1. Awareness of your own interaction with other people is the first step in improving your communication skills. Learn to identify which types of situations make you uncomfortable and then modify your behavior to achieve positive results is a critical step in improving your communication skills. You can learn to become aware of behaviors in other people that prompt you to respond in negative ways and modify your own behavior to turn the situation into a positive experience. 2. You must accept responsibility for your own behavior and do not fear apologizing for errors in judgment or insensitive...

All of us want to be good at our jobs, but how good do we really want to be? Quite good. Good. Very Good. The best in our field. Or the best in the world? Talent helps, but it won’t take you as far as ambition. Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great. To many people, being nice in order to be liked is more important. There’s equal merit in that, but you must not confuse being good with being liked. Most people are looking for a solution, a way to become good. There is no instant solution, the only way to learn is through experience and...

As a teenager, Victoria Beckham’s ambition was not just to be better than her mates or even a famous singer but to become a world brand. She not only dreamed about it, but wanted it enough to go about getting it. That in itself makes her different from most of us. It’s not how good she was that mattered, it’s how good she wanted to be. What is interesting in her quote is that she didn’t compare herself with George Michael or Mariah Carey, rather she saw the fame of Persil Automatic as her yardstick. Laugh at it as you may, it’s this highly original imagination that got her where she is...

Goal setting can go wrong for number of reasons. Before setting up goals, it’s better to look at some of these reasons. - We always end up setting outcome goals instead of performance goals. For instance, you might set a goal of achieving 80% in your exam. This is an outcome goal. Instead you need to set a goal, which is performance oriented. For example, trying your best to achieve 80%. The outcome may often not be in your hands, but our performance most definitely is. Fail to achieve goals for reasons outside your control can be very dispiriting and may lead to loss of enthusiasm and feelings...

Setting goals simply means deciding targets for yourself. A goal can be simple and is an end towards which efforts are directed. Targets must be realistic and obtainable and should not be too high or low. They should be moderately high, so that it takes efforts to reach them. In simple words, before starting anything, you must being with the end in mind – developing a clear picture of where you want to go in life and drawing up a map to get there. Often we set goals when we are in mood, but later realise that we do not have the strength to achieve them. This is because we don’t count the cost...

Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you. You will remember from school other students preventing you from seeing their answers by placing their arm around their exercise book or exam paper. It is the same at work, people are secretive with ideas. ‘Don’t tell them that, they’ll take the credit for it.’ The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Somehow the more you give away the more comes back...