Do You Understand Your Man?

Understanding men in relationships, though many single women will disagree, is quiet simple. The reason is that men, unlike women, are very simple creatures. They have simple needs, desires and are not overtly emotional, like women.

Still, many women find themselves in a situation where they never get a call after the first date or where they have been in a series of broken relationships, or where they have been dumped by men without any warning or where women in long relationships are left waiting for that marriage proposal, which never comes their way.

If you too are a woman, who has faced a familiar situation and want to know a few magical tips on understanding men in relationships, then below is something very interesting what you are looking for.

Main Tips on How to Understand Men Better

It is human nature that we always want the things which we do not have. And once we have them, our desire fades away. Men are pretty much the same.

So, a useful tip for all single women is to remain a mystery for the man, especially in the initial phases of the relationship. It is a bad idea to tell a man how crazy you are for him or how much you want him. Let him confess his feelings to you initially, be slightly detached and give him opportunity to miss you. Once he makes the first move, you can tell him whatever you want to.

Men like challenges in life and love to 'chase' after a woman. So why deny him his fun? Be slightly unpredictable, once in a while. Do not always agree to what he says. Have your own opinions in life. Be very clear about your needs and expectations and do not overlook them, even if the man asks you to. A modern, assertive and challenging woman is much more appealing to a man than a woman who is always complying with her man's wishes.

Men do not like women who cling to them. Men don’t like women who makes huge emotional demands on the man, who constantly looks for his attention and who is always trying to please them. So, all women who are keen on understanding men in relationships should know that never ever sound desperate to a man as it is bound to turn him off. The more a woman clings to a man, the more he will try to distance himself from her.

Tips on Understanding Men in Love
When a man is in love, he will be at his best behavior around the woman he loves. He will do anything to keep the woman's attention to himself. He will try to know about the likes and dislikes of the woman, will try to understand her better and be very protective of her too.

Men in love may sometimes act in a very weird manner. He may act detached, all because he is fearful that he is falling in love with one particular woman. At the same time, he can become a little possessive of the woman he loves, because he fears that the woman might leave him for someone else.

Once a man is truly committed, he will introduce his woman to all his friends, family and everyone he knows. This is a man's way of showing that a woman now belongs to him. Although marriage is something that makes most men jittery, but when the right woman comes along, men no longer feel that way and are ready for commitment.

For understanding men in marriage, and to make her marriage successful, there are two things that a woman should never forget. Firstly, all men like to act as providers for their family and have an inherent need to be respected, trusted and looked after by their wives. Secondly, men just love sex and can not do without it. And for men sex is a way of feeling emotionally connected to the woman they love.

Happiness is a Choice: 7 Ways To Feel Happy Right Now

Happiness isn't something that suddenly appears in our lives when we have everything we want; happiness is a choice we make in every moment. Sometimes it's just not possible to feel on top of the world; for example if we've just lost someone we love, nothing is going to make us feel happy right now. In those circumstances, probably all we can manage to do is accept how we feel and maybe find a little relief.

These tips are for the times when we wish we felt better and need a quick fix:

1.Appreciate what you have. Nothing new about “count your blessings” but that's because it really works! If you can, start as soon as you wake in the morning and just look around your room for reasons to feel better. Your comfortable bed, the shaft of sunlight coming through the curtains, the anticipation of the taste of that first cup of coffee – now keep going …

2.Do a little daydreaming. Imagine one perfect scenario and really live it for a couple of minutes – no more than that. This is something you can do almost anytime and it will put a smile on your face and give you a quick recharge when you feel yourself wilting.

3.Go outside or lean out of the window and look up at the sky. Even if it's grey and cloudy, it's still a magnificent and magical sight. I especially love a windy day, when the clouds scud across so quickly, with so much energy.

4.Go for a walk. Exercise of any kind is the absolute best way to get yourself out of a funk and a walk needs no special equipment (so no excuses). Even 10 minutes brisk walking with deep breathing will give you a whole new perspective.

5.Listen to the voice in your head. If the story it's telling is a negative one, then change it. Most of the time we're not even aware of the thoughts we have “by default”, but they churn away automatically and when we stop to listen to them it can be a big shock to realise just how negative they are. Make a point of tuning in maybe once an hour and making the conscious decision to focus on something happy or positive for a couple of minutes. After a few days of awareness, that inner voice will start to sound a bit more cheerful.

6.Look for the sparkle in every scene. I heard that phrase from a friend and it stuck with me because it's so evocative. Another way of saying it is look for the positive in everything, but “sparkle” is a word that makes me smile. You don't have to be a Pollyanna (although there's nothing wrong with that) but making a conscious choice to find at least one positive “sparkle” in every challenge will make it easier to find a solution.

7.Breathe, slowly and deeply. Breathe in for a slow count of four, hold it for two, breathe out completely for four. Nothing complicated, you're breathing anyway so why not make the most of it? Deep breathing makes you feel more energised, reduces stress and can even help you lose weight!

The above tips are simple, easy ways to deliberately lift your mood. The more you do them, the more effective they are. Pick one right now and put a smile on your face!
Author's Bio
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Raise Your Self-Esteem, Six Behaviors That Give You a Boost

The importance of self-esteem is an unavoidable reality. All of us are impacted by our self-esteem, whether we recognize it or not. High self-esteem allows us to respect ourselves and makes it easier for others to respect us as well. When we feel good about ourselves we are more able to successfully handle life’s challenges. We will also be much more likely to enjoy the good times.

Almost everyone struggles with self-esteem some of the time. Even those who seem arrogant and overconfident are probably compensating for a bit of self-doubt. Then there are those for whom high self-esteem seems like an impossible dream. Since self-esteem is so important and affects every aspect of our life, how do we lift ourselves up?

One of the easiest ways to have high self-esteem is to have parents who have high self-esteem. Unfortunately many people have not had that luxury. But we are not doomed to stay stuck in low self-esteem. We each have a responsibility to first become aware of the state of our self-esteem and then, if we find ourselves wanting, we need to accept the responsibility to do what it takes to raise our self-esteem.

How can we tell if we have high self-esteem? There are six behaviors that tend to indicate high self-esteem. The fascinating thing is that if you have low self-esteem, behaving like you have high self-esteem can actually raise your self-esteem. There is something about disciplining yourself and practicing these six self-esteem behaviors that helps you to raise your self-esteem.

1. Wake Up in Your Life
Get to know yourself. Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings; get to know your preferences and opinions. Allow yourself to seek reality checks and be willing to see and correct mistakes. This means snapping out of autopilot and being present in your own life.

2. Accept Yourself
Accepting yourself does not mean pretending that you are perfect. You can accept yourself and still want to change something about yourself. The reality is that we can never change that which we resist. When you hate parts of yourself, you will find that you have given those parts incredible staying power. Self-acceptance is the foundation for growth.

3. Take Responsibility for You
You are responsible for those things that are within your control—your thoughts, your words, your action, your values, your happiness . . . You are not responsible for those thing outside your control. Stop waiting for someone to rescue you, to make you happy or whatever it is you are waiting for and be there for yourself.

4. Stand Up for You—Be Assertive
This is your life and if you sell yourself short to please others your self-esteem will suffer. Accept that your needs and wants are important. Muster the courage to stand up for what is important to you. Start small and work your way up.

5. Live Purposefully
Set and achieve goals. It is not the achievement that is important; what is important is that the process of achieving feels real good. These feelings of satisfaction will boost your self-esteem.

6. Strengthen Your Integrity
Say what you mean and mean what you say. If your behavior contradicts something that you value or believe, you let yourself down. Self-esteem is about what you think of yourself. Living with integrity or practicing what you preach helps you to raise your self-esteem.

The formula to raise your self-esteem is simple, but not easy. If these behaviors are not a natural part of your life, it will take some persistence and practice to include them. But adopting these behaviors will reward you in every aspect of your life. According to Nathaniel Branden, “To trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.”

Author's Bio
Susan Derry, B.Ed., M.S.Psy., R.P.C., C.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course

Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples

Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine

Seven Gateways to Happiness A Positive Psychology Method for Increased Happiness

What are the tools to get to THE ENCHANTED SELF® part of ourselves? What skills do we need in order to find happiness that is unique and sustainable for each person?

This paper outlines the positive psychology methods that you need to employ to enter each of the “Seven Gateways to Happiness.”

First Gateway: Honoring what is Right about Ourselves Rather Than What is Wrong

As women, we're all experts in identifying what is wrong with ourselves. We can probably quickly make up a long list, detailing what is wrong in our lives. However, it's a lot harder to get in touch with what is right. We need to know ourselves in positive ways. We need to learn how to honor our talents, strengths, even our coping skills which serve us so well. And most important, we need to treasure and enjoy our potential.

These parts of us, if not honored, identified and talked about both to ourselves and to others, will lose their power. We have to keep igniting them. We need to get to know ourselves in ways that emphasize the heroic, strong parts of ourselves. This means using our memories in very different ways from what we've been accustomed to. It means searching through our history to find our talents, strengths and even lost potential, even if we have to sort through pounds of dysfunction. It means searching our past for what is right about ourselves, not for what is wrong.

Gateway Two: Falling in Love with Ourselves

This is an extremely important gateway. This gateway is achieved after we have made efforts to reclaim and honor our talents, capacities, strengths, lost potential and coping skills. Now we are ready. We no longer break our hearts by putting ourselves down and saying "No, no, you can't do that," or "You're stupid." Now we are ready to say, "Yes, I love myself. I have a lot to offer. I am capable of having fun. I am capable of doing good, and no one can sidetrack me from who I really am."

When you fall in love with yourself, you begin to feel the positive self-esteem that comes when we don't deflate ourselves. You're ready to take yourself out for tea or to that wonderful spa for a day, or to go back and play the piano, which you always wanted to do. You're ready to recognize all the tools of wisdom that you have to offer. You're ready

to recognize that you have an Enchanted Self that deserves to be part of your every day. When you love yourself, you know when you need help. You know when you need guidance. It isn't a narcissistic love where you feel that you are perfect. It's a love of yourself, as you would love a child. If the child is ill, you take the child to the doctor. If the child comes home with a good paper from school, you put it on the refrigerator. It's a self-acknowledgment that makes you viable, real, and whole. Now you've become really ready to see the story of your life in a positive light. Even the disappointments, even tragedies have served only to hone you like tempered steel. You've been through the battles and have emerged stronger. You're in charge of your own self, a most wonderful feeling!

Gateway Three: Learning to Meet Our Needs and Negotiate Successfully

There's nothing more demoralizing than a woman who does not know how to speak up for herself, who doesn't have a voice for herself. When we feel ignored or not understood, we can feel rage and anger building. Often as women we find ourselves in a predicament where we don't know how to speak up. We simply don't know how to negotiate for what we want. While sometimes it's a cultural attitude that we've taken on, for instance that women should be demure, quiet, and modest, often it's due to a lack of understanding the appropriate skill-set necessary for negotiating effectively. All of these factors put a tremendous pressure on our true capacities. Our future happiness or fulfillment is restricted simply because we don't know the right road to get there.

Learning how to meet our needs and how to negotiate appropriately is a lot of work, but the satisfaction far outweighs the work. When you have been able to speak with integrity

to a husband, mother-in-law or a boss, when you have been able to finish a level of training that moves you ahead professionally, you're really living your Enchanted Self.

You feel as special as you deserve to feel. It's worth every moment of effort.

Gateway Four: Replenishment - Truly coming home to our Enchanted Self

Replenishment, joy, pleasure and delight are all parts of truly coming home to our Enchanted Selves. If any gateway is the pivotal gateway for a woman, it is this gateway.

This is the gateway that we must return to above all others, as frequently as possible. It is where we fuel up, where we energize. It is where we fill ourselves again so that we can meet the needs of others, be the caretakers of the world, bring up our children, spend time with the elderly, and do the hundreds of womanly tasks that we do, including having a full time job and running a home.

It may seem strange to you at first, but the smartest way to fill up again once we’ve become depleted is to bring personal satisfaction and replenishment back into our own lives. This means really knowing who you are, loving yourself and knowing how to meet your needs. If you feel rejuvenated after a great game of tennis, then that works for you. If you try to fill up by going to a comedy performance or having a massage, you may remain on empty if it isn't right for you. Choosing what is right differs from person to person, so invest some good thought into finding out what is right for yourself. In THE ENCHANTED SELF: A Positive Therapy, I teach how to sort through your memories to get to know yourself, so that you can really tune in on the best forms of replenishment, joy and pleasure for you. A general rule of thumb is to look for what has felt good in the past, and try to either duplicate it or find a way to transform the activity into a form that works for your present stage of life. For example, a long swim in a lake in childhood might now be light swimming, walking in the pool at the local “Y,” and a cup of coffee!

Gateway Five: Coming Home or Going Away, Finding Tribes in Which to Belong

As women we find ourselves automatically belonging to certain groups. There's the family we're born into, the family we may have created through marriage, and all sorts of other groups going on in our lives: PTA groups, office colleagues and church affiliations, etc.

Many women don't realize how critical it is to belong to groups. Depression feeds very quickly off of isolation. By nature most women not only share commonly in our care taking and in our concerns about others, but we enjoy and thrive when we're a part of the right groups. We want to be connected. We don't want to be isolated.

Choosing the right groups, the right tribes to belong to, is part of the dilemma and the wonderment of going through adult life. While our children don't always have much freedom in choosing what groups they belong to, sometimes they can be so greatly against an activity that we finally let them quit. We may let them leave the Girl Scouts or little league, or perhaps stop taking piano lessons, thus letting them make their own determinations.

But we, as adult women, can on the whole always have the privilege and luxury of picking our groups. It may well be time, as your children get older, to say "goodbye" forever to the PTA. It may be time to find a religious affiliation that is or is not connected to your heritage or what you were initially exposed to.

Gateway Six: Sharing Our Wisdom, Mentoring and Being Mentored

As women, we live in a golden age. We have more education than women have historically had access to. We live longer; we're healthier; we look better. Everything is really in our favor if we know how to absorb and share our wisdom and knowledge. The key to making use of all our opportunities, and maybe even the key to a happy and healthy longevity, is learning what we need to learn. What a lot of women don't realize is that mentoring can come in many different forms. I can be sitting with an 85-year-old

woman and in listening to the story of her life have my heart warmed and my courage heightened, just by hearing the things she's had to deal with and live through in her many years. I can also be in the presence of a two-year-old and learn the infectious, delightful nature of laughter once more, a lesson I may have forgotten too often. I can be taking a walk at the shore, listening to the sounds of the ocean waves and letting them soothe me, reminding me of the constancy of Mother Nature and her efforts to keep the world whole and in rhythm. Wherever a woman passes in her life, she can be giving and receiving profound levels of exchange with nature and with other people of all ages and all stages of life. This is indeed what the good life is all about.

Gateway Seven: Positive Action, Remember the Notion of a Good Deed

This Gateway is the gateway of positive action, or “Why not do a good deed, it can’t hurt!” We're all faced with bouts of discouragement, letdowns and disappointments, and for women, certainly the cycle of life itself has its ups and downs. Anyone fortunate enough to have longevity on her side will inevitably sustain losses and disappointments. None of the Gateways to Happiness can totally prevent a person from the necessary bumps and grinds of life, but what they do provide are mechanisms not only with which to pick ourselves up heroically, but to strengthen ourselves and make the world a better place for us. One of the very best ways to do this is through positive action. I look at positive action in three ways.

For one thing, it's good practice to take positive action, whether it's about a personal issue in your own life, or to help others. This forces us to practice timeliness, good behaviors, and often good logic and decision-making.

Secondly, taking positive action can definitely help offset loneliness, letdown feelings, and feelings of discouragement. It does this by the act of pushing us into connecting with people, sharing with people and having the opportunity to experience the happiness shared by others when they are affected by something positive that we do. The cliché, “A smile is more infectious than a frown,” definitely holds true in this case.

Thirdly, doing positive action helps us to grow emotionally and spiritually. And it helps the world at large. It is a win-win for everybody and everything alive.

Positive psychology in general and the Enchanted Self Gateways to Happiness emphasize how important and how much fun it can be to rediscover the best of ourselves.

I wish you good luck and good times as you enter the Gateways to Happiness!

Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein is a Positive Psychology expert and the author of THE ENCHANTED SELF: A Positive Therapy, RECIPES FOR ENCHANTMENT: The Secret Ingredient is YOU!, There Comes a Time in Every Woman’s Life for DELIGHT! and her latest book THE TRUTH, I’m Ten, I’m Smart and I Know Everything! Originator of THE ENCHANTED SELF®, Dedicated to Delight, Purpose and of course, Feeling Good About Ourselves! The Enchanted Self - Dr. Barbara Holstein.