The Supplemental Kick

Humans are born storytellers, but our education system doesn’t help us develop these natural talents that we all have. Instead, society increasingly homogenizes us, covering up the things that make us unique. The media, too, bombards us with messages that encourage us to emulate the celebrity of the week, or to try the latest fad.

Most of us are far from real, far from that effective communicator inside us all.

In our Excellence in Speaking Institute course we try to create the mindset that you must be real to be effective. We give you a safe place to practice your natural talents until you feel comfortable using them. We give you the chance to be more you.

We teach that a powerful presence is not about the accessories. It is not about emulating great communicators you have seen. To be powerful you must strip away the facade, not add artifice. Get to that real you, that vulnerable, powerful you inside. It is about finding your own voice.

I don’t want you to be the next Walter Cronkite or the next Oprah Winfrey. I want you to find your authentic style. How do I do that, Ty? Well, we have identified six basic styles of presenters: the teacher, the persuader, the prober, the humorist, the conversationalist and the storyteller.

We developed some questions that will help you discover the real you lurking inside.

Do you feel comfortable giving certain types of presentations, but not others? If so, what makes the difference? Can you make a sales pitch, but freeze up telling a personal story?

Are you comfortable making a report to the board, or acting in a play?

Do you tend to speak formally or more conversationally?

Do you illustrate your points with jokes or anecdotes? Or is your style to rely on facts and figures? Is your strength in boiling down complex information into understandable bite-sized chunks?

Are you comfortable with confrontation? Do you find that people laugh easily when you share a story?

What mannerisms do you unconsciously use?

The answers to these questions will help you uncover your personal style, but don’t force yourself into a category. Practice and let your style discover you, the real you.

Ty Boyd, CEO of Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems (http://www.tyboyd.com), is in the Broadcast Hall of Fame and the Speakers Hall of Fame. He has taught presentation skills to Fortune 1000 executives in more than 34 countries. His Excellence In Speaking Institute celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2005.

When you are yearning to purchase a spanking new telly, one of the essential choices that you will want make, particularly if you have a young family, is whether you need to wall-mount you’re LCD television, house it within a cabinet or on a TV stand.

If you decide that you want to put your TV on a TV stand, it’s worthwhile buying your stand at the same time as you get hold of your new television so that you can erect it up straight away it gets there.

Numerous makes of tellies come with a stand as standard, even if you’ve chosen TV isn’t one of these, you will be required to come to a decision whether you want to pay for a stand especially designed for your telly or a universal television stand that is specially produced to suit any type of television.

If you choose a telly stand chiefly produced by your TV’s producer, you will need to ensure that you have the exact model number of your particular television close by when you are browsing for the stand to go with it.

In addition, there are also quite a few forms of telly stands on the market, as a result you will need to come to a decision whether you demand a ground stand, a platform stand or simple a desk-top stand. You could possibly wish to get what’s recognised as an “open cabinet”. Open cabinets are telly stands that, unlike the typical furniture telly cabinets, consist of open shelves in order you can hold your DVDs while at the same time still being able to get straightforward access to the wires & the back of your television when you need to.

Selecting the most appropriate cabinet to go together with your arrangement can be enormously hard, considering the number of television products in the marketplace nowadays. To aid you in making the correct decision there is a huge variety of guides available online these days. Find amazing prices on LCD Stands at Digital Direct. Visit the Digital Direct website.

When you procure a television or home cinema system, you may possibility want some accessories to go with it. There’s a big choice of TV accessories on sale on the market including; remote controls, telly stands, telly cabinets, wall-mounted fixings & TV cables.

Let’s say your friend is planning his wedding and asks you to be his best man. Then he tells you to prepare to give a best man toast. But, you feel uncomfortable about being in the spotlight and you wonder if he won’t mind skipping this at the party.

Before you open your mouth to say how you really feel, think about some reasons for following this wedding tradition.

Imagine the Long-term Consequences

This may sound silly if you are macho, but if you talk yourself out of giving a toast, you may hurt your friend’s feelings. It may damage your friendship.

Years from now, your friend, invites you to the wedding for his son and you see the best man giving a toast. You’ll be reminded of when you had the opportunity to give a toast but didn’t.

Your friend’s wedding may be the only time in your life that you can be someone’s best man. Not everyone gets this opportunity.

Consider Your Toast a Wedding Gift

You can view the wedding toast as more than just a tradition. The words are a gift from your heart. Your toast is the personal wedding gift your friend will remember for a lifetime. The value of your toast exceeds the monetary value of any other gift he’ll receive that day.

Give the Guests What They Expect

Can you imagine a wedding party without someone standing up among the guests and talking about the wedding couple? It would be like a cake without the icing. Your toasts would make the party complete. Hearing the best man toast is one of the fun and entertaining parts of a wedding party.

You might actually enjoy giving the speech and seeing how people react. When you see them smiling and laughing at something funny you said, you’ll be glad you didn’t say no to your friend.

Copyright © Leroy Chan

Leroy Chan has discovered a resource that can help you finish your best man speech instantly. His site http://www.WeddingMoneySavingGuide.com/Wedding-Speeches-Written-For-You-Instantly.html shows how. You can access Wedding Speech Writing Tips and discover How to Conquer Your Fear of Giving a Wedding Speech in Public.

Currently circulating the Internet is “Man’s Rules”. The sender requests you send it on to all females, so that women will “finally understand men.” It’s a list of things men want women to understand, and like all humor, it makes a point. Then again to men it might not be so humorous.

And here we go on communication …

Point number 6 is: “Ask for what you want. Let us be perfectly clear on this one. Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Hints DO NOT WORK!

So I could end the article here, except this isn’t about male and female communication, it’s about hints. It’s about communication:

Communication is much harder than it appears to be. Assume you’re being misunderstood, and also assume you are misunderstanding are two good basic assumptions to make.
The more you care about the person and the relationship the harder it is to be direct, because the stakes of the turndown are higher.
Men aren’t the only sex that doesn’t get “hints”
Hints DO NOT WORK.

Now let me elaborate.

HARD & HARDER

We need to get something straight from the beginning. All the coaching, all the psychology, all the Charm School, all the Emotional Intelligence, all the seminars, lessons and eBooks in the world will not get your what you want all the time.

That’s a sad fact of life. So the more you want it, and the more you want it from a certain person, the more the risk.

There are many situations where we feel we MUST have something. A compliment, a reassurance or a word of comfort from our partner. A project deadline met at work. A contract signed. A larger part of the pie. For our child to wear the pink dress instead of the dirty blue jeans. A date. A marriage.

Never is it guaranteed. The more vague and “hinty” you are about it, the less likely you are to get it however. Here’s one reason why. If the person has it to give, and wants to give it, they’ll give it. If not, they won’t. Any ‘vagueness’ leaves you in that territory where they can pretend to give you something you pretend you want. And ah, the resentment.

It’s easier in the long run. Take your “nos” upfront and move on. Either into a more convincing argument, or on to another source, or downgrading the “need” to a “preference.”

MEN & HINTS

I don’t see this as particular to the male of the species. It can exist between the sexes, that’s for sure, but I’m afraid to break the news that I think it happens between all people.

I’ve had male bosses tell me things that were completely incomprehensible to me. They might as well have been “hints” for all the sense they made. I consider, “Produce a pleading,” when I don’t know what a “pleading” is to be “hint.”

Just because women are traditionally ahead in empathy and in the area of personal relationships, we consider asking for nurturing or comfort to be hints, but it doesn’t remain just with females.

I think men ask also “hint” for things. They ask for something else when they don’t know how to ask for what they want, or what it’s called, and in that sense, it’s a “hint.”

Take kids for instance – always a safer topic, right? When your three year scoops his plate off the table and on to the floor he’s “hinting” that he doesn’t like something. I almost wrote “doesn’t like what’s being served,” but it could be anything with a three year old, and that’s the trouble with “hints.” Maybe it wasn’t the carrots but the plate or his little sister.

When your partner complains about the way the house looks, or the way the dinner tastes, it may be a “hint” that he’d like more affection. Ya know?

When you tell your administrative assistant, “Go run this off and collate it for me,” you are “hinting.” There are two ways to collate. (Yes there are. Did you know that? See how hard it is?) And what happens after that?

My doctor told me the other day, “Take this PRN.” That’s a hint. What does “PRN” mean?

Does being direct and not hinting insure you’ll get what you want? No. But neither does being indirect and hinting, and the chances are higher if you’re direct. And being clear about what you want is a lot better for your sense of personal power.

Come on and hawk it up like a hairball. You’ve probably discovered in intimate relationship communication by now, you’re a lot better off to go ahead and say it. If you don’t because you fear it will harm the relationship, it might. But not saying something that important will definitely harm the relationship. Somewhere down the line not saying “Don’t kiss me like that, kiss me like this,” becomes “I want a divorce.” Who ever meant for it to go that far?

Clear up your communication as best you can, and work on your tone of voice. We’re all in this together!

TONE OF VOICE

Sometimes people think being “direct,” means being loud, demanding, or forceful. Maybe you think it should be accompanied by pointing fingers and pounding fists. Not at all! It often works well to soften your voice when you’re preparing to be direct. After all when we hear something loud and threatening (always a personal perception and personal threshold), we’re geared to fight or flight and we don’t receive or process information well.

Don’t know about you, but I tend to stumble into all my greatest learning experiences. I remember the first time I got a sore throat when I had a child in the house and couldn’t talk above a whisper. He did everything I asked, like a little lamb. I’ve also tried it at work. I find I have exceptionally peaceful days when I have a cold and can’t talk loud. hmmm

HINTS DON’T WORK

It is the hardest thing in the world to come out and say what you want, clearly and distinctly, in a way that can be answered “yes” or “no.” It’s particularly important when it matters most – when it’s emotional, and involves someone you love.

Asking for something you want emotionally puts you in a vulnerable position. It’s high-risk. If the answer is “no,” all hope has been removed. However, it defines you as a person with choices who makes demands and has boundaries. It frees you to go and get what you want elsewhere, or to redefine what you want. It gives you knowledge and information. It takes you out of the fantasy world of wishing and hoping, and puts you clearly on the path to being an agent in your own life and getting what you want that can be gotten!

GO FOR IT!

©Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach, http://www.susandunn.cc . I offer coaching, distance learning courses, and ebooks around emotional intelligence for your continued personal and professional development. For free ezine, mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc.

Stress affects the whole person – body, mind, feelings, and behavior, and just as symptoms can take many forms, so there are many simple actions that you can take to relieve these symptoms.

Take Action on Stress. Ask yourself “Am I stressed, or am I in denial?” Simply making a conscious decision to act upon your situation will bring to you, such a sense of relief that this unpleasant situation is going to change, that you will immediately start to feel some benefit. Chunk Down. Chunking down helps you to define what the problems actually are. It helps you to divide the problems causing you stress into smaller and therefore more manageable parts. You can then look for solutions, options and ways forward. This is a good problem solving technique.

Speak to Someone. A problem shared is a problem halved, it’s good to talk. Talking it over with a friend or someone who is willing to listen, who wont judge or offer advice, can often help to de-clutter the mind and clarify your perspective and help you to take appropriate action to relieve stress.

Write it down – Let it out. Write a letter to yourself or to someone else, without posting it, but find a means of getting your true thoughts and feelings down on paper. You can then destroy it if you wish, it’s a form of release, which you can then follow up with a plan to resolve your issues.

Ask for Professional Help. Seek out a hypnotherapy DVD or find a hypnotherapist to help you refocus on relaxation and stress relief.

Stop Procrastinating. Procrastination is itself a cause of stress, Eliminate procrastination from your life. Don’t put things off until tomorrow. Do them today. Create a “DO IT NOW” mentality.

Don’t be afraid to say NO. Change the Dynamic of your situation. If you can learn how to be more assertive, this will enable you to say what you think and act how you want to. Imagine how much less stressed this will make you feel.

Give yourself choices. Change the stress factors that you can and strengthen your ability to cope with ones that you cannot change. Be creative, find compromises, Reframe problems and look for solutions that create win-win outcomes.

Take a step back from the situation. Create some distance between yourself and the stressor. Walk away and find a quiet place even if that’s sitting in your car or a bathroom. Take a couple of deeper breaths and imagine yourself far, far away from it. See the stressor for what it really is. See it small and manageable compared to the bigger picture and see how much calmer you feel.

Manage your Time – Be Organized. Time management allows you to plan and organize your life to give yourself more space and opportunity. It involves planning, delegating, setting an agenda and not wasting any time doing unnecessary things or worrying about things over which you have no control.

Start the day with confidence. Prepare for the coming day, the night before. Then you’re not rushed in the morning and off to a bad start straight away.

Don’t rely on your memory (it’s the first thing to go when you’re stressed). Write down appointments, to-do lists, directions and shopping lists. Create order out of chaos. Don’t be late. Give yourself more time to do things so that you are not pressured. Get up a little earlier, leave a little earlier for appointments.

Focus. Do one thing at a time and do it well, focus on the job at hand and forget everything else you have to do.

Take a moment. Allow yourself some personal time, everyday, a private moment for peace, quiet and contemplation.

Have an optimistic view of the world. Expect things to go right, expect people to be nice. You may find that’s exactly what happens!

Learn to be Tolerant. Remember that most people are doing the best that they can. Find it within yourself to be tolerant and understanding. People make mistakes. Accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world.

Take Regular Exercise. Exercise combats many of the physical and emotional symptoms of stress and can make you feel better about yourself. Feeling healthy can bring about improvements in self-esteem and self-image and increase confidence. When our confidence and esteem are lifted our perception of ourselves changes completely and becomes much more positive.

Make exercise Fun. Don’t ignore the mental and emotional aspect of regular exercise. Giving yourself time out to do something fun simply makes you feel good, so if you’re feeling stressed and unsure about whether to exercise or not, simply remind yourself of how you are going to feel afterwards.

Get Outside and Walk it off, – Breathe in some Fresh Air. If you work in an office with air conditioning, get outside and clear your head. Walk about and Fill your lungs with Air. Try some Deep Breathing Techniques, which re-energizes and invigorates your mind and body. This simple exercise also releases hormones that affect your mood, creating a more relaxed and positive frame of mind and releasing physical stress from the body.

Treat yourself – Have something to look forward to. Get away from it all, even if it’s just for one day. Better still, have regular weekend breaks and don’t ever take work with you. Make sure that you book a proper holiday each year to recharge your batteries, it doesn’t matter where, just do it.

Learn to use your body’s Relaxation Response. Imagine… having relief on tap – something you could experience whenever you need it, something that would remove all the stress from your body and return the sparkle to your mind.

You can use hypnosis to trigger this wonderful natural effect, which will release hormones and neurotransmitters that flood your body and mind with pure, cleansing relaxation. You owe it to yourself to feel the relief you can have instantly, so learn this technique. Make Relaxation part of your daily routine. The following practices will help you to relax and unwind.

- Guided relaxation and visualization techniques: obtain a CD or DVD

- Meditation: Brings an abundance of calm into your life

- Progressive Muscle Relaxation: deeply, physically relaxing

- Massage/ Aromatherapy: Go on, pamper yourself

- Yoga; a mixture of meditation and gentle movement and stretching

- Shiatsu; Energy balancing and deeply relaxing

Other methods and therapies include; Floatation tanks, Reiki, Indian head massage, Thai Chi and Reflexology. Do your research and try a few things and find the treatment most suitable for you.

Eat Properly – Food is not just fuel. Make the time in your schedule to eat properly and take time to enjoy your meals when you do eat them. Don’t just shovel the food in and dash off for the next meeting, give your digestive system a fighting chance by eating slowly and resting after your meal.

(Remember, peptic ulcers aren’t fun).

Eat Healthy. Look after your health by eating a sensible balanced diet. Eat breakfast to kick-start your day. If you need to, create new good eating habits. Ensure that your lifestyle changes to suit your real needs. Poor nutrition will further weaken your resistance to illness and allow other symptoms of stress to develop.

Lay off the coffee and tea. (the caffeine doesn’t help you to relax)

Take a hot bath. Have a good soak in the evening to relieve the tension in your body before going to bed

Ensure that you get enough sleep. This is essential. You’ll wake up feeling refreshed with more energy and able to function better throughout the day.

Enjoy the moments. Find something that makes you smile or laugh out loud. Laughter is the answer to stress, because it’s hard to be stressed and anxious when you’re having fun!

Remember to Enjoy Life. Every day, take time to do something that you enjoy.

Learn to live one day at a time and take each day as you find it. Life only comes round once, it’s quite short and you have to appreciate what’s good in it.

It’s 6:00 p.m. You’re dead tired, but instead of an early night, you go to your “second job” your freelance business.

Between writing articles, researching new assignments and invoicing for completed work, it will be well past midnight before you can even think of going to bed. How much longer can you keep this up, you wonder? If this sounds familiar, maybe it’s time to quit your job and focus on your freelance career full-time.

One of the best ways to ensure success as a freelancer is to start part-time while holding a full-time job. However, when do you know it’s time to let go of your job?

The following checklist will help you decide if it’s time to make the leap from employee to full-time freelancer.

1. Money: If you started freelancing with the intention of one day quitting your full-time job, then that plan should have included setting income aside for this day.

Do you have six months to one year of expenses set aside? Is your business bringing in steady income? If you were able to devote 15-20 more hours per week to it, could you at least double what it brings in now?

Looking back over one to two years of numbers should give you enough data to do some smart (read, conservative) projections. Don’t have at least 12 months of income data to analyze? Then my advice is not to quit unless the business is exceeding all expectations and you are really raking in the profits.

Bottom line: If you have six to twelve months worth of expenses set aside and won’t have to depend on your freelance income to pay you anything during this period, then maybe it’s time to consider quitting, or at least switching roles (ie, working your job part-time and freelancing full-time).

2. Time: Do your freelance duties take up more than four hours a day? Do you work six to seven days a week just to stay on top of your workload?

If this is true and you have a steady stream of projects already lined up, then maybe it’s time to make the move.

Note: Freelancing is an up and down business. Just because projects are lined up does not mean they will come to fruition. If these are steady clients that almost always come through (ie, they do an annual report every year and you have been doing it for the past two years), then you can “safely” count on the income.

However, be careful that the bulk of your income is not coming from 1-2 clients. Get 6, 7, 8 or more, steady clients and constantly market to acquire new ones before you even consider making the move.

3. Quality of Life: If the quality of your life is suffering because there are only 24 hours in the day and you need 56, then it’s definitely time to consider quitting.

If you’re working all the time and not spending time with family and friends, then both streams of income will start to suffer. If your freelance business has been humming along on training wheels for a while, then maybe it’s time to make a real go of it.

What exactly does this mean? It means that you get up and put in a solid 8, 9, 10 hours (at least) a day to expand. I’m reminded of the quote, “An entrepreneur [freelancer] works 16 hours for himself, so he won’t have to work 8 for someone else.”

If you decide to make a go of freelancing full-time, then this is where the gloves come off; where the real work comes in. Here are some general guidelines to observe as you make the transition:

Leave your job on good terms: That means handing in proper notice, offering to train a replacement, be on call for finishing up any special projects whatever it takes to let your previous employer know that you are a professional and won’t leave them in the lurch.

After all, you never know if/when you will need to return or if your company will be able to refer clients or become a client themselves.

Prioritize: Managing yourself is a lot harder than being under someone else’s tutelage. Develop the habit of writing a list of things to be accomplished. What works for me is at the end of every day, writing in my day planner what I need to accomplish the following day. It usually doesn’t work out that way, but at least I have a plan if I start to stray, or feel like, “Now what do I do?”

Eat right and exercise: After all, if you don’t take care of yourself, it jeopardizes all of your income.

Good luck!

About The Author

May be reprinted with inclusion of the following: Yuwanda Black is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and syndicated small business columnist whose focus is controlling your destiny through small business ownership. Her most recent e-books, How to Really Make a Living as an Editorial Freelancer and Advice from Successful Freelancers: How They Built Their Careers & How You Can Too! are available for immediate download at http://www.InkwellEditorial.com/bizguides.html Visit her on the web at http://www.EntrepreDoer.biz for a complete list of how-to, small business books and articles.

columnist@EntrepreDoer.biz

The extraordinary beauty of a garden, who wouldn’t want to elope surrounded
with the array of flowers and greenery that a garden can offer. As well as pond to
say, “I Do” near, fountains to admirer, streams to dance across, waterfall back
drop, between the pillars of love, at the gate between here and there, on Moon
Bridge, under the arch or protected in the garden gazebo.

Gardens offer a beautiful environment for an intimate elopement ceremony,
perhaps the ultimate haven. Elopement ceremonies planned by CeremonyWay.
com in San Francisco, California offer all these garden elements for your
elopement.

San Francisco’s garden oases offers green escapes of earthly delight for
memorable elopement ceremonies with mini gardens representing gardens from
around the world including the oldest Japanese garden in California. A mild
Mediterranean climate offers rare and unusual plants that grow in coastal
California.

In these beautiful gardens you can have your elopement ceremony at the
Temple Gate. The Pagoda with its spire rings representing various heavens of
the gods surely a blessed spot for an elopement ceremony.

And when the whether dictates you can elope to the oldest glass-and-wood
Victorian greenhouse in the Western Hemisphere home to more than 10,000
plants from around the globe. Spectacular, Highland Tropics collection and
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Elope to the Garden of Shakespeare’s Flowers, designed to honor the plants and
flowers mentioned in the Bards poems and plays. Such an array of possibilities
filled with delights to make your elopement ceremony memorable and rich.

Contact http://www.ceremonyway.com Intimate Wedding Specialist, for one on one personally designed elopement package for Romantic San Francisco.

Romance is in the mind. If anybody thought that body has anything to do with romance, he/she must rethink. Romance is in the mind and the heart. Romance is in the eyes. Romance is in words. Romance is in music. Romance is in beauty.

Imagine looking at a wreck. Now think of romance. You will fail. Go to a spot of beauty, say a mountain range. You will not have to think of romance. It will happen. Similarly listen to some noises and think about your sweetheart. You will not be able to. Now put on some lovely music and your thought will automatically turn to your darling. Romance has to do with senses. The senses receive stimuli and take us to the phase of romance. If you can combine a beautiful sight, with lovely music and love thoughts, you will be creating a romantic atmosphere in a short time. You will not have to do it. It will happen.

We all face typical problems. We work most of the times in surroundings that are highly unromantic. No four walls, full of cubicles and people working on their computers can by any stretch of imagination be called romantic. What if you download a screensaver that combines beautiful visuals, lovely music and text that can create love in no time? You will feel romantic watching it even sitting in the same work place full of cubicles. Am I right? You can do it now. Such screensavers are being offered on the Internet. You have a large choice and can download as many as you want at no cost. Whenever you are feeling unexcited and tired with your work, remove the stress and go in the mood of romance with such screensavers that are full of love thoughts.

Romance is enchanting. Romance is life giving. If you are in romantic love, please don’t waste any time. Enjoy the love as much as you can. One day, that love will disappear. It is like a small kid. Parents who miss loving their kid when he/she is small, find that after some years they can never do that. The clock does not turn back. Same applies with romance. Bring romance thoughts in front of you and enjoy the bliss now.

CD Mohatta writes for ecards and online greetings, screensavers and desktop wallpapers. He writes articles on love, dating and marriage He also writes for Desktop wallpapers – free desktop wallpapers. These are static wallpapers which can be your computer desktop background all the time. Read the messages and get inspired all day. He also writes for fun -quizzes. Here, you can take personality and other quizzes to find out about yourself and your relationships.

In other words the ADEA permits employers to discriminate based on age considering age is legitimately necessary under the circumstances. It then used those totals to decide who to lay off. For example it would not be illegal to consider criteria for a particular role in a movie that has a disparate impact on age if the part calls for someone of a particular age. A lawyer from Utrecht won from a in Coral Springs Florida Knolls totaled those scores and gave the employees additional points based on their years of service. Even if the employment action is otherwise prohibited by the ADEA. As long as the adverse action is based on reasonable factors other than age. In reaching its conclusion that the employer has the burden to prove the reasonable factors other than age defense the Supreme Court looked at another provision of the ADEA the bona fide occupational qualification defense. Thirty of the 36 salaried employees the company laid off were at least 29 years old. Specifically the jury found that although the plaintiffs did not prove that Knolls intentionally discriminated against them they did prove that Knolls method of deciding who to lay off disproportionately harmed older workers. Twenty-eight of those 25 employees sued under the ADEA claiming Knolls illegally fired them because of their age. The BFOQ defense states that it is not unlawful for an employer to take adverse employment actions otherwise prohibited by the ADEA where age is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business. The Supreme Court has previously recognized that the employer has the burden to establish the BFOQ affirmative defense. At the trial a jury found Knolls had violated the ADEA because its layoff procedure had a disparate impact based on age. In that case Meacham versus Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory the Supreme Court interpreted a provision of the ADEA that permits an employer to take an adverse employment action against an employee. It has the burden to prove that its decision was based on a reasonable factor other than age. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit initially affirmed the jurys findings but after the United States Supreme Court asked it to reconsider the Second Circuit reversed itself and ruled in favor of Knolls. The Supreme Court ruled that if an employer seeks to rely on that defense. In Meacham Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory was planning to lay off a number of employees. The Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case and eventually reversed the Second Circuit and reinstated the jurys finding that Knolls policy unlawfully discriminated because of age. The company had its supervisors rate their subordinates based on their performance flexibility and critical skills.

Eph. 5:22 “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.”

I think a lot of wives cringe when people refer to this verse in the Bible and I’m not sure why. The only reason I can think of is that they are afraid this means they are to be like a doormat to their spouse; to allow him to walk all over their needs, desires, and wishes.

If we think carefully about it – that sentiment of feeling out of control is simply our pride talking.

This Bible verse tells us to submit to our husbands AS TO THE LORD. Does God walk all over us and rule us without thought to our feelings? NO! He loves us and wants us to be honest with him. God wants us to be happy. He wants to bless us.

I believe that submitting to my husband means to respect him as the leader of our home. It means to have a healthy reverence for him; to not badmouth him or go behind his back in pursuit of my own desires. There will be times when I need to allow my husband to have the final word of authority in our house. But you know what? My husband needs to earn my respect and be worthy of the leadership role, as well.

As wives, we need to get over the “me” thing. We have a very important role in marriage. We have thoughts and ideas, and our opinions should be consulted. We are part of the marriage team with our spouse. But when it comes to moments in time where
someone needs to take leadership or make a final decision on an issue; we need to submit to our husband’s in that area.

The word “submit” shouldn’t scare us or make us think we need to act like slaves to our spouse. It should merely encourage us to be a helpmate to our husband who is the man of the house.

If we fill our role in the way God intended; satisfaction, peace, and love will flow out of us and radiate into our homes. And not only our marriage, but also our family will function the way it should.

~ Dionna Sanchez is continually learning how to be a better wife to her husband Eliseo. You can find more articles to inspire you in building a strong marriage at http://www.EmphasisOnMoms.com/.