Wagging your way out of the pandemic!

 Fear is the biggest extinguisher of the fire of innovation in a human mind! Fear is a very timid emotion. It cannot face itself nor will it allow the mind to progress forward. It will stall all the activities of the mind and it shouts louder than the soul voice. The soul voice should be guiding you instead the fear drowns that voice in it's loudest roar!! The irony of all this is that externally the person experiencing fear may appear calm and composed while harnessing the feelings of self-defeat and fear! These are monsters who need to be controlled with the strength of the mind. As the common proverb goes, "A coward dies a 1000 deaths before really dying". This is a profound statement explaining the state of the mind experiencing fear.  One must develop the mental strength to overcome fear.  Consider the fear of the unknown. This can consume a person and force him to do un-necessary actions. When a student knows that he has not prepared for the exam, he would be afraid...

  Growth happens in tangible and intangible form! Depends on what you are looking it!. "The only constant in life is change". That is so true! Change enhances the environment and makes infinite possibilities available! Growth is the effect of change! If there is no change, it means no growth happened! That will be heart breaking! We all want to grow and reach new horizons. Every experience in life is a lesson to learn from and grow. Keep a personal diary in your mind and keep track of all the events where you felt out of place, out of turn, in the dark, being in the tunnel. Those were the periods in your life that helped you grow! A baby in the womb is in complete darkness but at the end of the term, he sees tremendous light and success. Same is the case in every stage of life. We have to strive through the dark patches of our life to come out strong in the light. No flower blossomed in complete sunlight. There are periods of extreme rain and dark clouds that make it impossib...

  Motivation is intrinsic for 90% of the time. You wake up each day thinking about all the things that needs to be accomplished. You. have a checklist of items that you want to complete in the day and chugging along the day you try to complete them. That is intrinsic motivation, you want to achieve and be a high performer. How you make people feel everyday drives the people around you and the atmosphere at your workplace and home! The outcomes you see in your life are a direct result of this subconscious action. What is it that keeps you up at night? The thought that there are more than 20% of the Earth's population struggling to meet basic needs like food, water and shelter should be quite nerve-wrecking. What you do in your daily life has a large effect on the lower strata of the population. If you are self sufficient and cooking for yourself, cleaning up in some sense you have saved some people the extra work of helping you. Your status in the society is directly proportional to...

  Multitasking is it good or bad? There are so many things to do in a day! In variably you end up stepping on one foot or the other. But there is a way to get out of this endless baggage of things to do! Creating independent functioning individuals is our creation goal! How do we achieve this? Studies have shown that multitasking provides benefits in the beginning then the dis-advantages outweigh the troubles. As the diagram above if you are doing one task at a time you are giving 100% to it. At 2 tasks you are giving 50% give or take to the task. At 3 tasks you are giving < 50% to each task. At 4 tasks you are giving <25%.  So why do we do it? Initial advantages suggest that you feel you are on steroids when you finish one task in the background while performing another task. The ego is boosted that you can finish quicker than others in the same amount of time. As the number of tasks increase the time to context switch your activities is more time consuming than doing t...

  What a wonderful idea? How many times have we felt this? There are times when a brilliant idea strikes you like a golden ray of sun in a dark overcast sky. What happens to the idea after it is put in your mind? Do you write it? Do you implement it? I have some ways to capitalize on this synaptic click that happened in the brain.  1. When you get an idea, text it to yourself. In the worst case you can laugh at it yourself later. 2. Bounce off the idea with a co worker or team mate , friend and see if it flies. 3. Implement the idea and make a fishbone diagram to find out what are the variables in this scenario. Another tangent is to go research on the topic some more to get a better feel of the idea. Make a mental picture of the idea. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, draw it out. Make the ideas as vivid as possible to make it fly, roll with you. Speak to yourself about succeeding in this idea over and over again. Positive affirmations last for a long time in t...

Respect the differences and act! Women are the core of every family, every country and organization. We can determine the quality of a nation based on the kind of women we see there. Men have professions that they can be identified with, but it is only over 70 years back that women started showing up at work and started having a voice! A woman has physical limitations due to her gender, but she makes it up by having a sound intellect and the desire to do something. We cannot discount men for their intuition and strength as well. But they are more physically endowed which makes them a little bit stronger than women! Realizing that gender is only another attribute that we add to a resume or a biography is something we all need to understand. Inherent biases cannot be encouraged among people. Any such display of emotion can fire negatively for the culture of the home, office or country.  When does the gender recognition and attribute slice population? It is mostly when the physical bo...

  We all have been in awkward situations of silence between the parties in communication. But how long does that silence last? What is too long and what is too short to pause? This is something that most speakers would think about. Here is where listening comes into the picture. The best way is to guage the expressions on the listeners face. But what about an era of pre-zoom meetings where the calls were only audio. In that case the best situation is for the talker to get an affimation from the listener that he is listening. Paraphrasing is a good technique to guage the depth of the listener's understanding and continue with the communication. Body language and gestures are effective measurements to understand if the point is communicated across. The discipline of controlled, articulated speech is taught by ToastMasters. Being involved in such groups has taught me the importance of listening when you are in a group situation. If all participants start speaking at the same time it i...

  Emotional intelligence Emotional intelligence is the act of recognizing your own emotion and those of others and discerning the differences and labelling them appropriately in a given situation. The act of using that knowledge to the advantage of the individual is crucial to success in office and home environments. Studies done by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence have shown that people with higher EI have shown better mental health, leadership capabilities, and equanimity in stressful situations. In the book - Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, it is mentioned that the question, “ How are you today? ” is the basic question that makes people delve into their emotional core and respond to situations. It is a form of expressing empathy in the most intimate form. How many times have we felt this? The four basic steps to exhibit EI are Perceiving emotions Understanding emotions Using emotions Managing emotions Lets use an example to understand this.  ...