Tip of the day - Are YOU too…?

If you are too busy to listen, too impatient to get things done, too focused to see changes, too quick to judge, too slow to decide, too proud to ask, too rigid to change, too smart to learn, too closed to speak, too cagey to teach, too critical to encourage, too presumptuous to notice, too hard to please, too soft to reprimand, you can neither make a good parent nor leader yet. There’s still hope if you read this far though and hence the yet in the last sentence!

Tip of the day – Being at ease.

The paradox is striking - that being at ease is one of the most difficult things to do for most people! Most of us look for the causes all around us – the environment, the people, the past, the future, the circumstances et al. The answers lie elsewhere. I briefly touch upon three well-known concepts that aid the cause of embarking upon the task of simplifying being at ease.

The first deals with locus of control. Over a couple of decades back, I was introduced to the concept of the locus of control by an eminent management and leadership development professional who has since tasted significant corporate success in addition to authoring some good fiction and is a thought leader in the field. The concept was simple. The locus of control has to be within and not without. I could elaborate on this but it would for one, take the thrill out of interpreting it one’s own way and secondly, it is on a path of digression in the context of the current discussion. What we want to draw from this concept is the idea of the environment being distinct from oneself and the fact that we can, more often than not, only control things that are internal.

The second deals with the degrees of freedom. Students of science and/or statistics would have dealt with the concept of degrees of freedom. In layman’s terms, the degrees of freedom are the set of independent variables or parameters that define any state. To describe the current state in the context of oneself, the degrees of freedom would be, in a simplistic view, environment, time and the self.

The third is about state itself being a (I would have liked to add, a vector) combination of many dimensions of state. State could be viewed as physical state, emotional state, spiritual state, mental state et al.

Awareness of one’s current state along each of these dimensions, appreciation of the self being a (internal) degree of freedom on its own, and acceptance of the fact that the other two (external) degrees of freedom, environment and time, by definition are exactly that again – independent variables – is simply put, being at ease.

The concept is not stationary vis-à-vis the degrees of freedom, but transient. In other words, each of the states keeps changing with our position along the degrees of freedom. So our state – physical, emotional et al - changes with time and changes in the environment. Since movement along the external degrees of freedom is inevitable, if one’s state along all non-physical dimensions is a sole function of one’s self, one is likely to be at perpetual ease.

This is the essence of being at ease. It is being at ease with oneself.

Tidbits – Why do we have NO TIME?

Whatever happened to all the time?

The irrepressible ability of man to change the environment around him to suit his needs combined with an overwhelming urge to find more time in every unit of time, has, over generations, changed the dynamics of how time is perceived and what man has wanted to do with it.

The intent of every invention, innovation and in a broader sense, change, has always been to free up man’s time for bigger pursuits and better application of his time. In a sense, it is to overcome today’s challenges, make them a lesser occupation, and use the freed up time to embrace newer challenges. Somewhere along the road, the stuff man did centuries, decades or years back continue to be done. Only, they are done in lesser time and man has found more stuff to fill the freed up time with. This, no doubt, is very useful for progress and evolution.

However, the hyper-compartmentalization of every unit of the biological clock has led to the hands of time becoming the sands of time. The amount of time that someone can focus on any one given thing has dramatically dwindled. If there is one single epidemic inflicting the human psyche in this day and age, it is the attention deficiency syndrome. Sit back and observe people around you to see what I mean!

If there is one or two things that are low down in the priority list and therefore are compromised, they do not free up enough time any longer for someone to be able to put it to any productive use; because they did not take up enough contiguous time in the first place to free up anything of consequence. So what does one do if one had 10, 20 or 30 minutes freed up from two compromised chores? A power jog because you do not have time enough for a normal jog or walk, browse for the shortest route to office (so you can free up the next 10 minutes!!) or the best value offer on the hot new smartphone out in the market (so you can browse on the move and save the next 2 minutes!!).

And incidentally, what does one do with the time one does manage to free up? Find some pursuits that would help free up a little more time! Well, it is a vicious circle. This is somewhat like Kiyosaki’s rat race in a financial context!

So how does one find the time and what does one do with it?

First things first, you do not find time by freeing it up. You find time by finding something worthwhile to do, to start with. If you want it bad enough, you will find time to do it. You find time by prioritizing – doing the things that you want to do most, first, and so on. The second thing to keep in mind is that anything creative, cerebral, soul-searching, touching others’ lives, meaningful, at least for the majority of us, is seldom achievable in the ‘minutes’ timeframe that we have been talking about and freeing up. Those things, presumably the most important ones, take significant amount of contiguous time, and more importantly, ‘uncluttered mind time’. The third, and most important aspect to finding time is the appreciation that the process is internal – no one can find your time for you (remember it is not about freeing it up!), you have to find it yourself.

So, go right ahead and grab what is rightfully yours, and yours only!

Tip of the day – What’s inside the fear of the unknown?

Strange as it may sound, the ‘fear of the unknown’ is just cliché and a wrong one at that! If something is totally unknown, it would never be in your consciousness and consequently not felt. If so, it cannot invoke any feeling or emotions like fear. Or for that matter happiness, sorrow, anger…anything.

Let us take a closer look at the anatomy of an emotion and its definition to get a better understanding of fear. There are, in fact, two key words one would come across in any dictionary definition of the word emotion. One is experience and the other is consciousness.

If you have to experience an emotion, you ought to be experiencing what causes an emotion in the first place. Somewhere, emotion follows from an experience and what you learnt from that experience. If you gained complete knowledge from an experience, there remains no unknown. Usually, therefore, there is no fear attached to that experience. If you learnt nothing at all, you never experienced anything consciously. And if you didn’t experience anything consciously, there is no fear. If you learnt something but not all of it, is when you might experience fear.

Let us explore this further. Why does incomplete knowledge cause fear? When knowledge about something is complete, one is certain about all possible outcomes and what can be expected in every scenario. From the point of view of knowledge, and as we will see, fear, it does not matter if the outcome is a success or a failure as long as there is certainty about the process of producing it.

However, when knowledge is incomplete, there is a lack of understanding of which scenario and which course is likely to lead to what outcome. This is the paradigm of uncertainty. And this paradigm is defined by the rules of probability. And that is not in one’s control. At least, not till it is understood in its entirety! This is what translates into fear. On the same lines, fear of failure is a misnomer. It is the lack of understanding of what would lead to success and hence the uncertainty that surrounds the outcome when in the zone of incomplete knowledge that causes fear.

The fear is of uncertainty that is caused by incomplete knowledge and understanding of what one is afraid of. It really is fear of the not fully known.

Perspectives – Some self-defeating prophecies.

They say you should not take yourself too seriously. Well, if you don’t take yourself seriously, slim chance that someone else will.

They say you should not take friendship for granted. Well, if you don’t, you’ve planted the first doubt about the friendship anyway.

They say you should not take an opponent lightly. Well, if you take them heavily, you’ve already handed them the first victory.

Tidbits – Peace and Harmony.

The terms peace and harmony have been interchangeably used by many. I wanted to bring out one aspect of the difference that clearly distinguishes one from the other. The frame of reference for peace could very well be singular but harmony always has to have a plural context.

To illustrate the point through an example, one can be at peace (with oneself, and no external reference) but one has to be ‘in harmony with’ (something or someone or whatever, an external reference point).

Some dictionary definitions of the two terms do not seem to address this element of their difference clearly –

-          Peace

o   is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict and the freedom from fear of violence

o   the state existing during absence of war

o   a state of harmony between people or groups; freedom from strife

o   harmony in personal relations

o   absence of mental anxiety

o   a state of stillness, silence or serenity

o   a state of tranquility or quiet

o   freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions

-          Harmony

o    A situation in which people live and work well with other people, or in a way that does not damage things around them

o   Pleasing or congruent arrangement of parts

o   Correspondence, accord

o   The attractive effect that is created when objects, colors etc combine well together

o   Joint, concord, agreement

o   To fit together, to join

o   A feeling that you are happy and your mind and emotions are well balanced

o   Internal calm or Tranquility

A couple of points about the differences that is interesting and noteworthy. One, the etymology of the words suggests that the usage had a strong bias towards the definitions in italics above during their origin. This is in support of the singular or plural view (or to extend the argument, internalized and externalized views) I had expressed right at the beginning. Second, it is worthwhile to think if one can exist without the other and if yes, which one – meaning, can there be peace without harmony or harmony without peace. The former does not seem probable whereas the latter definitely does!