Archive for July, 2009

Top Recession Proof Home-Based Business Ideas

Well, nobody’s job is 100% secure. At this point of time when the whole world is under recession you can try out these Top Recession Proof Home-Based Business Ideas which will definite help you. Here’s a look at some tried-and-true home-based business ideas that have growth potential, now and in the future. These businesses have a greater chance of survival in recession coz these are somehow one or other way are essential to many people and people are in need of these services. These are the best of the recession-proof jobs.

  1. Yoga instructor: People now a day’s are getting more conscious about their health. If you have a studio or arrange one it’s great otherwise just like a personal trainer, you can visit clients at their homes or offices. The expertise in yoga can help you grow in the business. The Yoga Alliance Web site provides information on yoga schools, certification, insurance, and more.
  2. Tutoring: Education is an essential part of life and everyone is need of a mentor. You can start a business tutoring students in their homes, at schools, or at local YMCAs or other child-care organizations. Talk to your local school district officials and school principals to determine their needs.
  3. Business coaching: If you have experience in management or some other specialized business skill, share it with others by becoming a business coach. The International Coach Federation provides certification and a coach referral service for its members.
  4. Consulting: If you are an expert in a specific industry, such as finance, marketing, or mediation, consider beginning your own consulting business.
  5. Accounting: There are many opportunities available for certified public accountants. If you are interested in getting certified, take a look at the Web site of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for information on specific state requirements.
  6. Web design: If you can design quality Web sites, consider turning your skills into a home-based business. Because this industry is constantly changing, good Web designers are always in demand.
  7. Senior care services: The rising number of senior citizens who want to stay in their own homes means big opportunity for nonmedical home care providers, who help seniors with tasks of daily living.
  8. Remodeling: If you are a gifted carpenter or contractor, you can turn your passion into your own business. Find a niche that’s in demand in your area and target it.
  9. Catering or personal chef: Consider starting your own catering or personal chef business. Target a niche by providing specialized services such as low-carb or vegetarian menus. (Catering requires a food establishment license and a commercially equipped kitchen that meets state and federal health requirements. Contact your local city or county health department for more information.)
  10. Gift baskets: Gift basket creation is a popular and creative home-based business. You can sell your baskets online and target both individuals and businesses to increase potential sales.
  11. Wedding or event planner: If you are an ace at organizing important events and have a lot of contacts, consider becoming a wedding or event planner. There are numerous certification courses online, including one from Weddings Beautiful.
  12. Personal shopper: If you love to shop and have an eye for people’s personal styles, you can offer your services to people too busy to shop for themselves. Increase your profit potential by providing a gift-shopping service as well.
  13. Concierge service: If you have a lot of energy, great organization skills, and the ability to juggle multiple tasks, consider providing a personal concierge service to busy businesspeople or upscale clients.
  14. Cleaning service: If you are good at cleaning, consider offering your services to others. Both residential and commercial cleaning operations can easily be run from home.
  15. Child-care services: Turn your expertise with children into a home-based day-care center. Be sure to stay abreast of your state’s regulations and insurance requirements for this type of business.
    July 14, 2009 Posted Under Business

    Bring up a creative and imaginative child

    Creativity and imagination are premium qualities that all parents want their children to have. Creative people are backbone of the society. They can solve business problems, create scientific advances, write books and songs and become leaders in many areas. They are the architects of culture and therefore are highly prized.
    As a parent, nurturing your child’s creative abilities involves a bit of a paradox. You need to let go a little, to back off and leave artistic and inventive decisions up to her. However, you can trigger imagination by asking thought-provoking questions concerning the whys, hows, and whats of objects and situations. It’s very important that you be available to provide reassurance when creative ventures don’t go right and praise for trying as well as finishing. When it comes to a child’s education, interaction is really a key.

    If we try to understand about creativity centres in brain then technically speaking new synapses should be created in young brains as far as possible. Synapses are the connections between brain cells. We have billions of these necessary connections in our brains. Young people need to form synapses and then use these connections repeatedly to strengthen them as they grow and mature. It is important to make, as many strong synapses as possible while humans are young. Starting around age 11, some brain cells begin to die and disappear. This is a natural process necessary to prune myriad weak connections that youngsters have formed. It also institutes order in the young brain.

    The closer we come to nurturing that creativity in a child’s early life, the greater the chance they’ll one day grow up into flourishing happy adults. The minute a child reaches the age where they are pushed into the world of public education, they are suddenly burdened with the pressure to succeed.

    Instinctively, parents and teachers alike turn their main focus on their children getting high grades rather than succeeding as a human being.
    Of course, curriculum is very important. But curriculum is not important enough to bear tremendous pressure on our impressionable children. Especially when the high cost affects the goal of truly happy, well-rounded kids. Parents would never purposely force harmful behaviours upon their children, but sometimes unknowingly do. This way parents themselves just demotivate child from using their potential, which might not always be shown during curriculum.

    Here are some tips to help you know how to increase creativity in your child.

    Tips to increase creativity  and imagination in your child

    Encourage Them To Question
    Curiosities are major step towards creativity. Children are curious and they ask many questions, with some capable of even baffling you. Make sure never to curb this habit. Rather, encourage them to ask questions and try to feed their curiosity as much as possible. But, do make sure that you don’t get political or dead serious in answering the questions. Provide open-ended answers and always be game with them. If you don’t know the answer, instead of directly saying no, tell them that it was a wonderful question and both of you should search for its answer.

    Spend Time With Them
    The modern life does not give people much time to spend with their children. So, you should try to make do with what little time you have. While your children are small, try to concentrate on them more than your career. You can even request your organization to give a schedule that allows you to spend more time with your children. The more time you spend with them, the more you will able to kindle their curiosity and creativity.
     
    Play With Them
    Play with your children like a child and not like an adult. Playing with them will help you bond with them. Persuade your spouse to be a part of the game as well. Incorporate creative games and imaginary plays in the time spent with your kids. Sing and dance with them and you will find your children more creative in few years. According to a recent research, those children whose parents spent more time with them became more creative.

    Talk To Them
    Talking to your children is very important to maintain a good rapport and communication with them. Although most people do talk to their children, it is generally in the form of instructions, rather than a conversation. Talk to kids like an adult, listen to what she has to say and give her advice if she wants it, but don’t impose anything on the kid.

    Give Coloring Books & Toys
    Give your kids toys that can be transformed into different shapes, like a colorful clay toy, and introduce them to color books from their childhood. It’s not necessary that they learn to be a painter. It’s just to develop their imagination and thus, enhance their creativity.
    Preschool-aged children are much more interested in the process than they are in the final outcome. Children are incredibly creative, so open-ended toys and games that can foster that creativity are always great ideas. Avoid toys that are so specific that after playing with them a few times, the child becomes bored.
    Wooden blocks, dress-up items, balls, train sets and tree swings allow children to come up with their own play scenarios and can allow them to learn more freely than with toys that aim for a specific outcome like many computer games.

    Give Them Decision Power
    Make kids the master, at times. We always want to decide for our children, as we believe that we know the best for them. However, we cannot decide for them all our life, can we? So it is better that you cultivate the habit of making decisions in your kids right from childhood, to make them self-dependent and creative. You can take their opinion and decision in small things. Although the absolute power should be with you, let them give a vote on what they want. If it’s reasonable, comply with it.

    Provide Encounter With Nature
    Take your kids for morning or evening walks. Involve them in gardening with you and make them learn about different plants. Encourage them to help the stray animals and take them to zoos and parks on a regular basis. Plan your weekend this way that you will be able to take your child to interact with nature. All this will help your child learn how to appreciate and love nature. And nature is the origin of all the creativity. Nature demonstrates the variety of creations by god. Wheyour child will start appreciating the nature and god’s creations, she will certainly tend to become more imaginative.

    Read To Them
    When you read to your children, they start imagining the story. The more you read to them, the more creative they would become. Reading aloud to children creates new synapses and reinforces old ones. The time-spent reading to your children will inevitably increase their creativity and imagination by allowing them to create a ‘œmental movie’ of what they hear.

    Emphasize Process Rather Than Product
    Encourage kids to make their own projects for school and don’t emphasize on making it perfectly. The most important thing is that your child learns to work on his/her own and uses creativity. A perfectly finished project is not necessary for that. Praise your kids if they make something by themselves, even if it is not that great and always encourage them to think creatively.

    Art Projects
    Art supplies are fun to buy, and you may be surprised at the number of them even a baby can handle and enjoy. Before the age of one, a child loves to scribble on a big piece of paper with a fat graphite pencil. She can move up soon to colored pencils, jumbo crayons, chalk, and, by age two, water-based felt-tip pens.
    When your child is ready to paint, probably at about two years of age, think first of protection — one of your old shirts to cover the child and newspaper sheets or a special mat to cover the floor. A two year old can help you make finger paint. From the age of two, your child loves to pound, roll, and flatten whatever kind of clay you supply as her sense of touch develops. The most practical first clay is a plasticized variety you can buy at the store or a flour or baking soda and cornstarch clay you make yourself .

    Make-believe play
    You’ll see your child’s first attempts at make-believe before he can walk, when the two of you play peek-a-boo with a handkerchief. At six months, your baby pretends to groom his head, bald or not, with a hairbrush. Your child will amaze you with his inventiveness finding props — a receiving blanket becomes a swirling cape for dancing or a knapsack for carrying supplies to a hiding place blocked off with a pile of books under the dining room table. You can contribute props, too, including such castoffs as hats and shoes and other clothes, costume jewelry, and a briefcase or small suitcase. You’ll learn not to discard big cardboard boxes, the cores from rolls of toilet tissue or paper towels, the plastic containers strawberries come in, or almost anything else that is clean and intact.

    Sometimes your child brings his dolls, stuffed animals, and puppets into imaginative play. Long conversations may take place as your child reenacts interesting or worrisome situations. You are also likely to see and hear versions of punishments and scoldings you recognize as originating with you. Go on encouraging your child for make-believe play. That way she will learn to wear her imaginative wings and fly in the sky of creativity.

    These are the ways you can take up so that you can bring up  a creative and imaginative child. Every child is creative and imaginative. But how you nurture this potential in child is important in making a creative adult.

    July 7, 2009 Posted Under Child Psychology

    Starting a Conversation with a Stranger

    There are hundreds of thousand people who face difficult in starting a conversation with a stranger and keep it going. Few years back I was one of them. Whenever I came across a stranger I always use to get confused where and how to start a conversation. My mind always used to get filled with lot of questions. How should I approach? What should I ask first? What if that person gives me a cold shoulder? What if they avoid talking to me? What will they think of me if I will take the initiative of going and talking to them? These are few of the questions that use to bother me a lot back then. For this reason I was not able to talk to people and I don’t have many friends due to this. Then I started to recognize my problems and decided to find out the solution for it. Now I don’t give a second thought before starting a conversation with a complete stranger, now I have lot of friends which I never thought I will have. So now I am giving away the steps I followed to overcome my shyness, start a healthy conversation and make lot friends.

    • Introduce yourself and simply tell your name to the new person. Offer your hand to shake, upon his/her responding to you.
    • Look around. See if there is anything worth pointing out. Sure, talking about the weather is a cliche, but if there’s something unusual about it, you’ve got a great topic of conversation. You need to have some idea of what is going on in the world. Also remember and plan to share anything you like, think is funny, or find intriguing. This is building up your own library of things that might be helpful to another person during a conversation someday. It will be amazing how you thread these interesting things when you least expect it, and make conversation an adventure instead of a dreadful task. If you take it to the next step and say things that you want the person to think of as adding value, and keep to yourself things that the person might not, you are actually honing your own personality to be appealing to the other person, and what is a greater act of kindness than that?
    • Offer a compliment. Don’t lie and say you love someone’s hair when you think it’s revolting, but if you like his or her shoes, or a handbag, say so. A sincere compliment is a wonderful way to get someone to warm up to you. But be careful not to say something so personal that you scare the person off or make him or her feel uncomfortable. It is best not to compliment a person’s looks or body.
    • Ask questions! Most people love to talk about themselves — get them going. “What classes are you taking this year?” but don’t talk about yourself too much that makes you seem full of yourself. “Have you seen (Insert-Something-Here)? What did you think of it?” Ask open ended questions that will get them talking. For example, a good question would be, “That’s a nice handbag, where did you get it?” and then they can talk about the day that they went shopping and all this funny stuff happened, as opposed to, “I like your handbag.” “Thank you.” and then it’s over. Again, keep the questions light and not invasive. Do not ask too many questions if he or she is not responsive to them.
    • Jump on any conversation-starters he or she might offer; take something he or she has said and run with it. Agree, disagree, ask a question about it, or offer an opinion, just don’t let it go by without notice.
    • Keep eye-contact, it engenders trust (but don’t stare). Also, use the person’s name a time or two during the conversation; it will help you remember the name, and will draw the person’s attention to what you are talking about. Smile a lot, and laugh when any quip is made by the other person.
    • Smile and have fun with your conversation!
    • Be yourself and ask the question that you would think be the right thing to say but, give yourself some time to think about what you say before you say it.
    • Follow the lead that your listener is expressing. If he or she appears interested, then continue. If he or she is looking at a clock or watch, or worse, looking for an escape strategy, then you have been going on for too long.

    Don’ts

    • Don’t be overly invasive with questions.
    • Don’t desperately ask personal questions.
    • Don’t ever comment negatively on the person or someone else’s looks… you never know if they have a personal attachment to it or if they are friends with the person you are criticizing
    • Never act arrogantly and pretend to be a Know It All when dealing with people
    • Do not speak, behave or dress immaturely
    • Never swear, insult, disrespect, use racial, religious, sexual orientation, and gender slurs in front of others (Unless you know who they are and if they have the same views on things as you.)
    • Never ever interrupt a conversation between one or more people. Wait for the conversation to stop and then say something. Common courtesy goes a long way.
    • Always say please, may I, thank you, could you when someone is nice to you and when you want something. Being polite shows maturity and intelligence
    • Respect those around you
    • Be neat, well dressed and groomed. Sloppiness, bad breath and body odor will get you nowhere.
    • Sometimes when you start a conversation, the person you’re talking with might think you’re boring. But, it’s okay! Head onto someone else, because sometimes you can pick the wrong person.
    • If you are talking to someone you have a “crush” on do not talk about their girlfriend/boyfriend or anything related to you liking them. Stick to what you know about them: if they are into sports talk about the most recent big game.

     

    One last thing, it is important to practice getting conversations started. You may feel a little clumsy at first, but with practice it can become easy to start good conversations.

    July 5, 2009 Posted Under Building Self Confidence
    
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