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Successful people are able to develop strong, good relationships. Need some help with building a new one? Use the following advices.

Use the first name.
During the conversation, use the first name of the person you are relating to. It is probably the nicest sound for his or her ears. Use it quite often, but don’t exaggerate. It must fit naturally into talk.

Find common subject for conversations.
This one works really well. If you find the common subject, you are on a good path. The conversation goes into more relaxed, comfortable manner. You can discuss about it for a very long time, exchange your experiences, share emotions while building strong connection. You will always be able to use this subject to reestablish conversation, strengthen your relationship or rebuild it.

Smile.
Simple, obvious and effective. Relax and smile. If you smile, you are perceived as a positive person. If you are a positive person, other people would more likely build a relationship with you. Smile is also very ‘infectious’. You smile to other person, the other person usually responds with smile. When he or she is smiling, you are in positive mood (of course I think about natural smile). When you both are in positive mood, developing a relationship is much easier and more entertaining.

Talk about yourself.
It is especially good while you are establishing a relationship with shy or introvert person. You have to take a lead and do work for both of you. Try to focus on some easy and funny things from your life, best if packed with action and emotions. It can be your hobby, sport, movies or restaurant where you have recently eaten a great dish. Don’t go to deep into details. Observe your listener. You can’t make him or her yawning. From time to time, try to stimulate, by asking for opinion or advice.

Be honestly interested in that person.
This point looks like a contradiction to the previous one. It is depending on type of person you are relating to. Some people talk a lot and the only thing you have to do is to ‘trigger’ them and then listen, while other prefer to listen to you, what means you have to put more effort to ‘open’ them and make them talking. But this advice works almost in every situation. Stop talking about yourself and start asking questions. Be interested in person you are building relationship with. Remember that this is not a quiz show. Don’t ask tons of short questions, jumping from one subject to another. For instance, you can ask about passions. Honestly be interested in what your interlocutor has to say about it. People love to talk about things they like to do and everybody will appreciate if you are a good listener for their stories.

Petr Hotovec runs his blog THA GURU about losing weight. His goal is to lose 110 lbs in 3 years. I wish him success.

I like the idea of using a blog as a diary. This way it helps you to track progress on your path to success and additionally you get a support from community. Of course it also boosts motivation by putting some pressure on you.

Moreover, Petr is promoting his blog by running a simple contest. If you want to win 25$ easily, just sign in for latest news and post a comment on this page. The contest lasts till end of February.

Good luck.

In one of my previous post, I wrote the very important law of money.

To gain wealth, you must spend less than you earn.

The conclusion is that, if I want to gain wealth faster or stop losing it, I have to spend less and/or earn more. I’m sure so far everything is clear.

Spend less.

What is important about spending less is that there is a line that we can’t pass. The limit is when our expenditure equals zero. It is not possible to reduce money we spend to this level, while keeping some living standards and of course it is unreal to go below zero. This is good to keep in mind. Savings are not always enough to cure our finances.

Cutting my expenditures is very important to me. If I save more money, I can invest it. The more money I can invest, more I will earn soon. Therefore, decreasing my expenditures today means higher earnings tomorrow. One dollar saved today gives more dollars in future.

But there is one issue, which can give negative output. It is possible, that while trying to spend less too hard, you will decrease your comfort of life. This is what you should avoid. Lower comfort of life would negatively influence your health, mood, productivity, creativity and consequently – your ability to earn more money. My advice is to look for possibilities, where you can spend less without decreasing your comfort of life.

Earn more.

Contrary to spending less, theoretically there is no upper limit, how much we can earn.

By increasing our income, we are both able to invest more and/or to increase comfort of our life. Both can output with increased earning in future, which gives us kind of feedback loop. Of course, it looks very nice on a paper (or screen), but in real life it needs a lot of effort and/or time to run it well. Our target is to effectively boost this mechanism.

Few most obvious ways to increase our earnings:

• negotiate raise or promotion at your job,
• find new and better paid job,
• start freelancing,
• …or very general, but my favorite - develop additional source of income.

Have other interesting ideas? Please, let me know.

Finally I added ‘About me’ page. You can access it from top menu or by clicking here.

If you need to write your own ‘About me’, I advise you to check your favorite bloggers pages. Of course, don’t do the exact copy. Look for interesting and inspiring ideas, which fit to you. For each ‘About me’ page, answer for the following questions. What do I like and what do I dislike on this certain page? What was interesting and what was boring? Why?

Now, you should know what to put on your page and what to avoid.

I also recommend taking advantage of Problogger’s tips. Simple and effective.