Moneywise24 Personal Finance

Social anxiety and shyness are more around us than we think. Social anxiety is anxiety, or a sense of extreme fear, about social situations, interactions with other people, and generally how we perceive social settings. Social anxiety is often formed during childhood, and usually remains unnoticed until adolecense or early adulthood. Social anxiety is usually a great burden to those individuals impacted, since it normally results in a small social circle, and the inability to engage in new relationships and friendship. However, at a business level, social anxiety also has a great negative impact on career issues; socially anxious people often have a harder time finding a job, they usually work for lower wages, and they have an extreme hard time getting up the career ladder.

The degree of social anxiety is different for each individual. Some individuals might experience social anxiety in only a few particular social settings, whereas others experience it all the time. Typical symptoms for social anxiety are a sense of fear and a great level of stress, which might occur in any of the following situations (this list is non-exhaustive):

• Speaking in front of a large audience
• Being introduced to new people
• Being approached by strangers
• Being in the center of attention
• Speaking with people with authority (e.g. superiors, managers, the police)
• Etc…

Socially anxious people often live unfulfilling lives, have small social circles, and due to the lack of frequent and intensive social interactions, they are verbally not as competent as others. Additionally, social isolation may lead to increased stress, depressions, potentially leading to physical illnesses (skin diseases, cardiovascular disease, etc.).

Often, social anxiety is the result of particular negative experiences in the past. These experience in its turn create beliefs, which start regulating our behaviour. The one and only way to overcome social anxiety and shyness is by creating experiences, which are positive and demonstrate that existing beliefs are wrong and do not apply. The problem here, is that in order to create these experiences, the socially anxious person will need to talk with many different people and approach them, which is impossible due to his belief system. It is a mean viscious circle.

There are different therapies addressing social anxiety, such as behavioural therapy. Behavioural therapy builds on the fact that each person has the potential to develop, and step out of his/her comfort zone using little steps. Behavioural therapy may take place in groups or not, and usually the patient will receive small assignments for which he needs to step out of his comfort zone step-by-step, as well as self-assessment assignments. The goal of behavioural therapy is to ‘override’ existing behaviour by creating new, positive, experiences. The steps taken are usually small, and possible for the patient to take. Each next assignment is built on the previous one.

It might be extremely hard to overcome social anxiety, but it differs from person to person. Sometimes, a person is able to step out of his comfort zone by himself, and break the invisible barrier which is withholding him completely. However, more often this is quite impossible to most people; the fear felt in such situation is simply too strong. For individuals suffering from social anxiety, shyness, or anything which they feel is not allowing them to lead a free and happy life, it is recommended to seek the help of a professional. The professional should be able to understand the situation of the patient and develop a step-by-step plan.

There are many programs (both offline as well as online), as well as professionals, which make it easy to themselves by simply recommend patients to break the barrier and do it. These programs and people show a great lack in professionalism, since they obviously do not understand how social anxiety and shyness impacts an individual in real life.

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Honestly, it costs me quite some effort and perhaps a bit of courage to write this article; finally, after having seen the book quite some times in my local bookstore but having ignored it due to its simple title, I decided to buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad - if it would have been called “an empiric study about the financial development of… ” I would have bought it sooner, in the end I currently live in Germany. I have still not read the entire book, and read through the first two chapters only yesterday. But still, I can say that those first two chapters have pretty much enlighted me. It is a funny thing, because many of what is written I know in some form of the other, but my entire life I have failed living it.

The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a story told by Robert T. Kiyosaki, who grew up in Japan. During childhood, he grew up with two ‘dads’: his real dad, a highly educated man with a good job, but constantly struggling with his financials, and the rich dad of his friend Mike, which is much like his second dad. Mike’s dad is a successful entrepreneur, and the main difference is how the two dad look at money, and the goals they pursue in life.

In the first chapter of the book, Robert T. Kiyosaki writes about how people are told during childhood and adolescence to get good grades, perform well through high school and university, in order to get a good job and a good salary. Thus, young adults graduate from college or university, obtain good jobs, and work hard on their career. They get themselves credit cards, they buy a fancy car, and with the first salary raise perhaps a home on a mortgage. People get married, get children, and as life gets more expensive, they work harder and take on second jobs… I do not want to lose myself in Robert Kiyosaki’s words, but the bottom line is that most people live in an illusion; the illusion of having a secure job, building a secure retirement, and that working hard for a large and well-known company is going to make them rich on the long-term. However, in the end these people end up working solely in order to be able to pay their bills and their liabilities.

In order to lead a truly fulfilled life (and I do not mean rich, simply fulfilled), it is necessary to find ways to let money work for you, in stead of the other way around. This means, for example, investing in stocks in order to see them rise in value, and to obtain dividend pay outs. It means investing in other forms of businesses, hire people to let them do the work for you. It means identifying opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities, and be in charge. The biggest problem, however, is that most people are so caught up in their thinking of “education / good grades / getting a good job”, that these opportunities pass by without them even noticing.

I let the first chapter reflect for a moment yesterday, and the more I thought about it, the more I identified opportunities in the past, which I had let pass by due to my focus on making a career. I still remember vividly, that when I was 19 or so, I got interested in international trade. I bought some books on international trade, and how to become a trade agent, and in a newspaper I saw some offers from manufacturers of cellphones looking for agents. The costs for starting up an agency were extremely low, and it was a time at which cellphones were just starting about to hit the market… but I was discouraged by my family and friends, and unfortunately I listened to their advice, to get a job. One year later the cellphone business started booming for real…

Throughout my entire life, I have been looking for better jobs, better salaries, promotions, and the like. And I believe this will be one of my top priorities for 2010:

I pledge to stop focusing on making a career and losing myself deeper in the treadmill until I cannot get out. In stead, I will be on the outlook for business opportunities, aiming at gaining financial independence. And I will do anything, that is necessary.

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Author: Ev Nucci

“Humankind cannot bear much reality.” T. S. Eliot

No matter how bad things are, like millions before you, you can create a new future. I have, so I know what I’m talking about. You find out who people are in the bad times, not in the good.

Re-writing your future is a state of mind

You are never too old , it’s never too late to start anew. And if you think you can’t take steps backwards in order to take steps forward, think again.

Danny Aiello began acting at 40, Rodney Dangerfield at 42, Gloria Stuart was 78 when she was nominated Best Supporting Actress for Titanic, Peggy Ashcroft was 77 when she won Best Supporting Actress, and Jessica Tandy won an Academy Award at 80 for Driving Miss Daisy.

Grandma Moses (one of the most important self-taught artists of the 20th century) started her painting career in her seventies and Bill Traylor started drawing at age 83. In business Irene Wells Pennington became known in her nineties when she straightened out her husband’s oil business, Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his sixties and Taikichiro Mori founded his business in his 50s and is the richest man in the world.

So you think you’re too old to start anew? I think not!

1. Failure is part of success. Don’t avoid it. You need to fail in order to succeed. Every failure is one step closer to success. If failing is a problem for you, then change your mindset. The one percent fail- up and perceive failure as learning opportunities. Without learning opportunities, or practice, how can you get better? Many people are so afraid of failing that they spend their lives avoiding their gifts; or worse, they failed a coupled times and gave up because of it. For years I gave numerous speeches that went well. Then I gave one speech that bombed and it was so humiliating I froze, months later I had a meeting that didn’t go very well. Those two experiences sent me to Toastmasters where I learned how to give a speech.

2. Become extraordinary. Do what you say you’re going to do. Accept responsibility and criticism. Being extraordinary takes work. Go the extra mile. Go above and beyond. Do what the normal person won’t do…be the extreme! And learn what extraordinary people do, study them, learn from them. While at Toastmasters, I learned I had an issue with criticism and had to learn how to accept criticism, to thank the person sharing it with me and to understand that it wasn’t personal. This was an issue I had to learn how to deal with from a professional coach. So the point is that I went from one problem and solved it, to discovering another problem and solved it to back to the original problem. That is what extraordinary people do–they don’t give up. Ever. And when people tell them they can’t achieve something, they think to themselves, “watch this!” Extraordinary people never stop learning, and it’s not about how many letters you have after your name, or what you school you went to, it’s about continuous learning–and knowing that the more you know, the more you don’t know.

Be extraordinary, handle criticism with grace and dignity.

3. Study your successes Take out a yellow pad of paper. Write down your successes. What were you doing? What value did you bring? What are you really good at? What does everyone say you are great at? What’s staring you in the face? What is your gift? What and where have you repeatedly succeeded? Where is there a cross between extreme anger and happiness? That is passion.

4. Study your failures The one percent fail- up. Failures are learning opportunities. Without learning opportunities, you can’t get better. What have you learned? What patterns emerge? What did you do that could have done better? Use this time as a time to evaluate and learn. I have learned the most in my life from my failures—not from my successes. In the next post we’ll address structured achievement relative to goals that will address setting a weekly fear/dream goal.

5. Happiness is not the key to success. It is a choice. Money does not make you happy. I know people that have jobs they hate because of the money they make, relatives that are wealthy, miserable and alone. Money doesn’t fill your home with laughter and love. Money is nothing more than a by-product of your job. Success is a choice. Happiness is a choice. You choose to do the job your were hired to do and choose when and how to leverage that job into another. Life is a series of choices.

6. Trust yourself. Watch for the yellow lights or listen for the voice inside. If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. I call it, “validate and verify.” Check out what it is that your voice is telling you. Don’t rush. What is that yellow light? Generally, I count how many yellow lights I see in a situation and if I count more than three, it turns to a red light and I don’t move forward. It signals the requirement to have a conversation, and flags that something isn’t right. Every time I didn’t trust myself or ignored the yellow lights—mistakes were made.

7. What miracles have you created in your life? Go to a quiet place and on a yellow pad of paper, write out every miracle you have accomplished in your life. Everything you achieved or created that you never expected to and is a miracle in your mind. List every one. On an index card write down the ten that are mind blowing to you. You simply cannot believe you ever achieved that goal. This is only for you, it doesn’t matter how big or small it is. This is your Miracles card. I put myself through college; it’s a miracle I went and graduated. That is one of about 50 on my yellow pad. Save the back of the index card for the next assignment which is in the next post. Until then, when you get a little depressed one of the things you will do is look at your Miracles card and remind yourself that nothing is impossible.

8. Have the courage to self-reflect. It’s takes courage to reflect on your dreams, vision of how you want your life to be, who you want to be, how it is currently structured. The reality is that we structure our lives around other people’s constraints. Our dreams and our visions are bigger than the constraints around us. If those constraints are too much, you must be willing to ask yourself some dangerous questions.

Take an honest look at your own life. How much is your life in alignment with how you are spending your time and energy? You have to take responsibility to thrive and flourish wherever you are. Think of yourself as a social architect, you create the rules of the game. Whoever has the goal, makes the rules. You may decide that you need to change some of the dynamics in your life in order to get yourself to the next level. You may have to change some of the players and your environment. Have the courage to look at your life and make those decisions.

About the Author:

Ev Nucci is CEO of Nucci Consulting Group, a retained search firm that specializes in the asset management industry. She spent the last three decades building high performance organizations. She started 5 companies, worked as an executive for Johnson & Johnson where she was part of starting two divisions, then ran 15 operating companies, did a start-up for Baxter, started her own company which she grew to to be an industry leader and she sold five years later to the industry giant. In 1996, she founded NCG and leveraged her talent for building high growth organizations to Wall Street. In 1998, she started working with a small fixed income firm, by the name of BlackRock and spent the next ten years working with founders and they have grown into the largest asset management firm in the world. Most recently she served as a consultant and Director for Armored Wolf, LLC a global macro hedge fund. She has interviewed over 15,000 people over the last three decades.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Laid off? Out of work? Life is all about creating yourself!

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I am currently visiting my parents for Christmas in my home town in The Netherlands, where I occasionally meet up with old friends while I am here. Yesterday, I met up with a very good friend of mine, and we started discussing our intentions for 2010, as New Year’s Eve is approaching. Besides the well-known health issues, and our intentions to do more sports, we had a long discussion about money. My friend had recently read a number of books and articles on career making and growing wealth in general, and his idea was that we had simply learnt many wrong things from our parents and relatives.

We are both from non-entrepreneurial families, and our belief of earning money is that of taking on a paid job, and earning one’s money through employment; in the end, this is what we had learnt from our parents our entire lives. In a sense, I can still hear my parents tell me to get a good education, work for a large and multinational company, work hard, and the rest will follow automatically, I can be assured of that.

Although this might have worked in the 1950′s (and I know it did, since this is what has made my parents pretty wealthy), they do not apply in the modern world. Young, well-educated men and women graduate from university, apply for jobs with titles bearing the word ‘manager’ in 80% of them, only to find out that the title “International Customer Relationship Manager” is virtually the same as “call-center clerk”. Additionally, a request for a salary raise during the annual review meeting is responded to by

You know the economic situation is a difficult one, and I will never be able to obtain approval from my superiors. You have done an extraordinary job, but 1.5% is the most I can give you.

1.5%? I am sure last year’s inflation was at least 2.5-3%.

The world’s globalization has simply brought countries closer together, more and more people have the opportunity to go to college or university, and corporations are simply faced with an increasing offer of well-educated employees on the one side, and on the other side the competition from companies from low-wage countries is increasing.

As we were talking yesterday, my friend made an extremely interesting point:

Who we are today is the result of our learnings and experiences in the past; What we do today will define who we are tomorrow. But how the hell does a person break out of the downward spiral of being a regular employee, if this is all he knows?

And let’s be honest: college and university will teach you everything about doing business and entrepreneurship, except for how to be one yourself. So, how does someone, who has been taught to deliver hard work through employment only, break this habit?

I believe it is not an easy task, with which many men and women are faced nowadays. The most feasible method for most people is to create an additional income, at the side of any regular income. A popular strategy is investing in stocks, stock options, futures, real estate, or any other form of investments. The anticipated income is firstly the growth of the investment value itself, second the yield it generates year after year. Additionally, many people attempt to earn a regular second income. Many people choose the internet as their preferred method, since the investments are extremely low. The boom in blogging sites is a great example of this phenomenon. Moneywise24 Personal Finance is also a blogging site following this example, but still it does not (yet) generate revenues. This is in itself the great challenge of starting up something online: you think you have a great idea and insight, thinking you are taking charge of your own life and ready to make a difference, only to find out that everyone else is already doing the same.

I believe the next ten or twenty years or so will be very exciting; we see that trends are coming and going fast, we are experiencing a growing competition on the international marketplace, we recognize that the old and proven methods for making a career do not work on-demand, and we are in search of new methods for achieving personal growth and development.

How it will end? I honestly do not know…

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We are so proud of the fact, that we are so international and the world is at our feet; the world has become so small, we can travel to anywhere in the world within 24 hours, live a few years in Asia, make a career in Europe, and then settle down perhaps in Brazil at the age of 55. Or are we?

A discussion I had with a friend of mine yesterday, actually demonstrates that we are proud of something that does not really exist. My friend comes from an Eastern European country, is well educated, and has worked for my company here in Germany for over a year as an intern. She has paid her taxes and her social security fees to the government. She is now almost graduated and looking for a full-time job, for which of course she would be more than happy to apply at the company I work for. However, the company is not showing the big enthousiasm to hire her.

The problem? She is not German. If the company has a vacancy, and a non-EU citizen applies for that position, the company has a legal obligation to keep the vacancy public for another 2 months, and then provide proof that no German candidate has applied for that position who could do the job (read: fulfills the absolute minimum requirements). As a result, corporations are very reluctant in hiring people, who would need a work permit, since the procedures are too long and too costly. This is not only a trend within the EU, but similairly it would just as well apply for a foreigner wanting to work in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Australia, or any country aiming at protecting its domestic labour force.

With my friend, we had come up with a perfect expression that explains this phenomenon:

The reason for countries to limit the domestic labour market to nationals of that country is a desparate attempt of the government to save the existing working conditions, knowing that they are not competitive on the international market place.

I think we still have a long way to go until we truly live in an international, bounderless world. And why shouldn’t we? If a person can contribute to a country or government, in a way that it pays taxes and fulfills its obligations, what should be the problem for that person to start working in a foreign country? Opening boundaries would mean a free flow of labour, but addionally it would also mean that enormous gap between countries will start to narrow down. In the long-run, this is a great benefit, but I believe that it is the transition period that everyone is affraid of.

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