An Information Product is any final product

So you have a question? Has something gone very wrong and you don’t know what to do? Well, fair enough. Here are the questions that I hear all the time from buyers.

Does eBay have a Customer Service Department I Can Phone?

eBay are notoriously hard to contact, should you ever need to – it sometimes seems like they expect the site to run itself. You can email them, as long as you don’t have your heart set on a coherent response: go to http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_us/_base/index.html. You might have better luck in a ‘live help’ webchat here: http://pages.ebay.com/help/basics/n-livehelp.html.

Only eBay Power Sellers (sellers with a very high feedback rating) get to phone customer service. If you really want to try your luck, type ‘ebay [your country] phone number’ into a search engine and you’ll probably find something. Unfortunately, the chances are you’ll have gone to all that trouble for the privilege of leaving an answerphone message.

It might seem cruel, but imagine the number of people who would call eBay every day with the silliest questions if they gave out their phone number everywhere. Its Wild West nature is, in a way, part of its charm.

eBay Sent Me an Email Saying They’re Going to Close My Account. What Should I Do?

This email asks for your password, right? It’s a scam, an attempt to frighten you, make you give up your details and then steal your account. eBay will never ask for your password or any other account details by email. eBay say that you should only ever enter your password on pages that whose addresses start with http://signin.ebay.com/. They even offer a special ‘Account Guard’ as part of their toolbar, which lets you check that you’re not giving your password to a dodgy fake site. You can read more here: http://pages.ebay.com/toolbar/accountguard_1.html.

It Seems Too Good to be True. How Does eBay Make Money?

For you, the buyer, eBay is free. Sellers, though, pay all sorts of fees: a listing fee for each item they list, a final value fee (a percentage of what the item sold for). They can they pay optional fees for extra services, including Buy it Now, extra pictures, reserve prices, highlighting the auction, putting it in bold, listing it first in search results or even putting it on the front page. You can see a full list of fees at http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html.

It’s obviously worth it to the sellers, though, or they wouldn’t carry on using eBay. The system is quite efficient, and basically forces both eBay and the sellers to keep their profit margins as low as possible – otherwise prices will simply go too high and the buyers will stop buying.

How Safe is eBay?

Well, as it happens, that’s the subject of our next email! All of eBay’s safety services for buyers and sellers are in one place, called ‘SafeHarbor’. SafeHarbor handles fraud prevention and investigation, helps with dispute resolution and keeps rule-breakers in check. Read all about it next time, and be safe.

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Can Dreams Tell The Future?

Why do you dream?

The precise function of dreaming when we sleep is still a matter of disputation among scientists and dream researchers. One accepted theory holds that dreams are a way for the subconscious mind to rinse out itself and make sense of the sensory inputs gotten during the daytime where you were awake. Another accepted theory is that dreams are a sort of let go valve. For example, a lot of people hold back or repress their feelings of anger and dislike during the day. The theory says that dreams are a practical and safe outlet for those repressed feelings to be express.

Can dreams tell the future?

At the same time as many people feel that their dreams can tell the future, there is no scientific proof that dreams are foretelling. What a lot of people mistake for prediction may actually be the fact that the subconscious mind notices things that go totally unnoticed by the conscious mind. When you sleep and dream, the stuff noticed by the subconscious mind is included into the dream, and you may notice many things you missed during the day. These unnoticed clues may be misinterpreted as predictions of what is to come in the future, but in fact they were just missed clues to present events.

Do you dream every night?

Yes you do dream every night, whether you can remember your dreams or not. The dreams that you most likely can remember are the ones that take place closest to waking.

How many dreams do you have in a night?

On average you have between four and seven dreams per night. And 15% to 20% of the typical night is spent sleeping, and consequently an eight hour night of sleep will have up to two hours of dreaming in it.

The stages of your sleep.

It takes you anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to reach a sleep state, that is deep enough for dreaming. In the final and deepest stage of you sleep you will cycle in and out of REM sleep. The average session of REM sleep lasts from 10 to 20 minutes, after which you cycle back into the deepest stage of sleeping. And then after a while, you will reenter REM sleep again. Each session of REM sleep will contain its own unique dream.

Do children dream about themselves?

The interesting thing to note here is that children normally do not dream about themselves until they reach the age of three. Children younger than three are not characters in their own dreams. This may explain why most children do not develop a strong sense of self until the age of three.

Do children’s dreams have the same meaning as adult dreams?

In most cases, dreams are a reflection of your concerns and experience of the awake and conscious world. Because those concerns and experiences are different in children than in adults, the differences are most likely reflected in the child’s dream as well. Studies have shown that the dreams of young children do not have either strong emotional content or a real storyline. A child between the age of 3 and 7 are frequently troubled by nightmares. These nightmares are often reflections of their own real world fears. Like noises, monsters, and so on. The dreams of older children or teenagers very much match those experienced by adults.
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Body Language in Communication: What Do Your Gestures Say?

While speaking at a large International conference recently, I was asked by lots of people why I made certain gestures while I was presenting. People get very intrigued about this kind of thing, especially when talking about body language and non-verbal communication as I was So I write today about body language in communication in relation to gestures in particular.

One set of people who really know about body language in communication are dancers. Recently, I had the opportunity of working with a well known dancer, who was demonstrating some secrets of what made certain dancers so good. She was talking to me about the importance of certain gestures made by dancers when they are dancing.

She also explained to me that in differing cultures, the gestures women make when dancing are extremely specific, and often depict story's all their own and emphasises the nature of that particular dance. As a younger man, I spent a lot of time in the stunning Spanish city of Granada and attended lots of traditional Flamenco dance and gypsy music events and lots of the images, colours and exciting feelings of those days began to resonate through my mind again when having this explained to me.

In recent months, someone asked me to consider writing a book with them about teaching methods and when subsequently researching child development and their body language in communication, I stumbled across some information that stated that young children develop certain arm and hand gestures shortly before they start to speak.

In fact, I read that both gestures and vocal sounds can be considered as part of a person's symbol-making ability. By "symbol-making ability" I am referring to the spoken word, writing, numbers and pictures; the ways in which we communicate. It is this ability which defines many of us and differentiates humans from the array of other mammals on this planet. However, when we communicate with people, we generally tend to be taught to pay attention to the spoken symbols, in the form of words that people say and tend to ignore body language in communication.

So here today are some steps to follow to heighten your awareness of body language in communication with particular reference to gestures and maybe you can utilise them more yourself.

Step One: Firstly, each time you are having a chat with someone, observe the gestures they make. There will often be patterns and repeated ways of utilising gestures. Notice how certain gestures accompany certain words and phrases. Think about what they are doing with this gesture too.

When you listen to someone, their hands will complement or emphasise what they are saying to you or what they are attempting to communicate. You can watch them paint pictures in the air, and interact with their imaginary world as they speak. Anyone that has ever seen me speak will notice that I have very active hands while speaking, if you listen to the podcasts or my audio programmes, you can even tell that I am using my hands while speaking even though you cannot see me!

The thing I find fascinating is that most people are blissfully unaware of their own gestures, unaware of their own body language in communication, let alone anyone else’s. These gestures are deep communications that emerge directly from our unconscious mind. So if you decide to start acknowledging gestures, you are communicating with someone’s unconscious mind and processes, wonderful stuff eh?

Here are three main ways to interact with a person’s gestures:

Step two: Secondly then, once you notice a person’s gestures, feed some of them back to the person. When you refer to something they have said, use their gesture as well. This is known as mirroring or matching, remember from a previous edition of Adam Up I talked about this, do your best not to make it too obvious and not to mimic the person.

Developing rapport with someone has often been described as getting the attention of and communicating with someone’s unconscious mind. When you mirror their gestures back to them, a person’s unconscious mind knows that you have noticed it. As I said, I recommend that you don’t mirror the gesture in full. Let me give you an example, if a person moves their hand in circles as they describe going round and round, you could move your index finger in circles to subtly mirror it.

The second approach to utilising gestures I call referring. So, for example, if someone said “I know there’s the right person out there for me somewhere” and held their hand pointing out in the direction ahead of them as they said it, you can subtly point to the same direction where their hand was guided each time that you refer to it: For example “So this person, you don’t know who they are yet you are looking forward to meeting.” As you refer to them, you match their gesture and point the same way. Just as mirroring did, this sends a covert message to the person that you understand what is going on with them and often that you understand better than that person’s conscious mind does!

Step Three: Investigate how to refer to people’s gestures by doing it more and more.

If someone says “I’d like to do a certain thing, but something else keeps stopping me” while they then hold one of their hands out in front of them, you could highlight the hand and ask them “What is that?” Sometimes people will just frown, or look at you strangely and say “What do you mean?” , but other times, it brings up wonder and amazement– things come into the person’s awareness that they didn’t previously have conscious knowledge of. It can really have a magical effect.

The third way you can use this is with full engagement. I once had a client who said “I’d like to be a great public speaker, but something’s stopping me.” As he said this, he held his hands out about a foot in front of his chest and made an actual pushing motion, as if trying to move a heavy object. I asked “What happens when you just knock that out of the way” and I then pushed his hands to the side.

His face went bright red and he began laughing raucously out loud! He said “Well that makes it easy” and he stepped forward into a relaxed and confident pose before starting to talk about how excited he was about doing it. This is amazing stuff. Full engagement with people's gestures is not appropriate for all situations and there are many workplace situations where any sort of physical contact is deemed inappropriate. Having said that, if you are in a situation where you consider it appropriate to do so, and you have a relationship with good rapport with the person where it is fine to do that, then go for it.

Body language in communication: In Business

This is not just interpersonal communication that I am referring to with this working with gestures. In the business and professional environment people use lots of gestures too, so you can mirror those gestures subtly to get rapport. In addition, people will use gestures when describing a specific problem. I was once demonstrating their power to some people on a seminar I was running. Upon meeting one of the attendees a couple of months later, she told me this story:

She said that there was a chap at work who often came to her for help in solving technical problems as she was a bit of a technical whizz. She said that it typically took 20-30 minutes to help the person find the solution to the problem, and subsequently consumed a lot of her time. After learning about gestures, she paid attention the next time the chap brought up a problem which went something like this “I’m trying to do x but I have this problem and can’t see beyond it.”

The lady from my seminar noticed that when the chap said the word “problem”, he held his hand up in a clenched way. Our quick-thinking heroine mirrored the gesture, then said “What happens when you just forget about that [moving his clenched hand as if throwing away a piece of rubbish] and focus on what you want.” The chap with the problem stopped absolutely still for about 30 seconds then said “Oh! I know the answer to that one!” and left the stunned lady in peace, saving her 20-30 minutes of her day.

Pay attention to the gestures of others, their body language in communication and use them back to those using them, become aware of what purpose they are serving and show that you understand and empathise with them.
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Birthday Thoughts

Birthdays are generally associated with celebrations. Partying, receiving good wishes, gifts and holidaying without any care in the world. These are the main themes of everyone's birthday. But what if I am asked to talk to God on my birthday? I will speak thus:

God, thank you very much for bringing me in this world. Without your wish, I would not have been here. God, I also thank my parents for bringing me to this world with your blessings. I am especially obliged to my mother for taking my care when I was inside her body. God, I thank my father for showing me how to live in this world and being with me in my early days. God, today, I thank everyone who has played any role in helping me in my life till today. I also thank the earth, the sky, the nature and everything without which the life would be no where.

God, I also apologize to everyone today. I might have knowingly or unknowingly hurt many people in my life. I apologize to them. God, I might have done many wrong things in my life but I have also done few good things with your guidance. God, I am proud of my achievements and myself. I know that I may not get all that I want and may not reach all of my goals, but with your guidance I will try to achieve as many of them as possible. I want to contribute in a small way to make this world a better place. Please guide me about that. What should I do so that I get inner satisfaction of doing something for the society.

God, on my birthday today, I wish to remove all anger, hatred, jealousy, envy and every other negative emotion from my heart. I want to cleanse my heart and refill it with feelings of love and joy. God, please help me celebrate my birthday this way. God, Thank you.
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An Information Product is any final product

Günstige shop

The Ebay Buyer’s FAQ.

Can Dreams Tell The Future?

Body Language in Communication: What Do Your Gestures Say?

Birthday Thoughts