There’s a fine line in a job interview between selling yourself and underselling yourself. If you’re too brash then you may well talk yourself out of the position. But even worse is if you’re too timid. Then you run the very real risk of talking yourself out of the job.

After all, if you don’t appear to have any confidence in yourself and your abilities, why should a prospective employer even think about hiring you?

Here are some tips on selling yourself in an interview

Prepare for the interview. Nowadays it doesn’t take much effort to do a bit of background research on the firm you’re thinking of joining. Then you can fire off the occasional question during the interview or answer one of the questions that’s bound to crop up that covers the firm you’re applying for.

Rehearse! This sound a bit weird – after all, you don’t know what questions you’re going to be asked. But there are some common interview questions that you can research such as how you think you’re suited to the job, etc. Plus like revising for an exam there’s no harm in rehearsing a few extra scenarios. If you can, enlist the help of a friend who can play the part of the interviewer and make the rehearsal more realistic as well as giving you hints on your interview technique.

Sketch out some open questions to ask in the interview. Open questions are ones where it’s difficult if not impossible to give a straight yes/no answer. This will help to show your interest in the company as well as giving you breathing space if you need it.

Allow your personality to come through. OK, maybe not the Donald Duck tie and fluorescent laces but you know what I mean here. Sure, conform to the extent that it’s necessary. But don’t be afraid to be as close to being yourself as possible during the interview itself. Insincerity shows through so if you’re out of breath climbing a couple of steps, don’t claim to be a gym rat! But that goes for other things in the interview as well. So be congruent with yourself – you’ll automatically sell yourself better when you do this.

Don’t drone on forever. It shouldn’t get anywhere near the stage where the interviewer has to cut you short. Keep your answers succinct without being too curt. Again, feel free to drop in the occasional anecdote but don’t go quoting things just for the sake of it.

Use hypnosis to help with the process of selling yourself. Quite often we sell ourselves short because our self esteem is lower than it should be. You can listen to a hypnosis download to help to turn that around – I’d suggest listening daily for about a week before the interview so that you can let the power of the hypnotic suggestions build up. This works well and could be the tipping point between getting the job or not.

Click here for a hypnosis track to help you with selling yourself.

We all daydream occasionally but when it seems to be your normal mode then it’s probably time to stop daydreaming so often!

Of course, you’re probably already drifting off and thinking about what it would be like to live a life where you weren’t in an almost constant dream state. But snap out of that for the next couple of minutes and check out these ideas to bring you back to a more normal state more often.

The low tech way is to catch yourself when you begin to drift off into a daydream. There’s almost always a short period – a bit like the transition in some movies – where you shift from regular wide-awake mode into one where you’re somewhere else entirely. One of the easiest ways to bring you back to reality is by wearing a rubber band around your wrist and giving it a quick “twang”. The snap of the rubber band is often all that’s need to bring you back to the land of the living.

Watch out for triggers. Often we’ll have certain things that seem to induce a daydream state almost instantly. Notice if there are various situations or events that regularly cause you to pop into a daydream. If there are, decide what you need to do in order to counteract this happening. That may be as simple as skipping certain tracks on your MP3 player or it could be complete avoidance of that particular trigger for a few days or even weeks until you “unlearn” the idea.

Keep yourself busy. Quite often we use daydreaming because we’re just plain bored. If you’re bored or uninterested in something (like some of those lessons at school for instance) then it’s attractive to move elsewhere, even if it’s only in your mind. Sometimes you can’t avoid being bored but a lot of the time it’s a choice that you’ve actually consciously made. Maybe because your daydream world is more fun than whatever else it is you’ve been doing.

Another option that works for a lot of people is to use hypnosis. Because hypnosis is close to a daydream state anyway it’s actually very easy for a daydreamer like you to get involved with the track and go deep into a hypnotic state. In turn, that will accelerate the hypnotic process and will help change your daydreaming ways for the better.

Click here for a hypnosis download to help you stop daydreaming so much.

You’ve reached that age where your youthfulness has gone but you’re not a pensioner. And you start to have a midlife crisis. All sorts of thoughts go through your mind: what you could have done but are now positively too old to do, missed opportunities, and a sense of your own mortality. This last point is often quite critical – you’re at the age when a close friend suffers from an unexpected early illness or even death.

Suddenly you find yourself reading the obituary notices and checking the ages everyone in them. You also get itchy feet and maybe feel like leaving everything behind and starting over.

Whatever the precise signs, you’ve been caught up in a midlife crisis. What can you do?

Stop focusing on what might have been. Like it or not, the past is gone. It’s irrecoverable. Whatever decisions you made then can’t be unmade. Sorry to be blunt but someone has to tell you that.

Some of the things on your “should have done” list can still be achieved. OK, you won’t be the young entrepreneur winner or the prom king or queen. But an awful lot of your bucket list can still be accomplished. If you haven’t got a bucket list then maybe it’s time to create one. And if you have this list, revisit it and revise it for how you feel now, not how you felt all those years ago when you last wrote it.

Next up, learn to deal with change. It happens whether you want it to or not. You can either growl at it (which won’t make it go away) or you can deal with it. You’re using a mobile phone whilst your parents had to make do with one that was attached to the wall with a cord. There are lots of modern inventions that – when you stop to think about it – you’d be hard pushed to live without. Heck, even the TIVO is easier to program than that old video recorder so progress can’t be all bad!

Get support. Talk about the issues and worries that are contriving to make up your midlife crisis. Whether you talk with a spouse, your life partner, someone you work with or even a tolerant random stranger doesn’t matter as much as doing the talking. Vocalizing your innermost thoughts can be scary but it can also show them for the shams that they often are. Give it a try – you could be surprised how much weight gets lifted off your shoulders just by having a chat (shrinks learned this trick years ago and charge for the privilege!)

Hypnosis is another option that works well to relieve your doubts and worries. It’s simple and painless. All you need to do is set aside some quiet time where you can sit back and listen to a hypnotic track on your iPod. It’s mainstream nowadays as well – no-one will mock you for using it – but you can keep quiet about using it if you prefer.

Click here for a hypnosis track to help deal with your midlife crisis.

It’s finally happened – your children have gone off to college or moved out – you’ve been secretly looking forward to getting your life back for years but suddenly you’re faced with what can only be described as empty nest syndrome. The hustle and bustle of the last umpteen years. Being a last minute cook, counsellor, janitor and taxi service rolled into one. That’s gone. So what happens next?

Just as no-one is really prepared for the arrival of their first born they’re equally unprepared for the change and upheaval when their children finally leave the safety of the family home. Sure, you’ll see them again but not on a constant basis, day in, day out.

Help to deal with empty nest syndrome

One of the best solutions for empty nest syndrome is to make yourself busy. With hindsight, you probably could have done this before your children left homebut we’re all human and most of us seem to leave this kind of preparation until the last minute. There’s no point in dwelling on why you haven’t got yourself organized with other things to do – just get on and start doing things!

Think about your hobbies and interests. Check out local clubs that you can try out. Then actually do it. After all, you won’t be getting those desperate phone calls to pick up your children at all times of the day and night so you can actually have some quality time with yourself and your friends.

Take the time to rekindle your relationship when the nest empties. Chances are that you’ve both been devoting more time to your children than each other. Whether you’re with the same partner you’ve been with for years or whether you’re living with a new partner doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you’re going to have more time alone with each other so you need to put things in place to make the most of this. Treating the situation like a second courtship or second honeymoon can be a great way to do this and will also help to take your mind off being pre-occupied at the absence of your children getting under your feet all the time.

Keep in touch with your children. Just because they’re no longer at home doesn’t mean that you don’t have to communicate with them. A quick text every now and then (without getting too cloying), checking on their Facebook status (without turning into a stalker!), phone calls. They all help to keep you in touch and take the edge off the shock of not having your children around all the time.

Hypnosis can also help to take the edge off your empty nest syndrome feelings. Take a while out to listen to an MP3 audio and let hypnosis work its way round your mind to help change the way that you deal with the situation for the better.

Click here for a hypnosis download to help deal with empty nest syndrome.

If you’re one of those people that are constantly thinking about yourself and how you look to other people, there’s a good chance that you’re self obsessed. OK, if you’re a famous star or model then there’s an excuse for this kind of behavior but if you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us, it’s not the same.

So how can you stop your self obsession and get back to a more normal life?

Start by realizing that the world doesn’t actually revolve around you!

There are lots of other people on this planet and whilst they’re not all worth listening to that doesn’t mean that everyone you meet is less worthy than you.

There’s actually no reason that – most of the time at least – you’re more important than the other people you come into contact with.

Sometimes this home truth is enough to wake you up and stop you forever obsessing about yourself.

But if that’s not the case then here are a few other tricks you can use:

Ask yourself how important your thoughts are at this moment in time. And do you really want to cling onto them as though there’s no tomorrow.

If your thoughts of your self importance are growing by the minute, this can be a big problem. Maybe you need a faithful friend to burst your bubble every now and then – ideally without hurting your ego too much although some collateral damage on that front is probably inevitable.

Which actually brings us round to one of the causes of self obsession: an ego that even Zaphod Beeblebrox would be jealous of.

If you’re guilty of that then you need to find a way to give yourself a reality check. There’s no need to wallow in things or be forever watching negative news stories. In fact the latter are probably bad news as they’ll run the risk of heightening the idea that you’re above everyone else.

Another good way to reduce your self obsession is to develop a sense of humor. Your ego may not take kindly to this at first but it should come round to the idea that it’s better for you to mock yourself than it is to allow others to do the mocking for you.

Hypnosis can work well in this situation. It can help to dampen your obsession and move you away from being a modern day Narcissus and towards someone that other people will want to spend time with rather than actively avoiding you because you really only ever think about yourself.

Click here for a hypnosis download to help stop your self obsession.

Most people fidget a bit when they’re getting bored or have been sitting in the same place too long but if it starts happening more often then it’s time to look at ways to stop fidgeting all the time.

If you’ve constantly got “itchy pants” then it’s time to do something about it!

Cut down on the coffee. There’s a reason Tweek is forever jittery in South Park – his caffeine intake is way too high. Your reaction may not be as exaggerated (after all, you’re not a cartoon character) but it shows up in just the same way. Since caffeine is a powerful drug, cut down gradually rather than go cold turkey unless you’re happy to have the headaches and other side effects that go hand in hand with caffeine withdrawal.

The same goes for sugar. Whilst it doesn’t necessarily cause you to fidget as much as some other things, sugar cravings can turn into full blown fidgeting attacks if you don’t satisfy your desire for sweetness fast enough. Much the same as caffeine, cut down gradually. And don’t just substitute artifical sweeteners – read up on things like aspartame, but not too close to bed time!

Learn to relax more. Fidgeting is often an outward sign that you’re stressed and need to make more time to relax. This could be as simple as taking a few deep breaths to help you calm down when you start to fidget. Or it could mean that you need to investigate options such as yoga or meditation to help you chill out on a more regular basis. Whatever you decide, work on finding a method that will help you to relax more often so that you don’t start fidgeting at the slightest provocation.

Exercise more. Sorry about that idea but quite often it’s been found that exercising more often has helped people to stop fidgeting as regularly. You don’t have to take out a gym membership or turn into a fitness freak. Just take a bit more exercise – walk a bit further, take the stairs, that kind of thing. Maybe even go out for a short stroll – called a constitutional if you want to hark back to bygone days – and just enjoy the break from your normal routine.

Listening to a hypnosis track is another good way to help bring your mind round to the idea of stopping fidgeting. Play it to yourself daily for a few days – you can use it as part of your relaxation program – and you’ll find that you begin to fidget less without really realizing why. Which is because the hypnosis is working its magic on you.

Click here to download a hypnosis track to help stop fidgeting.

If you trade on the forex markets then you’ll know that your trading psychology has a tremendous effect on the results you get. Too often, you find yourself trading like a donkey. Taking revenge trades on the market, missing trades that seem blindingly obvious with the benefit of hindsight, cutting winning trades too fast. All that kind of thing.

You know what you should be doing. Your paper trades work out spectacularly. But as soon as there’s real money on the line – even if it’s a low amount – you go to pot. Your trading strategy vanishes almost as fast as your bank.

So how can you turn round your trading psychology to your advantage?

Start by taking a step back. Demo accounts are all very well but as you’ve found out by now they’re nothing like the real thing. After all, if you lose your bank on a demo account you can replenish it with the online equivalent of Monopoly money and start over. That’s not the same feeling as seeing your own cash pile diminish at a startling rate.

So, as soon as you’re happy that your system isn’t going to instantly break the bank it’s time to play the markets for real. But resist the temptation of staking 1% or 2% of your bank on each trade. Cut that down by a lot. A tenth or a twentieth – whatever the lowest amount your trading setup will allow.

Then get over the frustration of thinking to yourself “that would have been thousands at the full 2% I want to trade”. That nagging voice will get louder and louder when you win with small trades.

But as soon as you increase the trade size it seems that your mojo runs away.

All those winning trades you spotted on the demo account or at stupidly small percentages suddenly evaporate.

And before you know it your bank is disappearing again.

The right mindset is absolutely essential for your trading strategy. It’s maybe more important than finding the perfect system. Because if you constantly sabotage your good trades then there’s nothing left to win with.

You can’t change your trading psychology at a conscious level. Think about it for a second – if you could, you’d already have done it and your bank would be growing exponentially.

Instead, you need to work on your subconscious mind. The part of you that’s scared you’re going to lose your entire bank and thinks it is protecting you by quitting all those trades early or letting you hang on to the losers until you’re pipped out and that’s another losing line on your trading spreadsheet.

The edge you need to turn your trading psychology around can be found with hypnosis. The options are to attend a session with a local hypnotist – which can be an excellent option if they’re used to dealing with traders – or to download a track that has been written and recorded by a specialist to address all the issues that are cropping up in your subconscious mind and help turn them around so that they work with you rather than against you.

When this happens it’s like a lightbulb going off and your trading account will start to move in the right direction at last.

You owe it to yourself and your future as a trader to get your trading psychology mindset working with you.

Click here to download a hypnosis track to help improve your trading psychology.

Whilst you may think that only you know that you’re always lying through your teeth with almost every sentence you utter, truth be told your friends and colleagues will have spotted it ages ago. So it’s time to stop compulsive lying and start being someone whose word can be trusted.

Of course, that’s not necessarily as easy as it sounds. Chances are that you’ve woven lots of webs of deception and you’re either going to have to go cold turkey and come clean about them or – maybe even more difficult – unravel them over the coming weeks and months.

Whichever way you choose, here are some tips to help stop compulsive lying:

This may sound counter-intuitive but start by stopping the big lies first. You know the ones – they’d make a Hollywood script writer jealous with their twists and turns and overall intricacy. They take forever to make up and there’s always a hole in them somewhere that gets spotted (either immediately or some place down the line) and someone calls you out on it.

If you’re really that creative – and if you’ve been a compulsive liar for any length of time, you probably are – then turn your lies into the fiction that they really are and publish them on the Amazon Kindle system. That’s a great way of turning your talent to good use. After all, by definition fiction isn’t the truth.

The next step is to have an in-depth chat with someone you know and trust. The friend who will tell you the truth no matter how unpalateable it is. Enlist their help to wean you off your habit of continuously lying about all things great and small. Get them to nudge you back to the straight and narrow the minute you start to cross the line from truth to something rather less acceptable.

If you have enough self discipline and can normally spot when you are about to tell a whopping big lie, try the rubber band method. Wear a rubber band on your wrist in much the same way as you might wear a charity band. Then every time you catch yourself about to tell a lie, snap the rubber band. Yes, it will hurt a bit. That’s the idea. Because you’ll start to associate the act of telling a lie with the feeling of pain. And, unless you’re really weird, you’ll change the way you act to move away from pain.

Don’t give up either!

You won’t move from being someone who always falls into the category of “truth was never quite your style” to being squeaky clean and always telling the truth overnight.

It’s quite possible that you’ll slip back into your old habits occasionally. That doesn’t mean that it’s all over and you can go back to telling lies at every available opportunity. Just keep at your quest for telling the truth and tell it as often as possible. The more you cut back on your lies, the further you’ll get to telling the truth most of the time.

Another way to reinforce the idea of telling the truth is to listen to a hypnosis track. This will work with your subconscious mind – the part of your brain that thinks it’s helping you by getting you to tell lies – and move you back on track.

Click here for a hypnosis download to help stop compulsive lying.

OK, so you want to be a winner but you seem to be forever being thwarted in this quest. Winning is a process – if you’re not following all the steps that lead there, you’re severely reducing your chances of being a winner in whatever field you choose.

Take a look at these steps to developing a winning mindset and – more importantly – start taking steps towards them every single day. It’s reckoned that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to become a top professional in whatever field you choose. You won’t get there by just thinking about it (sorry!) – you’ll need to practice. And that’s a big part of having a winning mindset.

Start by having a clear goal in mind. It could be reducing your golf handicap, scoring for your team, winning a new business contract or any other target you care to pursue. But if you don’t have that clear goal, you won’t ever know whether or not you’ve run.

It’s fairly easy for a hundred metre athlete to know if they’ve won a race. But it’s less easy for team players to know – they could have their best match ever but if the rest of the team isn’t up to scratch, they could be on the losing team. So you need to clarify in your own mind precisely what events need to happen in order for you to win something. Sit down and take the time to do this analysis, then you’ll have a benchmark to work towards.

Next up, make sure that you keep at it. There will be days when you don’t meet your winning target and they may even seem like dismal failures (our minds are much better at being grumpy than they are at being happy). Take a note of what you’ve done and replay the event – either on screen or in your own mind – so that you can figure out where you can improve next time.

Mental rehearsal is another great way to move towards being a winner more often. What this means is that you practice the event over and over again in your own mind. Visualize yourself doing everything spot on correctly. Imagine how the other people in the event will react and play around with how you’ll react to their reaction. This can be quite fun and unlike real life you can practice it over and over again.

Actors do this all the time – they haven’t got a chance of getting all those smug one-line quips right the first time. In fact, if you’ve ever seen an actor interviewed, it can be a painful process to watch. There’s no script for them to follow and they seem like a fish out of water.  So take the time to practice an event in your own mind until you get as close as possible to perfection. Then the actual event will be a lot easier.

Another option to backup the above ideas is to use a hypnosis track. Deep down, your subconscious is resistant to the idea of you changing into a winner. It will fight to keep the status quo unless you redirect it and that’s where hypnosis comes in. Simply listening to a hypnosis download will help you to train your subconscious mind to help you to be a winner.

Click here to download a hypnosis track to help you to be a winner.

OK, insecurity in a relationship isn’t unusual but that doesn’t stop you worrying about it and feeling as though you’re the only person in the world that could possibly be affected.

There are all sorts of things that can lead up to feelings of insecurity: maybe your partner doesn’t seem to understand you, maybe they hang out with their friends just that bit too often or whatever else is causing those nagging doubts to form in your mind.

So what can you do to overcome insecurity in a relationship?

The first step is obvious but all too easily missed. Start by speaking to your partner. After all, you decided to hook up with them in the first place and found something in them that attracted you, so set aside some quality time where the two of you can speak without letting your worries and emotions get in the way too much. Keep things as natural as you can and just let your thoughts and feelings flow through naturally. You could well find that your worries have sent some unconscious signals to your partner and that these have caused them to adjust how they react to you, compounding the issue.

If that doesn’t do the trick, the next thing to do is speak about your worries to a trusted friend. Because they’re not intimately involved, your friends can often act as a sounding board for your feelings and also offer an outsiders viewpoint that is next to impossible for you to achieve as you’re too close to the problem. This is the kind of conversation that goes well over a coffee or – if you’re really trying to get to the root cause – maybe a glass or two of wine. Just keep an open mind and make sure that your friend will do the same.

Learning to trust is another way of overcoming insecurity in a relationship. Too often, we let trust issues get in the way of our thoughts. All kinds of “what if” thoughts run through our minds. Usually these are worst case scenarios – the sort of thing that only ever really happens in over-the-top television shows. It’s unlikely that your relationship worries will be chosen to appear on Springer so don’t let your mind show you all the gory details in constant re-runs!

Another way to tackle insecurity in relationships is with hypnosis. This is totally discrete and your partner doesn’t need to know that you’re listening to a hypnosis download to help re-train your mind to think more positively about how you interact with them. This has a good success rate and has the extra advantage that you can listen to the downloads over again if the doubts start to creep back in.

Click here for a hypnosis download to help overcome insecurity in relationships.