Reflections in Personal Growth

This is a long weekend for us now. As dyed-in-the-wool lastminute.com-mers, we had made no plans to go out of town or even anything substantial. The upside to that is that we are having a relaxed weekend. It is Sunday evening, and it is such a welcome thought that we get to laze for one more day tomorrow before the work and school week begins.  After a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant which put me in a food coma, I returned home and took a lazy Sunday afternoon nap. Once the weather cooled down for a bit, I stepped out to go on a trail walk.  There is a small brook that runs through our town, and there is a trail alongside, called the Fuller Brook Trail. It is a trail I frequently walk/run on, I quite enjoy the views all around.  I usually do my daily walk listening to music or podcasts or have phone conversations with friends and family. Today I went without my airpods, which are a standard part of of my walking gear. This meant I was alone with my thoughts and had m...

I would think of getting somewhere as having three distinct steps. Identify where you need to go; evaluate and steer course toward that, and then accelerate. And the steps have to be in that order.  Change the order of the steps and you would have different outcomes. Think of it as you are driving a car going in a certain path. Now you decide where you are going is not where you wanted to be, and you decide it's time to change. What you do at that point is very critical if you were driving.  Here are the things that you could be doing that could be dramatically disastrous. One, you could come to a grinding halt and literally choke up the vehicle. Two, and this happens more often that we think, you could rev up the engine and accelerate thinking the problem is that you are not going fast enough. If you did that, you would literally get to the place faster, except you did not want to go there.  Three, you realize that the direction you are going in isn't appropriate, and yo...

  Couldn't have said it better myself! The reptile brain in us instinctively decides without deep thinking. This part of the brain, the amygdala, is responsible for the famous 'fight or flight' response. It is that part of the brain that has to rely on cues from the environment and quickly decide a course of action. It is the part of the brain that held our ancestors in good stead in the savannah several thousand years ago.  So when faced with a problem, the instinctual response is to flee the scene or fight the problem. Fighting the problem is a little different from 'solving' the problem; fighting the problem usually takes the form of shooting the messenger, or being upset with the bearer of the news. Fleeing the scene is an equally thoughtless option. I call it the - ignore the problem long enough in the hope that it goes away. Now, the real solution to the problem emerges when we are able to look beyond the instinctual response and get to the "thoughtful...

  There is a quote that's doing the rounds in social media "20 years from now, the only people who remember that you worked late are your kids" The quote is intended to dissuade people from overworking, to urge people not to make work their only gig in life. I get that.  I do believe, though, that work you do has to be meaningful. And when work is meaningful, you do tend to go deep. Very often, you do so without a sense of time. Maria Montessori argued that children as young as three years immerse themselves in real work for long hours, and become irritable when they are taken away from the work. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi echoes a similar sentiment in his seminal work "Flow" - when the level of complexity of the work you do matches, or slightly exceeds, the level of competence you have, you are in a state of "flow", a state where productivity is high and fatigue is low, and creativity and satisfaction out of the work you do is attained. ( I am paraphrasi...

  Anyone who has been through any change will agree to the messiness of the process. Going into the process with eyes wide open is important for a successful outcome. The hard part of the change comes in many shapes and forms. The first is the newness and unfamiliarity of the change. Our brains are inherently wired for efficiency. It assumes that what you know is set in stone, and builds on it. When you are asking for the brain to do something different, the brain protests and wants to return to the familiar, the tried and tested, because it knows what to do. The heuristic is already in place, and it doesn't need to do anything new. The draw of the familiar is a dangerous one. It is the one that reaches for the cigarette, or the comfort chocolate.  It is the one that demands the extra shot of alcohol. It is the one that tells you to drunk-text the ex.  The second is - you are giving up the comfort of the familiar in favor of a change, something you think  you want. A...

Do not underestimate the magnitude of effort How often do we say we are going to change this or that about our life? I want to start exercising, I want to eat better, I want to lose weight (it is an outcome, not an input but we will talk about that later), I want to read more, I want to write more, I want to be a more patient parent, I want to mend relationships with my family.  We say all these things and assume that these are commitments. We make half assed attempts to make changes. Two things happen as a result - we don't see the results we expect to see, and/or we begin to see ourselves as failures for not following through on our commitment. In either case it sets off a vicious cycle where you are no longer motivated about the change. There is some benefit to not overthinking. Sometimes you need a little push if you've been waiting far too long for the perfect time or the perfect circumstances. I have seen several instances in myself and others where we overthink ourselves...