How to Lower Blood Sugar Naturally

How to Lower Blood Sugar Naturally

By Laurie Sanchez, Lifescript Staff Writer

Published May 07, 2013

It’s the Holy Grail for people with diabetes – checking your blood sugar and seeing the numbers right in line. Can lifestyle changes help? Yes, says Jill Weisenberger, Lifescript’s nutrition expert, and other top diabetes doctors. Check out these 10 tips to learn how to lower your blood sugar naturally...

If you have diabetes, lowering blood sugar isn’t just a short-term goal: Doctors believe that it consistently helps prevent or delay diabetes complications, including kidney, eye and nerve diseases, such as diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Most of these diseases require 10 or more years to develop, but “it's still worth aggressively managing blood sugar levels to slow the onset of complications,” says Edward Geehr, M.D., Lifescript Chief Medical Officer.

Here are 10 tips to keep your readings on target:

1. Spread out your meals.
“I always tell my patients to spread their food out over the day, keeping carbohydrates consistent,” says Jill Weisenberger, M.S., R.D., C.D.E., and Lifescript’s nutrition expert. “Don’t eat small meals so you can save up for a big dinner.”Avoid fasting or skipping meals, even on weekends or other days when your schedule is hectic. It’ll give your body enough time to regulate blood sugar levels and keep them even.

How many carbs per meal are ideal?

“It’s tailored to each individual,” says Weisenberger, who factors in medication, hormones and other key information for each patient.

A typical starting point is 45 grams per meal for women and 60 grams for men (15 grams per snack). From there, make adjustments according to your blood glucose readings. 

2. Eat more food with resistant starch.
Resistant starch — found in some potatoes and some beans — bypasses the small intestine, gets metabolized by the good bacteria and then behaves as dietary fiber in the large intestine, Weisenberger says.“Even after your next meal, your blood sugar will be lower,” she says. “It’s called the ‘second-meal effect.’”

You’ll find it in a potato that has been baked and then cooled, but not in a warm potato. So a half-cup of potato salad will bring on better blood sugar readings than the same amount of warm mashed potatoes.

Black and kidney beans also have natural resistant starch.

3. Bring on the beans.
Can something as simple and inexpensive as beans really help with diabetes control?

Yes, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Beans digest slowly, resulting in only a small rise in blood glucose levels. Several studies have shown that eating 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 cups of cooked beans daily improves diabetes control.

Beans also are an excellent source of folate, which is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, a common diabetes complication. Eating 1-3 cups of cooked beans a day will lower total cholesterol 5%-19%.Sneak beans in soups and salads, or eat them as a side dish.

But introduce them gradually into your diet, the ADA says. Chew thoroughly, drink plenty of liquids to aid digestion and take enzyme products such as “Beano” to avoid gastrointestinal distress.

For convenience, go for canned beans, which require less preparation time and are as healthy as dried.

4. Cook up cactus.
The paddle-shaped nopal cactus (also known as “prickly pear”) slows carbohydrate absorption and lowers post-meal blood glucose readings in people with type 2 diabetes, according to some studies. In Mexico, nopal is used for treating the disease.

According to a 2007 article in the journal Diabetes Care, the cactus is very high in soluable fiber, and, when eaten with other foods, slows the rate at which sugar from the meal enters the bloodstream.

Nopal, popular in central Mexico, is boiled, grilled, fried or mashed and added to soups and stews.It’s available in supplements, but be careful: Some people experience gastrointestinal distress, and it hasn’t been studied extensively in the U.S. as an oral extract. Always talk to your doctor before trying this or any other supplement.

5. Get more sleep.
Poor or limited sleep affects body chemistry and getting more shut-eye helps with blood sugar control, Weisenberger says.

People who get fewer than 6 hours a night consistently are 4.5 times more likely to get abnormal blood sugar readings than those who slept longer, according to a study by the University at Buffalo, N.Y. Adults typically need 7-9 hours a night.

Lack of sleep is also linked with other health conditions, including heart disease, stroke and cancer.

More than a third of people with type 2 diabetes have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), where a collapsed airway causes a person to repeatedly stop breathing during sleep, according to James Herdegen, M.D., director for Sleep and Ventilatory Disorders at the University of Illinois in Chicago.“Studies have demonstrated that type 2 diabetics who also suffer from OSA can dramatically reduce their glucose levels by getting treatment,” he says.

OSA can be treated with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a mask worn during sleep that sends air through the airway to keep it from collapsing.

Check out more sleep disorders here.

6. Lose a little weight.
Carrying around those extra pounds causes insulin resistance, keeping the blood sugar lowering hormone from working.

Your weight-loss goals don’t have to be enormous either, Weisenberger says. Some of her patients have seen improvements in blood glucose readings with only a 5-pound loss.

7. Manage stress.
When you’re stressed out, your body creates a lot of stored energy – glucose and fat – so cells can use it when called into action.

In diabetics, this extra energy doesn't make it to the cells, so glucose piles up in the blood and results in high readings, according to the ADA.

How can you burn off tension?Yoga and meditation have helped lower blood sugar levels in her patients, Weisenberger says.

The ADA also recommends creating your own stress-relieving routines: talking with a supportive friend, taking a warm bath or shower, watching an enjoyable movie, listening to music or taking a walk.

8. Get moving.
Exercise normalizes blood glucose in people with type 2 diabetes (but not type 1).

“In type 2, exercise helps improve insulin resistance,” says James Beckerman, a Portland, Oregon cardiologist. “The end result is lower blood sugars.”

But exercise is important for both types because it helps prevent heart attack, stroke or diminished blood flow to the legs.

Because exercise can immediately reduce blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetics, work with your health care team to determine the right amount of activity and timing for insulin.

A combination of resistance and aerobic exercise may be the most beneficial, Dr. Beckerman says.9. Fidget more.
That’s right. It’s OK if you can’t sit still.

Mayo Clinic researchers studied how thin people burn calories and found that they have more “spurts” of daily activity, such as fidgeting, than heavier people. Just how much? Up to 350 more calories per day.

Add these short bursts of activity to your daily routine: 

• Park your car at the back of the lot and walk to the store’s door. 
• Return your grocery shopping cart to the supermarket door. 
• Walk to your neighbor’s house instead of calling her.
• Walk your outgoing mail to a farther mailbox.
• Do some sit-ups or push-ups during TV commercials.

10. Eat breakfast.
We’ve all heard that breakfast is the day’s most important meal, and this is especially true for those who have diabetes. After fasting 8-12 hours, your body needs food to balance blood sugar levels and injected insulin from the previous night.

Besides, eating breakfast can help overweight people with type 2 diabetes shed extra pounds.Of the 4,000 participants In the National Weight Control Registry who maintained at least a 30-pound weight loss for about 5.5 years, almost all said they ate breakfast daily.

So what’s the best breakfast? One with carbohydrate, protein and fiber, according to the ADA.

Good options are cereal or an English muffin, low-fat milk or yogurt and fruit. (Save high-fat foods, such as bacon, sausage and eggs, for special occasions.)

And think beyond the breakfast box: Leftover chicken breast with fruit is just fine too, the ADA says.

What if you're not usually hungry for breakfast? Then make your previous night’s meal smaller, so you’ll wake up hungry, the ADA says. It will spread your carbohydrates more evenly throughout the day, leading to better blood-sugar control.

For more information, visit our Diabetes Health Center.

Henry Ford's Experiment to Build a Better Worker

Henry Ford's Experiment to Build a Better Worker
By RICHARD SNOW,  WSJ 05/09/13

Early in 1914 Henry Ford, spurred by a combination of wanting to cut down the high turnover in his workforce and what seems to have been genuine altruism, announced that henceforth the base wage in his factory would be five dollars a day. This at a stroke doubled the prevailing salary for industrial work, and it caused a sensation.


Henry Ford posed in an early model at his plant in Detroit, in 1900.

.But Ford company workers discovered that achieving their five-dollar day came with some rigid stipulations. To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.

Book Excerpt

From the forthcoming book "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford" by Richard Snow.

.The job of ensuring such behavior went to John Lee. He was in charge of what today goes under the pallid name of "human resources," and was one of the very few of Ford's high executives who was universally liked.

Lee put out a booklet called Helpful Hints and Advice to Employees, which opened by declaring a "sole and simple" purpose that was far from simple. It was "to better the financial and moral standing of each employee and those of his household; to instill men with courage and a desire for health, happiness, and prosperity. To give father and mother sufficient for present and future; to provide for families in sickness, in health and in old age and to take away fear and worry. To make a well rounded life and not a mere struggle for existence to men and their families, and to implant in the heart of every individual the wholesome desire to Help the Other Fellow, whenever he comes across your path, to the extent of your ability."

This irreproachable aim was advanced by investigators for the newly formed Sociological Department who brought their questionnaires to the home of every Ford employee. The agents weren't mere busybodies. They'd been trained to offer useful advice on hygiene and on how to manage household finances. Behind them stood the Ford legal department, whose lawyers would help, free, with everything from buying a house to becoming an American citizen. Should an employee get sick or be injured, the company maintained a full-time staff of 10 doctors and 100 nurses.

The agents, initially recruited from among Ford's white-collar workers, soon grew to a force 200 strong. Its members had to assess some 13,000 people, and do it quickly. Naturally they met resistance, from newly arrived Russians, for instance, whose memories of the czar's secret police were all too fresh, and from the occasional descendant of an original settler whose family had been in Detroit for generations and who didn't care to have some company hireling tell him how to live like a decent American.

For the most part, though, the workers took the intrusion into their lives philosophically. A few nosy questions were a minor ordeal if they opened the door to the highest-paying job in the industry.

William Knudsen, Ford's immensely capable lieutenant, who by now was busy sowing branch assembly plants across the nation, opposed the plan. He told his biographer that "as he saw it, the men were entitled to the money and, having earned it, it was theirs to spend without answering the snooping questions of investigators."

Simon & Schuster

.Mr. Knudsen was greatly amused to learn about a boardinghouse close to the factory on Manchester Avenue where 11 young Ford workmen lived. None of them was married, but whenever an agent stopped by, the man he was visiting would borrow the generous-spirited landlady and present her as his wife. Fortunately, said Mr. Knudsen, the social workers never called on all 11 at the same time.

One stipulation of the new mandate was that a Ford worker needed permission from a Ford executive if he wanted to get his own automobile. Mr. Knudsen was in Mr. Lee's office when an employee came in and said, "Mr. Lee, I would like to buy a car."

"Got any money?"

"I have seven hundred dollars."

"Do you have a family?"

"Yes, a wife and four children."

"Is the furniture paid for?"

"Yes."

"Have you any insurance?"
"Yes."

"All right, you can buy a car."

"Thanks, Mr. Lee." On his way out the door the man turned and said, "Oh, by the way, Mr. Lee, my wife is going to have another baby. I'm going to buy a Buick."

The occasional worker was openly defiant. When asked if he had any savings, one man told the investigator that he had invested his earnings "in houses and lots." When the skeptical agent pressed him for details, the man explained he'd meant "whorehouses and lots of whiskey."

On the other hand, there was Joe, who had come from a peasant life in Russia with his wife and six children.

F.W. Andrews, one of the Ford investigators (they were later to be given the less provocative title of "advisors"), told his story. "Life was an uphill struggle for Joe since landing in America," Mr. Andrews wrote. But he was willing to work, and work hard, digging sewers and farming, making his way to Detroit where "for five long months he tramped in the 'Army of the Unemployed'—always handicapped by his meager knowledge of the English language, and unable to find anything to do." Joe's wife "worked with the washtub and the scrubbing brush when such work could be found."

Joe landed a job at Ford, and that is when Mr. Andrews entered his life, to find him living in "an old, tumbled down, one and a half story frame house." Joe and his family were in "one half of the attic consisting of three rooms, which were so low that a person of medium height could not stand erect—a filthy, foul-smelling home." It contained "two dirty beds…a ragged filthy rug, a rickety table, and two bottomless chairs (the children standing up at the table to eat)." The family owed money to their landlord, to the butcher, to the grocer. The eldest daughter had gone to a charity hospital the week before. Mr. Andrews said the remainder of the family "were half clad, pale, and hungry looking."

Mr. Andrews at once got the pay office to issue Joe's wages daily instead of every two weeks. He secured a $50 loan, and such was the Sociological Department's seriousness of purpose then that Mr. Andrews, not Joe, borrowed the money. Mr. Andrews paid the butcher and the landlord, rented a cottage, and filled it with cheap but sound new furniture, new clothes, and, he said, "a liberal supply of soap."

Then the messianic moment. Mr. Andrews "had their dirty, old, junk furniture loaded on a dray and under cover of night moved them to their new home. This load of rubbish was heaped on a pile in the backyard, and a torch was applied and it went up in smoke.

"There upon the ashes of what had been their earthly possessions, this Russian peasant and his wife, with tears streaming down their faces, expressed their gratitude to Henry Ford, the Ford Motor F -0.46%Company, and all those who had been instrumental in bringing about this marvelous change in their lives."

Were those tears only of gratitude as Joe watched this strange pyre of his family's old life?

Today the Sociological Department might seem the essence of suffocating paternalism, and many felt it so even at the time. Certainly no other big industrial operation had anything like it. But with its medical and legal services, and the English language school it ran for the company's thousands of immigrant workers, the department appears to have done more good than harm. In 1914 the average Ford worker had $207.10 in savings. For those who stuck with the company during the next five years, the average had risen to $2,171.14.

The reformer Ida Tarbell went to Highland Park planning to expose the oppressive Ford system. Instead she wrote, "I don't care what you call it—philanthropy, paternalism, autocracy—the results which are being obtained are worth all you can set against them, and the errors in the plan will provoke their own remedies."

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Snow. From the forthcoming book "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford" by Richard Snow to be published by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.

A version of this article appeared May 10, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Henry Ford's Experiment To Build a Better Worker.

Great Quotes

Great quotes inspire us to change, to grow, and to become our best selves. I researched thousands of quotes from successful leaders for my last book, to capture one for each chapter, covering 11 simple concepts to become a better leader. My recent LinkedIn post explaining the 11 concepts became the 2nd most read article in LinkedIn history (at 1.3 million views!) So, I'm sharing my favorite quotes here- those which inspired me enough that I published them in the book, along with the runners up. Here are my 25 favorite likeable leadership quotes. I hope they inspire you as much as they have inspired me:

Listening

1) "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway

2) "The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them." - Ralph Nichols

Storytelling

3) "Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McKee

4) "If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story." —Barbara Greene

Authenticity

5) "I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier." -Oprah Winfrey

6) "Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet - thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing - consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust." -Lance Secretan

Transparency

7) "As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth." -John Whittier

8) "There is no persuasiveness more effectual than the transparency of a single heart, of a sincere life." -Joseph Berber Lightfoot 

Team Playing

9) "Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds." -SEAL Team Saying

10) "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

Responsiveness

11) "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." -Charles Swindoll

12) '"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates

Adaptability

13) "When you're finished changing, you're finished." -Ben Franklin

14) "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." –Charles Darwin

Passion

15) "The only way to do great work is to love the work you do." -Steve Jobs

16) "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein

Surprise and Delight

17) "A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless." -Charles de Gaulle

18) “Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” - Boris Pasternak

Simplicity

19) "Less isn't more; just enough is more." -Milton Glaser

20) “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo daVinci

Gratefulness

21) "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." -Gilbert K Chesterton

22) "The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Leadership

23) “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” — Peter F. Drucker

24) "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." —John Quincy Adams

25) "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." —John F. Kennedy

Happiness

Happiness--in your business life and your personal life--is often a matter of subtraction, not addition. - Jeff Haden


Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things:

1. Blaming.
People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time.
So you blame them for your problems.

But you're also to blame. Maybe you didn't provide enough training. Maybe you didn't build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.

Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn't masochistic, it's empowering--because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.
And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.





2. Impressing.



No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all "things." People may like your things--but that doesn't mean they like you.



Sure, superficially they might seem to, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship that is not based on substance is not a real relationship.



Genuine relationships make you happier, and you'll only form genuine relationships when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.





3. Clinging.

When you're afraid or insecure, you hold on tightly to what you know, even if what you know isn't particularly good for you.

An absence of fear or insecurity isn't happiness: It's just an absence of fear or insecurity.

Holding on to what you think you need won't make you happier; letting go so you can reach for and try to earn what you want will.

Even if you don't succeed in earning what you want, the act of trying alone will make you feel better about yourself.



4. Interrupting.

Interrupting isn't just rude. When you interrupt someone, what you're really saying is, "I'm not listening to you so I can understand what you're saying; I'm listening to you so I can decide what I want to say."

Want people to like you? Listen to what they say. Focus on what they say. Ask questions to make sure you understand what they say.

They'll love you for it--and you'll love how that makes you feel.



5. Whining.

Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better.



If something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that effort into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually

you'll have to do that. So why waste time? Fix it now.



Don't talk about what's wrong. Talk about how you'll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.



And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don't just be the shoulder they cry on.



Friends don't let friends whine--friends help friends make their lives better.





6. Controlling.



Yeah, you're the boss. Yeah, you're the titan of industry. Yeah, you're the small tail that wags a huge dog.

Still, the only thing you really control is you. If you find yourself trying hard to control other people, you've decided that you, your goals, your dreams, or even just your opinions are more important than theirs.



Plus, control is short term at best, because it often requires force, or fear, or authority, or some form of pressure--none of those let you feel good about yourself.



Find people who want to go where you're going. They'll work harder, have more fun, and create better business and personal relationships.



And all of you will be happier.





7. Criticizing.



Yeah, you're more educated. Yeah, you're more experienced. Yeah, you've been around more blocks and climbed more mountains and slayed more dragons.



That doesn't make you smarter, or better, or more insightful.



That just makes you you: unique, matchless, one of a kind, but in the end, just you.



Just like everyone else--including your employees.



Everyone is different: not better, not worse, just different. Appreciate the differences instead of the shortcomings and you'll see people--and yourself--in a better light.



8. Preaching.

Criticizing has a brother. His name is Preaching. They share the same father: Judging.

The higher you rise and the more you accomplish, the more likely you are to think you know everything--and to tell people everything you think you know.

When you speak with more finality than foundation, people may hear you but they don't listen. Few things are sadder and leave you feeling less happy.



9. Dwelling.

The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Then let it go.



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Easier said than done? It depends on your focus. When something bad happens to you, see that as a chance to learn something you didn't know. When another person makes a mistake, see that as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding.



The past is just training; it doesn't define you. Think about what went wrong, but only in terms of how you will make sure that, next time, you and the people around you will know how to make sure it goes right.



10. Fearing.



We're all afraid: of what might or might not happen, of what we can't change, or what we won't be able to do, or how other people might perceive us.

So it's easier to hesitate, to wait for the right moment, to decide we need to think a little longer or do some more research or explore a few more alternatives.

Meanwhile days, weeks, months, and even years pass us by.

And so do our dreams.



Don't let your fears hold you back. Whatever you've been planning, whatever you've imagined, whatever you've dreamed of, get started on it today.

If you want to start a business, take the first step. If you want to change careers, take the first step. If you want to expand or enter a new market or offer new products or services, take the first step.



Put your fears aside and get started. Do something. Do anything.

Otherwise, today is gone. Once tomorrow comes, today is lost forever.

Today is the most precious asset you own--and is the one thing you should truly fear wasting.

Karmanyevadhikaraste

That famous verse in the Gita (Karmanyevadhikaraste) really means — do your karma without distractions. If success doesn’t fill your head with pride and failure demoralise your heart, you are unstoppable!


- from author - Amish Tripathi

Innovator's DNA - Discovery Skills

The Innovator’s DNA - From INSEAD and Clayton Christensen -  

The five “discovery skills” that distinguished innovators from non-innovators.

1. Innovators ask provocative questions that challenge the status quo.
2. They observe the world like anthropologists to detect new ways of doing things.  
3. They network with people who don’t look or think like them to gain radically different perspectives.
4. They experiment to relentlessly test new ideas and try out new experiences.
5. Finally, these behaviours trigger new associations which allow them to connect the unconnected, thereby producing disruptive ideas.

Power of Indulgence

If Tomorrow Never Comes

If Tomorrow Never Comes lyrics  - Garth Brooks

Sometimes late at night
I lie awake and watch her sleeping
She's lost in peaceful dreams
So I turn out the lights and lay there in the dark
And the thought crosses my mind
If I never wake up in the morning
Would she ever doubt the way I feel
About her in my heart

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That she's my only one
And if my time on earth were through
And she must face the world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last
If tomorrow never comes

'Cause I've lost loved ones in my life
Who never knew how much I loved them
Now I live with the regret
That my true feelings for them never were revealed
So I made a promise to myself
To say each day how much she means to me
And avoid that circumstance
Where there's no second chance to tell her how I feel

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That she's my only one
And if my time on earth were through
And she must face the world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last
If tomorrow never comes

So tell that someone that you love
Just what you're thinking of
If tomorrow never comes

Can U Read this ?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh

uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr

the Itteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist

and Isat Itteres are at the rghit pcleas. The

rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll

raed it wouthit a porbelm.  Tihs is bcuseae

we do not raed ervey  Iteter by ilstef, but

the wrod as a wlohe.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

1) Be Proactive

As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. We have the independent will to make our own choices and decisions, and the responsibility ("the ability to respond") to make the right choices. You have the freedom to choose your own fate and path, so having the independent will, imagination and self-awareness to make the right move makes you a proactive, and not a reactive, person.

2) Begin With The End In Mind

Mental visualization is extremely important. Covey says that all things are created twice: first, the mental conceptualization and visualization and a second physical, actual creation. Becoming your own creator means to plan and visualize what you're going to do and what you're setting out to accomplish and then go out and creating it. Identifying your personal statement and your principles will help.

3) Put First Things First

With your power of independent will, you can create the ending you want to have. Part of that comes with effective time management, starting with matters of importance. Then tasks should be completed based on urgency after you deal with all the important matters. If you deal with crises, pressing problems and deadline-driven projects first, your life will be a lot easier.

4) Think Win/Win

If you believe in a better way to accomplish goals that's mutually beneficial to all sides, that's a win/win situation. "All parties feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan," Covey wrote. "One person's success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others." If you have integrity and maturity, there's no reason win/win situations can't happen all the time.

5) Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

If you're a good listener and you take the time to understand a concept, it will help you convey your opinions, plans and goals to others. It starts with communication and strong listening skills, followed by diagnosing the situation and then communicating your solution to others.

6) Synergize

Synergistic communication, according to Covey, is "opening your mind and heart to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options." This applies to the classroom, the business world and wherever you could apply openness and communication. It's all about building cooperation and trust.

7) Sharpen The Saw

Sometimes you're working so hard on the other six habits that you forget about re-energizing and renewing yourself to sharpen yourself for the tasks in front of you. Some sharpening techniques include exercise and nutrition, reading, planning and writing, service and empathy and commitment, study and meditation.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-coveys-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-2012-7#ixzz216D5A3kw

Define-Collaborate-Measure-Improve

What is not planned cannot be defined
What is not defined cannot be controlled(Collaborate WITHOUT Authority)
What is not controlled cannot be measured
What is not measured cannot be improved

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Don't judge people before you truly know them

A 24 year old boy seeing out from the train's window shouted: "Dad, look the trees are going behind!" Dad smiled & a young couple sitting nearby, looked at the 24 year old's childish behavior with pity, suddenly he again exclaimed: "Dad, look the clouds are running with us!" The couple couldn't resist & said to the old man: "Why don't you take your son to a good doctor?" The old man smiled & said: "I did & we are just coming from the hospital, my son was blind from birth, he just got his eyes today." Every single person on the planet has a story. Don't judge people before you truly know them. The truth might surprise you!!

Seven Step Problem Solving

1. Definition
2. Data Collection
3. Cause Analysis
4. Solution Planning and Implementation
5. Evaluation of Effectiveness
6. Standardization
7. Evaluation of Process

A Good One : Empathy and Sympathy

A doctor entered the hospital in hurry after being called in for an urgent surgery. He found the boy’s father pacing anxiously, waiting for him.
Seeing him, the father yelled, “Why did you take so long to get here? Don’t you know that my son’s life is in danger? Don’t you have the sense of responsibility?”

The doctor said calmly with a gentle smile, “I am sorry, I wasn’t in the hospital and I came the fastest I could, after receiving the call.
I know it is tough, but take a deep breath and calm down.”

“Calm down?! What if your son was in this room right now, would you calm down? If you felt that you would lose your son, what would you do?”
said the father angrily.

The doctor smiled again and replied: “I believe that life and death are in the hands of God and we can only do so much.
Go and pray for your son, we will do our best by God’s grace.”

“Sympathy is so much easier than empathy. It is easy to dismiss someone else’s trials because they aren’t your own”, muttered the father.

After a long while, the doctor came out of the operating room. “I’ve got good news! Your son is saved! If you have any questions please ask the nurse.”
And without waiting for the father’s reply, he immediately rushed off.

“What a cold and unfeeling man!” exclaimed the man, “He couldn’t even wait a few minutes so that I could ask him about my son.”

Hearing him, the nurse replied, “The doctor’s son has been extremely ill for many weeks, but as soon as he received the call about your son,
he immediately rushed to the hospital. Now that he is confident that your son is safe, the doctor's hurrying back to be with his son.”

How many times do we make wrong assumptions, when we only look at things from our own point of view?
Just as we expect empathy from others, it would fare us even better if we can empathise with others as well.
Let’s make it a point to give others the benefit of doubt and…

14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated

Here are 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated:

1. Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.

2. Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action. Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.

Read More: Why You're Still Overweight
3. Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.

5. Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.

6. Act with a higher purpose. Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is wasted effort--and should be avoided.

7. Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

8. Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

9. Don't wait for perfection; do it now! Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life. Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.

10. Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don't achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.

11. Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow's failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.

12. Avoid weak goals. Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with "I'll try ..." Always start with "I will" or "I must."

13. Treat inaction as the only real failure. If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can't even learn from the experience.

14. Think before you speak. Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.

The above is based on a conversation with Omar Periu, one of the world’s best (and best known) motivational speakers.

Good Note

The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything.

Live simply.
Love unconditionally.
Give generously.
Care deeply.
Share heartily.
Speak kindly.
Work sincerely, Play cheerfully.
Laugh openly and leave the rest to Almighty.

Good Quotes

Without Your love I can do nothing, with Your love there is nothing I cannot do.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
-Swami Sivananda


If you work just for money, you'll never make it, but if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success
will be yours."
-Ray Kroc

"When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward
your coveted goal."
-Napoleon Hill

"We are what we think".
-Buddha

"Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve"
-Napoleon Hill, motivator

"No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent"
-Eleanor Roosavelt

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
- Thomas Edison, inventor

Google engineer Steve Yegge’s - On Platform

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ten Tips On How To Work With Your Board Of Directors

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/ten-tips-on-how-to-work-with-your-board-of-directors/
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Len Jordan, who is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and currently holds board seats at companies like Cedexis, MaxPoint Interactive, Zapd, Control4, DSIQ, Medio and Wetpaint.
Whenever I invest in a new company, I send the CEO my customary email with advice on how to work with his or her new board. I’ve spent 24 years in the software industry—including holding operating roles at three early-stage software companies and board seats at 12 startups—so I thought my “Top 10″ list on the care and feeding of board members might be helpful to other CEOs and executive as well.
So, without further ado, here it is:

1. Have a plan, and get your entire company and board to understand and support it.
A company’s business plan and strategy is the map of where we are going. The plan almost certainly will change, but the best CEOs keep everyone informed about where we said we are going, where we are currently going, and why we changed plans if we did.
The plan should not be that complicated. Too many business plans use multisyllabic adjectives and adverbs—the plan should be simple even if the products are complicated. The essence of the business plan should be simple enough for a six year-old to read and understand.
We should agree on a plan that describes our target customer; the company’s product; and competition. This plan informs the product roadmap (including timeline and hiring requirements, such as how many people you need to build, market and sell the product) and P&L (revenue, expense and net income) broken out by month and quarter and by R&D, sales and marketing and general-and-administrative expenses. The sales and marketing plan goes with this, including a product and pricing model.
The preference is to approve the above and then stay out of the CEO’s way—the opportunity
cost of your time is incredibly high.
2. Tell us if the plan changes for “small reasons”.Most plans change for tactical reasons — e.g., the product is earlier/later than expected. Or customers are adopting/buying earlier/later than planned. I like a process in which, if the plan shifts, the CEO pre-emptively throttles the investment/spending without being asked. For example: tell us what level of business progress/metrics (e.g. downloads, installs, usage, trials, bookings, contracts closed, etc.) you want to see to feel good about spending to the plan (or below it if necessary), even if we are not yet certain about exceeding revenue during the current period.
Conversely, what level of progress above plan would make you want to invest more aggressively and what key investments (products, sales and marketing hires) would you make? Having the entire plan and contingencies agreed to ahead of time makes it a lot easier for you to do your job and for us to stay out of the way. Plans don’t have to be perfect, and they change, especially at startups.
3. Tell us if the plan is changing a lot for “big reasons”.Sometimes plans need to change for strategic reasons. The best CEOs are continually testing and retesting their basic hypothesis. Is there still a fundamental problem we are solving, or market opportunity we are addressing? Are we still pursuing the right product? Are we selling to the right customers? Are the ways we are selling and marketing right for the market and product? Are we as competitive as we thought? Is our team as good as we had hoped?
Being a CEO is hard because you need to have conviction and commitment to a specific strategy, but you need to continuously challenge the assumptions underpinning it without whipsawing your team, customers and board. The best CEOs stay on-strategy, but are very deliberate when making strategic changes.
4. Strategy mistakes are harder to admit than execution mistakes.It’s hard to admit when a strategy is flawed. It’s very easy, on the other hand, to decide that the market, customer and product thesis is correct but sales-and-marketing execution is weak. I’ve seen too many companies delay making a tough strategy choice by first trying to fix the flaw through a change in execution. If execution is flawed, fix it, but look beneath the veneer to make sure the substance underneath is sound.
5. The average of two strategies is usually not a strategy.Whether you have a board or not, you have to commit to a cohesive strategy. In tennis you can play at the net or the baseline, and both can be great strategies, depending on the circumstances. The average of the two — playing in the middle of the court (commonly referred to as ‘no- man’s-land’) — is the worst place to play and is never a good strategy. Too many startups split the difference: They continue with the old strategy, add a new strategy (like a new product), under-resource both and fail at each.
Good strategy starts this way: Assess the company’s essential attributes—market, team, product, customers, competition–and develop a simple one page SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Frame alternatives, discuss tradeoffs with the board and make hard choices. The classic startup mistakes often consist of giving up on the right strategy too early, choosing the wrong new strategy, assuming the old strategy provides more benefit to the new strategy than it does or choosing, instead, to focus on both an old and new strategy out of fear of making the wrong choice. It is scary to have both feet and hands off the rock at the same time.
6. Email is good for delivering straightforward information; board meetings are good for explaining complicated information and discussing alternatives.I love short (above the fold) weekly email updates from CEOs on key progress points (product development, hiring, revenue, key partnerships, etc.), but it’s OK if they are less frequent (coming every other week, or once a month). But bad news should travel fast—this includes losing a key customer, a key engineer quitting, etc. The road has bumps; I’d rather know about it when it happens than after it leads to some other issue (like a product delay or a revenue miss). Also, I’d prefer that problems/opportunities not only get communicated, but that options be developed to address the problem or opportunity. Frame the situation and assess the pros and cons of a few choices—it makes it easier to help come up with a reasonable solution.
7. Board meetings are not pitches. You have our money, so let’s figure out what to do with it.The best way to earn trust from your board is not to tell us what’s going well; it’s to tell us what’s not going well. Better yet, make everything run well but tell us the things you want to focus on that could become problems if not addressed. If you do #6 , the board meetings can be less about updating the board and more about discussing key strategic choices/decisions and ways we can better tune our execution. A basic review of financials, customer progress, product development, partnerships, hiring, etc. would be great, but we’d also like you to expose key strategy elements (SWOT) and get us to discuss and react.
Receiving board decks two days ahead of time means we can add more value in the board meeting. Also: The best companies can get the board deck down to 10-15 slides, max, especially if #6 is happening. Allocate time for strategic topics at key board meetings and from time to time, invite an outside/expert that can challenge the group at key strategic inflection points. Finally, as with any meeting, don’t unveil controversial topics at board meetings for the first time. Give people a heads up ahead of time so they discuss the topic at an average blood pressure.
8. Ask for help — we work for you. Really.We like helping recruit employees and partners (customers). Put us to work, let us brag about you to potential employees and provide context and support. We can assist with strategy questions. You should know more about the business than we do, but our distance can provide perspective. And perhaps we have seen patterns that can be applied from other experiences. This can be incredibly valuable as long as we don’t over or mis-apply the patterns in the wrong instances based on the wrong attributes.
We are OK if you seldom call and are also OK if you call every day when we are working on something that requires it. We do appreciate just getting a check-in call from time to time. A little like calling your mom in college, sort of. If you only call to ask for money she will know something is up.
9. Involve your exec team with the board.It’s good practice to have at least one board member interview all exec hires; different perspectives can be good. Having the exec team in the board meetings can be great, especially if they present the area of their responsibility (product development, sales, marketing, finance). That said, it’s also important to have a closed session of the board that is just the board plus counsel, to discuss board-only matters.
10. Tell us how we are doing.We hope to add value but will make mistakes and can often manage things better. Tell us about these areas and we will try to get better. We will do the same with you. And tell us when we should stay out of the way — you run the company, and sometimes the best thing we can do to help is let you do that.
The average early stage company takes nine to 10 years before it will exit. So we likely are going to work together a long time. Let’s make it productive, rewarding and fun.

The Must-Have Leadership Skill

listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: Selected Writings.

"We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months," the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently. "His resume looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, 'You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.' He was pure command and control."
The think tank's work centers on interlocking networks of relationships with the board, staff, donors, and a wide variety of academics and policy experts. The CEO urgently needed to manage those relationships, but lacked the interpersonal skills that organizations increasingly need in their leaders. A CEO who fails to navigate those relationships artfully, the think tank's board saw, could torpedo the organization.
Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.
As I've written with my colleague Richard Boyatzis, technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
That was brought home to me yet again reading "Making Yourself Indispensable," by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott E. Edinger, which makes the strong point that a leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results.
But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.
While Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger make a strong empirical case that competencies matter, it overlooks a crucial point: some competencies matter more than others. Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.
You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. What Zenger and colleagues call the "interpersonal skills" — and what I call social intelligence — are the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.
Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.
So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told me how his organization assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.
"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centered monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.
I wouldn't use such subjective measures alone — you're better off to combine them with best practices on hiring without firing. But don't ignore your gut.

Making Yourself Indispensable

Making Yourself Indispensable
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger
A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. After a dozen or so years there, he was thriving—he made his numbers, he was well liked, he got consistently positive reviews. He applied for a promotion that would put him in charge of a high-profile worldwide product-alignment initiative, confident that he was the top candidate and that this was the logical next move for him, a seemingly perfect fit for his skills and ambitions. His track record was solid. He’d made no stupid mistakes or career-limiting moves, and he’d had no run-ins with upper management. He was stunned, then, when a colleague with less experience got the job. What was the matter?
As far as Tom could tell, nothing. Everyone was happy with his work, his manager assured him, and a recent 360-degree assessment confirmed her view. Tom was at or above the norm in every area, strong not only in delivering results but also in problem solving, strategic thinking, and inspiring others to top performance. “No need to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Go with your strengths.”
But how? Tom was at a loss. Should he think more strategically? Become even more inspiring? Practice problem solving more intently?
Learn more about developing your strengths with this slideshow.
It’s pretty easy and straightforward to improve on a weakness; you can get steady, measurable results through linear development—that is, by learning and practicing basic techniques. But the data from our decades of work with tens of thousands of executives all over the world has shown us that developing strengths is very different. Doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills—what we call nonlinear development. This has long been familiar to athletes as cross-training. A novice runner, for example, benefits from doing stretching exercises and running a few times a week, gradually increasing mileage to build up endurance and muscle memory. But an experienced marathoner won’t get significantly faster merely by running ever longer distances. To reach the next level, he needs to supplement that regimen by building up complementary skills through weight training, swimming, bicycling, interval training, yoga, and the like.
So it is with leadership competencies. To move from good to much better, you need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training. If you’re technically adept, for instance, delving even more deeply into technical manuals won’t get you nearly as far as honing a complementary skill such as communication, which will make your expertise more apparent and accessible to your coworkers.
In this article we provide a simple guide to becoming a far more effective leader. We will see how Tom identified his strengths, decided which one to focus on and which complementary skill to develop, and what the results were. The process is straightforward, but complements are not always obvious. So first we’ll take a closer look at the leadership equivalent of cross-training. The Interaction Effect
In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own. There’s nothing mysterious here. Combining diet with exercise, for example, has long been known to be substantially more effective in losing weight than either diet or exercise alone.
In our previous research we found 16 differentiating leadership competencies that correlate strongly with positive business outcomes such as increased profitability, employee engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Among those 16, we wondered, could we find pairs that would produce significant interaction effects?

Golden Anniversaries

1. I and Me to WE

2. There are no sacred cows (talk about anything and everything)

3. No matter what treat eachother with respect. Treat the other person the way you would like to be treated

4. Take care of your body. Present yourself best to your partner. Take care of eachother (annual physicals)

5. Find the joy of return. Our resources, not mine or yours.

6. LOVING TOUCH. Frequent touches ...pats.... Being in love in more than saying

7. Onboarding. Doing and finding things are different and interesting. Passion/hobby/pranks/jokes

Simple Things Matter: 50 Simple Things You Can do to Enhance Your Relationship

From http://www.simplethingsmatter.com :

1. Take long walks together.
2. Snuggle in the morning before you get out of bed.
3. Recognize kindness with a thank you.
4. Call when you are going to be late.
5. Share a good bottle of wine while watching a sunset.
6. Be generous with your time for each other.
7. Compliment your lover about something they did today that made them special.
8. Hold hands often.
9. Bring home flowers when it is not a special occasion.
10. Leave a sticky note on your lover’s wallet or purse telling them to come home safely to you because you love them so much.
11. Ask your spouse about their dreams and their dreams for your future together.
12. Open doors for each other.
13. Take a bike ride together, bringing a picnic lunch for a secluded spot along the way.
14. Walk your dog together.
15. Fix your lover breakfast in bed for no special reason.
16. Say “I love you” several times during each day.
17. Treat your lover with courtesy at all times.
18. Help clean off the table and do the dishes after dinner.
19. Compliment your lover’s cooking.
20. Tell one reason why your lover means so much to you.
21. Take your spouse to their favorite restaurant in the middle of the week.
22. Touch your mate 100 times a day.
23. Surprise your lover by bringing lunch when they least expects it.
24. Prepare meals together as often as you can.
25. Spend an evening listening to music and making a CD of your favorite songs together.
26. Never let things get stale. Upend expectancies and delight your lover.
27. Always point out the positive attributes of your lover, both at home and in public.
28. Give your spouse a massage or a back rub.
29. Look directly into your lover’s eye when you are having a conversation.
30. Be your lover’s best cheerleader for their accomplishments.
31. Plan a bubble bath together and see where it leads.
32. Go dancing together.
33. Talk about everything. No topic is too small or too big. There are no sacred cows.
34. Always demonstrate respect for each other in your words and in your actions.
35. Schedule your annual physicals on the same day.
36. Plan a week of healthy meals together with foods that you both enjoy.
37. Write your husband a love letter and leave it for him to find in his underwear drawer.
38. Sit down and go over the finances together before you pay the bills for the month.
39. Take your lover to a movie, putting your arm around them like you used to when you were dating.
40. Go for a boat ride, car ride or train ride that isn’t planned and doesn’t have an itinerary.
41. Write personal Valentine’s Day cards today even though it's not Valentine's Day.
42. Turn off the television and talk to each other.
43. Sing a song together and to each other.
44. Go to Disneyland—just the two of you.
45. Plant flowers together.
46. Share a tuna melt.
47. Kiss each other passionately.
48. Go to the zoo together.
49. Share a shower.
50. Sit in your porch swing and gaze at the stars.

Good One

Except GOD, everyone brings data to the table.

Four Ways to Lead a Successful Transformation - HBR

From HBR : Managing an organizational transformation, executives tell us, is like trying to change the wheels on a bike while you're riding it. You have to take your organization apart and put it back together in a new way, but you have to keep the business running at the same time. It's a lot to ask, and the senior leader bears much of the burden.

Being at the top of an organization makes you uniquely visible: consciously or not, you provide cues about what matters that everyone else will follow. When we were researching Beyond Performance, we found that little had been written about this crucial responsibility during a transformation. So we drew on our own involvement in scores of major change programs to identify the roles that only senior leaders can perform.

1. Make the transformation meaningful

Whether employees buy into a change effort can spell the difference between success and failure. Senior leaders tap into employees' energy by making the transformation personal and openly engaging them.

Successful leaders often allude to formative events in their own life to show their determination to overcome obstacles. When Andy Grove was CEO of Intel, he used his personal story of escaping Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 to push the company to make bold decisions as they transformed into a giant in the semiconductor industry.

Connecting with people takes time and effort. Corrado Passera, CEO of Banca Intesa, traveled all of Italy to spread the bank's transformation story to its 60,000 employees. He told us, "You have to put your face in front of people if you want them to follow you."

2. Be the change you want to see the mindsets and behavior you want to see

When you're asking others to transform how they get work done, it's incredibly powerful for you to transform how you get work done as well.

After John Akehurst tackled underperformance at Woodside Petroleum, he admitted to us that "It took a lot of effort for me to recognize that I am responsible for the culture of the organization, and how dysfunctional my behavior was and what an impact it had on other people." Learning to be humble, to listen, and to trust intuition as well as analysis helped Akehurst and his team turn the business around.

Well-chosen symbolic actions can have an impact out of all proportion to their size. At Infosys, chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy habitually pays the difference between a single and a double hotel room when he takes his wife on business trips. He explained to us, "Credibility comes from eating one's own food before recommending it to others," an attitude that helped Murthy transform a company started with $250 in seed capital into a global leader in consulting and information technology.

3. Build a strong and committed top team

It's likely that not everyone on your team wants — or is able — to change. Ask yourself about each one: Does this individual know what they must do to make the transformation succeed? Is it clear what will happen if they don't get on board? Have I given them a chance to build the skills they need? Have I been modeling the target mindsets and behavior? If the answers are yes, swift action is warranted.

That's what happened at Seagate, the world's largest manufacturer of hard drives, during its transformation led by Steve Luczo: "We said, we will work as a team. So we needed to find out who was on the bus and who was not and to do it fast. I got rid of two top people in the first three to four months."

Taking tough decisions can have a surprisingly positive impact on the rest of the organization. High performers become more motivated, low performers opt out, and those in the middle realize they need to raise their game.

4. Relentlessly pursue impact

In a change effort where real value is at stake, there's no substitute for simply getting involved in the details. Kicking off a transformation is one thing, but sticking with it is what really counts.

Larry Bossidy, reflecting on leading a transformation of AlliedSignal, wrote, "Many people regard execution as detail work that's beneath the dignity of a business leader. That's wrong ... it's a leader's most important job." This means getting involved in the problem-solving on high value initiatives, making quick decisions when barriers appear, and staying on top of the numbers. We've learned that the adage "In God we trust, everyone else brings data to the table" fully applies during a transformation.

By playing these four roles, the most senior leader can greatly improve the odds of success for any organizational transformation.

Greatest Value

The ONLY ONE that i VALUE the most is LOYALTY. Without that a you are NOTHING.