I’m not a fan of the educational system that I was brought up with because I feel like I didn’t receive the maximum benefit from it. What I mean by that is that the two things I dreaded most throughout my school years (including college), reading and studying, are now two of my favorite activities.

The August Edition of the Fast Results E-Zine was about opportunities and the importance of not missing them. Let’s face it, missing an opportunity is one of the biggest mistakes we can make. Often, it’s taking advantage of opportunities that help us succeed. Missing an opportunity can do everything from frustrating us to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: I only had a camera with me, if I only had something to write down that idea I had, if I had just asked her out before the other guy did, if I had just introduced myself to the prospective client before my competitor did, if I had just sent my resume out a day earlier….

Today is a holiday for those of us in the US – Labor Day. As a kid, I used to have mixed feelings about Labor Day: on one hand, the weekend itself was always one of the most enjoyable of the summer but it’s also the last one of the summer. Even as an adult, I still see it as the last day of vacation despite the fact that I’m excited about the fall season, which is becoming my favorite season (I love all the activities in the fall, the temperature and I’m excited about all the events I have planned).

Even though Twitter has been around for years, I’ve been reluctant to try it out. But I finally decided to give it a whirl. Writing real blog posts can be chore so I wanted to see what this micro-blogging business was all about. Using a service like Twitter can help you promote your business as well as any other projects that you’re working on. Both Presidential candidates here in the United States are supposedly using the service.

A common piece of wisdom often bestowed to aspiring professional speakers is to speak whenever you can. This piece of advice when taken literally is actually very bad advice. Although self-help guru Tony Robbins put himself on the map by giving several hundred seminars all over the world within a single year, often speaking more than once per day, it won’t work for everyone. In this article, I’ll go over some of the pros and cons of seizing every speaking opportunity.

The Physical Toll:

How long can you go with saying something negative? How long can you resist having a negative thought? Negativity, whether through words or thoughts, have a poison-like effect on our success. It negatively influences the way others see us and, more importantly, the way we see ourselves. Chronic negative thinking can set us up for failure and in its worst form, lead to feelings of hopelessness. Negative words can be contagious and can affect the moral of groups, lead to negativity in the workplace and can potentially kill relationships. So how can one escape this silent killer?

In part one of this series we talked about the fact that you’re not alone in feeling that sense of hopelessness – practically everyone feels it from time to time. Realizing that your feeling this way is the beginning of the process for pulling yourself out. What we’re going to talk about in this part is how you end up feeling that way to begin with and some things you can do to get out of it.

Why we feel hopelessness: