hi ilanders...

been a very long time... happy to meet u guys again.... its been 6 months...

so belated NEW YEAR wishes and Makara Sankaranthi wishes...

It started on that fateful day

with a very simple "HEY"

we carried on talking

and got close from there


friends like you

are very few

our friendship is faithful

strong and true


when i need you

your always there

i value your opinion

'cause i do care


theres another poem thats very true

for special people like you

I'm Glad i met you

and that our friendship is true


"of all the friends I've ever met

your the one i wont forget

so if i die before you do

I'll go to heaven and wait for you"

i thot this poem would be very apt for all ma friends in iland.....
so WISHING YOU GUYS A VERY HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY.......

be ma friend always guys.......

  DO YOU consider yourself well equipped in presentation skills? Or does the very thought of a presentation set the alarm bells ringing in your mind?

If yes, don't worry. You are not alone and there are many others who feel the same way as you do.

Sunita experiences a dry mouth, sweaty palms and feels terribly sick before client presentations. Once, Guarav's mind went blank as he rose to speak. Now he shudders at the thought of public speaking, lest he forgets what to say and makes a fool of himself.

There are scores of others who are nervous speakers and struggle for the right words to express themselves.

If you are a nervous speaker too, the piece of good news is that nerves are common to everybody and can be put under manageable limits through change of your perception. Prof John Adair in his book Effective Communication says, "Some degree of nervous tension is a good thing. It gets the adrenalin flowing and prepares your mind and body for a superlative performance."

Presentations or addresses to an audience using audio-visual aids are here to stay. They have become an indispensable medium to communicate our thoughts, ideas, proposals, and achievements. Business presentations are no doubt a part of the job for marketing and sales persons. However in today's computerised, result oriented work environment, professionals from all walks of life are required to give presentations at some point or the other in their careers.

So brace yourself to fight rather than flee when a fight or flight situation arises. Like any other performance, a presentation needs effort and hard work to reap success. Here the effort can be characterised into

Designing the content

Delivering it with aplomb before the audience.

While designing the content remember the A, B, C of a good draft.

Articulate: A brief introduction of yourself and an overview of the topic of the presentation would be the best way to begin. Next, the subject matter should be explained in a focused manner well supported by slides. Make sure that the slides are not overcrowded with information.

Brief: Make the presentation simple, short and easy to understand as far as possible.

Clear: Be very clear about the purpose, the objective of the presentation and what you intend to convey or achieve through it.

Show the draft to your seniors, get their nod and incorporate any changes suggested by them. Complement yourself for completing the first part of the ordeal successfully.

Now it is time to rehearse as many times as you can before the D-day. Nothing can replace practice in attaining perfection. While feeding the draft to your memory, realise that your memory is much more capable and reliable than what you perceive it to be. Leave behind all your apprehensions about the brain going blank at the nick of the moment. Try to remember some of the oldest events, incidents, dates, names of acquaintances and places you have visited or birthdays of your cousins. Pat yourself for having the best memory and take on the world with rejuvenated confidence.

Reassure your mind

Unpleasant symptoms show up in the body when our brain perceives some danger. So it is pertinent to tell the brain that the audiences are not hostile. Reassure your mind that the audiences are very friendly, that they are there to listen and encourage you and definitely not to criticise you.

A few mantras

Remember, nerves are normal and even the best of speakers are nervous before their speeches. Their greatness lies in training their brain not to succumb to nerves but to overcome them!

Simple deep breathing exercises can go a long way in easing the tension.

Talk slowly in order to synchronize your thoughts and utterances. This way you can avoid stumbling over your words.

Look at the audience more frequently. Even if you are reading from a script make it sound more natural by not losing the eye contact with the audience.

It is always good to summarise the points in a nutshell while you conclude; it refreshes the memory of the audience and imprints the crux of the matter on their minds.

End the presentation on a positive note and do not forget to thank the audience for listening to you.

So, next time you are asked to give a presentation, replace nerves with a dash of verve and conquer the world with confidence.

  A roomful of individuals is not a group. To be successful, a group requires training in group skills, the opportunity to practice, and a lot of patience from its facilitators. As a group unfolds, it goes through a number of fairly predictable developmental stages. With the proper nurturing, groups evolve and mature just like people.

A basic understanding of these developmental stages helps us form realistic expectations for our group's performance. We also get to know how to support the transition from one stage to the next. While some group behaviours are predictable, they are different in various ways.

A group is never really completely finished with a given stage. While it is helpful for group evolution to keep the activities appropriate to the stage of group development, each stage may be revisited over and over again, if and when necessary. Losses occur in the membership, and each person's level of involvement changes as he re-examines his role in the group. New topics bring forward new leaders, conflicts are resolved, and individual members continually rediscover each other as their facades drop and their commonality is revealed. As a result, the group cohesion grows, functioning improves, and the group evolves. Each time a stage is revisited, the group brings new perspectives, new skills, and increased solidarity to face the challenge at hand.

Forming/Beginning: In the early stages, the new members of the group may feel lonely and even anxious. There will be several questions to answer, such as "will I have homework, who are others, will I fit in, will I be embarrassed, will it be fun?" Self-esteem issues will be in high gear. Those with low self-worth are apprehensive and wary of this mode of working. The confident members on the contrary look forward to the experience as an opportunity to grow. There is an intense scrutiny of appearances, language, or anything that helps determine "where do I belong in this group, who is dangerous, who has the power, and what will happen?" These questions need to be addressed at the early stage of the group formation. People must get to know each other and understand the ground rules. After some early 'getting to know you' activities, the new group can focus its energies on deciding the topics to be explored and the initial guidelines and rules.

Storming/Struggling: Often, just when things seem to be cruising along weirdness begins to break out everywhere.

From the beginning, everyone would have been on his best behaviour, trying to live up to group ideals. This means that feelings of frustration, anger, and discomfort with aspects of the group or with behaviour have been brewing the secret. Struggle for power and control also start to emerge. Members have a general sense of where they fit in the power structure and begin to test the system. This is the stage at which group formation gets interesting. We have to remember that the emergence of conflict is a positive indicator that the group is getting stronger, not falling apart.

Conflict in the group represents an opportunity to build understanding and acceptance and strengthen group cohesion. Within the context of the purpose statement, guidelines and rules of group, members must be encouraged to value conflict and find constructive ways to deal with their predictable differences.

Norming/Solidarity: After group members have some experience with conflict, and more importantly, realise they have a system for dealing with future feelings of discomfort or fear, they feel safe and trust more willingly. In this stage the group really begins to see itself as a group, a 'we'. This stage aims at dealing with and facilitating positive feelings.

Focus on practicing the skills of interpersonal support, affirmation, and being present for others without fixing or giving advice.

Naming individual success and pointing out the group's increased ability to handle problems build a sense of group solidarity.

Performing/Accomplishing: In this stage the group members mature. They have a positive identity as members of group. This is important for success.

Members would have experienced intellectual and emotional benefits from their environment. They feel a personal commitment to the other members and responsibility for the life of the group.

At this stage the group uses and refines its self-management skills and becomes increasingly proficient. It's an exciting period. At times, the group can experience the set- backs, but they need to be overcome.

Closing/Ending: At some point the group will have to disperse. Whatever length of time the group has been together, this can be a difficult and painful process. But life is full of endings. It's precisely because of pain of endings that this stage should not be skipped. Learning to deal with losses in healthy ways is a primary gift of group membership. Closure should include both acknowledgement of pain and a celebration of what has occurred. A final group evaluation can be made and it can be asked for reports of the biggest challenges for individuals of group, the best moments, personal accomplishments, or ex-pressions of gratitude and appreciation. But we must remember that endings and losses are emotionally messy. They don't have to be done perfectly and should hurt a little because they are the other side of our love and caring.

  Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its mother's womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this position it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then the mother giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the reality of life.

In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a newborn giraffe learns its first lesson.

The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels.

When it doesn't get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the calf stands for the first time on its wobbly legs.

Then the mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks it off its feet again. Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all enjoy young giraffes, and they'd get it too, if the mother didn't teach her calf to get up quickly and get with it.

The late Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.

Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these exceptional people. He said, "I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to work.

"They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do."

  Three Steps Towards Friendship

Friendship and friends continue to remain central to our lives. The relationship that we share with our friends is grounded in a mutual concern as our friends help us in shaping up our personalities as well. Even in this age of online social networking and ecards, the need of expanding the network of friends, whether online or offline remains a primary concern for people. We may have a very vague understanding of what makes a friend but we all want to have a good many number of friends around us.

Research has shown that the quality and nature of your friends are one of the key influencing factors in achieving happiness, self esteem, and satisfaction. Friends often affect the health and energy of a person as well. More and more people are increasingly turning towards their friends for support and mutual sharing rather than communicating to their relatives; and this sociological phenomenon has escalated the desire to make more friends. Though friendship is an impulsive relationship developed between two autonomous individuals marked by a voluntary, emotional and mutual concern, but there are certain steps, which, if implemented can win you friends or at least help you get close to those whom you want to make your friends.

The first step to make friends with someone is to make them like you. If they don’t like you in the first place, it is unlikely that they’ll be eager to become your friends. To let someone know that you are genuinely interested in them, simple gestures like a little smile and calling him by his name can lay the basic foundation. To make the other person feel important you need to be a good listener and encourage the other person to talk. Give your honest and sincere opinion but do not overtly criticize or make fun of him or her.

 

The second step of making someone your friend is to develop a mutual consideration between each other. You need to share his or her perspective and for that it is necessary for you to develop an inclination to see things from the other person’s point of view. To become best of friends you must show a genuine concern and consideration for your friend’s desires and opinions.

The third and final step towards friendship is to show your unconditional support and encouragement towards your friend. Moreover, you also need to be very clear about your expectations from your friend. If what you expect from the person you want to befriend, matches with what that person can and want to contribute in friendship, the developing friendship between you and your friend is assured to flourish, making both of you gratified with mutual emotional bonding.

Friendship has overwhelming significance on both social and individual level. Friendship doesn’t only provide us with emotional as well as utilitarian support but it also helps us to improve our personal identities. Friendship remains familiar yet quite ambiguous for our deeper understanding of this elusive relationship but then again, friends remain the most important ingredients in the recipe of life!

   There are few jobs that don't require us to interact with colleagues in a team. For the most part, we need to work cohesively with others at our workplaces to achieve the organisational goals.

But how many of us can really claim to be good teammates? Here are a few ways to help you become a more effective team member.

Whether it is meetings, brainstorming sessions, conference calls or any other activities, it is important that you participate wholeheartedly. If someone puts forward an idea, ask questions without restraint.

Says Sunita Chauhan (name changed), a developer with a large IT firm, "One of my colleagues had this annoying habit of keeping quiet during meetings, but would pester others later with his doubts and make snide remarks on decisions that had been taken. His productivity and attitude were so poor that he was assigned to another project." Speak your mind freely but, of course, remember to be inoffensive.

Keep the common goal in mind
The formal definition of teamwork is 'cooperative effort by the members of a group or team to achieve a common goal.' The key words here are -- 'cooperative effort' and 'common goal'. Often, individual members of a team seem to venture in their own directions, without considering the overall goal of the project.

Keep in mind that companies are working on moving towards team-based appraisals. A prominent engineering firm is adopting this approach, in which your appraisal will earn you extra points (or negative ones) depending on how your team has performed.

Be open-minded
Often, you may put forth ideas that will be mulled over by the team as a whole and may eventually be rejected. Be broad-minded and confident enough to accept this. Use this opportunity to get feedback on your ideas such that it helps improve your thinking process for the future.

Mrinalini, who works in an advertising agency, says, "There were one or two members in my team who believed their ideas were always the best. When those were not accepted, they sulked and landed up adversely affecting the team morale. They even managed to convince some others that the approach being taken was wrong."

Be clear about your role
At the outset itself, the project leader should assign specific responsibilities to people keeping in mind their relevant skills.

Abhijit Sinha, senior developer in an IT consultancy, says, "When my project started, there were no clear demarcations of roles. Things were going haphazardly, with people just taking up whatever work they liked. As the seniormost person on the team, I landed up doing a large chunk of the work, in addition to guiding youngsters and planning the schedules. I discussed this with the project manager in great detail and he finally sorted out the issue by assigning me the role of team leader and issuing specific tasks to other members."

Help your teammates and your leader
If your peer is stuck with a problem he or she can't resolve alone, assist him in solving the issue by all means. Of course, this doesn't mean you do all his work for him or even that you neglect your own duties completely.

One of the best ways to help your supervisor is to keep him or her updated at all times about the percentage completion of your work. It may be a short daily e-mail, or even a daily status meeting by which you can do this.

Don't be the dominating one
If one person takes up the floor and tries to steamroll others with his ideas, it can only have a negative effect. The team member who does this is usually the most annoying person, who tries to force his ideas and opinions on everyone.

Support your leader
All team members must support their project-in-charge whole-heartedly. They need not be yes-men but, once a decision is taken, they must rally behind him or her with complete support. This is especially true if your leader is a woman.

As a female project leader, I have often noticed a slight tendency on the part of male employees to resent having to report to a lady. They either feel uncomfortable about the idea or are just sceptical of her capabilities.

Don't forget to have fun!
A team should always take the opportunity to meet in a relaxing unofficial environment where there is no talk of a project or its problems, even if it means just going to the office canteen for a cup of coffee.

And always remember the other popular expansion of TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More.

If you want to be taken seriously at the office, here are a few pointers to set you in the right direction.

If you want your work to be respected and your ideas to be accepted, then you must ensure that people take you seriously. You already know that it takes hard work, honesty and integrity to get ahead in your career, but for others to see you as a serious dude and not a joker, there are specific actions which you must take. Here they are.

Don’t be a yes-man
Kiss-ups can be sniffed out from across the office. The favours you may gain from nodding robotically will be short lived, empty and, ultimately, ungratifying. If your gut disagrees with something, voice your views without fear. But, remember: Keep your arguments civil and measured, always respecting the opinions of others. 

Be well-spoken
Yes, some bosses swear like sailors and are still respected, but they possess a unique strength of character that lets them get away with it - don’t assume that you can. Keep your language clean and your sentences crisp. Say what you need to say without rambling, and resist the urge to chime in all the time. This means that you shouldn’t interrupt people and you needn’t voice your opinion about everything. Instead, listen to others and consider their counsel. Let them finish their thoughts and hear them out. You don’t have to reply right away, so take the time to think out your answers. 

Be punctual
Make a habit of keeping others waiting for you and you’ll lose their respect. After all, how can you be trusted with major projects if people can’t trust you to show up on time? By respecting the schedules of others, you’ll earn their respect in return.

Do your homework

Ignorance is one of the professional world’s least respectable traits - if not the worst. No man can be taken seriously if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you want your ideas to count, be better informed than everyone else. Stay up to speed with current trends and never stop learning. Being prepared will help you in your proposals. Before pitching an idea, know the exact message that you want to deliver. Consider what you want others to think, what objections they might have and how you can ease their minds. Collecting all your information and knowledge beforehand will reinforce your pitches and presentations, showing a serious, professional approach to business.

Be a worthy ambassador

When you’re sent somewhere on behalf of the company, you become its ambassador. This applies too, at after-office parties. There is a protocol to be followed. How many ambassadors will spill dirty secrets about their countries just to get them off their chests? If you want your company to look like the best, you have to look like the best. Speak proudly and admirably about who you work for. If you need to badmouth, that’s what your drinking buddies are for.

Show results

Big talkers might make an impression at first, but they only sustain it until they fail to show the goods. If you believe in your abilities (which you should), then don’t be afraid to act on them. Take the initiative on what you feel is the right course of action, then stick to it. Sometimes rules can be broken and protocol can be sidestepped. Follow every declaration with real action. Better yet, promise little and deliver a lot, more than you said you would. Those who go the extra mile on their own are rare, highly admired and always respected.

Don’t brag

You may have accomplished a lot, but wait before singing your own praises. There’s something to be said about a man who lets others discover his merits on their own. Boast about your achievements and, at best, you’ll receive envy - at worst, resentment.

Keep your cool

True leaders show their mettle in times of great stress. There are those who break down and despair, and those who stay focused and shift gears to quickly find a solution. Whatever happens, don’t explode or throw your arms up in resignation. Keep your mind clear at the worst of times and you’ll be able to handle anything. There’s nothing more respectable than calm under fire.

Dress up, not down

Since so much is predicated upon appearances, the quality of your dress will play a large role in how others determine your quality as a man. Take the usual dress code of your company and dress at the top of it. We’re talking crisp shirts, good trousers and shiny shoes - minimum! Even if your company tolerates shorts and sandals, hold yourself to a higher standard. Don’t overdress, though; you’ll look pretentious and a tad ridiculous.

Hold your liquor

Even at office parties, where employees are encouraged to cut loose, you should watch your drink count. Even if it’s a nonprofessional event, your coworkers will still remember if you grab the boss’s wife and call her a plump turkey. If you know you’re no damn good when you’re drunk, then cut yourself off after a few drinks.

Keep your private life private

You're at the office for work, not therapy. Talking about private matters makes others uncomfortable and will shatter the serious image you want to portray.