5 self-massage techniques you should learn right now

Bad posture, stress and overuse can take a toll on our delicate muscles and tissues, making us feel tired, tense and not our best selves. Getting a professional massage may not always fit into our busy schedules or our budgets, but neglecting self-care for too long isn't the best for our physical or mental health. Whenever your body is feeling stiff and tense, try these 5 self-massage techniques to ease pain and stress in your feet, hands, neck and back.

How to Give Yourself A Foot Massage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUQYuQC-lWQ

How to Give Yourself A Hand Massage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=168lKIyc3lw

How to Give Yourself A Neck and Shoulder  Massage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFCO4f-NklA

How to Give Yourself A Breast Massage

4 Step Self Breast Massage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSd0dpwixvo

How to Give Yourself A Back Massage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CYAXocIk_U

For even more tips on how to give yourself a massage, check out this full-body guide to self-massage from Beyond Talk.

how to make anything you cook taste better

Since I caught the cooking bug, I’m always looking for ways to make my food look and taste better. If I’m going to take the time out to cook, I want to make the best meal I can. So whenever I cook at home, I try to come as close as possible to creating a restaurant-quality meal for myself and my guests as I can. Fortunately, that’s not as difficult as it might seem to be.

What makes a really good restaurant meal really good, generally isn’t the fact that the dish contains a lot of unrecognizable ingredients, or that the chef uses fancy cooking techniques. Instead, a really quality meal relies on some very simple cooking tips that should be incorporated into every dish.

how to make anything you cook taste better

5 Tips for Creating Restaurant-Quality Meals At Home

Use fresh ingredients

Fresh ingredients have much more flavor and texture. To make your food taste better, avoid canned or jarred goods if fresh is also available. This is especially true for vegetables.

Canned vegetables are probably to blame for many people who claim they don’t like vegetables. Canned veggies are mushy, and all of them taste kind of the same after soaking in room temperature salt water for god knows how long. In my opinion, canned food is emergency food that should really only be used under certain circumstances, namely:

When you’ve run out of everything else in the house,

When camping, or,

When the zombie apocalypse pops off.

For almost every other occasion, use fresh. Also. If you’re using that jarred diced garlic? Stop.

There are some exceptions where I think canned foods are an ok alternative to fresh, like: beans, tomatoes, fish (tuna, sardines, salmon).

How to Make Anything you cook Taste Better-flavor

Add more than just salt & pepper

While salt and pepper are the basic must-haves for seasoning food, if you want to create more complex and interesting food flavors, you absolutely need to use herbs and spices. Stock your spice cabinet with some basics, and learn how to use them in your favorite dishes to make them truly taste like something.

You can even coax more flavor out of your standard salt and black pepper. Instead of table salt, use a good quality sea salt – a tiny bit goes a long way, and you’ll find that you need to use less of it. Which is particularly helpful if you’re looking to cut back on your salt intake. Fresh ground black pepper also tastes much more flavorful and goes a lot further than pre-ground black pepper.

Combine olive oil & butter

If you’re sauteeing, pan frying or roasting something, instead of using oil on its own, combine both olive oil and butter to cook your food. There are a few benefits to this blend:

1. Adding butter to olive oil adds a richer, more luxurious flavor to a dish than just olive oil on its own.

2. The browning power of butter creates nice color and crispness on the exterior of the food.

3. Butter burns much more quickly than olive oil, so adding olive oil protects against over-browning or burning the outside before the food is finished cooking inside.

4. Since oil and butter have about the same number of calories, by combining the two, you get extra flavor without extra calories.

I recommend the olive oil & butter trick more for meats and proteins (like this recipe for perfect pan-seared salmon), than for vegetables, but if  you’re one who doesn’t really like to eat veggies to begin with, go ahead and add some butter to help yourself out.

Follow the rule of 4

Try to make sure your home-cooked dish includes all of the following 4 taste components:

1. Salt – as mentioned previously, you shouldn’t only do salt, nor should you overdo salt, but the right amount of salt will instantly bring out the other flavors in a dish.

2. Sweet or savory – Dishes usually fall into either the sweet (aka, sugary) or savory (non-sugary) category. But any dish can benefit from adding sweetness or savoriness to help balance out already existing flavors. Aside from sugar, sweetness can be added to a dish with: molasses, sweet vegetables like butternut squash or sweet potatoes, and dried or fresh fruits. Ingredients that add savory flavor include: herbs, broths, soy sauce, MSG, and fish sauce.

3. Acid – Your tongue has bitter and sour receptors for a reason. Don’t forget about them when you’re making a dish. Adding a touch of something acidic – a squeeze of citrus, a dash of vinegar, bitters, something pickled, fresh chopped onions – to a dish creates a layer of brightness and contrast to almost any dish, whether sweet or savory.

4. Texture – Ok, so, technically, texture is not a component of taste. But! It’s so intricately linked to how we perceive the flavor and taste of food, that the lack or presence of texture definitely influences how good we think a dish or meal is. Words like crunchy, crispy, tender, fluffy, creamy all express texture, or, the way a food feels in your mouth. Be sure that your dish has the right texture for what it’s supposed to be.

Including all of the above flavor components in your home-cooked meals will stimulate all of the flavor receptors on your tongue, along with the sensation of texture. And that means better tasting food.

How to Make Anything you cook Taste Better-pleasure

Plate it nicely

It’s said that you eat with your eyes first. If you’re going to go through the effort of cooking, make sure you show off the finished product – even if you’re only cooking for yourself. Don’t just slop your food onto the plate, take a few minutes to arrange everything nicely and admire it for a few moments before digging in. And, dear God, please don’t serve your lovely home-cooked meal on a paper or plastic plate. I mean I get it, I don’t like to wash dishes either, but my food is better than that, it deserves a proper plate. And so does yours.

If you must eat on plastic, at least refrain from posting a picture of it on the internets. It just looks sad.

If you’ve already mastered these tips for cooking better tasting food, try these more advanced tips from Lifehacker on how to make your food taste better.

What other tips do you have for making your food taste good?

how to say goodbye at a party

Have trouble saying your goodbyes at a party? This should help.

Original source: Lifehack.org

how to get more than money from your job

how to get more than money from work

Money isn’t everything. Yet, when most of us embark on a job search, it’s the primary factor we consider in deciding whether a job is worth taking.

We typically define compensation as, ‘the money we get for working’, but another definition for the word compensation is,

something that counterbalances or makes up for an undesirable or unwelcome state of affairs.

Let’s face it. For most of us, being at work is an undesirable state of affairs. We’d certainly rather be hanging out with our friends, going for a walk in the park, taking a nap or travelling the world instead of going to work every day for years and years on end, right? So, compensation is the thing that makes up for the fact that we have to show up at a job instead of doing whatever we want. It’s the price we accept for selling our time and talents to a client or a company.

But when we only accept money as payment in this transaction, we’re forgetting about the value of other things that we’re giving up in the deal. Things that have nothing to do with money, but would do a lot to make up for the fact that you’re at work instead of snoozing under the covers.

5 Forms of Non-Monetary Compensation

Autonomy / Ownership

The ability to turn your own ideas into reality is an often-overlooked form of compensation. A job that gives you the opportunity to lead projects, come up with ideas or plans for your company or department, or just the freedom to accomplish your own work tasks in the way you see fit and without being micro-managed is much more satisfying.

Dress Code

The ability to wear what you like; not having to invest part of your salary in a totally separate wardrobe for work.

Flexible Work Schedule

Being able to structure your work day as you see fit – working on the days and times when you’re most productive. Being able to schedule your ‘real life’ into your workday.

Flexible Work Location

Being able to do your work wherever you see fit. Having the option to change work location as needed.

High-Performing or Highly Experienced Co-Workers

Working alongside super-smart or super-experienced people is like getting a free education. I owe every soft skill and business know-how I have to working with, observing and learning from people who were way better than me at what we did. Learning via traditional education does have value, but learning via association and apprenticeship is priceless.

Of course there are other forms of non-monetary job compensation like: health benefits, gym memberships, cell phone discounts and the like,  but since these job ‘benefits’ are fairly standard and usually available to every employee, I feel like they’re not as valuable as the ones listed above.

Not all of these forms of non-monetary compensation will be available in every industry or for every job role. But some of them will be. And you should be sure to ask for them during the interview and selection process. If not, you could literally be selling yourself short.

And you’re worth more than that.

What other forms of work compensation would sweeten the deal for you? Have you been able to successfully negotiate any of these forms of compensation for a job?

how to make time slow down

how to make time slow down

A while back, I was talking with a co-worker about an NPR story on why time seems to move faster as we age. One explanation offered in the story was that, when we were younger, everything we encountered was new and big and significant – we’d never done most things before, or, we’d done them so few times that it all still seemed like new.

Something about how the brain registers time makes it feel like everything slows down when we’re in new situations or experiences. Likely, it’s so we can process all this new information and store it in a logical place according to our brain’s particular filing system. As we age and repeat experiences, however, the brain takes shortcuts. It no longer needs to record every minute detail of something that you’ve done a thousand times. It speeds past those familiar and known experiences, and as a result we feel like our lives have sped up as well.

But part of the beauty of being older is the accumulated experience. The wisdom that is its own treasure. Even if we could turn back the clock to when we were young and time moved more slowly, certainly we wouldn’t to lose all that precious learning and growth we’ve gained over so many years of living?

So the challenge is: how do I look through ever-older eyes with a forever-new heart? How do we make time slow down like way back when everything was new?

Here are some ideas:

9 Ways to Make Time Slow Down

Be fully present in your body. I think most of us are pretty detached from our bodies. We only really pay close attention to our body when something’s wrong with it (‘my knee hurts’, ‘I’m hungry’), or when it experiences pleasure. Most of our relationship with our body is spent in either avoiding pain or chasing pleasure for it – things that send our mind racing through time. Taking time to slow down and actually focus on how the body functions, and what it feels like when it’s being used, is essential. Active hobbies (e.g., sports, biking, walking), stretching, meditation, sex, even massage are good ways to get your mind back into your body.

Be observant. I can get in the habit of having blinders on while going about my day – walking with such purpose to my next meeting or to grab my lunch, that I don’t really see anything except for what’s directly in front of me. You’ve probably done the same. Convinced yourself you’re in a hurry, even if you don’t want to go where you’re headed (Really? I’m rushing… to work?) or you aren’t on a schedule at all (It’s Saturday, why am I mad that everyone’s moving so slow?). Instead of rushing past everyone and everything to get to your next location, slow down and pay attention to the things that you would normally pass by without noticing. Turn your head from side to side as you walk. Look up at the sky, count how many trees you pass from the train station to the office. Imagine the whole world is a ‘Where’s Waldo’ drawing, and you’re trying to see where that sneaky sumbitch is hiding.

how to make time slow down - ferris bueller quote

Change 1 small thing. Routine makes weeks and months pass by in an indistinguishable blur. If you’ve been going about your daily life with minimal variation, introduce a little change. Take a new route on your commute. Switch your brand of cereal. Take a day off for no reason at all.

Go somewhere new. Even if it’s just a new park, a new restaurant or new area of town. Explore somewhere you’ve never been.

Learn something new. A new language, a new dance move, a new joke. Once you’ve got that one down, learn a new one.

Hang with kids. If you can’t be a kid again, be with kids again. Ask them questions, listen to them talk and engage in conversation with them like you would with any other friend. Play a game with them, show each other your best dance moves, have them tell you a story, laugh together at something silly.

Stop saying you don’t have time. I’m a big believer in the idea that what you affirm mentally and verbally, is made real in your life. If you say you don’t have enough time, you won’t. Your actions will follow your words and you’ll keep finding ways to squander away your time on a hundred things that you’ve chosen to do instead of the things you should be doing. If you really don’t have enough time to do the things that you need or want to in your life, that’s a big red flag that you need to sit down and make some difficult decisions about what needs to stay and what needs to go in your life. Ask yourself what and who you need to re-prioritize in order to stop feeling so overscheduled and overwhelmed. Or, you need to stop sweating the small stuff and change that statement from a helpless, “I don’t have time,” to a knowing, “I can’t do everything.”

Be someone new. This isn’t as un-doable as it sounds. I’m not suggesting you go fugue or check into the witness protection program, but do something that lets you see yourself as a different person. Change up your style, get a new hairdo, lose or gain some weight, talk in a German accent for an entire day, schedule some sessions with a therapist or a life coach.

Plan a vacation. Cuz, seriously, time moves at its absolute slowest in the weeks and days before it’s time for you take a highly anticipated trip somewhere.

Do you feel like time has sped up as you’ve gotten older? What other ways have you found to make time slow down?

how to do the impossible

how to do the impossible

“It always seems impossible until it’s done." ~ Nelson Mandela

When a group of friends comes to you and says that they’ve found a great deal on a 2-hour private Mediterranean boat cruise and want to know if you’re in, you say yes. You don’t think about the fact that you swim like a rock and are therefore mildly terrified of deep water without a pool’s edge or lifeguard in sight to cling to. You simply say yes. Because it’s summer. It’s southern Spain. And it’s what you do.

So when you subsequently find yourself scared shitless on a sailboat off the coast of Malaga on a blazing hot summer day with half of that group of friends taking turns diving from the boat into the water and playfully splashing about, and the other half shouting for you to jump in and join them, you’ve got a choice to make. Do you:

1. Disregard the mind-numbing fear that’s gripping you, your bowels that keep threatening to loosen on you, and your lack of strong swimming skills, and take the plunge? Or,

2. Act like a sensible person and say, “No thanks, guys, just gonna stay on board and make sure the chips don’t get soggy,” and miss the opportunity to add ‘swam in the Mediterranean’ to your list of ‘have you evers’?

If there’s anything I loathe more than the fear of ending up in a watery grave, it’s the fear of missing out on a chance to make an amazing memory. So, after watching my friends enjoy themselves for a few moments longer, I walked to the edge of the boat and stood there peering down into the water, hoping I’d be able to will myself into doing the impossible.

How to Do the Impossible

Find your motivation (aka, ‘the push’)

What is the one thing that makes you feel like you can’t not do this? The one thing that makes the impossible task looming in front of you seem like something you must attempt, even if you don’t prove to be successful at it? This is the thing that will give you that initial push that you need to get started with an impossible task, and will keep fueling your fire to see it through to the end. In almost every situation, that push will come from one of the following:

Naysayers

Years earlier, I was faced with a similarly impossible moment. I was at the famed Rick’s Café in Jamaica, nervously waiting my turn to jump off of one of the surrounding cliffs into the cool blue waters below (I know, I know. For someone who can’t swim well, I jump into deep water an awful lot). I wasn’t even sure if was actually going to jump. I waved 2 or 3 others ahead of me, while I continued to work up the nerve. Just as I was starting to talk myself out of it, one of the guys who’d seen me around the resort that I was staying at, sauntered up and took a seat on a rock off to the side of the diving ‘platform’. He took one look at my terror-stricken face and started playfully chiding me, telling me that I wasn’t going to jump, that I was too scared, that I should just walk back down and join my friends at the bar. It turns out that someone telling me that I couldn’t, was all the motivation I needed to realize that I could. When my detractor was right in the middle of one of his wisecracks, I ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped. Geronimo, ho.

how to overcome fear and do the impossible despite naysayers

Necessity

You’ve heard the stories of people who’ve rushed into a burning building or displayed superhuman strength to save someone they love in a moment of disaster. What makes those miraculous feats possible is a certain type of necessity. A necessity brought about by the fear of an outcome that is worse than or would cause more suffering than the impossible thing to be done. The avoidance of pain or suffering is a powerful motivator, and can make you completely suspend the notion that you can’t do a thing. After my Rick’s Café cliff jump, I hit the water so hard that my watch – which I’d forgotten to remove – came off and began to float away from me as I sank beneath the surface. The watch was a treasured gift from a dear friend, and I was damned if I was going to let the Caribbean claim it. In that moment, I completely forgot to remember that I couldn’t swim well. My panic at being in a big body of water was replaced by the panic of potentially losing my watch, and before I could think, I’d swum my way up to retrieve it and over to the bottom of the cliff where I extracted my beloved watch and my beloved self from the water.

Tragedy

Sometimes a personal life tragedy and the long, slow pressure cooker of time is what you need to accomplish a seemingly impossible feat – like this guy who went from Homer Simpson to hotbody in one year after a breakup with his girlfriend. Tragedy and adversity often gives us a reason to fight and a willingness to win – or at least, persevere – despite impossible odds.

Cheerleaders / Role Models

Things don’t seem nearly as impossible when you’ve got a friend or few by your side cheering you on, believing in you, and pledging to be there for you if and when things get dicey. Sometimes a support group and a gentle nudge is what you need to get started on an impossible task. While I was standing on the edge of that sailboat in the middle of the Mediterranean, still debating if I could jump, I heard my friends cheering me on and smiling from the water. “C’mon, Kisha! You can do it! Jump!” Surely these smiling, strong-swimming people wouldn’t let me drown, I thought to myself. They weren’t even pointing and laughing at how obviously scared I was. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I can do this.

Fully commit (aka, ‘Sh*t or get off the pot’)

So you’ve found your motivation, but you’re still a little bit scared, you may even still be hemming and hawing about going through with this impossible feat. Nothing unusual about that. Fear doesn’t necessarily fade away simply because you’ve found a reason to face it. But if you’re still hesitating and reconsidering once you’ve started down the path toward the impossible, there’s a huge chance that you’re going to hurt yourself in the process. While motivation gives you the power to start an impossible thing, commitment is the thing within that says there is no stopping, no turning back, no giving in once you’ve started. Or, if you’ve decided to ‘get off the pot’, commitment prevents you from regretting that decision and continuing to beat yourself up about it.

how to do the impossible

Visualize the Desired Outcome

What’s the worst that could happen? Instead of letting that be just a rhetorical question, allow yourself to imagine the worst possible outcome – failure, embarrassment, physical pain, financial loss. Sit with that image for a while, try to feel the emotions attached to that outcome. Now, imagine the most desirable result. How would that feel? What would that look like? Spend more time filling out that image in your mind. See yourself swimming and playing with your friends in the water. See yourself not drowning, making it back to the boat and enjoying soggy chips with your friends as you sail off into the sunset, still laughing. Imagine yourself 1, 5, 10 years from now telling your kids the story of that one time when you swam in the Mediterranean despite the fact that you were scared to death. Then tell yourself that all the positive things you’ve just imagined can be real. All you have to do is….

Once It’s Done, Do It Again

You already know how my story ended, right? Of course you do. I eventually jumped off of the sailboat into the water on that sunny summer day in southern Spain. It was much, much colder and a lot less scary than I thought it would be. I splashed about in the sea, dodged several jellyfish undulating by, floated on my back (yay, saltwater!) and admired the cloudless sky above, and, when our little swimming pit stop was over, I climbed back onto the boat, proud of myself for having conquered my fear. We pulled up anchor, sailed off and headed back towards the shore. But just a few minutes later, my friends pleaded with the captain to stop the boat once more so we could take one final dip before heading back in. Once again, my intrepid friends dove fearlessly into the water. And, once again, I was struck with fear at the prospect of following them. Even though I had already jumped, here I was, moments later, just as scared as I was the first time. Even I was surprised at my lingering fear. Why was I still afraid? Hadn’t I already slayed this dragon? Doing the impossible once doesn’t necessarily make it any easier or less frightening to do the next time. My fear was still present and it was clouding my brain with irrational, but very convincing thoughts. What if I just got lucky the first time? What if it was just a fluke? What if I was about to let a false sense of confidence get me into trouble? Fear is not a rational thing. Which is why the only way to conquer it is to do what it says you can’t, and do it again and again and again. The fear may never fully disappear, but you will eventually learn to tune it out when it starts whispering its senseless nothings to you.

That day, I ignored my fear, and jumped. Twice. And once my friends and I were safely back on the shore and enjoying a few celebratory beers at the nearby beach, I confessed to one of them how scared I’d been because of my weak swimming ability.

“Whoa, that’s pretty awesome! I didn’t even know you couldn’t swim that well!” exclaimed my friend, before giving me an enthusiastic high-five. And at that moment, I realized a simple truth. Even if your attempt at the impossible is awkward, fumbled, ugly, causes you to shit your pants, lose money, lose friends, or get laughed at, going ahead and doing it anyway is infinitely better than the feeling of ‘what if’ or what might have been.

In short, doing the impossible – not necessarily being flawless at doing it – is the reward.

how-to-overcome-fear-do-the-impossible-jay-z

How have you overcome impossible feats in the past? Are there any big, impossible things you're afraid of that you need to go ahead and do anyway?