Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: 2015 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2015. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poors Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2015 and/or its affiliates.

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Retirement Planning and Savings Plans - Retirement ...

Louisiana

Good housing deals, warm weather and great culinary culture are drawing boomers to Louisianaand not just to New Orleans.

For many retirees, Minnesota Nice and a booming economy make up for the states cold weather.

A hip food scene and cultural attractions enhance Oregons natural beauty, in Portland and beyond.

For retirees, New Mexico offers a cultural melting pot with a friendly year-round climateand a lower cost of living than Arizona or Colorado.

Taking advantage of New Yorks cultural buzz without paying Manhattan-like real-estate prices.

Mild weather, affordable real estate and college-town culture draw retirees to the Bluegrass State.

Good deals on real estate are helping boomers retire to the Riviera of the Midwest.

A comfortable climate and reasonable real-estate prices lured the Vanderbilts in the 1890s; now those same assets are luring boomer retirees.

Tucked away among the cornfields are some great real estate bargains and cultural destinations for retirees. We look at the pros and cons of retiring in Cedar Falls, Decorah, Ames and Urbandale.

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Retirement Planning - Financial Planning for Retirement ...

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled unanimously on May 8, 2015 that the 2013 state law overhauling Teachers Retirement System benefits is unconstitutional.

The high court decided that changes in retirement benefits enacted by the law violated the Pension Protection Clause of the Illinois Constitution. This decision upholds a 2014 ruling by a Sangamon County Circuit Court and is the final chapter in the legal challenge to the law.

With this decision, TRS members in Tier I and Tier II will see no changes in the administration of their retirement benefits. The current retirement benefit calculation, cost-of-living-adjustment calculation, active member contribution rate, eligibility standards for retirement and all other current laws governing teacher pensions will not be changed.

To read the Illinois Supreme Courts decision in this case, select this link: Supreme Court Decision

During this year's Teacher Appreciation Week, your retirement system would like to thank you for choosing a career in education. As you continue to prepare children for their futures, TRS will continue to work diligently to preserve your well-deserved retirement. We join schoolchildren and parents throughout Illinois in saluting your professionalism and dedication to your students. Thank you!

Andrew J. Hirshman of Oak Park and Cinda J. Klickna of Rochester were elected by active TRS members on May 1 to the Systems Board of Trustees, according to preliminary results released by TRS. In addition, Daniel Winter of Decatur will fill a seat on the Board selected by retired members.

For more information on the election results, please read the press release.

The annual Benefits Choice Period for the Teachers Retirement Insurance Program (TRIP) will be May 1 through June 1, 2015. Detailed TRIP information booklets are mailed by the Illinois Department of Central Management Services during this time.

The Benefits Choice Period is the time that TRIP participants not currently enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug insurance plan may change health insurance carriers or add an eligible dependent to their insurance coverage, provided that the dependent has not been enrolled in TRIP previously.

For more information please visit the TRS TRIP page or the CMS Benefit Choice website.

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Illinois Teachers Retirement System

It's been almost ten years since Mike Robertson and I introduced our Magnificent Mobility DVD set. This popular DVD set certainly helped a lot of people, but as with all aspects of the incredibly dynamic strength and conditioning and rehabilitation f

I'm a huge fan of incorporating landmine press variations into strength training programs. These awesome exercises are great for building scapular upward rotation, core stability, upper body strength, thoracic mobility, and a whole lot more. Unfortun

I just wanted to post a quick heads-up on some Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales: 1. The entire Functional Stability Training series is on sale for 25% off. To get the discount, just head to http://www.FunctionalStability.com and enter the coupon code BF2014

I hope everyone is having a great week and is excited for a great Thanksgiving. It might be a holiday week, but it's still super busy at the new Cressey Sports Performance facility in Jupiter, FL. Luckily, I've got some great content from around the

Master the King of All Exercises

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Everything you need to know about this complex exercise.

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Eric Cressey | High Performance Training, Personal ...

performance appraisals purpose - and how to make it easier

Performance appraisals are essential for the effective management and evaluation of staff. Appraisals help develop individuals, improve organizational performance, and feed into business planning. Formal performance appraisals are generally conducted annually for all staff in the organization. Each staff member is appraised by their line manager. Directors are appraised by the CEO, who is appraised by the chairman or company owners, depending on the size and structure of the organization.

Annual performance appraisals enable management and monitoring of standards, agreeing expectations and objectives, and delegation of responsibilities and tasks. Staff performance appraisals also establish individual training needs and enable organizational training needs analysis and planning.

Performance appraisals also typically feed into organizational annual pay and grading reviews, which commonly also coincides with the business planning for the next trading year.

Performance appraisals generally review each individual's performance against objectives and standards for the trading year, agreed at the previous appraisal meeting.

Performance appraisals are also essential for career and succession planning - for individuals, crucial jobs, and for the organization as a whole.

Performance appraisals are important for staff motivation, attitude and behaviour development, communicating and aligning individual and organizational aims, and fostering positive relationships between management and staff.

Performance appraisals provide a formal, recorded, regular review of an individual's performance, and a plan for future development.

Job performance appraisals - in whatever form they take - are therefore vital for managing the performance of people and organizations.

Managers and appraisees commonly dislike appraisals and try to avoid them. To these people the appraisal is daunting and time-consuming. The process is seen as a difficult administrative chore and emotionally challenging. The annual appraisal is maybe the only time since last year that the two people have sat down together for a meaningful one-to-one discussion. No wonder then that appraisals are stressful - which then defeats the whole purpose.

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performance appraisals and sample appraisal form templates ...

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. Thats where coaching comes in. Credit Illustration by Barry Blitt

Ive been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. Id like to think its a good thingIve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if Ive just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. Its not about hand-eye cordinationyou have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

Say youve got a patient who needs surgery for appendicitis. These days, surgeons will typically do a laparoscopic appendectomy. You slide a small cameraa laparoscopeinto the abdomen through a quarter-inch incision near the belly button, insert a long grasper through an incision beneath the waistline, and push a device for stapling and cutting through an incision in the left lower abdomen. Use the grasper to pick up the finger-size appendix, fire the stapler across its base and across the vessels feeding it, drop the severed organ into a plastic bag, and pull it out. Close up, and youre done. Thats how you like it to go, anyway. But often it doesnt.

Even before you start, you need to make some judgments. Unusual anatomy, severe obesity, or internal scars from previous abdominal surgery could make it difficult to get the camera in safely; you dont want to poke it into a loop of intestine. You have to decide which camera-insertion method to usetheres a range of optionsor whether to abandon the high-tech approach and do the operation the traditional way, with a wide-open incision that lets you see everything directly. If you do get your camera and instruments inside, you may have trouble grasping the appendix. Infection turns it into a fat, bloody, inflamed worm that sticks to everything around itbowel, blood vessels, an ovary, the pelvic sidewalland to free it you have to choose from a variety of tools and techniques. You can use a long cotton-tipped instrument to try to push the surrounding attachments away. You can use electrocautery, a hook, a pair of scissors, a sharp-tip dissector, a blunt-tip dissector, a right-angle dissector, or a suction device. You can adjust the operating table so that the patients head is down and his feet are up, allowing gravity to pull the viscera in the right direction. Or you can just grab whatever part of the appendix is visible and pull really hard.

Once you have the little organ in view, you may find that appendicitis was the wrong diagnosis. It might be a tumor of the appendix, Crohns disease, or an ovarian condition that happened to have inflamed the nearby appendix. Then youd have to decide whether you need additional equipment or personnelmaybe its time to enlist another surgeon.

Over time, you learn how to head off problems, and, when you cant, you arrive at solutions with less fumbling and more assurance. After eight years, Ive performed more than two thousand operations. Three-quarters have involved my specialty, endocrine surgerysurgery for endocrine organs such as the thyroid, the parathyroid, and the adrenal glands. The rest have involved everything from simple biopsies to colon cancer. For my specialized cases, Ive come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solutions. For the others, Ive gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary.

As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didnt. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.

Maybe this is what happens when you turn forty-five. Surgery is, at least, a relatively late-peaking career. Its not like mathematics or baseball or pop music, where your best work is often behind you by the time youre thirty. Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which S. & P. 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four. Surgeons apparently fall somewhere between the extremes, requiring both physical stamina and the judgment that comes with experience. Apparently, Id arrived at that middle point.

It wouldnt have been the first time Id hit a plateau. I grew up in Ohio, and when I was in high school I hoped to become a serious tennis player. But I peaked at seventeen. That was the year that Danny Trevas and I climbed to the top tier for doubles in the Ohio Valley. I qualified to play singles in a couple of national tournaments, only to be smothered in the first round both times. The kids at that level were playing a different game than I was. At Stanford, where I went to college, the tennis team ranked No. 1 in the nation, and I had no chance of being picked. That meant spending the past twenty-five years trying to slow the steady decline of my game.

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Personal Best - The New Yorker

A goal is a desired result that a person or a system envisions, plans and commits to achieve: a personal or organizational desired end-point in some sort of assumed development. Many people endeavor to reach goals within a finite time by setting deadlines.

It is roughly similar to purpose or aim, the anticipated result which guides reaction, or an end, which is an object, either a physical object or an abstract object, that has intrinsic value.

Goal setting may involve establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bounded (SMART) objectives, but not all researchers agree that these SMART criteria are necessary.[1]

Research on goal setting by Edwin A. Locke and his colleagues suggests that goal setting can serve as an effective tool for making progress when it ensures that group members have a clear awareness of what each person must do to achieve a shared objective. On a personal level, the process of setting goals allows individuals to specify and then work toward their own objectives (such as financial or career-based goals). Goal-setting comprises a major component of personal development and management.

Goals can be long-term, intermediate, or short-term. The primary difference is the time required to achieve them.[2]

Short-term goals expect accomplishment in a short period of time, such as trying to get a bill paid in the next few days. The definition of a short-term goal need not relate to any specific length of time. In other words, one may achieve (or fail to achieve) a short-term goal in a day, week, month, year, etc. The time-frame for a short-term goal relates to its context in the overall time line that it is being applied to. For instance, one could measure a short-term goal for a month-long project in days; whereas one might measure a short-term goal for someone's lifetime in months or in years. Planners usually define short-term goals in relation to long-term goals.

Individuals can set personal goals. A student may set a goal of a high mark in an exam. An athlete might run five miles a day. A traveler might try to reach a destination-city within three hours. Financial goals are a common example, to save for retirement or to save for a purchase.

Managing goals can give returns in all areas of personal life. Knowing precisely what one wants to achieve makes clear what to concentrate and improve on, and often subconsciously prioritizes that goal.

Goal setting and planning ("goal work") promotes long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses intention, desire, acquisition of knowledge, and helps to organize resources.

Efficient goal work includes recognizing and resolving all guilt, inner conflict or limiting belief that might cause one to sabotage one's efforts. By setting clearly defined goals, one can subsequently measure and take pride in the accomplishment of those goals. One can see progress in what might have seemed a long, perhaps difficult, grind.

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Goal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Just-Released 10th Anniversary Edition of The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be is a revised and updated edition of Jack Canfields classic bestseller... with a brand new foreword and an afterword for succeeding in the digital age. It has been hailed as the new self-improvement classic, containing 67 of the most powerful principles of success known to mankind. Since its publication a decade ago, Jack Canfields practical and inspiring guide has helped thousands of people transform themselves for success.

It doesn't matter if your goals are to be the top sales person in your company, become a super-star athlete, lose weight, become a better parent, increase confidence, buy your dream home or make millions of dollars Jack can help you develop a clear, personal plan of action that will completely transform your life into exactly what you want it to be.

Order the Book Today and Receive FREE Bonus Gifts from Jack.

If more success and personal fulfillment is what you're seeking, Jack Canfield can help you get from where you are - to where you want to be. For more than 40 years, Jack has been teaching, training and coaching entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders, and people from all walks of life (and of all ages, cultures and backgrounds) to create the life they desire - and he can do the same for you! As the beloved originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, he's personally taught millions of people his unique and modernized formulas for success and personal fulfillment, and is a widely recognized leader in peak performance strategies.

To get started, explore our life-transforming products, dynamic in-person events and valuable free resources to discover fun and easy ways to accelerate your success STARTING TODAY!

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Jack Canfield | Success Principles for Peak Performance

The purpose of this website is to help you grow as a conscious human being. This includes guiding you to discover and accept your life purpose; inspiring you to feel more motivated, energized, and passionate; helping you shed disempowering relationships and build a network of loving support; teaching you how to achieve stable financial abundance doing what you love; and encouraging you to make a genuine contribution to humanity -- so you can finally experience the kind of life that deep down, you always knew you were meant to live.

You aren't here to struggle and suffer. You're here to express and share your creative gifts, to give and receive love, and to be happy. It will take time, but this site can certainly help you get there, and the vast majority of resources here are free.

This site will help you make conscious decisions in your personal development journey and courageously follow through. This means having the maturity to take 100% responsibility for your health, your career, your finances, your relationships, your emotions, your habits, and your spiritual beliefs. It requires taking a deep look at yourself, consciously deciding what kind of person you truly are on the inside, and then getting your external reality to be congruent with your inner being. The goal is to help you achieve outstanding effectiveness while maintaining internal balance, where your thoughts, feelings, actions, and skills are all working together to create the life you truly desire.

Personal development is hard work. It takes time, consistency, and patience. If you're only here looking for shallow quick fixes and you aren't interested in real, lasting change, this isn't the right place for you. This site is designed for people who are serious about personal growth and willing to commit to it.

This site will help you learn to live more consciously, to summon the courage to face the unfaceable parts of your life, and to solve the deep problems you've not yet been able to solve. You'll learn practical ideas to make important changes in your life, both big and small, so you can get your life on track and start living up to your potential.

This site can't teach you to be perfect. Perfection isn't the point. The point is for you to get yourself onto a path of practical, positive growth. It's very likely that this site will be of tremendous assistance to you on your journey.

The main themes of this site are:

The areas of your life this site will help you improve include:

This site contains enough free personal development material to fill more than 25 books. Don't let that overwhelm you though because no matter where you begin, it will only take a few clicks to find something of value to you. If you find an article that interests you, but you don't have time to read it right now, feel free to print it out for later. Whenever you print a page from this site with your web browser, you'll get a nicely formatted printout with no navigation elements and no ads. If you'd like to see an example of how any page will look when printed, just use your browser's Print Preview feature (File -> Print Preview... on most browsers). Test it right now on this page if you want.

Be sure to bookmark this site, so you can return to it again and again. Many visitors begin their days by spending 15-30 minutes here and report that it helps them become more focused, motivated, and confident.

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Personal Development for Smart People - Steve Pavlina

Sigfig data is provided as-is, delayed, and subject to Terms

Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: 2015 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2015. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poors Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2015 and/or its affiliates.

2015 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Privacy Policy. .

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Personal Finance Advice and Financial News - CNNMoney