deepcontemplator

thinking deeply about things that matter

Tag: selfdevelopment

  • What is your definition of enough?

    One of the things to think about in life is how much is enough for you?

    How many friends do you want? How many meaningful friendships you can really maintain? Or how big of a house you need? How many countries do you really want to visit and so on!

    You need to draw the line between hustling for more and being content with what you already have, or achieved. Modern culture wants us to believe we are always ‘incomplete’. We can keep getting better or acquire more things in a never ending quest,

    But at many things in life, being good enough, or even average will just do.

    It might be the best even.

    This is specially important if you have been constantly striving and achieving in one domain of your life. You might have started off on that path as you sorely lacked initially, but then you might lose sight of your rewards and never get to enjoy them.

    In this post The Art and Science of Spending Money, Morgan Housel mentions how, many people get into the mode of making more money and get stuck in it.

    Never having a chance to relax and spend the money, long after they have reached their goals.

    There is ample flex in pushing the goalpost further and further when you reach one.

    But it doesn’t have to be so.

    You don’t have to be a constant work in progress.

    You can be growing, yet valid and complete at the same time.

    So revel in the light when you reach your goals. Pat yourself for how far you have come.

    And maybe if you want, push for an even bigger goal.

    Or realize that its enough, and choose something new altogether.

  • How easily can you adapt?

    A random fact about how humans can survive in the harshest climates of the Tundra to the Sahara deserts made me thinking. Though that’s an extreme example, humans are really quite adaptable.

    Unless we stop being so.

    Adaptability, resilience, openness to change are all interrelated.

    You can’t be adaptable unless you are open and willing to change. Resilience depends on how easily you can bounce back from setbacks and mold yourself to changed realities.

    Being adaptable is not a trait which comes easily to few. Once you get used to a particular lifestyle or even story, it can be really hard to change. Even when not changing is in fact being harmful or not working for you.

    I used to get flustered by even small changes. If my boxing instructor asked us to combine punches instead of following the set routine, I used to get frustrated. “Why can’t we just continue to do what we have been doing all this time?” 🙂

    However, understanding your own friction to change can hopefully open the doors for change as well. Just by realizing the difficulty and real work it takes to adapt to changes sometimes softens the problem.

    This podcast Why You Don’t Change (But How You Still Can) beautifully captures the difficulties involved in change and gently gives some suggestions. For me, the biggest takeaway was the realization was how change always entails giving up something, even if it was bad.

    Starting an exercise regimen, means you have to give up your old habits of eating junk food or not moving your body enough. By being aware of what the change entails, you can make a more practical decision if you want to pursue with the change. You realize that you are in control of your life, you can at any point decide to swap out these habits with healthier ones.

    Change is always hard. But by exercising change and being quite adaptable to changing circumstances, hopefully we get better at it with time.

  • The importance of being able to articulate well

    The importance of being able to articulate well

    Being a frequent listener of podcasts, I am both amazed and in awe of how effortlessly articulate few people are. It is a greatly useful skill to be able to clearly and concisely convey your thoughts and ideas and effectively land them.

    You need to have good ideas, but the aspect of having a great delivery associated with it matters. It decides whether your idea will be heard and come to reality or not.

    I do want to build on my articulation skills and am working on it. It does take effort and practice. This post is not about how we can build the skill, but about why it matters, as seen from the outside.

    Firstly, being able to convey your ideas effectively saves a lot of energy. Incomplete and haphazard communication can result in back and forth. If your message is not clear, it can lead to unwanted deciphering and misconstruing of the message intended. Prevention is better than cure applies even in communication!

    Effective articulation, be it spoken or written word is an art in itself. Of course the greats novelists of the world of literature have honed this to the maximum. They can build entire layered inner and outer worlds of a character beautifully and masterfully. A lot of aspects are deliberately left out to make room for interpretation.

    Good communication or storytelling helps in building trust and cooperation. Of course the content matters, but just having good intentions and useful information is not enough. A lot rests on how well we are able to effectively articulate why the idea matters and how its relevant.

    Hence it is a worthwhile endeavor to constantly improve your articulation skills.

    And get your ideas heard, loud and clear! 🙂

  • Be generative

    Be generative

    In the current times, it can be so easy to passively live away your life consuming content. There is nothing wrong with this. However to achieve anything worthwhile, you need to assimilate and integrate your learning and lived experience and generate energy, ideas and work from it.

    Being generative and producing work performs many functions –

    You find your voice

    Actually going and doing something consistently helps you discover your voice. Constantly putting yourself out there signals to yourself that you matter and your ideas matter.

    You build the momentum of creation

    By forcing yourself to be generative, you are constantly looking for ideas which you can use and bring to fruition. This builds on itself and creates momentum to sustain and grow further.

    Its a way to teach yourself

    Its always said that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone. By teaching someone, and in the process generating words, notes, conversations puts into test how much you have understood the topic.

    It might be one thing to abstractly understand algorithms, but actually writing it down and explaining it step by step to someone and convincing them why it works is totally different.

    So go ahead and weave in moments of being generative along with learning and growth.

  • The limits of to do lists and planners

    The limits of to do lists and planners

    There is the oft quoted
    Failing to plan is planning to fail

    So we end up planning our days by the minute with things to do. There are many apps and planners which help you do this (to the extreme sometimes). You are asked at the start of the year/month/week to meticulously plan ahead, tack your daily habits like water intake, reading, watching shows and all. In return, at least implicitly, the promise is that by becoming an ultimate task slayer, you become a happier person.

    I have had my trysts and multiple false starts with such planning apps and planners. You firstly spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect app or planner which is customized to you. Sad news is – there are none which will perfectly fit you. There are many apps though which can work for you. 

    The important aspect however is how much pay off can you expect from tracking your days as a series of To Dos.

    As with many things in life, we go through seasons and cycles. There might be times when you are in the productivity mode and the whole month is filled with ticking off items on your to do list. Then there are extended periods of slump, where maybe you get 2-3 things done in the entire week. And that is okay.

    We do not have to be chained to never ending to do lists. 

    Our worth is not determined by how long the to do list is or how many items we are able to tick off.

    My experience with planners have been lackluster to say the least. I realized I am better off without them, and a simple to do list for the week, quarter, year suffices and mostly gets the job done.

    However, like any other tool in your life, be open to trying something new. Something which probably can make your life simpler. If it works for you, adopt it, even in a big way maybe!

    But the tool should not become an end in itself. Its a mean to achieve something greater. Definitely there are many worthwhile and important things in life, which you go ahead and do anyway, and may not figure in your to do list!

  • How dance has helped me

    How dance has helped me

    A flyer pasted on my dance class notice board had in bold colorful lettering

    ‘Why do you dance? What do you feel when you dance?’ and the like.

    It was amusing when I saw it first, but I keep coming back to those questions every now and then. I used to learn dance over the weekends for close to three years and it has been more than a couple of years now since I returned. So it took some remembering when someone recently asked how dance has impacted me.

    Everyone’s journey in dance is different and so are its benefits. However for me the benefits have been clear as before –

    You learn how to hold yourself

    It can sound pretty basic. But any activity which increases body awareness, like dance, or yoga, makes you more conscious of your body structure and posture. By learning complex movements, you realize how effortful or effortless something can be. All this increased awareness just lets you have a better poise and presence.

    You get comfortable with falling (even literally)

    We used to try inversions like handstands, cart wheels every now and then. And for a beginner that just means lot of falling rather than doing an actual cartwheel.

    And then days, or weeks later you finally get hold of it and learn to do it with less thought. So you need to be ready to keep falling and failing repeatedly and trying regardless.

    It becomes easier to put yourself out there

    Any performance art entails showing up fully as yourself and willing to be seen. Doing more of it makes you slightly more comfortable to be in the spotlight.

    Seeing others on stage and the vulnerability which accompanies that can be greatly comforting. It can compel you to show up in your full glory as well.

    You get out of your head

    Dance can become an intense physical activity which you can’t intellectually force. Many a times a movement which seems simple can be so difficult to execute. You then understand that you need to stop overthinking it, and just enjoy and stay with the process. Eventually the movement will distill to your body.

    There are obvious physical, and mental fitness benefits from having a steady dance practice. But the advantages can be much more.

    Every time I go to a dance class, there is something new I learn about myself.
  • Time is a container

    Time is a container

    Time feels so real and yet fleeting at the same time. Usually it feels as though we have an unlimited supply of it. However, all of us need to work with this rigid container of twenty four hours in a day.

    There is a lot of pressure to maximize the output from this container. The loud productivity brigade calls us to extract the most from limited time. Thankfully for us, we have books like Four Thousand Weeks which have established how getting on to a productivity treadmill is a futile endeavor.

    Like many other things in life, your relationship with time gets better once you let go of your desire to control it tightly.

    Recently I came across this insightful podcast episode featuring Laura Vanderkam, the author of the book Tranquility by Tuesday. It is filled with great, easy to apply steps which can help you get a better hold of our never-failing-to-overwhelm-life.

    The author gives us a simple tip on how to work with this container – time.

    Have a set bedtime!

    It can be easy to believe that we can extend our supply of time by forgoing our rest or leisure time seeping into our sleep. Revenge bedtime procrastination is becoming more common now – a long tiring day would drag well past midnight with scrolling through Instagram or watching Youtube.

    Of course this means that you don’t feel your best the next day, as you still need to wake up on time to get on with your day.

    I have started to apply this principle, and honestly am quite surprised how a simple change can improve your overall wellbeing. Having a set bedtime ensures I put myself to sleep around that time. Even if I stretch by twenty or thirty minutes, I am somewhat clearly aware of how this will impact my energy the next day.

    Earlier it felt like it was my right to continue entertaining myself well into the night, because I have had a tiring/boring/exciting/<insert any emotion> day. But now you understand how delaying bedtime can impact you.

    Eventually you feel indebted to your future self and go to bed early! At a time you had chosen for yourself.

  • Living gracefully

    Living gracefully

    Life is hard.

    Many a times you will get punched in the face when you are least expecting it.

    But what matters is how you are able to dust off the sand and get back up again. Get back to what you were doing. With better understanding perhaps, but you persist.

    Much is spoken about grit, in this post I want to talk about grace.

    One of the definitions of Grace is
    “elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action”

    I refer to grace here in a much wider sense. Its your ability to put a persistent and smiling face after a setback. (Or maybe you really want to sob loudly, which is okay too!)

    You fully understand that you have failed at something, maybe even miserably. But you allow yourself enough grace and self compassion to continue with renewed energy and strength.

    At some point or other, everyone messes up. Or things might be totally out of our control and maybe luck didn’t favor us well. However that doesn’t mean we need to wallow in self loathe and beat ourselves up.

    You acknowledge the reality, get back to business, one step at a time, gracefully. 🙂

  • Should you say Yes, or No?

    Should you say Yes, or No?

    Self help literature usually asks you to say No to things by default, to avoid burnout and save your energy for things that really matter. But like any other maxim, it leads itself to over simplification.

    So I was pleasantly surprised when Atul Gawande (whose book Being Mortal I greatly admire), asked us to say yes until we are 40 in this podcast.

    This got me thinking on how saying yes, within limits and based on how much you can chew at a moment has its merits

    You become more open minded
    By saying yes, you allow serendipity and surprise to enter your life. Saying yes does not have to be anything big like a long online course. Even little things like a social event which you would normally skip, or a last minute booking for a theatre play can open up new ways of thinking.

    You understand your limits
    Just following along with many things will eventually expose your hard limits or attributes which you weren’t aware of. Such moments where you hit a bummer, if channeled and processed correctly can be a great opportunity to understand yourself better.

    You create space for new things
    To take on something new, you need to forgo something present or put it on the backburner. It means you have to critically look at your resources (time, energy and finances). Even if you end up declining the offer, it forces you to rethink whether you are using your resources for things that matter to you.

    You choose to say yes, mindfully
    By stepping up and choosing to lean into opportunities which interest you, you are signaling to yourself that you are making a choice and committing to something. There are times and perhaps areas in life where you won’t have much choice, like staying-in during a pandemic.

    But when you say yes, You are making the choice and you get to keep the promise you made to yourself.

    Saying yes doesn’t mean you need to follow through even after you discover information countering it.

    You gain a better understanding of your range, solidify your values and make your drive stronger for things which really matter.

  • Influence is your superpower – Book Review

    Having influence in your life is such an important skill. Throughout my growing years I always assumed that I didn’t matter much and hence couldn’t exert any influence whatsoever. However later I realized whether you know it or not, you always have some influence.

    With that preamble, you can imagine how happy I was to read Influence is your superpower – Zoe Chance.

    When the subtitle said – “How to get what you want without compromising who you are”, I wanted to gobble the contents in an instant!

    Overall the book is a great guide in understanding, nurturing and embracing being an influential person. It does deliver what it promises and I had multiple Aha moments as I went through the book.

    There are many points in the book, which resonated with me deeply which I intend to cover as part of upcoming posts. For now, I wanted to list the biggest takeaways –

    1. The power to say NO
      We hear it a lot, but yet we keep giving away free yes’es in a variety of situations and to various people. You end up being stretched thin and everyone loses finally. The book makes a passionate case as to why you are well in your right to say no and choose yourself. If you have a history of people pleasing like me, saying no would mean internally you imagine yourself ruining their plans, dreams and their world! But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. As Zoe says, when you say a No, “Be warm, clear and firm”.
      And move on.
    2. Ask
      This was a big eye opener for me. The simple act of asking for what you want. You can skirt around the bush and drop all types of signs and hints. You are then left despairing how the world is filled with people who just don’t seem to have the capacity to process your unsaid needs and desires. The message is clear and direct here – “Ask more often, ask more directly, and ask for more”.
    3. You can always negotiate
      This is a huge one as well. Firstly just understanding what negotiations even are. It aren’t always those big board room meetings. It could be just who among your friends will end up traveling the most for the lunch meetup. For me the biggest takeaway here was “Negotiation is always possible”
      I had kind of started to realize this after I heard how people had negotiated home loan rates (apparently they are) , or stuck a deal with their spouse to attend that party alone, or even just traded for a better looking set of goodies at birthday party! So always remember, can this be made better so that everyone gains more? Point noted.

    I am glad I read this book and sure that there are lessons which will distill slowly and organically. This book will definitely be among my top reading recommendations.

    Lets use our influence skills to dream bigger and better as Zoe closes off her book.

    Overall rating – 5/5