Siam Thai

What comes to mind when you hear “leader” or “leadership”? It’s likely that you think of someone who’s, well, in charge, someone who exhibits a very aggressive personality, who nobody ever dares to defy, and who never takes no for an answer. Leadership is also seen as having assertive behavior. Apart from that, some people also think that those who have the title of “president”, “director”, “CEO”, “chairman”, or “supervisor” already qualifies as a leader. Anyone who also has seniority and is at the right age to be appointed to a certain position can also be seen as a leader.

Aside from these, there are also some wrong notions about what leadership means, notions that the right leadership training program should be able to dispel. The general impression is that leadership means nothing more than being assertive, than being someone who doles out orders and instructions. Leadership is certainly not about power and about making other people feel small and helpless.

On the contrary, the right form of leadership should even make every employee feel big, important, and useful. A leader is someone who inspires and encourages, because this sort of encouragement pushes people to improve themselves and thus work hard to do everything they can to achieve their goals. By inspiring and encouraging people, you actually help them see their potential and make them realize that they can achieve quite a lot. It’s a far cry from being the kind of person who brings them down and makes them feel worthless and useless, which will certainly not encourage them to do their jobs at all.

The right leader doesn’t just focus on himself or herself. He or she is not out to paint himself or herself as the star of the whole show. Instead, the leader works to make sure that it is the entire team that shines and gets the proper credit.

We are all facing retirement someday and savings and investing are the keys to becoming a millionaire. But people come to me all the time and say it is impossible to save money and pay themselves first. They truly believe that they don’t have the money. The truth is that they really don’t know where they are spending their money or have never really thought about whether they should be buying all those little items they buy every day.

Now David Bach coined the phrase “latte factor” to describe the value of all the little things that people buy regularly that they really don’t need to buy and could get along just fine without.

Let’s use my friends Jill and Shawn as an example. They were over the other night and we got talking about retirement and savings and I was explaining how paying yourself first was the real key to coming up with the money for retirement and that if they wanted to become an automatic millionaire they needed to set it up so that money was transferred automatically, after every pay day, into their retirement savings account. Of course the first thing they said was we don’t have that kind of money. So I told them about David’s “Latte factor”. I got my white board out and we went through the exercise to see what their latte factor was.

First Contact…Now What?

When you decide to join a funding network that has been accredited by the BBB, you will first create a profile and make some edits to your business plan to hone your funding request. After the business plan is uploaded, it’s time to begin communicating with investors. So you wait for investors to show interest in your request and eventually that is exactly what happens.

The first investor contact provides an initial only for the last name and the full first name. A second investor provides a business name. The third investor leaves a first and last name, but there is no company name. The fourth contact is the only one that leaves a telephone number.

Now what do you do?

The Next Step…

The first step is to consider the types of investors that usually join accredited funding networks. Funding networks are attractive to funding providers because they simplify the process of locating quality start-up companies. The investor doesn’t have to wade through dozens or even hundreds of funding requests that are of no or little interest. It is up to the investors to decide on when and how they want to promote funding availability and will often maintain anonymity until locating promising investments.

Investors also have the option of requesting that you mail, post online or send an electronic version of your business plan. You may be asked to send the business plan to an email address. Some investors will hold off requesting an emailed copy until able to obtain additional information about your business goals. The goal is avoid wasting time on requests that are unlikely to be funded.

To Non-Disclosure or Not to Non-Disclosure…

In this day and age, it is very difficult to find a country that does not have a strong emphasis to develop a Sports Nation. Apart from very under-privilege countries, most countries now have some form of initiative or structured programmes that drive them towards a becoming one. But what exact is a Sports Nation? What are the things different countries do in order to aspire to reach that status? Is it national policy that sports must play a prominent role in societies? These are some of the questions we will explore as we uncover the nature of a Sports Nation.

All aspiring Sports Nations have a hidden agenda these days, and that is to develop a healthier nation. Healthy people require less cost to look after as they age and develop. Encouraging an active and healthy lifestyle is an indirect way to tackle the demographic issues of higher life expectancy and rising health care cost. In countries that are considered welfare states, like Australia, Britain, France, and Canada, the health care cost of citizens are mainly bourn by government coffers. This could present a significant burden on the countries resources as health care cost has skyrocketed or will continue to skyrocket with time. Since 1965, health care cost has exploded exponential.

This geometric rise poses a very challenging problem to governments of the world as population growth has not receded. In fact the global population is forecast to breach the 9 billion mark by 2020. How than can governments cope with such pressing need to sustain their peoples? Developing a Sports Nation can be one long-term strategy to deal with this issue. The key is to keep people fit and strong and hopefully keep illnesses and diseases at bay, such that health care costs could be contained.