Life Optimizer is about how to live life to the fullest through personal growth. You can read the newest posts below and some featured posts on the sidebar. If you find them useful, make sure to get free content updates via e-mail or RSS feed.
How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
Note: This is a guest post from Dave Ursillo of DaveUrsillo.com
Humor is often the fastest and easiest way to make new friends.
I love meeting new people. To me, one of the most wonderful aspects of life is coming across just a handful of the billions and billions of men and women that live amongst and around us, getting to know their unique stories and personalities, and being able to connect with them on some level.
Meeting new people isn’t always difficult. Through work, school, social events, the weekends and meeting others through current friends, we are presented with ample opportunities to connect with people and make new friends. The difficult part is making a connection with men and women that can outlast the short duration of time that you’ve spent meeting them: how do you establish a connection with someone that can last and that causes you two to become friends?
Note: This is a guest post from Walter Adena of LionSlinger.com
Making someone happy is a matter of being sensitive to one’s needs. Many pursue the common approach of knowing what the other wants in order to bring them happiness, but the truth however is that we don’t need to know what they want. Instead, we should be observant to the subtleties of their aspirations.
There are ways to know the things that can make someone happy. But the first thing we need to do is to let go our own definition of happiness. Let us always remember that people are different, what makes happiness for one may not be for the other. An effective method to know what can make someone happy is to be sensitive to their concerns. If we truly care about knowing what would constitute happiness to a person it is wise to open our awareness to the things they treasure.
Do you have a set of productivity tools that you consider essential? I do and here I’d like to share them with you. But, to prevent the post from being all over the place, I limit the scope only to programs that I install on my computer (which is a Windows machine). I don’t include any web application here.
Of course, the tools that work for me don’t necessarily work for you. But I hope that you will find something useful here.
I’m not the kind of person who likes to change my tools whenever something fancier comes out. Once I find a tool that works, I usually stick with it unless I find a very strong reason to move to something else. That’s why I’ve used most of the tools below for years.
Here are my essential productivity tools:
Note: This is a guest post from Faizal Nisar of FaizalNisar.com
Becoming a champion at small talk has its benefits. You’ll have more friends, more fun, more confidence, and more to talk to about. Mastering the art of small talk requires practice at first, but becomes a natural act after a while. To use this guide effectively, you must put into practice all of the steps outlined because they are interrelated.
1. Be knowledgeable: Knowledge is key to being good at small talk. What are you going to talk about if you don’t know anything? Now I’m not saying you have to be an expert in every single category but basic knowledge is necessary. Learn a little about everything. Read books on cooking, browse through magazines about celebrities, or watch videos on dancing. This way no matter what the person is interested in, you’ll have something to relate to them with.
Note: This is a guest post from Zach of Always Live Now
There is no denying the importance of making a good first impression. There are simply too many clichés decrying just how critical it is in developing positive relationships. Regardless of the relationship – personal or professional – getting off on the right foot cannot be overemphasized. Knowing this is one thing, being able to do it is quite another. Even when I try my best, it seems as though various wardrobe malfunctions, unruly hair or the ever present toothpaste stain always conspire against me.
Without question, there is a somewhat superficial element that shouldn’t be ignored. It would be nice if there wasn’t – wouldn’t it be great if we actually got to know someone before we judged them – but like it or not, the world doesn’t always work that way. Making sure that we put our best foot forward with our hair combed, zippers up, and our teeth brushed can only help. But to me, the real keys to making good first impressions lie a little deeper.
How happy are you now? How is it compared with yesterday? With last week? As it turns out, comparing happiness, even of the same person at different times, is tricky. Why? Because our experiences change our view of happiness.
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert explains how our experiences change our view of happiness:
Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened… Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.
The question is: how do our experiences change our view of happiness? One good explanation is the experience-stretching hypothesis:
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