Why Is Personal Coaching So Popular?Written by Will Craig
Personal coaching might be most easily described as customized self help books and tapes, brought to life. Coaching is equivalent of attending a motivational seminar where speaker only talks about you and how to make most of your gifts and talents. Coaching creates an environment where you stay positive and charged up–not for a day or two–but week after week.Ask 10 different coaches why this burgeoning profession is coming into prominence and you're likely to get 10 different answers. If we take a long view of where society has taken us as individuals over past 100 years, need for and benefits of personal coaching start to become apparent. Decline of Family At turn of last century, we were dependent upon one another for our very existence. In spite of our pioneering spirit–or maybe because of enormous risks we were taking in blazing trails across this new country–we needed each other for our most basic of needs. As we skip through subsequent decades and observe morphic changes of society, we notice a gradual disconnection of tight bonds previously necessary to survive. The traditional family unit shrinks from supportive environment of multigenerations living under one roof to scarce reality of single parents barely able to make ends meet... both financially and emotionally. The answer to question "Why Coaching?" could be a simple one. It may be our attempt at partial restoration of safe environment we once enjoyed as an interdependent family unit. Sense of Community Even if multigenerational families under one roof are not answer in today's society, you'd have to agree pendulum certainly has swung other way just a little too far. We interact with grocery checkers, bank tellers, and convenience store clerks without so much as looking them in eye. We see neighbors who have lived near us for months or even years and we don't even know their names. This conscious disconnect is often justified by pace of our lives and–ironically–the needs of our family. This fast food equivalent of Family and Community–with fries on side–is not nourishing our body, nor our mind, much less our soul.
| | Getting Started In Mystery Shopping (The Right Way)Written by Melanie Jordan
One of most common questions I get from people who are looking to get started in mystery shopping is "how do I get started?" If you intend to make mystery shopping a real career rather than just getting "paid to shop" it's important to get started off on right foot. Mystery shopping can either be road to overworked and underpaid, or if you do it correctly, it can be quite lucrative for a legitimate, work-at-home, flexible job.Unfortunately, most common error newbie mystery shoppers make is that they go berserk applying to mystery shopping company web sites left and right. Signing up with companies is last thing you want to do when you are just starting out--unless you want to be a new mystery shopper with sore fingers saying "I applied to 100 companies but I didn't hear anything". Going directly to companies, especially if you don't have any, or have very little mystery shopping experience, is a waste of time in my opinion. Most companies are inundated with requests from newbies wanting to become mystery shoppers; what they want are experienced shoppers they can count on. Think of a "real world" job search. If you just apply to companies all over place without any experience, or knowing if they even have any job openings, it's going to be a fruitless effort. Another big reason why applying to company web sites is a waste of time is that largest and best companies outsource their assignments to schedulers--the middlemen of industry. So companies don't bother going through their own databases. The real way to get started in mystery shopping is to get connected to schedulers in a way that makes you stand out from crowd and gets assignments coming to you. Okay, you ask, how do I get connected to schedulers? I go over many ways to do this in great detail, along with lots of other great tips and techniques in my book "The Perfect Work-At-Home Job: Mystery Shopping". But here's one way:
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