Positive state before doing

                 One day Buddha was travelling from one town to another town along with his followers. On the way, they took a rest and the Buddha asked one of his followers to get some water from the nearby lake.A disciple walked up to the lake and he noticed that some people were washing clothes in the lake water and also a bullock cart crossing through the lake.As a result, water became muddy and the disciple thought this muddy water cannot be given to Buddha to drink. He came back to Buddha and told that the water was muddy and not suitable for drinking.

                 After a while, Buddha again asked the same disciple to go back to the lake and get some water. The disciple also went to the lake and found that mud was settled down and the water was clean enough to drink.So he collected some water in a pot and brought it to Buddha.

                 Buddha looked at the water and looked up at the disciple and said “what did you do to make the water clean to drink? You just allowed it as such to settle down the mud. Similarly, when your mind is in a disturbed state, you cannot make use of it effectively for decision making or doing anything useful. Give a little time to settle it down, your mind becomes in a positive state and you can produce results “

Possibilities

“The Future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.”- John Sculley

         Sometimes we are skeptical about the future and think that the status quo will continue as such either business growth or financial status or even professional growth  or quality of life.During such time, “Possibilities thinking” may be useful to get confidence or overcoming the skeptic mindset.

        For example, observe any successful people from business, sports, media, politics, etc., You may realize that their background were ordinary or much worse than yours. How they became successful is that they believed themselves. Before believing themselves, they think the possibilities of becoming successful or achieving something great. They believed in the possibilities of changing their destiny better than they were. They believed in the possibilities of tomorrow, which would be  better than today.

        Similarly, look at the developments in all the fields like connectivity of the world through internet, mobile communication, affordability of transportation modes, education, healthcare inventions, etc which was not imaginable a few   decades ago. Today it has become reality as  someone was thinking about the possibilities changing from better to best.

         In a nutshell, what was not possible yesterday becomes reality today and it is the result of possibilities thinking of humanity. Hence, think about new possibilities in your life either business turnaround, personal transformation or improving the quality of life, it will become reality with right actions!  

The power of faith and surrendering

“Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.” – Martin Luther

      
          Even though we possess the knowledge, experience and capability in our profession, sometimes our confidence will be shaken. During such a time, if we are not able to maintain “mental cool,” outcome will be disastrous. One of the ways to calm our mind would be faith in divine power and surrendering.

           For instance, recently I was called for speaking in a forum. Even though the topic was very close to my heart and preparation was good, somehow the new forum, environment and the senior experts sitting on the dais made me inferior, eventually I was losing my confidence. I knew in a few minutes, I need to deliver my speech and no way I can escape the situation and in the back of my mind, I was losing all the confidence and  the contents of the speech. At that moment, it was very difficult to boost the confidence with our intellectual learnings and techniques.

            The only option I had was to surrender to divine power. I was telling myself “I have not tried this speaking opportunity as it comes to me as divine wish. If it gets to me as divine’s wish, how come divine make me  to fail in this? Even if I fail, that is the divine’s wish to gain experience out of this.Surely things will turn out favors in any way.” Within a few minutes, I was called  and surprised my speech came out more powerful and content made positive impacts as I received a positive response from the people.

           The point  I am asserting here is that be faith in yourself, if not, be faith on divine and surrender ,that will make you calm and  life will be good whatever happens!

Battle Choice

“How people treat you is their karma, how you react is yours.”—Wayne Dyer

           In professional or  business environment, sometimes , we may have to work with the people who may not be inline with your thought process, attitude,character ,simply put it wavelength. The person could  be your boss  or  peers or subordinates  or even the customer. Practically you may not have immediate solution to move away from them ,the only option left out is to live with them  temporarily.

          What is the choice available to manage those characters? One choice can be to  confront with them  and always prove that you are right. This choice is like adding fuel to fire as resistance always back firing. In this process, either you lose your peace of mind or your productivity or lose track of growth as you always think how to make others  wrong.

          Another choice can be to make your mind  to accept them as such  and keep moving on your  growth activities. Learn from the nature that anything is cyclic and things will work out in your favor soon. Learn from your past that tough times never lasts forever and how you managed similar situations.


          In essence, your peace of mind is more important than anything else. That depends on the choice of battle you choose!!

Managing Emotions

“The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason.”—Marya Mannes

      One of the toughest  management is managing the emotion of self. The internal  emotion will manifest as behavior to the external world and makes us  either great or break. It can be in relationship, day to day decisions and even in managing personal finance. Those who can able to master their emotions  through self awareness becomes successful in all aspects of life.

        For instance, as most of  us aware of the fact that  stock market is one of the investment avenues of our period and if we manage well, we can create wealth. But how many of us really have made money in stock market consistently? One of the reasons  that most of us  are operating in stock market mostly with  emotions like anxiety, greed, fear  and then take decisions which most of the time goes wrong.

        Likewise, in a relationship with our family members or even with fellow workers, we are predominantly run by emotions like fear, jealousy, anger and then proved  by words or natural process which moves the relationship character.


         Managing emotions  well is mastery of all skills. For some people, it is a natural process  and for others, it is possible with awareness and practice. If one masters managing emotions, he starts attracting all good things in life!

Learn from Success

              In both personal and business  aspects, delivering results or achieving success milestone   is relatively easy if factors like process, people, and the environment favor us. However, sustaining the success is much more important and a real challenge. Even though it is difficult, but it is possible, as we are seeing  outstanding, lifetime successful people from business, sports, music, media etc. How can we sustain the success forever? One of the answers could be “learning from the success."

          Most of the time, when we achieve success, we forget to look back the factors led us to success. Whereas after failure, we tend to look back what went wrong and learn from the mistakes. Similarly, when we achieve success milestones, we can look back in the process, which led to success. The factors can be the strategy we adopted, the approach we used, people whom along with we delivered result, People for whom we delivered, environmental factors like competition, timing, and other assumptions etc.

          This reflection or introspection on success will help you to reinforce the confidence on you, adopt the same methodology in future and to improve the quality of execution.This will help you to sustain the success. Hence, it is not only important to learn from failure, but from success as well for sustaining it.

Myth of multitasking

“You can do two things at once, but you cannot focus effectively on two things at once”-Gary Keller

       With the intention of doing more in a given time, we tend to do multiple activities simultaneously or switching rapidly from task to task in the same time.It  is called multitasking.

        For example, you are in preparing the presentation for your annual review, in between, you attend the phone calls as you received, and you call someone, attend the SMS and browse the internet, download the mails and again focus on preparation of reports.

       Each time when  we move between tasks, the brain takes a little  time to  reorient    itself to the new task at hand. Psychologists estimated that multitasking in the form of switching backwards and forwards between tasks increases the overall time needed to complete the tasks by 40 percent.

      The simple message that we achieve more personal productivity if we stay focused on tasks for longer instead of diverting our attention to different tasks.


      With so much distraction in today’s world, it is easy to be diverted in the name of multitask. However, the reality is that we are losing our productivity.With awareness and self-control, it is possible to orient our focus on a given task and complete!.

Why goal fails?

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” –Jim Rohn

               In professional and Personal environment, many of us  have experience of setting  goals  and not able to achieve the same.There may be many  external  reasons for not achieving the goal, but one of the  causes for failure is an internal oriented or mindset in approaching the execution.

            Whether we are setting the goal only with OUTCOME oriented or PROCESS oriented makes a lot of difference in the success or failure. For example, if you set a goal to improve your revenue by 2X in a year's time. This is outcome oriented. If you focus only on this outcome,  likely you may not achieve the goal.

            Instead, if you focus more on setting process goals to achieve revenue increase by 2X in a year time ,then  likely you may achieve the goal. For example, you set goals to improve your skill set, up gradation of knowledge, improving network etc and working on it will lead you to achieve the goal. This is a process-oriented goal.

           To sum it up, we tend to focus more on the outcome than the process to achieve the outcome. This leads to failure of achieving goals. Instead, being disciplined in the process   will improve the probability of achieving the goal.

Appreciating the value

“Light can be understood only with the wisdom of darkness."--Ka Chinery

         Most of the time, we use to approach the aspects of life as granted. The reason could be we   get anything easily and we do not see much value in it. Our tendency is while everything goes right, we assume that it happens because of our brilliance or effort and hesitate to appreciate the giftedness.

         In order to balance this mindset only, nature always plays with balanced and equanimity principle. To appreciate the value of life and its blessings, challenges or difficulties are given.

For example,

When we get sick, we appreciate the value of fitness and respect the physical body....

When we loss materialistically, we appreciate the value of hard earned money....

When we are alone, we appreciate the value of relationships....

When we are undergoing the tough times, we appreciate the value of mental strength and self-development....

We appreciate the value of light when we are in darkness...

         It does not mean just to appreciate the value of life, one need to undergo all the troubles in life. With a little bit of awareness, gratitude and balanced approach, we can appreciate  everything that happens in our life.

If you resist anything, it will persist

“The only proper way to eliminate bad habits is to replace them with good ones.”Jerome Hines

       Most of us use to make commitments to give up  bad habits or unwanted habits. We initiate  effort to  to give up, but  end up with failure as habit will never give up us!!! .

       The study shows that during the process of giving up any bad or unwanted habits, our mind focuses more on resisting the habit and in this process we are losing our mental strength. Instead, focus on developing new habit  or divert your  time on something new habits while setting the mind to give up the unwanted habit. In this process mind focus on a new habit forming and this increase mental strength  than  focusing on to resist.

         For example, if you want to give up the habit of spending too much time on browsing net.If you focus to give up, your resistance will weak your mental strength and likely you may not succeed. Alternatively, while to decide to give up the habit, take new habit like  spending time with closed one or writing or reading, etc. and focus on continuing new habit. Eventually, your focus on new thing will help you to  succeed in new things as well as  diverting you from unwanted habit.

It is because what you resist will persist and what you positively focus will flourish!