Christmas Present Ideas 2010 – Where to Find Inspiration

Where and how do you find inspiration for Christmas present ideas when you’re still sporting your holiday tan and sorting out your photo album?

Each year, we are forced to start our Christmas shopping earlier by a variety of factors;

  • Supermarket shelves start filling up with Christmas lights, chocolates and stocking fillers as soon as the children go back to school, even before Halloween items have made an appearance.
  • Your hairdresser asks you to make your Christmas appointment during your visit in early September.
  • Your local butcher has replaced his BBQ order book for his turkey order book.
  • Great Aunt Nora is asking what your children want for Christmas – they’ve only just come back off their summer holidays! Christmas seems a long way off for them!
  • Adverts appear on TV showing happy families playing with the latest gadgets surrounded by lots of snow!
  • Hotels and restaurants banners are everywhere advertising Christmas parties and Christmas day meals – and there’s limited places!

And it’s only September!!!

So what’s the easiest and most reliable way to source top Christmas gifts for 2010?

The quickest way without a doubt is the internet, but you need to be careful who you are buying from. On the run up to Christmas, a number of rogue websites make an appearance, their only aim to grab your money and run without delivering anything to your door!

However, with a careful bit of checking, you can make all your x-mas present purchases in one place and avoid the crush of Christmas shoppers!

Top tips on where to buy great Christmas gifts:

If you need inspiration for that perfect Christmas present, search on Google for “top Christmas gifts” or similar terms.

Click through to a few websites on the first couple of pages to get a feel for what is on offer. If the product you click on takes you through to a reputable website such as Amazon, you know you’re probably in safe hands.

Look for websites that offer x-mas present ideas for all the family and make as many purchases as you can from the same website, saving on postage costs.

Sometimes less is more – the more on offer, the more difficult the choice. Whilst you want plenty of choice, you don’t want to spend longer going through each page on a website than you would if you went to the local shopping centre.

If your child wants that popular Christmas toy that’s on every child’s Christmas wish list, enter the specific toy in Google e.g. “Jet Pack Buzz Lightyear.”

This will narrow down your search considerably and then it’s more a question of who has got the item in stock. Don’t hang around – grab that toy while you can!

If you need inspiration for top kids toys this Christmas, visit the Toy Retailers Association The Toy Retailers Association produces its Dream Toys list each October (27th for 2010). This is the toy retail industry’s authoritative body who reveal their top Christmas toy predictions for this year based on 50 years on consumer knowledge and tracking the latest trends. Retailers then go into a frenzy as they try to stock up to meet expected demand.

Christmas shopping should be fun, whichever month you do it in!

The best tip is to jump on the band wagon and get your Christmas shopping done early and then sit back and watch all the Christmas adverts, content in the knowledge you’re done and dusted for another year!

Happy Shopping!

How To Obtain/Use Influence To Win More Negotiations

Do you consider the role influence has in your negotiations? Do you know how to use influence in your negotiations once you have obtained it? If you wish to improve your negotiation skills and outcomes, you’ll find the following insight about obtaining and using influence in your negotiations to be very insightful.

Influence Relating to Negotiations:

In a negotiation, the negotiator that casts the most influence will usually come out ahead in the negotiation. That’s due to the fact that influence allows a person to persuade another individual to follow and/or adopt his perspective and point of view. That leads the person possessing less influence to move in the direction of the influencer. The one variable in this scenario is the degree that the person with the lesser amount of influence is willing to be led by the influencer. Thus, when seeking to influence someone, consider to what degree they’re open to following your request, based on the insight and reasoning you give them to do so. If the lesser of the two is not willing to be led, your efforts to cast your influence will be unsuccessful.

Acquiring and Using Influence:

So now that you have a better perspective of the role influence has and plays in a negotiation, how can you acquire it? There are multiple ways to do so. I’ll discuss two of those ways.

One, cast the clout you’re perceived as having. This is done based on those that you’re around (e.g. if you’re in the company of high-profile people, one will assume you’re a high-profile person). If that’s important to the other negotiator and he wishes to obtain such status, you’ll have the trappings of influence needed to inspire him to follow your directions.

Two, you can gain influence by controlling the way the other negotiator thinks; this is not brainwashing. The way to do this is to force the other negotiator to question his current state of beliefs and have him confront them as to their validity. Then suggest how he can improve his plight by adopting a new belief, one that you lead him to. Once he relinquishes his current beliefs and adopts yours, you will have gained influence with him.

Enhancing Your Influence:

To enhance your usage of influence in a negotiation, enhance your ability to accurately interpret the opposing negotiator’s body language. To be specific, observe his verbal and nonverbal reactions to your attempts to influence him (i.e. him leaning towards or away from you indicating acceptance or non-acceptance of a thought or offer/counter offer, position of his hands up or down when he responds to such offers, etc.). By observing such nonverbal signals, you’ll gain insight into the degree your attempts to influence him is taking hold.

As you can see, influence can be obtained and used for the purpose you establish for the negotiation. By having and using influence, you’ll have an intrinsic advantage from which to make your offerings, which will enhance your efforts of coming out ahead in the negotiation… and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

How Your Clutter Stops You From Living In The Present

Despite the fact that your clutter is obviously around you in the here and now, one of the reasons why having a good declutter session makes you feel great is because most clutter is anchored in the past. So as you exist with all these remnants of your past in your immediate surroundings, you are unconsciously holding yourself in that past. Which means that you’re stopping yourself from moving forward in a lighter persent and towards a freer future.

Most people’s clutter is a mixture of their ancient history, their middle past and their recently lived present. It can be most interesting to take a look at your own clutter and see if there’s a period of your life which you’re holding onto particularly strongly. There may not be – you may find that your clutter is a mishmash of past life stages and more recent procrastinations.

The reason why clutter accumulates in the way that it does is because most of it doesn’t actually start out as clutter at all. Think about your own clutter and you’ll probably realize that most of it started out as something useful, valuable, attractive, creative, supportive, positive…

As time passes, though, what happens is that those valuable and attractive items simply get out of date. Over the months and years they reach a point where they’re no longer useful or valuable to you. But instead of recognizing that fact, you hang onto them out of habit. Or just in case. Or for sentimental reasons.

Sentimentality around clutter most often occurs after the death of someone close. You inherit all sorts of items which, under happier circumstances, you would easily identify as clutter and dispose of. But there’s an emotional attachment to these particular items and to the past memories that they hold.

A coaching client of mine, living in a small house, inherited a large amount of family memorabilia when her father died. She kept it for a while, but didn’t really have either space or use for most it and felt guilty whenever she considered the possibility of not keeping it all. The moment of truth came when she realized that her dad would never have wished for her to be leading a heavy hearted existence full of clutter and obligation to old memories. She chose a couple of items that she wanted to keep, then contacted an auction house about the rest. She knew her dad would be proud that she was being decisive and getting on with her life.

It may be a painful truth, but in these circumstances, you are the one moving forward with your life and you need to choose what will serve you best as you do that. You most certainly do not have to discard all your happy memories in the decluttering process, but do make sure that you ditch the guilt!

Decluttering is never a one-off. However careful you are not to let obvious clutter into your life, there are always going to be some things that evolve into clutter over time. So if you want to be clutter free in the long term and you want to live your life in the here and now instead of letting your clutter drag you back into the past, there’s a really important skill you need to learn…

By developing an awareness that allows you to recognize when something that was once useful and valuable has evolved into clutter, you will be well on the path to clutter free success. The second step involves learning to thank that clutter warmly for its previous usefulness, and then to dispose of it with gratitude in your heart. In this way clutter is not the enemy, holding you back, it is simply a reminder that you are involved in the ongoing process of staying present in the present.