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Introduction: Why Self-Confidence Changes Everything

If you could enhance a single trait about yourself with the objective of improving your success, your happiness and your effectiveness, what would it be?

Your intelligence?

Your empathy?

Your height?

I‘m here to tell you that 99% of the time, you‘d get the best results by enhancing your confidence.

In other words, all those self-help books that tell you to take supplements to make yourself smarter, to work out more, or to stick a lump of butter in your coffee are barking up the wrong tree. With self-confidence, you can genuinely accomplish anything.

No, Really

This might seem like the kind of advice you get from a poster with someone punching their fist into the air in front of a sunset. It might sound like the sort of thing that your mother would say to you but which you suspect she may not really mean.

But it‘s true. Self-confidence really does change the way you approach every situation, the way that others see you and the way that you come out of every interaction.

How?

Well, let‘s start with a little bit of evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary psychology and theory in general, essentially tells us that all of our behavior and all of our traits have been ?selected‘. In other words, your ancestors all managed to survive in order to pass on their DNA and create you because they had traits that helped them to survive. Your great, great, great, great, great Uncle Jimmy though died out because he had traits that didn‘t help him survive. And those did not get passed on to you.

What does this have to do with confidence?

Well, it comes down to the crucial importance of social interactions. That is to say that human beings are naturally social animals. We are pack animals just like dogs or wolves, although a human ?pack‘ is actually known as a tribe.

Being a member of a tribe would have helped us to survive by giving us strength in numbers, access to potential mates, greater resources etc. Those members of the tribe that would get ostracized and left out in the cold would end up dying out as a result of less access to food and resources and less protection from predators.
So maybe Uncle Jimmy died out because he was unsocial and he got evicted from his group. Survival at least partly comes down to a popularity contest. Think of it a little bit like Big Brother!

But social success is not just a binary matter. It is not a case of being accepted into the group or not being accepted. It‘s also true that you can exist within that group at different levels. So, you have your alphas and your queens. These are the individuals that rise to the top of the ladder and which command the most respect. They are generally physically more intimidating, they are generally more intelligent and they are generally ?wealthier in terms of what they have access to.

These alphas get their choice of mate, they get first pickings when it comes to food and they get to sleep on the most comfortable pile of hay in the cave.

Point is, that being alpha means you are more likely than anyone else to survive and to thrive even more so. If you are an omega, if you are the jester of the group, then you don‘t get fed as well and you become much more likely to get killed when you go out hunting and gathering.

So, how do you ensure that this doesn‘t happen to you?

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The Power Of Focus

Introduction

There is plenty of advice available on how to increase your performance. One of the least talked about is the need for improved focus. You could call focus the secret ingredient to success. We face distractions every day. Our environment is filled with abundant stimuli, all vying for our attention and ensuring that we will lose focus and have difficulty in concentrating. These distractions make it difficult for us to perform at our optimal level.

Mental focus is the deliberate and conscious effort of keeping a mental spotlight on what we are doing. We block out distractions and hone in on what is important. However, that is not always easy. The problem with not focusing properly is not only that we feel out-of-control, but we experience a constant high level of stress, which can affect our health.

For many, trying to maintain concentration is a daily chore with which they struggle. If we want to succeed, we need to improve our focus, and luckily, that is skill that can be learned and enhanced. The fact is, we have only so much mental energy to spare. It’s a finite commodity. As that energy gets scattered in many directions, our brain simply rebels, as our body does when we expend too much physical energy.

The ability to focus on one task becomes lost. That’s when we become stressed. Frequently, our ability to focus is directly related to our emotions. If a task – at work or at home – makes us nervous or anxious, we actively seek distractions. If a report the boss is waiting for fills us with panic, it’s easier to divert our attention to checking email, making phone calls or chatting with someone at the water cooler than to concentrate on the report.

At home, when a serious discussion with a spouse is necessary, we may welcome the distraction of Facebook, Twitter and ESPN rather than face the unpleasantness ahead. We may not do this consciously, but there are times we certainly choose to invite distractions to keep us from focusing on something that is important. And as a consequence, our work and relationships suffer.

We will discuss how to keep a better balance between positive and negative thoughts and how to creative habits that help us develop a better focus on a daily basis. The good news is, focusing is not only a skill we can learn, it is also a choice we can make. This book is designed to help us make better choices to enable us to focus better.

Why We Need To Focus

Being in focus is a purposeful direction and control of our awareness to the present moment, where it is most needed. Never has this been more important than today, when there is such an abundance of ready distractions competing for our attention. So many of us feel anxious if we aren’t checking Facebook updates, Twitter notifications and emails every few minutes. Unfortunately, this has turned into a chosen lifestyle for many. Our smartphone has become our lifeline.

We’re on the phone while driving and posting on Instagram while grabbing a meal. Instead of focusing on what we are doing, we take pride in “multitasking.” The problem with multitasking is that it doesn’t allow us to do more, it merely dilutes and diminishes what we are already doing.

The good news is, our brain, like our body, can be enhanced and developed. And like our bodies, this takes patience, time and effort. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Building our muscles is the results of daily habits, and the brain is a muscle. We can train ourselves to improve our focusing power and perform better until it becomes natural and second nature. The better we become at focusing, the better we are able to control our thoughts and our actions.

Does mental chaos seem natural to you, like a car battling heavy traffic every day? Do you wonder how some people manage to get more done and do it quicker and better? These people face the same focusing obstacles we all do. Everyone does. They have merely trained themselves to overcome it instead of remaining a victim to information and anxiety overload.

Computers allow information to be processed at a speed that would have been unimaginable just decades ago. They have changed our lives. Unfortunately, our brains are still working at the same pace. That’s why we are suffering from circuit overload. In effect, some of us exist in a perpetual mental traffic jam.

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The Complete IM Strategy

The Future-Proof SEO and Internet Marketing Plan

Good SEO means understanding what Google is looking for and making sure that your websites and your clients’ websites meet those criteria. But great SEO means preempting what Google is going to look like in the future and where it is heading. This way, you can ‘future proof’ your SEO against changes to the algorithm, or Google’s overall direction.

This is a lesson that SEOs have learned hard in the past. The original version of Google worked purely by looking at the number of links pointing at a website and by looking at the number of times the keywords were repeated in the text. If you wanted to get to the top of Google back then, all you had to do was to post hundreds of articles, each with keywords stuffed into it, and likewise buy lots of links, swap lots of links and upload your site to link directories.

But then Google did a U-turn. Suddenly, Google didn’t want people gaming its system any more. Suddenly Google didn’t want people creating poor quality content by ‘keyword stuffing’ any more.

And let’s be honest: it was obvious this would happen. The current system meant that anyone could get to the top of Google with a low quality site, without caring at all about the user. Google would not want to support that, because it would ultimately result in Google losing traffic.

Anyway, Google made its updates: it introduced Google Panda and Google Penguin and suddenly, thousands-if-not-millions of sites were massively downgraded. Businesses closed their doors. Entrepreneurs had to get real jobs. It was chaos!

People ranted and raved at Google for not giving warning, for not telling people what it wanted.

But Google was doing what it always did: serving the customer.

And a few clever SEOs who saw this coming were ready. They had built sites using smarter strategies and their sites were aimed at the visitors more than simply being designed to serve Google.

That is what great SEO means now. SEO is in perma flux. The algorithms are never changing. In fact, the whole point of the ‘Hummingbird algorithm’, is that it allows Google to update its index constantly and in real-time.

So you need to do better. You need to get inside the mind of Google to create a future proof SEO and internet marketing plan…

Google’s Master Plan

The Pixel 2 is Google’s second serious foray into the hardware game and represents another step in the company's grand plan to be an 'AI first' company. This may sound a little strange to those who still think of Google as a ‘search first’ company. But the truth is that these are one and the same thing. Google’s focus is still on indexing the web and on providing users with an easy way to find the information that they need. 

Remember, Google’s mission statement starting out was to:

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

And that’s also the way that Google makes most of its money thanks to advertising. Other ventures, such as YouTube, are famously still not profitable!

So, Google is all about search and AI just so happens to be the best possible tool for doing that better. One example of this is ‘RankBrain’, which is a machine learning algorithm that helps Google to better understand what people are looking for and how that matches the content it has indexed. Instead of just looking for precise word-matches Google now tries to look for content that provides the answers to your questions. Google is starting to understand what you say to it and dish up the best results as a response. Like talking to my sage-like Granddad (by which I do not mean the herb).