Tag Archives: pickthebrain

saving money

It’s OKAY to Spend on Stuff You Love

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Erin Falconer

With personal finance, as with so many areas of life, we have a tendency to swing between extremes. Often, an excess of spending – with accompanying credit card debt, clutter and stress – prompts us to take a good hard look at our finances. We make all sorts of good resolutions: a plan to reduce our debt, a savings account for our emergency fund, and so on … and somewhere along the way, we pick up the idea that we should only spend money on absolute essentials. Continue reading →

The Self-Confidence Con

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Erin Falconer

There is a funny concept among the softly-spoken, the meek, the apologetic excuse-makers that there is some ‘kind’ of person who is confident, capable and calm in the face of adversity. The have-nots usually disempower themselves further by making an assumption that confidence is like a genetic trait, written into the DNA of some, and left out of the chromosomes of another. It’s not, it’s a lie. Continue reading →

Truth and Secrets in Memoir Writing

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Erin Falconer

When you’re nine years old, Aunt Jessie presses her powdered face to yours and whispers, “Now don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw. Your mother would just die.”

This is a scary thing to a child—to be entrusted with a secret that has so much power if could kill someone. Aunt Jessie probably didn’t mean to scare you like that, but words have power. Silence in the face of wrong has power. And when we begin to write our memoirs, we can get caught up in the webs of the past. Sometimes these webs are so tangled that we stop writing. Continue reading →

save money

5 Simple Ways to Cut Your Spending – And Still Enjoy Your Life!

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Erin Falconer

Would you like to have more money in your pocket – without having to do any extra work? For many of us, the easiest way to boost our savings is to cut back on how much we’re spending. Whether you’re channeling money into an emergency fund, or whether you’ve got your heart set on that dream vacation, saving an extra few hundred dollars each month might seem out of reach right now. Continue reading →

Are You Experiencing Someone Else’s Emotions?

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Erin Falconer

Why do you think you feel bad when you see a poor miserable homeless man in the street? Apart from feeling guilty for not helping poor people there are still some sad emotions that you will experience upon seeing anybody who suffers.

Do you know why you experience these emotions? It’s because you experienced some of the man’s pain at the moment you saw him. Continue reading →

Bad Day? 5 Tips to Keep Your Motivation

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Erin Falconer

A couple of weeks ago I had a bad day. Actually, it was a terrible day. Every piece of news I got was disappointing. Did it affect me? I still have bruises from the rock I tried to hide under. Continue reading →