What to do when someone is refusing to learn their lesson

Are you well-fed or hungry? – Master Yourself

A must-listen for a very important ingredient for growth in life.

1. Are you well-fed or hungry? 06:13
2. An inspiring story of hope in the corporates 05:53
3. When life's not fair 04:39
4. What to do when someone is refusing to learn… 06:54
5. Knowledge is not power unless you have this 07:49

If there was an award for being the most self-critical, would that go to you?

Being self-critical is one hobby that we unconsciously pick up and become really good at in no time – all in the pursuit of self-improvement. However, it doesn’t really help us achieve that purpose quite as well as we had imagined.

One might wonder then, how does one change if we don’t find our own flaws and faults. Great question! Yes! It is important to know one’s strengths and opportunities – but not in a way that impedes our confidence and our ability to pursue life in full potential. The knowledge of where we went wrong, and what we can do better is helpful only so long as we actively pursue learning for ourselves. Not if we use it to limit our very own self. 

Did you know that constantly scolding yourself gives you the permission to continue being at your less than optimal state in the long run? You read that right! We just get better at being bad if we continuously pull ourselves down.  So don’t get into a competition of scolding yourself or telling yourself that you are unable to do this, you can’t help yourself, you aren’t confident, you are a mess, you don’t know to communicate etc. because the more you tell yourself that, the more you are giving yourself the unconscious permission to be just that. It’s like declaring to yourself and the world that you have some terminal illness that is beyond cure. Obviously then, dying is the most natural expectation that others and yourself will have of you. Where’s the question then of life, hope, and of getting better?

If you want to really help yourself, “Catch yourself to coach yourself. Not to criticise yourself.” (Source: Just Open)

At times, people give up without even exploring, or trying the alternatives. They are so used to living with themselves the way they are, that they’d rather die criticising than challenge themselves to be any different. It’s a far more deadlier virus than anything we have witnessed. We have such low expectations of ourselves and we repeatedly tell ourselves, “I have been this way. It is tough to change. I tried but I couldn’t. I am like this. You don’t know my past. It is easier said than done.” And so on and so forth. The nature of these sentences is such that it prevents your mind from conceiving/considering any possibilities of challenging yourself to learn. Your mind resigns to the fact that ‘the Master doesn’t want to change. So let us just continue this way.’

No one is interested in knowing how well you can scold yourself. It would be inspiring to see how committed you are to change yourself. 

Give a reason for your mind to feel challenged and not resign. Don’t take succumbing to your fears as the only alternative to life. Challenge yourself to question your limiting beliefs about yourself. Challenge yourself to change. You may have been short-tempered, you may have been lazy, you may have been whatever else so far. But you don’t have to continue to be that way forever. Don’t give up on yourself. You aren’t a victim of yourself, or of life. You can become a survivor this very minute if you only challenge yourself healthily. And life won’t change for the better unless we commit to changing ourselves for the better. We were not born with these prejudices and criticisms. We can change anything that we weren’t born with and quite some things that we were born with too. Doesn’t matter who started this game of criticising. You can change it or end it for yourself. Don’t make a pathetic excuse of life, when you can be a precious example of it. Find the conviction to rise in front of your own eyes! For those who are convinced that they can change, courage will naturally follow. 

Why bother loving others, or believing in others, when we can’t for our own selves?

We are not stuck because of lack of courage. Rather, we are stuck because of a lack of conviction. Some are more convinced, and hence more courageous.

You are anyways thinking. Which means, you can think. Hence, think you can!

It’s your choice whether you wish to line up an ambulance fearing you’ll fall. Or line up an award believing that you’ll rise!

(For the other kind, who mostly believe the world is at fault and they deserve more sympathy/ recognition/ attention/ love/ care, this one’s not for you.) Eventually, both beliefs – the word is right and I am wrong, or, I am right and the world is wrong – are lopsided perspectives. Always remember there’s no smoke without fire. Our world is a response to what we are thinking and being mostly. So every situation is an opportunity for us to be better, smarter, wiser in some way. Just remove the guilts and the blames – and we shall be along on our journey just fine!

We don’t deserve better! We get better!

Those who think they deserve better, stay where they are feeling bitter. Those who challenge themselves to get better, get ahead feeling better. 

If you think it is bad that some people have low expectations of us, it’s worse still to think of living down to those.

What happens when you ignore things that are normal

Something to reflect on –

• are you more likely to silently participate and enjoy when things are going normal or good?
• If there’s something not-ok, are you quick to take action or provide feedback?

If so, then that’s something you might want to reconsider. Normal doesn’t need to be ignored. Normal needs to be noticed too. Because you won’t like it if those so-called seemingly normal things go abnormal. We mostly think appreciation is reserved only for something excellent. No! Appreciation is in general for things that are in normal working conditions too. Because the opposite of normal would be abnormal. And you might not want that, right? Are you glad that things are normal? Do you express that?

It takes efforts to keep things normal! If you ignore normal, you can’t complain when things don’t remain normal anymore.

A simple example – when I was in the corporate world, I noticed this happening with the transportation team often. If they operate say 200 vehicles every single day for 25 days of the month and everything runs smoothly for 24 days – nothing is said. It is expected that they have to run properly. One day – a vehicle goes late or the driver misses pick up – all hell breaks loose on that team. From the employee to the manager, an entire chain of emails comes their way complaining of negligent behavior.

Now you may be wondering, “should I appreciate people for doing their job even?” Appreciate doesn’t mean go and give them awards. A simple thank you while getting off the vehicle will do! You are acknowledging their presence and their effort! And once in a while, taking time to talk to the team and thank them for their efforts to ensure smooth operations, being curious to understand what does it take from their end to actually keep this entire fleet running and empathizing with their challenges – all these are small ways of showing you care for what they do.

And honestly, you know what? When you do the above, on that one day when things go wrong, you will not be affected by it as much.

• One – because you know how tough it is in the background to keep things running normal. So, your understanding of the process makes you more understanding of the person or the situation.
• Secondly, by taking notice of these small normal things, you have generally been practising gratitude. Hence, when things go wrong, they don’t tend to disturb you much since you are in a more positive frame of mind.

It’s like this – if you blessed with a normal working brain and body – one way is to assume of course, ‘a human being is meant to be this way. So, what’s to be appreciated. This is the definition of a normal human and I am normal. God just did his job.’ However, do you also realize, that God has a choice not to do it this way too? What if he chose not to create you ‘normal’? Then you may not have all that’s working for you now, working exactly that way.

Give people the motivation to be normal. Pay attention to things when they are normal so that they strive for going better. If you don’t pay attention to things because they are normal, people might want to do something abnormal to get your attention.

Unfortunately, most of us assume bad things need to be corrected openly. Good things need to be observed and enjoyed inwardly. You may feel happy or grateful from within but might not find it necessary to express it to the concerned people. But should there be something not-so-good, you’ll be quick on your feet to seek clarification or criticize. We have to remember one thing – we have the right to criticize openly only when we also have demonstrated the ability to appreciate openly. That’s when you maintain the balance of energies and rapport too. It doesn’t matter what we think inside. No one will know unless we state it. Hence, please do state what you like. Give thanks more openly. Only then will criticisms also be welcome. Because you create a safe space for someone by letting them know that you appreciate them. Once they know you generally appreciate them, even if you give critical feedback once in a while, they may be more open to receiving it.

These are again, mostly unconscious patterns – based on what we are used to in our life. If you think you are being grateful and are expressing it regularly – don’t stop with that assumption. Please do confirm with your loved ones if they feel so too. Do they feel you are appreciative of them too? Often times, we can’t see our blind spots. We think we are something, but in reality, we may fall short of it somehow. So, get some feedback, understand, see what makes the difference. You mean well, you want to do well. Hence, seek clarification from people who matter since it might really help you align your actions with your thoughts in the truest sense of the word. Imagine you spend your whole life assuming you are being grateful to your loved ones. And your loved ones never felt recognized! What a shame it would be to realize that too late! You meant well but somehow couldn’t get the point across in time. Therefore, crosscheck and confirm while there’s still time.

Who do you make friends with?

Do you like people who are non-threatening to your ego or do you make friends with people who are a competition to you and challenge you to raise your bar everyday?

Sometimes we choose the easy way out. We like people who put us on a pedestal. We like people who in no-way can be compete with us and hence, they look up to us. It feels non-threatening to like those people and encourage those people and load them with praises.

If someone is truly excellent, we see them as a threat, and find it difficult to appreciate them. So, we try to pull them down, or assume that they just got lucky with success, or sometimes even talk about them in a condescending way. We know their caliber but we choose to not acknowledge it because it threatens our ego. And all these happen at an unconscious level. We don’t consciously choose to be this way. That’s why it is important to question yourself, every time you dislike someone or more importantly, don’t wish to appreciate someone’s talent, why is it that you do so? Therein, lies a great learning for you.

The belief that there’s enough for all of us to live in abundance in this world is going to help us recognise and encourage other talents to flourish without feeling jealous or envious.

It is also important to be friends with people who can challenge you healthily and who are equally, if not more talented than you. It’s funny that we find it easy to like, admire and appreciate people who are way above our league or way below. But not someone within our own league. Everyone has their own share of success. No one’s success eats up your share. To believe in that abundance will help us let go of ego, envy and jealousy and enjoy everyone’s talent equally.

For those who want to live a more fulfilling life…

Have you imagined how would you want your life to be when you are 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 or a 100? Well, we hear quite a few wanting to retire at 40 or 50. But then I wonder, what will you do next if you retire at 40? How long will you or can you chill? But that’s not the most important question, however. What I wonder the most is, why do we want to retire at 40 itself? Are we not enjoying what we do or doing what we enjoy?

I have the huge privilege of coming across someone phenomenally inspiring in this regard. He inspires us to think, challenge ourselves and live more beautifully. He is a Padma Shri awardee (the 4th highest civilian award in India) and a Sangeet Natak academy awardee too. He knows scriptures in such great detail that it might take most of us a few lifetimes to get that kind of command. If you see him, you’ll automatically be filled with reverence. He is a living legend in Kathak (an Indian classical dance form).

 If you are wondering who is it – it is the one and only, Guru Dr. Puru Dadheech. He is 80 years young and if you see his passion and commitment to the art form, it is so inspiring and heartwarming. He is actively working towards reviving ancient Kathak which literally meant showing a katha (story) (sometimes, people think it’s about footwork and spins, but there’s much more to it). Last year, on his 80th birthday, he danced an entire 40 minutes presenting the famous ‘Kevat Prasang’ from the Ramayana. (To see his magic for real, please click on the link below. You just shouldn’t miss this dose of inspiration).

While most of us plan for retiring at 40- here’s a man who breathes his passion and pours life into an art form at 80. All in the name of true passion and dedication. He truly demonstrates that only jobs have retirement. Not passion. And it is passion that keeps us not just alive but happily, healthily and inspiringly alive. 

• We don’t move from our seats because there’s no incentive to move. So our limbs give up early on in life. 
• We miss thanking the universe for all the gifts we have because we are busy getting stressed about what we don’t have, so our heart gives up early too. 
• We don’t give ourselves enough challenges that make our brain exercise its full potential, so it goes to sleep sooner too. 

If you want your limbs to be active and functional, if you want your heart to actively beat for you, if you want your brain to healthily work for you, then don’t waste another moment. Find your passion and fill your life with it. Life becomes so meaningful and beautiful. There’s never a right time to wait for life to happen. It’s always time to make life happen. That’s one of the learning when we see Guruji.

Narmada Rao

Psychologist, NLP Trainer & Author

www.masteryourself.in

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRMxBbuAtDk-uQTND11gs3g

https://www.facebook.com/Masteryourselfacademy/

https://www.amazon.in/Open-Up-Narmada-Rao/dp/1684661617

Why do we dramatise our lives…

Why do you think these days we have an increasing need to dramatize our life and the problems and post them like heroic stories on social media?
Is it the need to establish ourselves as heroes? Or is it the need to gain attention?
Why do we have this need to establish ourselves as heroes?
Is it to feel good about ourselves? To reassure our egos that we are doing well?
What if we don’t dramatize the problems? What difference would it make to our lives?
What if we don’t try to grab every opportunity (or problem) to project ourselves as over-rated heroes of our own stories?
Do we need to inflate ourselves to that degree to get through life?

Just wondering how did our parents get through without the over dramatization and without these heroic projections?
They remained grounded I suppose. That meant, the highs and lows of life could touch them – but not break them – since they never thought it made them into some super hero as well.
While we, on the other hand, make huge things of ourselves, so we get caught up in every problem that comes up and want to either play the dramatized victim or the emphasised hero. We try really hard to project someone else as the villain or try even harder to project ourselves as the heroes. And we place ourselves in a rather fragile bubble of greatness. So, anyone who comes close to challenging our heroism or heroic deed is a sinner to be banned and banished from our lives. Else, there’s this perennial fear that they might break us.

In the past, without all these extreme projections, people got along with each other despite issues. Now, in spite of all good things, we can’t seem to stand each other, because each story can have only one hero – the megastar – and we can’t dream of sharing that space with anyone else – hence, we have to make villains of the rest – so we can make the hero of ourselves or someone who we absolutely love. This is not to say that we should stop appreciating ourselves or our beloved ones. By all means we should, but without dramatizing and blowing things out of proportions. If we absolutely love ourselves or someone close to us – can we still continue loving the rest of the world? Or will that excess love towards one person stop us from connecting with the rest of them, or even worse, hate them from not being similar?

And that’s the flip side of making ourselves or our loved ones heroes – we are unable to appreciate others. We feel if we appreciate someone else, we may not be considered good enough. So, we stick to appreciating ourselves. We don’t want to be inspired and appreciative of all the others since we are THE HEROES according to us. Like the old story of the lion and the hunter – unless the lion learns to tell it’s story, the stories will always glorify the hunters.

The other flip side is – we are tending to be super secretive – and act as if we are burdened by the world’s biggest problems that we can’t openly talk about. You’ll find a quite a few this way – who keep walking with pumpkin faces, and you ask them, “What’s wrong?” And they reply rather glumly, “Nothing!” (With an expression that shows “EVERYTHING is wrong!”). And they add on to say, “I don’t want to talk about it!” Why be so secretive? Because the stories aren’t that big, we realise. Rather than tell the story to others and let them realise how trivial are the things that we are holding on, we want to be secretive and make people assume we have these big monstrous, unthinkable, unimaginable and un-talk-able problems that we are having to dealing with.

Are we by any chance thinking that dramatizing our stories and sharing them will inspire others to get through their life stories too? Well, if you see, the actual real heroes have never really publicised their trials or spoken big about themselves. They were humble and grateful. They tell a story without making themselves as the big hero – and more importantly, without making any person or any situation the big villain too. They talk about everything with a great sense of neutrality . No extreme love or hatred to anyone or anything . Those are the ones that actually inspire us. The dramatized stories might only teach people how to inflate their egos momentarily, if at all, and not much else.

Or are we generally addicted to dramas because that’s what gains popularity in reality shows, movies, tele-series? What is it about dramas that attracts us to that degree? Yes, we face rejections, we face failure, we face loss, we face isolation and so on. But that’s true of any life – not just you and me but humans in general. Life’s purpose is about moving ahead and finding our learnings.

Instead of living in pretentious bubbles of greatness, how about living in solid houses of reality & gratitude? Bubbles are fragile. We run the risk of it being broken and hence, we tend to be more guarded. We spend half our time trying to protect it. Or, because it is fragile, anyone can break it easily so we tend to get angry, upset or frustrated with people for breaking our bubbles.

I am sure our grandfathers had a lot tougher times than us. They had to walk for kilometres to get to a school. Our grandmothers had to really struggle to cook food. Nothing was easy for them. Compared to that.- a vast majority of our lives are a lot easier than those of our ancestors, thanks to technology and thanks to evolution. Rather than being grateful for our blessings, we choose to make heroic stunts out of everyday challengesand make ourselves look like ‘larger than life’ figures. It’s time to move towards gratitude without complaining or gloating about how we got here. We can’t be counting our problems and talking of ’sacrifices’! Everything we did, we chose to do! Either because doing it was important for us or the other person was important to us or we were ridden by fear. After doing it, we can’t now call them sacrifices. They are all choices. And there’s nothing wrong with being normal human beings. We don’t all have to be heroes and victims. Stuff happens in life and we learn to move on. That’s just how life works. No life is lesser or more. We need to choose between being a melodramatic hero versus a regular, happy individual who is capable of spreading happiness to others around too. We don’t need to keep proving ourselves to some make-believe human measures. We don’t need to move mountains to contribute to the world we live in. Just smile and make the day lighter for ourselves and others, and consider that a day well-spent.

Narmada Rao

Psychologist, NLP Trainer & Author

www.masteryourself.in

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRMxBbuAtDk-uQTND11gs3g

https://www.facebook.com/Masteryourselfacademy/

Not absolute, but definite

Your search may not yield an absolute result. But keep looking anyway –

You may definitely find something of great value.

Reality, truth, love and death aren’t absolute.

But keep at them anyway- for you may find your purpose.

Thought, words, emotions aren’t absolute.

But be aware anyway – for you may find your deeper self there.

Pain isn’t absolute

But get through it anyway, for you may find new strength there.

The universe and all its contents aren’t absolute.

But keep exploring anyway – for u may find a precious path.

You, me or these relationships aren’t absolute.

But keep at them anyway, for you may find new learnings and realisations along the way.

My project – a human! Result – destruction!

I made a happy one an unhappy one!

I made a childlike bud a withered one!

I gave rules instead of wings,

Instilled fears instead of confidence,

What did I do you ask?

I tried to make perfect, a natural one!

I kept correcting innocence,

I kept controlling humour,

I kept chaining freedom,

I kept preaching wisdom,

All in the name of life’s preparation!

What happened?

I destroyed it!

The bud never bloomed.

The smile faded.

Fears crept in.

I crippled it!

Now I look at the fearful, crippled, sad one and wonder what did I do wrong?

What should I have done?

Too late, it says! Now the damage is already done!

I sit with myself feeling despair and distraught knowing that nothing that I said or did can ever be unsaid or undone!

It took so much destruction for me realise that it’s better to let them make their own mistakes and learn rather than make them too afraid to even attempt one.

I could have instead just appreciated, gently nudged and silently supported them in building one by one.

Now I stand in ruins where an entire building could have easily been done!