Antidote to insecurities

Do you know what is the funniest thing about insecurity? That it is a good thing and also a bad thing at the same time. Yes, you heard me right. And this my friends is not just an academic argument but also a practical one. Your disagreement with me at this stage of the article is normal, it will cause insecurities in either of us if we do not come on the same page, by the end of it, ok, it was a bad joke, let’s put it behind us. We are the sociable species in the animal kingdom, which enables us to mingle with people in our immediate surroundings. We spend time and effort in becoming like others, you see we descended from monkeys. Aping is our first nature. What makes things rather complex is that we are also living animals with ambitions and from it stems everything positive as well as negative. It is counter-intuitive to give away one of the key conclusions right in the introduction paragraph. But let the instinct take over the reasoning for now. Insecurity in your growing years is more useful than it is in years when people see you as grown up or expect you to behave like one. It is ok for a front line executive of an organisation to be insecure but not for those who sit from higher to highest chairs. When I say so, do I forget that even the C Suite executives, CXOs or another dude/gal from across the street who kept getting lucky over the years masquerading as a big deal leader, is also made of flesh and blood and therefore will have the tendencies that are prevalent in people who have just begun. But if both the grown-ups and the infants behave in the same manner; what is the point of growth? You get the point I hope. Education, well, quality education is a rare privilege in our society, sadly. I really wish for it to change but till it doesn’t it will do a great deal of damage to us, in ways more than one, it cripples the potential of our collective evolution. 

All undesired and unhappy outcomes like poor performance, lack of equitable culture, poor infrastructure both physical and logical, regressive approach to change, the tunnelled vision of future, unskilled manpower etc, even organisational insecurities can also be turned around and corrected. But while other deficiencies require rather simpler framework change, insecurities take longer to go away. It is chronic in nature. I have said, a few lines ago, that it is a good thing in junior staff. Why do I say so? Let me answer, irrespective of the industry and the geography, that you choose you’ll find that bottom of the pyramid is occupied by the workhorses, the real people, the real deal: if I may say so. These are the people who work with their hands, efficiency from these groups is often valued more than anything and perhaps everything else that they bring to the table. This class of workers ( we are all workers, don’t you take off on Mayday?) are generally young, in their early twenties, beaming with energy and at the pink of health. Full of desire and hopes. The design is thus laid out to make this section compete with each other fiercely. You would notice a plethora of reward and recognition being organised. People are made to compete in useless disciplines, the idea is to keep the animal at the boil. If they get easy with their life, the wheel of progress or let’s just say production will come at a halting stop. Therefore, it helps overall progress. When young people are insecure, they mostly take it sportingly, also because they haven’t build anything which they consider worth protecting from intrusion. It is like a fresh start when age is by your side things look easier than they actually are. Your neurons fire and you learn to hop, skip and jump, it is all in the good spirit. Things are not quite the same though when the grown-ups become insecure. Their fears cost heavily on them in the long term and catastrophically in the near term on the area that they control. Some of the symptoms of the big boys and grown-up girls surrendring to insecurities are.

1. Fear of getting exposed.
2. Difficulty accepting change.
3. The inability of accepting the mistake.
4. Killing the messenger without reading the message.
5. Forming allies to counter the force.
6. Ugly politicking.

The number one mistake that these smart men and women make is falling in the trap of believing that they are too clever and they can go undetected. Let me bring it open to you; people who have the eye for it will see it even if it were to exist between blinks and those who don’t have an eye can always borrow binoculars; so it is just unwise to think you can pull it off. You can’t so face it.

Let me also say this that I sympathise with you, it is not easy to let go of things. We are all control freaks, in ways we do not even recognise. For instance, don’t each one of us have a certain way in which we prefer our drinks (both hot and cold, both intoxicating and toxic). Ordinary people call it preference and psychologists categorise this tendency as the desire to control. And at some level, one has to concede that we are not only social, ambitious, but also combative and above all animals. To learn, we must make mistakes. But because we are the most intelligent animals, we must quickly detect our own problems and correct them to get better. And there is absolutely no shame in the minds of the wise in accepting their follies because they know to err is human.

Let’s look at possible ways to ward off the demon of insecurity. Before we move any further let’s accept this that we are all good people deep inside and wish to remain that way but when challenges appear insurmountable we sometimes lose our judgement and do things which we initially are not proud of but because we have difficulty accepting our own errors we start defending those errors and in no time to create a smoke screen of evidence, repeat it so many times that it becomes our natural response. But it is never over .. should you wish to change, you can do it, right now. All it needs is a sacrifice of some ego, courage and above all conviction.

Here are a few things that you can try: Antidots to insecurities.

Be discourteous to yourself: If you happen to spot any of the above symptoms, stop, take a reflective pause and tell yourself that you would not let yourself getting reduced to a sulking looser and will make amends. You have built something worth protecting but what is sensible is to better it, open it up for others to collaborate. Your signature will not evaporate if you show a larger heart and get people involved in your mission. The only way for you to not become history is by letting others make your creation a part of their present; it is a great way of giving yourself a lease of life.

Bring objectivity: You’ve to be your own worst critic. Detach yourself with your creation and also yourself. You must know that you are not as important as you think you are. You are just as ordinary today as you were the day you started. Day one innocence and day one ego is worth gold, preserve it. Your hard work, dedication, grit has got you all that you’ve and if you do not learn to let it go you will lose it in no time. Things change, the grandeur of the past is your legacy it may and may not impress others. In fact, you shouldn’t even expect others to find your story awesome. Remember this, if your story is good .. it will be told and re-told. Has Mirza Galib died? Not really, even today, you and I relish his work. Very little do people know that he was receptive to feedback ( Read Diwan-e-galib) you’d know. Look for problems and when you find them announce it to relevant people and correct them quickly but not quietly and certainly not secretively. Coward hide mistakes and you are not coward, or so I hope.

Re-count your victories: You’ve won, there is no one who has not won! Some victories are bigger than the other, some attract more applause than the other but at its core every victory is important and it shapes your character. Every action will be judged on the plains of morality, ethics, law & performance (social, business and financial). Victory is achieving your goals; if you plan to wake up at 5 AM and run 4 miles every day, every single day that you manage to do it you win. Remember, you fought illiteracy, if your teacher went insecure and did not pass on the knowledge of letters to you, your life would have ended before it even got off to a start. So the act of giving is core to success. Every time you have won, someone willingly, gave up something for you; recognise it and make that pool bigger. Don’t be another ‘I-me-myself’ fool.

Commit to renewing: Promise yourself that you would not get old. Well, you will get chronologically, your body will get tired, organs will give up slowly on you, but your mind must not get old. Your commitment to stay mint should not get dusted ever. Day one mentality, for as long as you can keep, it will serve you well. Remain agile, keep learning newer and better ways of doing things; make yourself uncomfortable - the need to grow and way of it do not change. In doing so you will need partners, welcome them to join you in your quest and achieve together.

Whatever virtue helps you appreciate people, make the group better and bigger is a good one to champion and in doing so your insecurities will fade, almost automatically. 

The unambitious, you!

All of us need to truly love something to exist meaningfully; it doesn't have to be one thing. It can be a combination of things, people or situations.. just about anything that we identify with unthinkingly, something that feels like our own, a natural extension of who we are, in its most elementary form. There are many ways to want ..not so many to know. The story of human evolution has been written in letters of adaptation and with the ink of patience, there has never been a shorter method to mutate naturally into a higher race, from fish to monkey to monkeys staring at blue screens all day, using both opposing thumbs to press mostly and not so much to grip, has happened in millions of years. Some advance laboratories today are creating working models of human heart and in some capacity also the brain – these aren't dwarf achievements, these could potentially change how we conceive our world. But even in its most profound state it is not evolution but an attempt to emulate, another proof that we are monkeys for the most part of our being. Monkey see .. Monkey do.. until we find what we love. That realization alters that course of being for better, does little to speed though.

Through centuries of recorded history, we have been educated about the need to progress and prosper, heroic stories of accomplishment has presented to us with the sole purpose of igniting inspiration in us. We pick up our idols and start emulating the qualities that made them who they become. It is a good thing to do .. we have to create something out of limited existence, we must leave behind things for people to remember us by. Nature is a great leveler.. it allows successful as well as failures to leave the same things behind – stories. Tales of who were we and how did we deal with our lives, in our times. And what can be better than creating a story about something we love. How we come to love a few things more than others is a topic in itself, the neural science, making it work is interesting .. we will surely touch upon them some day. Today, however, it is about identifying which is that thing, or if we have actually found it.

Would you believe me if I told you that everything that we do unambiguously has the potential of becoming things that we truly love and desire? But hold on, isn't being competitive and coming out as the winner a thing? It most certainly is, but what we are talking about today are things which exist at the level much deeper than the sense of accomplishment in our thought center, in the most pristine parts of our brain. These things define who we are in far more meaningful ways than how much money we make, what our net worth is, what job title we have .. how big our homes, our cars, and offices are. Let me put this straight, I'm not trying to make a saintly argument here. Nor am I trying to hike to a moral high ground from which wealth seems as waste and material belongings are another representation of limiting chains. While you are at it .. make the money you want .. create the home that you've always wanted, be on the cover of every magazine that you liked reading in your growing years. Possibly be so awesome that every poster is in the town dreams to have you in it. Material matters are important ..it is the unit by which society measures success and you have to score. Go be the person you must become.

My argument is simply this .. to get better at being that person that owns stuff, good stuff, you will first have to be the person who loves, and this is only the romantic love, that SRK has fooled our generation to fall for. This love is admiration that Gandhi had for truth, respect that Nelson Mandela had for equality, and importance that human/civil rights had in Martin Luther King’s world — you see what I'm saying? This love is not Manmohan's silence or Modi's chatter .. this love is the time that Dr. Tharoor takes out to keep writing books and publishing them at a stage in his life when he can simply reap the benefits of who he has been in the first 40 years of his life. This love is feeling that got AJP Abdul Kalam to take up teaching .. after leaving the majestic Rashtrapati Bhawan. This love is also in some ways called "purpose", life's mission, identify or just a hobby. Pick the word that you think describes it the best, as long as the definitions are aligned expression isn't a problem.

For all we know life is not a lazy Sunday afternoon or a busy Monday morning .. it isn't a laid-back Friday evening or an exhilarating Saturday – life is a concoction of all these and more. It is the routine of Tuesday, weight of Wednesday, throbbing of Thursday .. all if it mixed into one. Have you ever wondered why you find it difficult to concentrate in your silent bedroom but find it easy to read your book, in a crowded café that you like? Have you mulled, why discourteous staff bothers more when the food is not particularly tasty? The same traffic jam feels ok when you are on your way to meet a person you know as a horrible being?  Why do we procrastinate a few things on the same day as on which we absolutely can't sleep to encounter an important event, the following day? Mind is a mess for some and mystery for others but is always is the key to the world that we like to build for ourselves. Product of our mind is thought and these thought are the only things that we really have .. everything else is just an illusion. Coming back to the definition that I attempted creating, I based it around being unambitious, I say so because in things we love .. we do not compete and this fact that we are not in a race promotes the kind of peace that is needed to create unison & tranquility, in other words concentration or happiness or simply put pleasure. Let me give you a few examples, if you like reading and Ruskin Bond happens to be your writer of choice, when you read his finest creations you do not bother about reading too fast or too slow .. you just enjoy being there. So much so that you often re-read, revisit the plots even without the book, think about what your writer said before sleeping amidst the emptiness of night. Now, think of a contract that you read at your work .. what things come to your mind? You've to read comprehensively, objectively, quickly .. make notes, be ready etc.. these are important things but at a cognitive level, to read that contact masterfully, you will need to have a Ruskin bond in your life .. if you do not have it .. you can't do an awesome job at reading and comprehending that contact.

Neither me nor your best friend .. will ever be able to tell you what should you love and why? Your mother can .. mothers know everything .. and they are always right. Whenever I have been defeated in life .. I have always run towards my mother .. her company gives me the strength to fight back. Maybe she is the one who inspires me the most and from her, I find things to love and be the person that I wish to be. I'm not sure .. if this method will work for you. On finding what you love .. you are truly on your own. I can tell you when you find the thing that you love .. you will experience one or all of the three things & thus .. you'll know you've found it. When you do, keep it close to your heart, keep growing into its stronger, bigger and better shape – that alone, will give you the story that you'll leave behind.

The three things are:

1) You'll be willing to reconsider, restart and even resume ..

2) It will make you forget .. everything else that you otherwise consider important. ( This forgetfulness is not a mental disability but the general phenomenon of being substantially more aware of something and giving other things lesser importance, momentarily)

3) It will be addictive, you will effortlessly want to do it more and more    ( so is smoking, drinking and drugs – but those aren't things that you love .. those are things you simply get trapped in for lack of education and dare I say, lack of awareness)

I will end this with a hope that you find what you truly love and create a wonderful story with it, one worthy of leaving behind.

You have a good Sunday.

Intuition, a trusted friend!

 Email or call? Tea or Coffee? Exercise or another hour of peaceful sleep? Resigning right now or staying? Writing or reading? White shirt, grey suit or pink shirt & black suit? To be or not to be? 

Decisions .. yes, that is right, we make an awful lot of decisions every day, if you studied psychology like I did back in school, you’d know that on an average day a functional & thinking human being makes 35,000 conscious decisions, alone, if I bring subconscious decisions into the counting as well .. the figure will bloat itself into a number which will sound unbelievable to many. Decision making is integral to being human. Decision that we take influence every part of our being .. at all levels. The binary scale of good or bad applies to decision making also, except, it is not as binary always as we might think & to make that point, I’m going to conveniently bring what we know as ‘perspective’. What may seem like a bad decision from one angle may appear fabulous from another. Don’t believe me .. let’s take an example. Titanic ended in a tragedy on its very first voyage .. it was catastrophic, a tragedy that terrified the world. The loss of human life and property is lamented, even today. Let’s observe a moment of silence for people who suffered that night.  Now, let’s take another perspective, think of crabs (of course living ones) that must have been kept in the salty tank to be cooked the following day? When this crash happened and they met water again .. Wouldn’t it have felt celebratory to them? Nice for sure. Had Titanic not happened Kate Winslet and Leonardo De-Caprio wouldn’t have delivered a massive hit years later. That Oscar that had Titanic written over it wouldn’t have existed if that tragedy wasn’t a fat reality of an ugly day.

Having studied history as my second subject I can go on and on about listing dreadful events and talk about the ways in which they changed the course of humanity for good after they happened but I think the point has been well made so would ‘decide’ to stop right here, that is another decision made ;) 

The point I was trying to drive home is that perspective makes a decision either good or bad and that at all times both worldviews exist, you can never be 100% sure of anything, in life. That pushes me to the next logical question .. what should we then do,  not make any decision or just make random ones when they go wrong find the perspective that makes them feel right and cling on to them? Of course not. That is not what I’m suggesting. If 100 decisions go wrong in a row you will still need to make the 101st decision hoping that it turns right.

Before we delve deeper, let’s get the definition out of the way.

Decision making is the process of identifying the rational choice among several available alternatives. Now that we have a working definition, let’s just say that broadly there are two kinds of decision making, while a few books that I read last year seem to suggest that there are more than 2 but textbook definition 8 out of 10 times goes with these categories so I’d consider them for this article.

Judgmental and intuitive! 

  

We all know what judgmental is, so let me pick the later.

Smart people, gather data, evaluate them to find discernible patterns use those to make models, pit one model against the other, weigh the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, the short term vs the long term and then pick what comes out to be the best option from the available lot. Only 1.68% (as per a research paper from the Yale University) life situations do not give you choices, for instances if your kidneys have failed and you wish to live longer .. transplant is the only option. Situations like these aren’t popular and aren’t even frequent, so don’t worry. Statistically speaking, in a lifetime of 65 years you will not have more than 60 such instances where there are absolutely no alternatives, very small quantity, you can even ignore those should you choose to.

The popular perception is that unemotional decisions are the best ones and thus we should not allow emotions to cloud judgment; the only problem with this theory is that it is untrue, strictly scientifically speaking. Human mind read data as emotion and leans on biases that they identify most with and then pick that over everything else that is available. Yes, I’m open to a bet on this concept. 

What is intuition; it is a form of knowing .. connected to a deeper perception, it is this magical black box with unknown dimensions, it resides at a formative layer of our cognitive structure. For a long time, researchers have had a problem comprehending it fully. When you are making a decision and you can’t clearly articulate why you are making it .. it just feels like the right decision to make is when you are relying on this much deeper system engraved in the most intelligent parts of your brain. Call it gut, instinct, experience or just intuition.

Oddly enough, psychologists, believe that intuition is a companion to rational decision making, my professor, would tell me that is an inseparable part of decision making. I’d like to believe him .. he is my Guru, after all, I haven’t quite found enough literary evidence of that but then it feels kinda right. It is a complementary component. Senses and how you feel are all indicators of what decision is likely to be a good or a bad choice.

As human, we believe that we normally form an opinion or take a decision based on data and that we make decision thoughtfully and later come to have an emotional attachment to it, more and more researches are showing that it is not true, we make an emotional decision first and later find data to support it. Rational decision making requires data but then often times data can cause problems and uncertainties of incomprehensible magnitude. And this principle is NOT to be applied in business. When at work .. you gotta rely on data heavily, this article is about larger decisions in life, substantial ones or should I say personal decisions. To pick a good performer at work you must look towards data but who to befriend is the kind of decision where only data will be less useful. This article is about those kinds of decisions, informal ones that determine the formal set up at an organizational (organization here doesn’t mean a business unit .. it means 'set up' ) level. Coming back to data, sometimes data is not enough .. or just not complete, sometimes you are pressed against time or trapped in cognitive biases. What do you do then?

Moments like these are when turning toward intuition may have real benefit. Let me throw such an example, here. Have you ever had to get down at a small railway station when it was midnight dark? To walk that 2 Kms or wait for the sun to come out is a decision that only your intuition will help you make. If even you had data .. you won’t rely on it solely. I hope you understand what I’m trying to say, here. Human brain is wired to see what can’t be processed through numbers ... which is why we have a complete system of recognition and safety built in the brain. Blinking of the eye is not a result of thoughtful decision making but an involuntary defense system put to action by the part of the brain that is for sake of simplicity (I'd say) is most awake and functional, even in those individuals who are slow or seated below in the intellectual scale.

Psychologists around the world have been trying to break the code of intuition but they haven’t succeeded in it as of yet. Why senses know things before you’ve had the chance to gather information is still unresolved. 

The question then is what do we do with it? Is there a formal training for it? Like exercising strengthens your muscle more decision making makes you a better decision maker, of course, conscious efforts have made to learn from a bad decision and examine well when to let gut take over. The only way know thus far is be aware and in some sense quantify how well does your gut serve you? In what matter it works better for you and are you willing to bear the cost of a bad decision? Every one has a way of knowing it, the question is do you have the courage to pursue it?

There is no formal training in intuition. You can exercise, begin with lower stake decision. Observe and learn to see how you can improve. If your gut pays off you know .. it is good and you can rely on it. I must emphasize on the fact when you take most personal decisions of life you are alone, but its impact almost always will spill over your private spaces and impact those connected to you, therefore you have to be cautious.

You must have heard “ignorance is a bliss” a couple of thousand times in your life if not more. The thing here is happiness is a creation of our own, when we are getting into smoking .. every drag make us happy. The day we realize that smoking is a bad habit and we must quit, every cigarette avoided gives us happiness. So you see how a change of context changes an unhappy act into a happy one and vice versa? There is a reason why those with lower IQ or intellectual capacity lead a happier life, if you have the burden of a high scoring IQ, you will see things which others easily miss. You will analyze, over analyze and remain in this unhappy space, most part of your life. But your higher IQ (130+) is a gift .. if you see things which others don’t. You must use it to make decisions that others don’t.

At the end of the day, it is not always about being right but taking a stand. The way life is you will never be 100% sure, sometime you just gotta listen to the calling of your deeper self and do as it commands. When you fail, take it as your, inner self’s way of giving you an opportunity to work on reconstruction.

At the end of it all, every choice is a matter of chance.

Wishing you and your family a very happy and prosperous Diwali in advance!

     

“Separation”- is it “Selfish” or “Sacrificing” of simply fear?

Separation is a considered a bad word, something no right thinking mind would wish for, it is yet one of those realities of our lives that we can not abandon, no matter how much we wished, we did. We sperate or part ways at many junctures in our lives , it will not be wrong if we say life is nothing more than a couple of separations and a couple of associations, it however has remained a less talked about or desired subject. Well my views on it aren’t any different from your’s except the fact that I sometimes do consider it “acceptable if avoiding is inescapable”!

“The guy I know” holds divergent views on the subject and unlike most times when we together think things out he wishes to chart out an individual line of thought  but in here I’m not choosing “separation” , I agree to serve my wine in the glass of his line of reasoning , neither is he in for separation and we agree to say cheers  - we get on to our discourse.

To ascertain if “separation” is desirable or not, it is essential that we examine what causes it in greater details. So , here is my take, would like to broadly categories my views in below two variants.

1 ) Separation is “selfish” – When we sperate to associate with something else, it is largely seen as selfish but isn’t it true that most associations are based on some or the other kind of separation? If we didn’t sperate from school , we couldn’t have joined the collage, a no to separation from collage wouldn’t have allowed us to associate with the work career – so is it truly selfish ? the answer is, it is not ,it is only progressive not selfish, when it is being supposedly done for one’s betterment.

2) Let’s take the other view – Separation is Sacrifice – Is it really is ? Perhaps yes , no matter how short, tough or sweet ,long an association is, it is always difficult to part ways and when we do it at the cost of our will, it indeed qualifies to be called sacrifice. Most of us loved our school ,collage etc but scarified it all for a better tomorrow.

Both of the cases appear true when linked with positive betterment , but there are many separations that life forcibly makes us, a part of, that in true sense of the word, tears us apart. Yes, you guessed me right, it is when we have to separate from people we wish to be with , people we love, people we care for – in some unfortunate cases it is a reality and this form of septation is truly the most complex and cruel in nature.

Why people choose to part ways when they were the ones who put their heart, mind and soul in creating a common path for themselves ? What possibly causes it ,has remained an unsolved puzzle and will always will be one, we are however trying to link what appears common among causes. Breathing with someone we are separating with becomes difficult despite of plenty of fresh air in the common space , every separation starts with disagreement, followed by inherited want of both parties to be proved on the right side of logic in the disagreement, when one of the two is pragmatic the situation dissolves to nothing sooner than soon , but when both parties stand for their beliefs of what they consider to be the right side, disagreement paves path for discussion/argument and that gives birth to Fear of looing  and/or fear of accepting other’s version of right , and from here distances of meters , become miles and finally a day comes when people part ways. Honest people part ways as unhappy and mischievous as happy but both undergo the test of fear.

That preciously is my take  - It is fear that causes separation.

And to all those of you, who are going through it, my only submission is try to be together for life isn’t fun separated.

The guy I know, seems convinced and we move ahead. On that note wish you well.