"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities." Josiah Stamp

TEACHING THE KIDS HOW TO WRITE A CV ?

If you are given this responsibility, you may like to look at the CV MAGIC page of this website. It is designed for teachers, but much of it has general relevance/can be adapted to school-leavers. You are welcome to print it out and use it as a worksheet/notes provided that you acknowledge the source and indicate our website address.

Think your way to success
28 August 2008 at 06h00 from IOL News (The Star)

See yourself as a winner and soon you should start winning - be it in your studies, work, sport or in personal life.

According to Natalie Rabson of Boston City Campus and Business College, visualisation is one of the essential mental skills that everyone who wants to succeed should try to develop.

"As the old saying goes, seeing is believing," she explains.

"Athletes and stuntmen rely on the ability to see beyond obstacles to achieve their goals; they are taught to visualise and focus on the outcome."

Though most people are awed by the performance of athletes at the recently ended Beijing Olympics, Rabson points out that visualisation is not only for sportspeople.

"We can all apply the basic principles in our day-to-day lives," she states.

She suggests having a closer look at the five main areas of mental skills training that sports psychologists use.

Goal Setting - this is the starting point. You need to define what you want and when, before you are able to visualise yourself achieving those goals. However, goals have to be realistic.

Visualisation/mental imagery: this refers to the mental process of creating and recreating success.

It is a skill athletes - and the rest of us - can tap into to reach our goals by focusing and visualising a successful outcome.

It can also be used to help you relax - if you are nervous, you can mentally take yourself to a quiet and calm environment to calm down your nerves.

Self talk: this is a mental discipline to keep negative thoughts out of your head and replace them with positive thoughts. It takes conscious practice and repetition to reach a state where you only allow positive thoughts in.

Concentration: this is where an athlete focuses on the right thing, at the right time, or the ability to attend to relevant factors and disregard irrelevant ones.

The ability to maintain concentration while under pressure of competition is critical to optimal performance. A successful athlete keeps control of his/her performance by blocking out distractions and focusing and responding to important cues.

Self-confidence: to succeed you need to believe in your ability to succeed despite any feelings of apprehension or doubt.

Rabson emphasises that working on the above mental skills is only the beginning - goal-setting and visualisation need to be followed by action.

"Your actions have to be aligned to what is going on in your mind," she explains.

"You can visualise yourself earning lots of money but if you don't work smarter or harder, the likelihood of you increasing your income is minimal.

"If visualisation were all that is required, all of us would come away from our TV sets and become successful athletes, entrepreneurs or academics overnight."

Besides aligned behaviour, visualisation also requires you to see something as though it was happening right now in the present and in detail, she adds.

"Visualisation should not be mistaken for random daydreaming," she explains.

"You need to believe that it is possible to achieve what your mind sees, so go-ahead and see yourself as successful right now."

Take it step by step: know what you want; make a wish; state your wish very clearly and then align your behaviour and all your actions as though your wish were already a reality.

"It may seem airy-fairy wishful thinking," Rabson says. "But fortunately personal development and growth has attracted the interest of scientists.

The advice that self-help gurus and coaches have been giving for years is increasingly being proven as valid through scientific research."

Boston City Campus and Business College offers over 80 dynamic career qualifications - including sports management - throughout 48 branches nationwide.

Unisa degrees and media studies are also available at selected branches. Contact Boston on 011-551-2000, email info@boston.co.za or visit www.boston.co.za for more information.

True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess. -Louis Nizer,

Smoking speeds up the ageing process - study (from IOL News) June 14 2005 at 07:24AM

By Patricia Reaney

London - Obesity and smoking speed up the ageing process, researchers said on Tuesday.

They showed that people who smoke cigarettes or are obese have shorter telomeres, the caps on chromosomes that prevent them from fraying, which makes them biologically older than their non-smoking, leaner counterparts.

"Our findings suggest that obesity and cigarette smoking accelerate human ageing," said Dr Tim Spector, of St Thomas' Hospital in London.

Telomeres shorten each time a cell divides. The loss is associated with ageing which is why telomeres are thought to hold the secrets of youth and the ageing process.

As telomeres get smaller, the chromosomes can become unstable and increase the risk of mutation.

"Obesity and cigarettes cause oxidative stress to increase and this cumulative damage over time causes the loss of these telomeres, which we believe is a marker of accelerative ageing and accounts for why these people get heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and other age-related disease," Spector told a news conference.

Oxidative stress is damage to cells and DNA caused by free radicals - charged particles found in the environment and produced by processes in the body.

Spector and scientists at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey compared telomere length from blood samples of 1 122 British women between the ages of 18 and 76.

Nearly 120 of them were obese, 531 had never smoked, 203 were smokers and 369 had quit. The research is published in The Lancet medical journal.

The scientists found a decrease in telomere length that corresponded to the more obese the women were and the amount of cigarettes they had smoked.

There was a difference between being obese and lean which corresponded to 8.8 years of ageing. Being a current or ex-smoker equated to about 4.6 years and smoking a pack a day for 40 years corresponded to 7.4 years of ageing.

"Our results emphasise the potential wide-ranging effects of the two most important preventable exposures in developed countries - cigarettes and obesity," the researchers said in the journal.

Obesity, which affects about 300-million people worldwide, increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other illnesses.

Researchers have shown that cigarette smokers die on average 10 years earlier than non-smokers but that kicking the habit can halve the risk. Smoking is a leading cause of lung cancer and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It also increases the risk of heart disease.

Over the years, TOUGHLOVE has helped thousands of families around the country, to cope with unacceptable behaviour and to restore peace and tranquility in their homes. TOUGHLOVE is a loving solution for families that are being torn apart by unacceptable behaviour, whether it be drugs, alcohol, substance, verbal or physical abuse. If your family is in crisis and you don't know where to turn - turn to TOUGHLOVE for really effective, practical support. Contact: 011-886-3344 or info@toughlove.org.za or www.toughlove.org.za

“Help Increase the Peace Project (HIPP) runs two-day courses for mixed groups of educators, secondary school learners, parents and school management members, aimed at developing:

Pre-emptive conflict resolution skills

Positive discipline skills

Participants attend the Basic and Advanced courses, after which they can be trained as HIPP facilitators on the Training for Facilitators course, and continue running HIPP courses for their peers.”

Contact: judy@phaphama.org 083 798 1256 www.phaphama.org

From IOL News 9 March 2005

LAUGHING IS GOOD FOR THE HEART March 08 2005 at 08:33PM

Orlando, Florida - Laughter is good for the heart because it prolongs life while depression increases the risk of an early death, according to two new studies.

A good bout of laughter every day provides similar cardiovascular benefits as exercise because it stimulates the blood-flow, said Michael Miller, who headed one research team at the University of Maryland.

On the other hand, depression - or the lack of laughter - is often linked to unhealthy habits such as smoking and drug addiction and increases the risk of death by 44 percent, said Wein Jiang, who led a study of 1 000 heart patients for the University of North Carolina.

Miller said laughter produced a "magnitude of change... in the endothelium... similar to the benefit we might see with aerobic activity, but without the aches, pains and muscle tension associated with exercise"

While laughter should not replace exercise, he said, "we do recommend that you try to laugh on a regular basis. Thirty minutes of exercise three times a week, and 15 minutes of laughter on a daily basis is probably good for the vascular system."

Miller told the American College of Cardiology annual conference that he showed excerpts of funny and stressful films to 20 non-smoking, healthy volunteers, equally divided between men and women, whose average age was 33.

Researchers measured changes in blood vessel reactivity as the volunteers watched the movies and noted striking contrasts.

Artery flow in the arms was reduced in 14 of the 20 volunteers following the movie clips that caused mental stress. In contrast, beneficial blood vessel relaxation increased in 19 of the 20 volunteers after they watched the movie segments that generated laughter.

Overall, average blood flow increased 22 percent during laughter, and decreased 35 percent during mental stress.

"The endothelium is the first line in the development of atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries, so, given the results of our study, it is conceivable that laughing may be important to maintain a healthy endothelium, and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease," Miller said.

However, the researcher was unable to explain the physiology of laughter's benefits.

"Does it come from the movement of the diaphragm muscles as you chuckle or guffaw, or does it come from a chemical release triggered by laughter, such as endorphins?

"Perhaps mental stress leads to a breakdown in nitric oxide or inhibits a stimulus to produce nitric oxide that results in vasoconstriction," he added.

On presenting the results of his research, Jiang said the "adverse association of depression and increased long-term mortality was independent of other factors, including age, marriage, cardiac function and the root cause of the heart failure".

"Approximately half of all patients with heart failure will die within five years of diagnosis, and we believe that our study appears to identify a group of these patients who are at a higher risk (44 percent) for dying," she added.

Jiang was also unable to explain the results of her research theorising instead that "depressed patients tend to make unhealthy lifestyle choices in such areas as diet and smoking."

Both studies, however, appear to show that emotional states can lead to real physiological changes.

In February, US researchers released details of a study which indicated emotional shocks such as the end of a relationship or a surprise party can kill otherwise healthy people. They called it a "broken heart syndrome".

---oOo---

Teaching your learners how to write CVs?

You may find it helpful to have a look at the relevant section on the NOTICEBOARD page of this website. Although it was written specifically for teachers, a lot of it applies generally. I frequently add to it.

South Africa has the highest rate of rape and wife battering in the world and one in four women are beaten by their partners.

Babalo Ndenze November 15 2004 at 05:39AM This article was originally published on page 5 of Cape Times on November 15, 2004

South Africa has the highest rate of rape and wife battering in the world and one in four women are beaten by their partners.

That is according to a gender survey by the University of Cape Town's Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing, which says at least one woman is raped every minute somewhere in SA. This means about one third of SA women will be raped in their lifetime.

Gender: The new struggle surveyed 3 500 people in a weighted sample representative of major city and rural areas.

Institute marketing consultant Sarah Bovim said the findings emerged from "secondary research" during the study of the changing concepts and roles of men and women in society.

The findings emerged from "secondary research"

She said conflict or violence happened mostly when a "chauvinistic" male was in a relationship with a woman with a liberated mind. "These are those (men) who believe men and women are not equal. Education is a massive factor because the more liberated women tend to have higher education."

Emphasis on education for both genders was needed in order for conflicts between men and women to decrease.

"Slowly everybody will move to a more liberated mindset. The more education, the more they (women) become liberated, which means more awareness."

Bovim said that changing cultural norms as well as higher education levels of women, which were not easily accepted by men, were influencing factors.

"Change is happening faster, and according to academics this sometimes results in domestic violence."

According to the survey, men resented the burden of the "good provider" role, and the influence of gay and lesbian movements meant they felt excluded by the narrow definition of masculinity.

A lot of women were finding their power, while some men were feeling disempowered and redundant. Gender was likely to replace race as the big issue facing SA marketers in future.

The survey also found:

61% believe men and women are equal.

66% say men and women should earn the same amount.

41% believe it is acceptable that society favours men.

32% believe a woman's place is in the home.

73% believe men should be the head of the household.

64% believe men should be the primary breadwinner.

This article was originally published on page 5 of Cape Times on November 15, 2004

Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose.

-Beverly Nichols, author