The Great Expert Blog

I’ve been spending so much time with coaching clients, making phone calls, and writing articles that I’ve nearly forgotten to exercise.

And like most people, I’m a devotee of one of the laws of thermodynamics; especially the item pertaining to inertia.

You know, the one that says: “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, while a body at rest, tends to stay at rest.”

Unquestionably, this explains what happens to me when I get busy with other things.

So, a few days ago, I decided to do something different. Instead of getting angry with myself, purposely, to get up a head of steam, and break through my sloth, I decided to be kinder.

Specifically, I caught myself thinking, “I’m so far behind in my exercise program that I’ll have to do a ton of work, just to catch up!”

Wrong thought!

Bad thought!

Fat thought!

Just the idea of seeing myself lifting weights over and again, or getting on my exercise bike, or using my Soloflex machine, turned me off, and made me feel fatigued.

So, I had an insight and made a deal with myself.

Exercising a lot is not my problem; it’s STARTING to exercise again. With this in mind, I told myself to just do ONE SET of exercises.

That’s it!

So, I picked up my light dumbbells, and did a set of ten repetitions, and I placed them on the floor.

I did a single set on my Soloflex, as well, and a single set of abdominal twists.

And I stopped right there. I wasn’t fatigued, at all. In fact, I felt nothing, at least right away.

About fifteen minutes later, the endorphins kicked in, and my mood lightened. Also, there was bounce in my step, where there hadn’t been any.

And I knew, I was getting back on my program, literally, without breaking a sweat.

When it comes to inertia, once you’ve started getting into motion, however modestly or slowly, you’ve made a powerful change for the better!

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.

There are some simple rules to follow when looking for a web host. The first rules is to avoid free hosts whenever possible, it is easy to think that a free service is preferable to paying a monthly fee however with web hosting this is defiantly not the case.

Paid hosting has several important advantages over free hosting. Firstly you will receive more useful features with paid hosting. Technical support will be much better with help available when you need it. Generally speaking Paid hosts will have much faster connections to the internet so your site will appear quicker. Most importantly with paid hosting you won’t have to display a banner on each page advertising the Hosting Company and advertising to the world that you are on a free host. With excellent hosting packages starting from $6.99 per month there is no reason why you shouldn’t go with a paid host.

The second simple rule concerns what operating system to choose. You will find hosts offering you Windows Hosting or Linux Hosting, it is tempting to choose windows as it’s a name everyone knows and many people mistakenly believe that because their PC runs windows they need a Windows Host but in this case they’d be wrong. Whichever hosting package you choose you will receive a control panel through which you administer your site these are graphical environments through which you can control many aspects of your website from configuring your web mail and installing forum software to creating a database. Take a lead from the marble halls of business most major companies host their websites on Linux Servers. Linux Servers generally runs faster and are more secure than a windows server. This is partly due to how the operating systems are built. Windows try to include every possible function in the base package whilst Linux allows the host company to add the functions they need.

The final thing to consider when choosing a host is the list of features they offer. If you don’t know much about html you can look for a host that supplies you with free website building software and some of the better ones will even supply free Domain names. You should look at a number of different companies and compare what they offer as standard with their hosting plans. Technical aspects to consider are; the amount of disk space available to you and how much monthly bandwidth you have to use. Look at how many email accounts you can have the more the better. Customer support features should not be overlooked check to see what their response time is and if it’s anymore than an hour look elsewhere, also consider if they offer a money back guarantee.

Look to see what additional services they include in the package for example do they offer daily backups? Make sure that they offer support for PHP as this is quickly becoming the programming language of choice with web programmers.

To conclude when choosing a website Host look for a paid host with Linux hosting and then compare the packages on offer from a variety of companies.

About the Author: Petr Sejba is owner of Marble Host ( http://www.MarbleHost.com ), a Web Hosting Company offering 99.9 % Uptime Guarantee, 24/7 Support with 1 hour Response Guarantee, Free Domain Name, Generous Disk Space and Bandwidth, Web Site Builder and more at affordable prices.

Source: www.isnare.com

My thoughts can get a little edgy at night. Possibly even deep.
Reflecting on almost a half century of life. Some of it better
than I would have imagined in my youth. Some not.

All in all I am glad that this present life is not all I have
been given from the hand of God. At night I tend to wonder what
it will be like to be on the other side of death’s door.

According to the Reverend Gary Davis “Death don’t have no mercy
in this land.” Thank God, Jesus does. Two or three mild strokes
and a minor heart attack over the last 6 years could well have
something to do with the way the stream of my consciousness
flows.

Not melancholy thoughts. Thoughts of a hope and future God has
prepared for me beyond the valley of the shadow of death. Makes
me want to do right and be appreciative of what He has given me
on this side of the valley and yet not to pin all my hopes and
dreams on family and friends and the things that make life
enjoyable in the present.

There is a day of reckoning and a day of rewards coming which
will fit all of us out for eternal life. James, the brother of
Jesus says it much better than I could hope to.

James 4:13-15 Weymouth NT

Jam 4:13 Come, you who say, “To-day or to-morrow we will go to
this or that city, and spend a year there and carry on a
successful business,”

Jam 4:14 when, all the while, you do not even know what will
happen to-morrow. For what is the nature of your life? Why, it
is but a mist, which appears for a short time and then is seen
no more.

Jam 4:15 Instead of that you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s
will, we shall live and do this or that.”

I need to learn humility. I wrote “we need” first but decided
that was a cop out. This isn’t a lecture, it’s me sitting here
in a nice warm quiet room, comfortably reflecting on the nature
of human life.

What is the nature of human life? Nothing substantial, whether
it’s you, me or Michael Jackson. We live our lives from day to
day and at any moment our breath could be terminated and our
next conscious thought would occur before the presence of
almighty God.

This life which seems so concrete to us is no more solid than a
mist or vapor, a fog we walk through while heading towards God’s
light. That doesn’t mean it is unimportant but it is impermanent
and insubstantial compared to the life awaiting beyond the
confines of incorporation.

Instead of steadfastly setting our faces towards our own plans
and purposes, there I go with that “we” business again. You have
to figure this out for yourself, you can’t ride on my revelation
of impermance.

Anyhow, here’s my thought:

I have some things I want to do and accomplish while still in
the body, but I need to learn to temper my desires with the the
fact that, “If it is the Lord’s will, I shall live and do this
or that.” If it is not His will then I will be moving on to
bigger and better things in the presence of the Lord.

Peace.

The best lessons learned come from actual experience. Having been a product manager for products as diverse as hosted applications to printers, these are the lessons I’ve learned and I hope they are useful to you. With a healthy dose of humility from lessons learned, here are my recommendations for surviving and excelling at product management:

Essentials of Product Management

• Passion for your products and their success matters more than organizational power. The role of a product manager is full of opportunities to find passion for the product today, its future roadmap, sales strategies, finding and growing a sales champion, and working with and supporting service. In short the best product managers I’ve worked with have a passion for their products and their success. They rarely coerce cooperation through formal power by invoking a VP or C-level executives’ name or position, but their passion and intensity earn them respect. Passion is the fuel of the best product managers; it propels them past doing “just enough” to get by to delivering exceptional work, projects and results.

• Manage expectations aggressively. In some companies product managers are considered the final authority on future product enhancements, current and future pricing, launch dates, PR and lead generation efforts, even which analyst firms are subscribed to. With this much authority, sales, channel management, operations, production - in short every affected group in a company - looks to product management to make commitments on products to respond to competitive pressure or capitalize on market opportunities. If your company has an Intranet post the product roadmap and product management plans, in detail by product, there for everyone to view. Deviating from product roadmap for special orders needs to be communicated aggressively, as do pricing moves and product direction.

• Resolve to know your competitors better than industry analysts do. Get to know your competitors and become an expert in every aspect of their business. If you haven’t already, get 10Qs and other filings from the SEC for publicly available companies, and for all competitors run a D&B report every three months to see how their business is going. Take the hardest-hitting competitive points and publish it to your direct sales force including inside sales. Take the trending data and publish it for your indirect partners and keep the best competitive analysis for your direct sales force. Publish how-to-sell-against papers on each competitor every six months to capture the current knowledge you have of them for both direct and indirect channels.

• Pricing competitive analysis deserves its own effort. When managing high-volume products like PCs, laptops or accessories, having a constant view of how your pricing measures up relative to competitors is easily accomplished by checking competitors’ and their channel partners’ websites. Tracking your competitor’s price relative to your own on a daily basis delivers the data necessary to fight for price moves and lower per unit costs from purchasing, procurement or operations. Consider hiring a couple of interns from a local university to do the daily analysis and establishing trending graphs and presentations. Hiring them for twenty hours a week, working the first half of each day of the week, works well. Pricing from competitors is typically re-vamped nightly with website refreshes, so having interns capture this data during the first hours of the day gives you visibility into pricing moves immediately.

• The first 90 days in a product management role is critical. This is the time the best product managers I’ve seen get their reputations established, start delivering on projects, show their strengths and weaknesses, develop alliances, and set expectations for the next year or two. It’s critical during this time to avoid being isolated and getting buried quickly in e-mails and distractions. The best product managers are those that get out to the departments they will need to work with in the future, building alliances, starting to earn trust, and getting to know where product management is positioned in the company and what its true role is. During interview cycles you get the org chart view, it’s time to get the real view now.

Reaching out to departments you will work with includes Sales, Marketing, Service, Engineering, Production, Operations and the customer base. Get out and see at least three to five customers if you can, coordinating this with Sales, and also spend time with the internal “customers” you will have, going as far as to publish your project list for everyone who is relying on you. Work to deliver projects before their deadline and ask frequently for feedback. The goal during this first 90 days is to become part of the fabric of the company and spend much time learning the organization and where its’ most pressing needs are before going after huge projects.

• Grow sales champions, even if it means you have to do pre-sales support. Sales and product management often have a cordial yet distant relationship in companies because on the one hand product management needs Sales to run up the most critical metrics there are, and Sales needs product management for product information and support. Pre-sales support is avoided by many product management staffs because it becomes all-consuming. But structuring pre-sales support in terms of escalation of the best opportunities coming to product management for face-time with product experts is critical to grow links with Sales and eventually grow a sales champion. Just manage your time to make sure this doesn’t become an all-consuming job.

Making Cross-Functional Teams Work

• Credibility is the capital you trade with, start with humility. Passion and credibility go hand-in-hand. Building credibility has to start with a focus on earning respect from engineering, product marketing, sales and other departments you regularly interact with. Building credibility starts by building trust. Trust comes from being transparent. Building credibility takes time, and so often product managers feel they must be the “instant” expert for their products, when building credibility is much better accomplished by admitting what you don’t know and asking for help. Humility and honesty gain respect, as does asking for help and being reciprocal about sharing thanks for getting it. Be sure to serve up plenty of recognition to those that help you too, copying their managers on thank you e-mails when members of other departments go out of their way to help you get to your goals. Start laying the foundation for positive relationships where you get the reputation for sharing credit and thank you early and often.

• Replace the frequency of cross-functional meetings with an Intranet site. Respect the time of cross-functional team members by distributing marketing, sales and business plans, specifications, and documents via an Intranet site. Distribute links and ask for feedback, and only have cross-functional meetings when there is enough to discuss and it warrants everyone’s time. You can also use an Intranet site for managing the approval cycles for documents as well, and if you have an organization that is comprised of team members across a wide geographic region use meetings and conference calls for exceptions and have the workflows on the Intranet site handle the routine tasks.

• Create a buzz around new product introductions by creating Champion Awards. In one PC company that had to rely on engineering resources from another project to get its product line built, tested and ready for launch, product management created Champion Awards signed by the Directors of Engineering, Marketing, General Manager for the Division and CEO. These were personalized by product managers and framed, then presented the same week a member of engineering completed a task above and beyond their primary job in support of the product launch. These were presented at cross-functional meetings by Directors of Engineering and Marketing.

• Under-commit on launch dates and over-deliver on them. Product introductions are when companies signal to the outside world how coordinated they are internally or not. There’s major pressure to move launch dates up from Sales, Channel Management, Marketing, and at times from Operations and Production as well. As much pressure there is to move up a launch date, keep schedules full of at least 20% extra time because the inevitable delays occur.

Lessons Learned From Working with Engineering

• Share product ownership with your products’ engineers. Partner and team with engineering, and specifically spend much time understanding engineering’s’ perspective on your products. Share ownership for the product and its future, and work to create a cooperative environment with engineering.

• Relentlessly pursue product expertise. Becoming a product expert starts by realizing that there is no such thing as an “instant expert” and that by working with engineering to appreciate which decisions they have made on your product and why goes a long way towards giving you a solid foundation to manage your products as effectively as possible.

• Be a de facto leader of development via customer and competitive intelligence. This takes much effort, and it is worth it for any product manager to establish their role as delivering in-depth customer and competitive intelligence. Often when the next generation of a product is being developed, engineering needs input on what customers are looking for. By committing to be the leader in terms of customer and competitive intelligence, you can that much more effectively guide product development.

Lessons Learned From Working with Product Marketing

• Get on top of lead generation performance for your products. Marketing may not have this data, but go after getting it for all product managers so you can start building out what the sales funnel looks like for your products and how many leads are needed at the wide end of the funnel to result in closed sales.

• Work with Marketing to understand the sales funnel for your products. See if you can create the sales funnel for your products using Marketing data, and see why some leads drop out of the pipeline.

• Get going on a Google AdWords strategy for your products. This is very economical as a lead generation strategy, and push to get AdWords going for your products. Define the specific keywords to include competitors and their products as well. The cost per click can be well under $1.00 and the leads finely tuned.

• Have a constant stream of white papers and knowledge going to prospects. This is doubly true in emerging markets where prospects are looking for guidance and insight into what new technologies are working reliably. Prospects want to understand what new technologies mean to them, they don’t want messages slammed at them. Educate and be the trusted advisor in new markets, and you’ll sell more.

• Use industry analysts often. In certain software segments, industry analysts are relied on by IT buyers for their guidance, and as a result they have insights into what is being purchased and why. Get industry analysts to visit your company and present competitive updates once every three to six months. Also get their insights into your product roadmap and direction, making sure an NDA is in place as part of your company’s overall relationship with them.

Summary & Wrap-Up

The bottom line is that product managers have great potential to make a lasting impact on companies and entire industries through their efforts. Exceptional product managers are marked by a passion to make their products, engineering staffs, and sales persons the stars of their companies, content to be the enablers of accomplishment, the “backstops” of products so to speak. A great product manager is like a great coach; they orchestrate people, resources, and strategies to make their teams successful first and always.

http://www.lwcresearch.com

Wholesale beads are designed and developed by each and every wholesale jewel maker, and they are considered to be one of the most important works in the jewelry industry. Designs and patterns of pure metal or gold are topped with various kinds of beads. The list of different kinds of beads include swarovski crystals, cat’s eye, Czech beads, glass beads, magnetic beads, trade beads, seed beads, cabochons, natural beads, pearls, Venetian beads, bicones, acrylic beads, European beads, and sterling silver beads.
Wholesale beads are most common in a circular form with a customary hole in the centre. These are designed in various shapes and varieties of beads. Long cylindrical beads are one of the popular beads. There are also rectangular or square beads, 6 faced or flat beads and also heart shaped beads. Wooden beads that are made from carving the finest quality wood pieces are used to make wholesale beads of various shapes.
Seed beads are very popular kind of beads, which are made from long hollow glass tubes called canes. These canes are chopped at varied lengths to get the desired kind and shape of wholesale seed beads. They are made of a blend using two different kinds of glass materials. Wholesale beads are usually purchased in strands. A cat’s eye bead, which is of size 4 x 6 mm and 16 inches long, can range around $2. A glass bead can cost you $0.91, whereas tube beads can cost you $1.35 a piece.
The kind of glass used for making beads easily determines the kind of bead. Wholesale beads made from Murano glass are very famous and are developed by well experienced craftsmen. Usually, the glass which is used here is melted in the open air in order to develop more attractive beads. Leaded glass or crystal is used to make various varieties of crystal beads. A high amount of lead oxide is used in the raw glass material making it hard and brilliant. They use high technology in precise cutting and polishing tools to produce wholesale beads with a great style.
Pearls are another famous kind of wholesale beads available in the market. They are shiny organic gems produced from oysters. They are classified into natural fresh water pearls and cultured pearls. They are available in various colors like white, cream, pink, blue, black and beige. A strand of fresh water pearls can range around $1.75.

Wholesale provides detailed information on Wholesale, Wholesale Jewelry, Wholesale Beads, Wholesale Candles and more. Wholesale is affliated with Material Packaging.

Online Casino recently
announced their first annual Video Poker Tournament.

More than $17,000 of prizes will be given away on January 15 and
16, 2006. The first prize winner of the two day competition will
receive $7,500.

A site official said that “everyone is gearing up for a great
video poker tournament with lots of people, lots of prizes and
lots of fun.”

This is the first video poker tournament of the year at Online
Casino.

The top 50 players on each day will receive a share of the bonus
giveaways.

Summer is fast approaching, and college students throughout the
world are rejoicing. Whether you’re spending your summer working
or playing, the thought of moving out of those smelly dorms and
into an apartment has probably crossed your mind more than once.
If so, you’ll need to learn a little about subleasing.

Typically, landlords will not directly rent out apartments for
terms shorter than six months. However, they realize that there
are tons of students out there looking for summer solstices.
This is where subleasing comes in.

Subleasing consists of you - the restless college student -
renting from another tenant who is temporarily moving out. With
subleases, the landlord is relieved of many of the hassles that
come along with finding new tenants and making them happy. He or
she doesn’t have to worry about the costs that come along with
preparing the apartment for the new tenants or drawing up a new
lease. This is now the responsibility of the original tenant.

For example, Jean has lived in the same apartment for two years.
Last week she was cast in an acting troupe, which will take a
three-month tour through the U.S. Hesitant to leave her dream
apartment behind, she decides to lease it out to someone
(sublet) during those three months. Lucky for Sam - a restless
college student - he sees an ad in the paper for Jean’s
apartment and decides to move in. Before things are officially
official, Sam - and anyone else interested in subleasing will
need to check out a few things:

* Make sure the landlord knows the apartment is being subleased
and get his/her okay in writing. * Find out if your are supposed
to pay the landlord directly, or if you pay the old tenant. *
Find out whom is responsible for maintenance. * Ask if there is
a security deposit. * Get landlord to perform an inspection on
the property before moving in so that you don’t get blamed for
property damages you didn’t make * Set up your own accounts for
power, gas, water, telephone and cable TV services so you don’t
get stuck with any of the old tenant’s bills.

Subleasing is perfect for college students trying to get away
for the summer. Typically, the old tenants will leave furniture
and appliances behind for you to use. So say goodbye to those
bunk beds and community bathrooms, and find an apartment for the
summer.

These beds are so fantastic and when you see one you will take a glance at it for a few seconds just to appreciate the stylish design. Not all of these beds are uniquely styled and designed some are just simple and you will not even notice that the bed is made of wrought iron. This is the fact that some of the beds have been made so simple and the base would be made of wrought iron and the foam placed on top of it. These wrought iron beds are usually common at boarding schools, hospitals and other places where a large number of people are located.

The other types of beds are so marvelous to see and they would have nicely styled the headboard of the bed with nice designs, artwork and colouring. These beds are available international and they range from the simple to stylish beds. These beds are commonly designed as base beds and comfortable foams are to be place on them. They are so durable compared to the wooden beds and they do not break at all. I bet you have seen these beds somewhere or you have one. These beds have become very popular ever since the creation of beds.

An often overlooked comedy from the early 1990s, Noises Off is a hilarious look at the behind-the-scenes lives of a traveling theater group on the verge of destroying their own act. With an endless array of Hollywood talents such as Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, Denholm Elliott, Marilu Henner, Mark Linn-Baker, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, and Nicolette Sheridan (whew!) - Noises Off somehow manages to combine this multitude of characters into a sensible, and sometimes outrageously hilarious, storyline. Movie buffs who love comedies should really consider watching Noises Off…

Lloyd Fellowes (Michael Caine) is the director of a traveling theater company. But despite his best efforts, he isn’t quite sure that he can get the cast and crew together in order to get his production off the ground. Working with a mixed cast of seasoned veterans and unknown newcomers, Fellowes never anticipates what he’s in for. With a series of romances, arguments, bouts with alcoholism, and rampant jealousy dominating events behind stage, everyone involved from the director down to the stagehands places the production in jeopardy. (Similar to the hit film Groundhog Day, Noises Off rehashes the same scenes - from the play - over and over again with a different outcome each time).

Noises Off follows the director, cast, and crew from the last moments of their final rehearsal to the tense moments of opening night and all the way to the final performance of the show. Watching Noises Off, the audience learns that most often what they see on the stage isn’t nearly half as entertaining as what’s going on backstage…

The late Christopher Reeve is one of the brightest stars in Noises Off. His straight face and presence in the midst of ridiculous and comic scenes is priceless. It shows a depth of instinct that professionals cannot teach. But the true star of Noises Off is long-time stage talent Denholm Elliott, playing the role of an aging, drunken actor who bumbles his lines and stumbles onto the stage at the oddest of moments. The late John Ritter also returns to his Three’s Company roots with a series of well-timed staircase falls and inadvertent bodily injuries. All of these various actors and actresses combine to perform slapstick comedy at its best, and a true connoisseur of the genre will love Noises Off…

With an ensemble cast composed of the Who’s Who of Hollywood, Noises Off did a superb job in the casting department. However, elements of the screenplay could use some work, and the film gets tiresome at points with its replaying of the same scenes. However, from an overall standpoint, Noises Off is more than worth the time and effort. Boasting an array of hilarious comic sequences, Noises Off is a definite must-see movie…

About the Author

Britt Gillette is author of The DVD Report, a blog where you can find more reviews like this one of the Noises Off (DVD).

Baseball and life have a lot of similarities. I know what you are thinking, yea right, it’s simply a game involving a bat and a ball. What can that possibly teach us? I am here to tell you what it can teach you. Not only baseball, but other sports as well.

Growing up I couldn’t see the similarities with baseball and life. I simply knew that a game was on and lets go play! But as time has evolved and I have gone on to other things, only now can I reflect and look at what the game of baseball has taught me.

Baseball and life are similar. I think the first thing it taught me was personal interaction. How to deal with teammates and how to work together towards a common goal. We all wanted to win together, but we also experienced defeat together. We learned how to deal with defeat and how to rise above it. How to keep on trying every out, every game. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were learning valuable skills that would carry over to other facets of our lives.

It also taught me how to deal with one-on-one situations. You against the pitcher in the batter’s box with the game on the line. You strike out and the game is over. How did you handle this on a personal level? It taught you that you will overcome even in the eyes of defeat. It teaches you how to handle defeat amongst your peers and what you will do to be better next time. Baseball and life are similar, they are just on different stages.

How about your hitting? You fail seven out of ten times and you are a three hundred hitter and a hero. You fail eight out of ten times and you are only hitting two hundred. One extra hit per ten at bats can propel you from hero status to the goat status. How do you deal with defeat when you are only hitting two hundred? Do you throw in the towel or do you put your best effort forward, hold your head high, and carry on with great determination?

Baseball and life teaches us that everyone fails at some point. What matters is not giving up. What matters is getting up and you keep pounding the rock. And while you are pounding the rock, without even knowing it, you are gaining character, desire, determination, and that great spirit that will carry over into life skills.

When I reflect back and try to understand what I learned from this game, I can now see what it has taught me. I know I can handle any situation, because I know how to get back up and move forward. I can deal with personal one-on-one situations, because baseball taught me that.

I know if it doesn’t go just right, there is always tomorrow and the prospect of better things. I can handle defeat because I know it is only an opportunity for success later. And an opportunity for me to learn along this road called life.

Yes, baseball has taught me how to be in life, how to handle the ups and the downs, how to be a better person, and how to go out and get what I want in life. It is a grand game in so many ways!

Baseball for me was a stepping stone to my career now. Yes, I accomplished a lot in baseball, but it is where I am now that matters to me and baseball helped me get here.

I am now a captain with the Tucson Fire Department and a paramedic. I have the opportunity to save lives and affect them in a positive way. I deal with tragedy, as well as the overwhelming emotion when saving a life. How do I handle these pressure situations when faced with real emergencies?

I can look back and know that baseball taught me life skills and the ability to handle success as well as defeat. I know that I put my best foot forward each day. Somedays will be enriched with reward, and some with tragedy, but I will keep the course and give it my all. Baseball taught me that. And I hope it can help you as well. Please email me with any thoughts or questions.

Bill Bathe- former major league baseball player who played in 1989 world series. Former instructors include Eddie Matthews, Harmon Killebrew, Billy Williams, and Dusty Baker to name a few. Just click on Baseball drills and baseball equipment to go to his website which provides drills, equipment, information and tips. Also, digital online video analysis, equipment, posters, and more. In addition, stories and pictures on the journey to the big leagues. Or email him at http://www.pro-baseball-drills-and-equipment.com/contact-us.html