated how well they expected to perform on a second set of such problems.

The team then gave half the students problems that were slightly easier than the first set, while half were given more difficult puzzles. This ensured that the students’ performances would either exceed, or fall short of, their expectations. Afterwards, the subjects filled in a questionnaire to measure their emotional reaction, such as how disappointed or ashamed they felt.

Students who expected to do badly, the researchers found, actually felt worse when they messed up than those who predicted they would do well but similarly botched their test.

This suggests that gloomy expectations could actually exacerbate the wretchedness felt when a person fails. The old advice “doesn’t work”, agrees psychology researcher Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, whose interests include optimism and pessimism. “You’re just making yourself miserable.”

Sunny side up

The study, published in Cognition and Emotion1, suggests that a person’s reaction to disappointment or failure is determined mainly by their general outlook on life. Those who expect to succeed tend to have a sunnier stance all round, the researchers say. If they fall short of their goals, they are likely to look on the bright side and still think they have done reasonably well.

These people, who see the world through rose-tinted spectacles, also tend to deny responsibility for their poor performance. Marshall and Brown showed this in a second part of the study, in which students were also asked whether they felt their test performance was a reflection of their ability. The ‘rose-tinted’ group who did badly in the test tended to believe that it was not.

Conversely, people who have low expectations tend to have a glum take on life and may be less mentally equipped to deal with disappointment. If they don’t make the grade, they take it to heart and tend to blame themselves.

It may be difficult for a person to cushion the blow of failure by trying to brighten their natural temperament, Brown says. Based on his earlier research, he says that the best way a person can deal with a setback is by writing it off as unimportant. “People need to be strong enough to learn that failure is not bad,” he says.

The dark side

At least in some cases, negative thinking could still work to a person’s advantage.

Anticipating failure at a forthcoming mathematics test or public talk, for example, is thought to help some anxious people motivate themselves to study harder and avert their dismal prophesy. Psychologists call such individuals ‘defensive pessimists’.

Conversely, there could also be detrimental consequences to perpetually expecting the best, says Julie Norem of Wellesley College, Massachusetts, who studies the psychological strategies people use to pursue goals. Those who continually brush off their failures at the office might be overlooking the larger picture – such as the fact that they are about to be fired.

Sadly, this means there is no simple advice about whether we ought to expect the worst. This study “is part of a very large puzzle”, Norem says.

Methinks I may have to rethink my ‘methods’.

I, for one, welcome our happy, upbeat, responsibility-denying overlords! May they ever smile at whatever disaster unfolds before them! They don’t need to avoid any prophesies of doom – they can embrace them and enjoy the support of all they bring with them into an unknowable oblivion.

Hooray!

It’s not pessimism if you WANT the world to meet its maker!

[/insanity]