When your company or organisation pays to send you to do a professional development course, they are doing it for the organisations benefit – and that usually means sending you to training that makes you better at your job.

What your organisation doesn’t generally do is send you to courses that actually benefit your career.

This new Career Catapult coaching and mentoring program has been specifically developed to help employees sell themselves. It will teach you the most important skills for career advancement taken from both the private sector and public service.

For more information, see this article http://life7.com.au/coaching-mentoring/professional-development/career-catapult/

Here is yet another great reason to exercise that has nothing to do with your heart, circulation system or resistance to disease etc:

University of Pittsburg researchers recruited 120 sedentary older people without dementia and randomly placed them in one of two groups—those who began an exercise regimen of walking around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week, or those limited to stretching and toning exercises.

Magnetic resonance images were collected before the intervention, after six months, and at the end of the one-year study.

Brain images show that the aerobic exercise group demonstrated an increase in volume of the left and right hippocampus of 2.12 percent and 1.97 percent, respectively. The same regions of the brain in those who did stretching exercises decreased in volume by 1.40 and 1.43 percent, respectively.

So, no matter what age you are, if you are doing nothing, you should get up off your backside and get outdoors before it is too late.

If you want to change your fortune, you shouldn’t start by setting goals. First you need to benchmark.

Before you consider setting goals for 2011, you should first be honest with yourself and benchmark your strengths, weaknesses etc (SWOT)

Fascinating new research helps explain why women are far more sensitive to stress and suffer from stress related illness such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than males.

The female brains relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala impairs their ability to learn from the experience and ‘move on’.

In experiments with mice, when the connection between these two areas of the brain are cut, the female mouse will learn from a stimulus association.

In suburbia, most people have no idea when fruit and vegetables are in season. We just go to the supermarket and get what we want. We buy all sorts of produce with no idea about how it was produced, where it came from or in many cases, the best way to prepare it.

The supermarket is a cold place where we are all just consumers. In fact, in many supermarkets we even have to scan our own items and pay the machine. It is all about input and output.

A farmer’s market is a nice reminder that we don’t have to be a number in a supermarket cue. Here you talk to the person who makes the food you eat. They care about you because you are their livelihood, and they take pride in the produce they are selling you.

I, for one, will be voting with my feet.

When it comes to a view, this one is hard to top!

Tracy Caldwell Dyson looks relaxed in a moment of contemplation 350 km above the earth.

If you have ever done a meditation, one of the standard ways of beginning is to imagine yourself in a peaceful scene. I can’t imagine it being much more peaceful than this!

This image was taken in late September 2010 from the International Space Station’s Cupola window bay.

I’d never heard this before, but apparently apart from keeping us awake, caffeine also makes us more susceptible to persuasion.

Experiments done at the University of Queensland showed that people who drank caffeine were more influenced by persuasive messages than those who had had the placebo.

Read more at http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/11/caffeine-makes-us-easier-to-persuade.php