Cultivate

Top 10 Positive Words For 2020: Find Your Word For The Year

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Positive words for 2020 is an article that I think is very much needed in the current situation with the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19.

Based on Positive Words Research analysis of nice words for 2020 to think, so that we can successfully match the current situation, we have discovered some interesting inspiring words.

Our research started by analyzing the negative feelings and emotions that emerged worldwide after the start of the coronavirus COVID-19 epidemy.

Mainly, we have seen an increase in doubt, greed, panic, anxiety, lots of fear, hate, and anger. Also, we have noticed that there was an increase in verbal bullying, especially on social media.

This being said, we have come up with the following list of ten positive words for 2020:

1. HOPE

Hope cultivated correctly is one of the antidots for doubt, together with ease and optimism. It is also said that hope is one of the essentials foods that we need as humans. There are four essential different types of food that we need in order to survive and thrive:

  • The first type of food is “bitten food”; this is the physical food – anything that can be bitten and chewed, like a piece of apple;
  • The second type of food is sleep;
  • The third food is hope, and ancient books describe it as such. A horse strayed into the Sahara, in the desert, and wandered the sands for several days in search of water. Even when he is ready to die of thirst, he smells of water; he crawls on his knees over a hill and sees down an oasis with a small freshwater lake. The idea is – no matter how close the end is – the horse will be able to reach the water. Maybe his body is weak, but the hope is enough to sustain him for the last hundred yards. Hope keeps him on his feet, as we all do.
  • The fourth food simply consists of uninterrupted moments of concentration.

The above four types of food are specified in Geshe Michael Roach – “Love Karma”, pages 150-151.

2. GENEROSITY

Generosity is one of the antidotes for greed, together with altruism, benevolence, self-restraint, and unselfishness.

Making sure that every day you feel generous is the base for prosperity, abundance, financial freedom. Having all the money you need when you needed it comes from a feeling of generosity. You feel the power of the feeling of generosity when you think that all that you need is more than you need it and it is always at your disposal.

Some higher thoughts of generosity will appear in your mind when you convince yourself that you can be paid by being you and there is money for you in the world like the oxygen. Some lower thoughts of generosity, but also very efficient, will come to you if you just believe that you have and you will always have more than enough. Believe that life will always take care of anything you need.

3. LOVING-KINDNESS

Surprisingly, loving-kindness is one of the antidotes for panic, together with self-relief and body movement. Loving-kindness is a difficult feeling to feel, especially to feel it every day and choose it every moment, when needed. Monks practice embodying loving-kindness for years, through many actions that they take every day. But even at a lower level, loving-kindness has tremendous benefits on your mind and body.

Loving-kindness is more than kindness. It is said that if you want to really feel what love is, then practice kindness for two years, then loving-kindness for another two years, then you are ready to practice Love. This practice is done in three ways: towards yourself, towards other people and towards life (the entire existence as it is). Be kind to yourself, to other people and to life as it shows right now.

4. CENTERDNESS

Centeredness is one of the antidotes for anxiety, together with self-relief and body movement. Centeredness is again something challenging to do, especially in these times. Some people center themselves in the center of the Earth, of course through visualization. You can do it too. Just imagine that you are connected with a golden light full of pure unconditional love in the center of Earth.

Besides centering yourself on the Planet Earth, I suggest centering your mind and heart in something higher than Earth. This can be done through a combination of connecting with your higher self, with the six Dimension (the formless dimension full of unconditional love) as it is done in theta healing, with the Holy Trinity (Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, God) as it is done in Christianity and many other divine connections as they exist in every culture.

No matter how you connect with a divine higher force (power, grace) is perfect. What I want to draw attention upon is for you to do it. It’s more important, not how you do it, but to just do it. Keep your mind focused (connected) on that higher power, no matter how you define it or believe in it.

5. BRAVERY

Bravery is another word for courage and it is one of the antidotes for fear, together with action and fearlessness. Have courage in these difficult times, be brave. Easily said, harder to be done when fear is knocking on your door. But humans are stronger and more courageous than they know. Due to our modern facilities, we have become comfortable in many ways. When our modern facilities are threatened, our comfort gets disturbed.

But we are not machines to operate only in a certain way. We are humans and there are many strong qualities and abilities in us, that are only dormant. Wake up your human abilities and be amazed by how brave you really are. Inspire yourself to have the courage and you will inspire other people to have courage too.

6. APPRECIATION

Appreciation, believe it or not, is one of the antidotes for hate, together with gentle love and goodwill.

I think a lot of verbal bullying comes from the lack of a temporary ability of one person to appreciate. First, this situation occurs because the person lacks education and does not know how to practice the art of appreciation. Surprisingly, based on the research I’ve done through my Positive Words Research project, this is the main reason why people don’t appreciate more. Second, this situation occurs because people did not train themselves to be strong in their choice between appreciation and bullying/hating/criticizing.

I strongly believe that practicing the art of appreciation can stop bullying, self-hatred, hating others, self-criticizing or criticizing others.

7. ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance and mainly “acceptance of what is” is one of the antidotes for anger, together with humbleness and forgiveness. The faster you accept what is, the faster you cool yourself down, even before you caught fire. Not catching fire is the secret of winning over anger.

Some say that anger is good, it’s transforming energy. Anger makes you change things. A lot of people change the material world with the energy of anger. I agree that anger is good. But I need to point something out and it is very important.

In the scale of consciousness, Dr. David Hawkins presents, below anger, the lower energies of shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, and desire. Therefore if you find yourself in a state of apathy, then anger is good because you will get yourself out of apathy and raise your vibration. Same, if you find yourself in a state of fear, then anger again is good.

Then again, on the same scale of consciousness, the same doctor presents, above anger, the feelings of pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace and enlightenment. If you find yourself at the level of reason and you let yourself feel the anger then you significantly drop in vibration and consciousness. Also, please notice that acceptance is a state above anger. Therefore in order for you to reach the acceptance stage, you need to let go of anger.

8. EMBRACING VULNERABILITY

Embracing vulnerability is one of the antidotes for shame, together with audaciousness and self-worth.

Brene Brown has made amazing research on vulnerability and she briefly explains her research on her viral TEDx talk “The Power of Vulnerability”. Among her many conclusions, she also states: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”

Yes, change is scary. But, also, change is constant. Change is security. You can always trust that change will happen. In the middle of change, when change is happening remember: This too shall pass… this too shall change.

9. FRIENDSHIP

Maybe surprisingly for some people, but friendship is one of the antidotes for boredom, together with fun and playfulness. We like to be friends with people we like. We like to be friends with people with whom we have things in common.

How about expanding our boundaries and starting showing friendship to people we never thought we could be friends with. For example with people from other countries or people from the same country as you, who are returning home. No need to make a spectacular contribution, just small acts of kindness. Like a good welcome comment on a social network, or an encouragement of some kind. Empathy helps you a lot in friendship.

10. CONTENTMENT

Contentment is one of the antidotes for helplessness, together with serenity and ease. Contentment is a little more than thankfulness and less than gratitude, joy or happiness. But it helps a lot. It has a lot to do with being thankful for what you have, but is actually, being content with what you have. A little smile on your face is an ingredient of contentment.

I remember one of the smallest types of meditation that I learned at one point in my life “Sit, don’t talk, smile”. In this meditation: sit still, don’t speak with your mouth, smile and mentally scan all the organs in your body. This is contentment.

Well, I hope you found some inspiration to help you get through these challenging times.

Meditate upon the positive words in this list and try to implement small actions in your life. In this way, these powerful words will become antidots for negative feelings and emotions. For yourself and the people around you.

Copy the link of this article, then send it and inspire a friend!

Learn Positive Words

Leadership That Cultivates Ethics Boost Employee Productivity

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Matching your leadership style with your core principles may be one of the most underrated factors in helping you grow your business. An organizational structure where the vision, management system and actual operations speak one language, has a voice that reaches further than any marketing campaign. It has the capacity to ignite a renewed confidence within personnel and raise the bottom line to new heights.

What would be your answers to these questions about your company?

  • Does your brand reflect your core values?
  • Is the information on your website About Page the truth?
  • Do your inner and external business affairs use the same system?
  • Do you show your employees the same respect you do your clients?

These are just a couple of question to get you thinking about what ethical leadership entails.

Decision Making

There’s a saying that decision making is nothing more than clarifying your core values. When it comes to black and white issues it’s usually relatively easy to choose what would be the right choice for your business. However, when something complicated comes along, you could easily find yourself in murky waters. Exercising your will within these grey areas is definitely not something to take lightly, it requires a deeper level of principles to help bring the wisest decision to the surface.

In the process of making decisions, we are also choosing between the importance of one thing compared to another. Many decisions in our personal lives are made in a similar way where we check and re-check our priority lists. Again, what we value most will also have the highest level of importance.

Few if any decisions in business are ever completely free from scrutiny. Decisions that went against the core principles and values of your business might be hidden inside your company’s archives for years, but never lose their potency to trigger disaster.

Decisions give external expression to the internal evaluation of what we deem most important.

Setting a Standard

Building a foundation for your business goes hand in hand with setting a standard to which you hold yourself and your employees accountable to. It helps everyone to know the core principles and the most important values. It may take some time, in the beginning, to become familiar with your hierarchy. If you use the different elements in your system often enough it will rather sooner than later become an integral part of every man and woman under your brand name.

Culture

What’s interesting is that such a system sets the stage to help define the culture within your organization. It is a natural flow of elements that naturally match and support one another. It is an organic way of creating the behavior that helps drive a culture true to the characteristic of what you stand for.

Leadership, Character, and Integrity

For anyone, at the top leadership position of an organization, finding the balance between resources, productivity and profitability can lead to restlessness or even sleepless nights. Ask any person with some business experience and they will agree, it takes years to build a financially sound business yet only a few moments to destroy it.

One of the lesser known benefits of aligning your public image with your business’ inner workings and core principles is the potential it holds towards guarding your reputation. Isn’t it true that reputation is one of the most challenging elements of your business to pull back on track once it’s been derailed?

It may very well be that maintaining a good reputation isn’t any different than being the person and organization you tell the world you are.

Managing public opinion becomes a much easier job when what you say you are, is actually so.

Although we do not live in a perfect world, we are creatures that aspire to achieve excellence. Sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes come to lesser efficient decisions, among other faults. But in this world filled with the unknown, perfection seems nothing more than an illusion. So, it is rather good that upholding a reputation doesn’t mean striving towards perfection as much as it is in maintaining consistency.

Management System alignment

Seeing that as human beings we are fallible, a Management System comes to play a big role in helping your business steer on the right path. Just like an alarm or calendar notification, a Management System should make it easy for people to know what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

A good Management System

  • it’s available in a documented format (either as hard copy or in electronic format
  • it’s accessible by every employee
  • it’s well organized with a good readability score
  • it’s an integrated system that incorporates each aspect and section of your business
  • it’s in use every business day
  • it’s flexible and employees launch revision request.

 Theory vs Practice

Leadership principles have been a point of discussion for many decades now. From finding the niche point for staff members all the way to bettering client relations. By simply looking at books available on this topic it seems there is almost no space left for a fresh title among the vast numbers of books published throughout the history. Yet, books on leadership are frequently being published worldwide.

Books on how to be a good leader have reached from the biggest of companies to the smallest of businesses. Leadership, in its many different shapes and forms, is a regular topic of conversation between volunteer communities, the general public, as well as those in education. Here is the list of the Financial Times’s Best Business books (https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/) in the category Leadership and Management.

Knowledge and implementation

As with any level of knowledge we acquire in life, it is the practical implementation that determines whether our knowledge will be useful or not. Every person who has ever read a good book should know, reading something doesn’t mean you’re applying it to your life. It may be that putting some of the amazing pieces of information into practice would be more difficult than we at first imagined.

It is exactly this point – the practical implementation – that set organizations apart. On paper, knowledge can make perfect sense. It is when we try to implement it that we find our current system can either be a hindrance in our path or make the change as easy as walking.

Your leadership style too will impact the degree of difficulty or ease the organization can transition to integrate a foundation that protects your business, employees, and clients against unethical behavior are worth the effort.

Alignment

Here are a couple of elements you can consider integrating as part of one system. Align them with the vision, mission, and strategy of the organization. This will help your organization to speak as one voice. This is where ‘word of mouth’ gets a foothold.

  • Management System
  • Website
  • Social Media Platforms
  • Vision
  • Mission
  • Strategy
  • Objectives
  • Targets
  • Finance
  • HR
  • Resources
  • Operations
  • Company Culture

Different Leadership Styles

Look at the different scenarios around the styles of leadership below and see if it can help you run your business with better productivity. Some leaders can have a combination of these factors present in their leadership style. Each one of these styles has an impact on the productivity and profitability of the organization.

1. Visionary Leader

A visionary leader has the ability to share his hopes and dreams for the business and puts a system in place that supports the people working in it to efficiently reach the objectives in growing the business. Communication is clear, there are no or little blurry lines between different responsibilities.

2. The Dynamic Team Leader

Imagine, a style of leadership in touch with the actual work that needs to be done. A leader such as this has reasonable expectations for their team. This leader involves the team when considering changes to the system. The team is encouraged and draws from their practical insight and accumulative experience over the years. Such a leader taps into the energy of the team dynamic.

3. The Chop & Change Leader

This is a leader who likes to have full control and then do as he pleases. If you are a leader who wants full control and literally chop and change as you like, it’s going to be very difficult to pinpoint what your business requires. It might even be impossible for you to build a system geared toward supporting profitability and productivity. This leadership style is also very stressful from an employee’s perspective leading to further losses. A job where things can literally be flipped upside-down the following day leads to unmotivated employees and unreliable delivery.

4. The Ego Leader

This is a style of leadership that expects something additional from employees without being willing to compensate for it. And then complain about it. Read this article by Rudi Dalman from PeopleHR on leadership ego and that will give a better idea.

5. The Periodic Leader

There is the type of leader who periodically remembers that he is the boss of a number of people. He drops in one morning before golf, dish out orders left, right and center and runs out before any staff member has the opportunity to tell him that three of his orders can’t be acted upon because they are conflicting instructions.

About the Author: Her name is Matilda Prinsloo and you can contact her at
ServingJoy@outlook.com.

Positive Words Research – Leadership That Cultivates Ethics Can Boost Employee Morale And Productivity

Leadership That Cultivates Ethics Can Boost Employee Morale And Productivity

Cultivate Exceptional Writing Skills for Success in College

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For the past few years, the popularity of technical sciences grew significantly. Modern students are no longer interested in writing stories or drawing pictures. They are more focused on revealing the secrets of programming, creating the codes of applications, and considerations on how to build another Tesla car that will surpass the success of Elon Musk.  However, no matter their intentions and expectations, they still need to understand how to write in an effective way.

Today, the words still have the same power as they had 20, 50 or 100 years ago. They help to reach the success by making prominent statements. They help to explain the results of the most complicated technical experiment to everyone, and they break all the boundaries between different nations. Thus, even though you have chosen technical science, it does not mean that you have chosen to forget how to write.

Building exceptional writing skills for success in college and beyond is essential to everyone.  However, here the question arises: how to cultivate this skill? In this article, we are going to talk about making students love writing and turning their ability to write to a totally new level. 

Why does a student need to write perfectly

The first question that students may ask is why exactly they need to work on their writing skill. The matter is that still being students they need to write a lot, starting from the essays and up to dissertations and scholarship papers. Thus, they must understand the peculiarities of each type of academic paper and additionally have an idea of how they should use words properly to reach the desired effect.

These skills never come in theory. In order to write well, a student must practice a lot. This will help to determine weak points in writing, the common problems that appear, and even develop their own writing style.

9 tips to improve writing skills

It goes without saying, that practice should always rely upon the theory. So before you start to work on the writing skill, you need to check the list of recommendations that will help you choose a proper direction.

1. Make reading your common activity

Reading is not only about expanding your knowledge and building confidence in different spheres. It also helps to build a proper foundation for a sufficient writing. The more you read, the more writing styles, new words, approaches to story building you meet. Do pay attention to such details if you want to improve your writing.

2. Make writing a daily habit

Writing will not be a problem for you if you make it your habit. Here’s everything like with sports. The first couple of weeks it seems to be too difficult, the next month you start to enjoy the process, and two weeks more and you cannot live without that. Write as frequently as it’s possible, and you will notice the results soon.

3. Try different styles

If you have strong intentions to turn writing into a talent, it would be better to give a try to different writing styles. In this way, you will be able to determine what works great for you, and which of the styles suits you more.

4. Read headlines of magazine covers

If you want to write strongly, you need to find out the strategies used by famous copywriters and journalists. Just pay attention to the magazine covers. In fact, they have everything you need to know about the most effective ways of creating content. All of them are catchy, and you would admit that even if the idea itself is not interesting to you, but you still want to read this article due to a strong headline.

5. Boosting your grammar skills

Many students think that grammar is not so important when it comes to the writing in adult life. However, when you compose an email to your business partner, you always pay attention to the smallest details, including commas and tenses used. So it’s better to start improving your grammar now to be able to write flawlessly and create content that has perfect ideas and perfect form.

6. Enroll some writing courses

If you have strong intentions to become a great writer, take some courses where all technical aspects of creating a perfect text are explained. Of course, you need to get ready to prepare some home assignments and learn the materials that will help you to build a perfect understanding of good writing. But if you have enough time for that it definitely worth the efforts.

7. Find a writing partner

If you feel that writing is too complicated for you, and you can do nothing with that, you need to find someone who will inspire you to keep writing no matter what happens. It will be better if your writing partner either has the same intentions as you or already achieved some prominent results in writing.

8. Learn not to get distracted

One of the main enemies of good writing is distractions. Unfortunately, today there are too many of them, starting for the messengers and up to a noisy city that just leaves you no chances to stay focused. Thus, you need to either eliminate these distractions or to find a way not to pay attention to them.

9. Give a try to editing and proofreading

In some cases, to start to write perfectly all you need is to start noticing the mistakes. When you try yourself in editing and proofreading, you will be able to discover the common mistakes of students, improve your grammar, and build and understanding of a well-organized and perfectly-structured text. Additionally, this will help you proofread your writing in future so you won’t need to use any additional services and enjoy the high quality of your papers.

A love for writing is what you need to cultivate. Only some individuals were born with the passion for writing, but most of us must work hard to gain this passion. However, when you start to get the results of your work on writing, you start to understand that you’ve done everything right and now you got rid of all writing problems.

Do you have some other ideas on how to make students love writing? Leave your comments and suggestions to share your experience of cultivating writing!

About the Author

Lori Wade is a freelance content writer for Thriving Writer who is interested in a wide range of spheres from education and online marketing to entrepreneurship. She is also an aspiring tutor striving to bring education to another level like we all do. If you are interested in writing, you can find her on Twitter or Google+ or find her on other social media. Read and take over Lori’s useful insights!

Positive Words Research – How to Cultivate Exceptional Writing Skills for Success in College and Beyond

Cultivate Exceptional Writing Skills