Laughter nourishes the soul and triggers joy.
It’s a natural stress reliever;
It’s stimulates the immune system and increases oxygen, stamina and our breathing capacity.
Medical literature is full of reason to laugh for the health of it.
We all need a good old laugh to lift our spirit, every now and again.
Laughter is food for the soul and is vital to our everyday lives.
It creates energy and vitality.
Laughter, not only benefit many of the body’s vital system; the respiratory, cardiovascular, hormonal and even immune system, but also “ generates powerful alternation cycles of relaxation”.
Start laughing today!!!

A Number of us must have watched the famous American movie, 44 Minutes, When I watched it i thought it was just a movie despite the fact that it was stated to be a true life story,until something similar happened in my academic community, Ogbomoso Oyo state of Nigeria.

It was 11:45am on Wednesday morning when some young, beautiful looking ladies and some gorgeously dressed gentlemen walked into the united bank for Africa(UBA) looking like some kind of customer who wants to transact some business.

According to an eye witness who happen to be my course mate; suddenly, they shouted "everyone to the ground" everyone got terrified and they all fell flat on their faces. A lady went out to secure the outside of the bank while the rest were robbing in the banking hall.

A police man who was suppose to resume to the bank at 12 noon unfortunately came at that time, on sighting him by the armed lady, she shot him on close range and killed him, also a man was steering at her from the building of another bank close to them, somehow she targetted him and killed him also.

At the long run, the armed robber, robbed the bank with out any interruption and carted away with huge sum of money of about 10million Naira. To worsen the whole situation, they didn't just left the bank with the money, they also took along with them the bank manger as hostage to escape the wrath of the police.

For neighbors living around the bank, it was a nightmare for them and for customers who witnessed the situation, it was a miracle they survived.

NURTURE STRONG RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR BOSS, PEERS AND TEAM MEMBERS.
Building and sustaining strong, effective relationships with your team members depends upon how well you have built and sustained strong, healthy relationships with your manager and your peers. If you are not concerned with “looking good” to your boss and your peers, if you are not trying to prove your importance or value to the team, then you are tree to lead from the vantage point of your commitment to your team’s objective in the spirit of openness.
You find yourself recognizing the strengths and positive values of your boss and peers. You more naturally find ways to help your boss be successful, to enable your peers to succeed, and to inspire the overall organization to achieve a new level of performance, “Us versus them” thinking is no longer useful to you. You engage with other leaders and their teams in a spirit of informed cooperation and shared mission.
Leaders who are focused on their team’s objective and open to the ideas and feedback of others actively build strong relationships with their colleagues. They spend more time communicating the shared vision and promoting a productive culture. They avoid micromanaging, they do not “snoopervise” and they do not look to find faults that is they are not knockers.
Responsive leaders find it easier to correct and to discipline when necessary, because they do not blame others as a means of justifying to themselves that they are not at fault.
They simply hold others to the some high standard of performance and conduct to which they hold themselves.
Such leaders find it easier to communicate openly and frequently with their people, holding them accountable while honoring them as people who deserve respect and dignity. They find it natural to work collaboratively in a spirit of teamwork and to find ways to leverage leaning among all team members. There leaders utilize team meetings to strengthen the team and to institutionalize helping one another as the means to achieve team objectives, open, responsive leaders create an information-rich environment. They teach more effectively, they lean faster, and they naturally place more trust in people than they do in policies, rules or other control oriented management mechanisms. Most of all, they have more turn!
Commitment based, responsive leadership consistently yields superior result.

ACTIVELY TEACH AND HELP OTHERS
effective leaders recognize their fundamental obligation to help their people grow. They see their direct reports as people whose desires are similar to their own-to grow, to lean, and to be a contributing, valued member of a winning team. Leaders who fail to recognize this obligation will resist teaching and nurturing their people, and will instead spend their time “tolerating” their direct reports, or worse, demanding them.
Leaders help their people grow by helping them remain focused on achieving the team’s shared goals. They are relentless in their effort to help prepare their people to achieve results-empowering them to be both responsible and accountable. They inform their people, and they stay informed themselves.
Effective leaders always set more aggressive (but reasonable) targets, because a responsive leader’s confidence in his or her people grows with each team achievement. Each successive him becomes part of a self-reinforcing cycle. These leaders see themselves as facilitators of success-they are quick to help, to coach, to recognize, to say thanks, to cheer-lead, and to generally promote a positive, winning organizational character.
Conversely, unresponsive leaders are reluctant to set aggressive goals because they lack confidence in their people as a result of their failure to prepare them for success and to hold them accountable although they are likely to blame “the system” for their reluctance.

CORRECT TEAM MEMBERS
exceptional leaders spend an overwhelming percentage of their time helping things to right, where as ineffective, self centered leaders spend their time dealing with things that go wrong.
When things do go wrong, effective leaders seek first to understand how they may have contributed to the problem only after making an honest assessment and determing that they did not contributed to the problem do they consider the possibility that their people may not be living up to their commitments.
An exceptional leader asks the following question;
Are my people holding themselves accountable?
Are they actively measuring their performance?
Are they toeused on the team’s objective?
Have they built and maintained strong relationships to better enable success?
If they answer to any of these questions is “no”, the responsive leader helps his or her people understand where they failed.
When corrective action or discipline is required, the effective leader recognizes that it must flow from accountability, not from blame, anger or resentment. The principle to be maintained is personal accountability.
If team members tail in their responsibility to hold themselves accountable, the leader must do so for them. Open, responsive leaders recognize that holding people accountable is not an act of punishment. If is a requirement of respecting them as people. These leaders recognize that failure to maintain the accountability of individual team members is to fail in their accountability to the rest of the team, to the greatest organization, and to the team’s objective .
Responsive leaders accept that their credibility in correcting others is based on the perception of their reasonableness and their real intent as a leader. Unresponsive leaders who are trapped in self-deception will be perceived as arbitrary, capricious and unfair in their correction and discipline.
When performance issues are chronic and/or serious, the effective leader takes decisive action. Effective leaders know that chronic or serious failures require severe consequence. The responsibility that has been entrusted to that leader is to safeguard the organization’s assets and interests. This creates an obligation to act, even it the appropriate action is termination of employment.

CONCLUSIVELY…
The determinant between an effective leader and an ineffective leader is self-awareness. Mental acuity, depth and breadth of business experience or leadership experience, strategic thinking skills, operating skills, street-smart, charisma and the like are important attributes of leaders, but they are not sufficient. A leader who is aware of his or her performance and the performance of his or her followers is not only an effective leader-but a truly exceptional one.

This abstract has to do with the effect of the pandemic disease HIV/AIDS on the women in particular and also the men and also the youths (Age 18-39) and also how it in turn affects the country’s National Development. I would say that the National Strategic framework has not adequately implemented its programs in the areas of youth sensitization and counseling in our higher institutions. I am particular about the future of Nigeria, which is the youths; the students in the Nigerian higher institution still show a remorse attitude to the issue of HIV/AIDS. We all know that having unprotected sex endangers us and make us liable to contact this disease and other sexually transmitted diseases.
With respect to the data’s from the global health council, all too many places, women face inequality with men, but in one area they are fast approaching equality where no one wants it. Worldwide, the number of women living with HIV is almost equal to the number of men. Every day 7,000 women around the world become infected and the number is on the rise. More than 17.5 million women are now living with HIV. In the most heavily affected countries in Africa, 59% of adults and nearly 75% of young people now living with HIV are female. In Asia, the situation is less dramatic but of serious and growing concern. Thirty percent of adults living with HIV in Asia are women, with rates reaching 39% in Thailand and 46% in Cambodia. Why are women catching up with men in terms of HIV infections? One cause is the difference in physical make-up between men and women, which makes women almost twice as likely to become infected with HIV from men as men are from women. But apart from the biological inequality there are many deeply rooted social patterns, which explain why women are increasingly becoming infected with HIV.
Many social norms and patterns across the world can influence the adoption of behaviors that increase the risk of HIV infection. In many areas of the country, suspicion of immorality and infidelity threaten women’s fragile status and scares them away from carrying or insisting on using a condom. For the same reasons, women will also avoid routine reproductive health services where they could be informed about HIV, be tested and if needed receive treatment. Social norms also encourage men to engage in risky behaviors, which put them, but also their female partners, at greater risk of HIV infection. For too many men across the country, seeking health care and information, and taking adequate responsibility for their sexual or reproductive health represents a challenge to their masculinity.
On the other hand, a multiplicity of sexual partners and violence against female partners may be considered as expressions of male’s power and strength. In the Nigerian HIV/AIDS summit, we need to look carefully at subjects still taboo in many societies – men and women’s place in society and their sexuality, often based on privilege and power or burdened by coercion, ignorance and violence. Twenty-five years into the epidemic and sixty five million infections later, it is long past time to confront these issues and challenge the nature of relations between men and women, which makes both sexes vulnerable to HIV. To stop the feminization of the epidemic, as well as the epidemic itself, we have to initiate legal but also social, cultural and economic changes to challenge some of the most pervasive social patterns and gender norms that continue to fuel the AIDS epidemic, which posses a serious misfit in the citizens and mitigate against the actualization of the National development goals, because no contributions can be made to development by the citizens when they are sick (As no man will go to rest when his roof is on fire).
We must start judging our responses to HIV by two questions: do they promote the human rights of women and girls and do they promote the responsibilities of men and boys? For example, do they prioritize sending all girls go to school to receive a proper education, including sexual education as well as life skills training? Do they respect women’s rights to control when, with whom and under what circumstances they have sexual relations? Do they sanction violence, inside and outside marriage? Do they create room for women to participate in the public debate and decision-making? Do they protect women’s economic autonomy by securing their property and inheritance rights? Do they aim to deliver on female controlled HIV prevention methods? To succeed against HIV, Nigeria like everywhere, must ensure that all its citizens, men and women, girls and boys, are equal and full players in this necessary shift in paradigm.
Women, inside and outside the home, must have the economic, social and political power to stand up for their rights and protect themselves and their families from violence and disease, and men must question those aspects of privilege and power that put themselves, their sexual partners and their offspring at risk. Above all, men and women have to agree to change together the society they live in for one respectful of the individual and of human rights. This paradigm shift is necessary to beat HIV – it has become a compulsory requirement to get ahead of this epidemic and move our country, Nigeria to greater heights.

Each of these principles is a pre-requisite of the next. For example, to build successful, beauty successful, healthy relationships with peers and with boss.
If you are struggling with any one of these principles, the solution resides in the former. For example, if you are having difficult building effective relationship with your peers, it’s likely you are not focused on the team’s objective and that you are self-deceived.
These five principles are interrelated, and each is highly dependent on the others, somewhat likely building a house-you cannot work on the second level if the first floor is incomplete and the foundation is weak.
Focusing on the team’s objective, while avoiding self-deception
Building and sustaining strong relationships with one’s manager and peers.
Building and sustaining strong relationship with one’s direct reports.
Actively teaching and enabling others to achieve the team’s objective.
Correcting and disciplining effectively.
1.FOCUS ON THE TEAM’S OBJECTIVE, AVOID SELF-DECEPTION.
This is the foundational principle of effective leadership. A leader’s focus is the team’s objective. To maintain this focus and successfully execute strategies and tactics to achieve team goals, you must maximize the effectiveness of your team. To do that, you must avoid self-deception.
A once familiar advertisement noted “you want increase you follower north, your people will”. Leaders who are not trapped in self-deception will see their people as individuals who are not much different from themselves.
They will be open to their people’s concerns, needs, fears, and aspirations. They will understand that their success as a leader will ultimately be determined by the success of the individual members of their team.
When things go wrong, a leader who views his or her people as objects will blame them first and preclude other possible root causes. The cost of seeing your people as object will be your failure to deliver on the team objective. Is a person ever deserving of blame? In some instances, yes. However, a leader whose first instincts is to find blame may be viewing that person as an obstacle to his or her own success, career goals or self image. For example, if you view yourself as the sort of person who always succeeds, how likely is it that you will view anything that goes wrong as being your own fault? You will believe that it must be someone else’s fault.
Is your first instinct to try to understand how you, as a leader, can help? Do you ask yourself how you can better enable the team members to contribute to the achievement of the team’s objective?
If you are open to your people and focused on your common objectives, everything you do you will do because it better enable your team. You will compliment, correct, teach, coach, direct, counsel, discipline, recognize and reward then because it will help them-not because it will help you. If you treat your people as mere objects orbiting around you, providing your the means to sustain your own self-image, then your focus is you, not on your people and not on your team’s objectives.
Regardless of your outward behaviours or actions, if you are truly aligned with and open to the team’s objectives, the team will respond differently to you than if your focus were your personal agenda. To illustrate this point, consider how different if feels when you are complimented by someone you believe has your best interest at heart versus receiving a compliment from someone who is just trying to get something from you. Think of a compliment you many have receive from a respected peer, a manager, a coach or a friend contrast that with a compliment you have received from a salesman trying to make a sale. Do you feel the same? Similarly, consider how different it feels to be connected or reprimanded by someone you know is committed to your success versus someone who is working his or her own agenda.
The important point to remember is that no matter what behaviour you exhibit as a leader, your people will respond to you based on their perception of your openness to them and your commitment to your team’s objectives. This guttural perception determines how influential you mill be as a leader. This will be true n matter how practiced or how polished you become in your leadership behaviours.
Can temporary management literature is full of recommendations regarding different techniques or skills leaders can adopt to become more effective and influential.
While improving your skills as a leader can be valuable work, it is not enough. This is because any new skill, such as “active listening” or “managing by wandering around,” can be done in two ways; with your focus on other around you, or with your focus on yourself.
This is true with almost any behaviour. There are two ways to smile, two ways to say “Hello”, two ways to teach, two ways to connect, two ways to reward, and soon. If you view your people as objects who exist only to help you prove what a good leader you are or how smart you are, or you are in some other way simply being a jesk, practicing skills such as managing by wandering around the organization will only expose more people to your “jerkiness”. You mould do better by staying in your office with the doors closed (or in your cubicle with a sheet draped across the opening).
New skills and techniques will e helpful only when you are genuinely committed to the team’s objective and are responsive to others. People will eventually realize that you are using new techniques to manipulate them or to close them off. This will be true no matter how practiced you are, and no matter how hard you try to commence them of your sincerity. They will know (even if you do not) that you are self-decieved.