Engaging with Thoughts

Buddha said, "All that we are is a result of all that we have thought." Our thoughts might not singularly decide our destiny, but they definitely influence our future. That is why we always aspire to nurture productive and positive thoughts in our minds. But mostly this is not the case. Without our willingness, unwanted thoughts enter our minds and echo there to strengthen negative mindsets and weaken the joyfulness of our lives. 

Let us reflect on how to regulate and manage unwanted thoughts. 

What do you do when you are sitting at home, doing some important work and someone knocks at the door? You have a choice of not opening the door but that also can mean missing a potentially good opportunity. The person can also be persistent and may keep knocking at the door, and finally, you will open the door. 

If the visitor is unknown and unimportant to you, you may finish your interaction at the door only and close the door to move on with your important work. Now, if the visitor is a person of importance, you will invite him inside to find out the purpose of the visit. If the purpose is of interest and benefit to you, you may engage with the visitor for a while; but if it is a social visit without any important purpose, you will not engage in deep conversation to keep the engagement short. 

We don't control who knocks at our door, but we have the choice of opening or not opening the door, inviting the visitor into our home or saying bye at the door, and engaging with them in a long conversation or not. 

Similarly, the origin and nature of thought are not fully in our control. But if we are aware of thoughts appearing in our mind and we are consciously evaluating their nature, we have the opportunity to manage them the way we manage visitors knocking at our door.  When a thought crosses your mind, it is important to acknowledge it and evaluate its nature. Then it is up to your wisdom to decide if the thought knocking at your mind's door needs to be entertained further and reflected upon or if you should be saying goodbye to it at the door itself. Some thoughts are also like false friends. They appear important but after evaluating you figure out that they will cause harm in the long run. We should disengage immediately from such thoughts and friends. 

We human beings have been blessed with the power of self-consciousness, introspection, and free choice. We should use this power to allow only positive, progressive, and inspiring thoughts into our mental engagement arena. 

In the coming weeks, when you become aware of a thought knocking at your mind's door, allow only the beneficial ones to enter into your heart. 

Wishing you a joyful life ! 

Handling Difficulties in Life

You might have noticed many times that people including yourself complain: "I didn't have a good day". Often the root cause of this feeling and our other complaints from life is not getting the desired experiences in the course of the day. When our desires are not fulfilled, the unwanted experiences of unfavorable circumstances make us feel as if our lives are joyless and we are unlucky. 

I believe that a happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. I read a thought recently that connected with me well, "We don't get what we desire, we get what we deserve." And to deserve desired results, we have to make an important change in our way of thinking. Instead of living the effects of our unwanted life experiences, we will have to become the cause of the desired experiences. 

Unfortunately, we are often only interested in favorable results and not concerned about required efforts. And the irony is that we only have effort in our control, not the desired result. I invite you to reflect on this thought. Let us not just live with the desire for a happy life, but also put our best effort to become the cause of joyful experiences in life. 

A happy person is one who has the least number of complaints in life. 

Let us light a lamp of positive efforts to drive away the darkness of unwanted experiences from our life. 

Building Confidence - Monday Motivation by arunb

There are two important foundational pillars of achieving success in any field of life- Competence and Confidence. These two complement each other and both are required to achieve anything of significance. In our educational and sports institutions, a lot of focus is given to building competence but the onus of knowing and following the process to build confidence is left to individuals. Everyone says and knows that confidence is important, but how to gain, enhance and sustain it is not clearly communicated. 

Confidence means having the awareness that we know something so well and that we have practiced enough to be able to provide an appropriate response under any circumstance without conscious effort. 

The question is what process do we need to follow to build such confidence in any of our abilities?  

Confidence is not something you can gain once and be done with it. It is a continuous process of creative and positive thinking, which largely depends on two factors: 

The first factor is to learn from our successes and register that in our memory, and the second factor is to restructure experiences of failures in such a way that we can extract learning from them without getting entrapped into the vicious cycle of regrets. 

Confidence is a fragile thing. Therefore, it is important to give constant attention to enhancing it and put consistent efforts to prevent any erosion. Just experiencing success does not enhance confidence. We have to extract relevant learning and consciously commit that to our memory to enhance our confidence. Similarly, failure does not necessarily reduces confidence. We have to observe failures with a detachment to learn from them without getting sucked into the quagmire of negative thoughts. 

In summary, the growth of confidence does not depend on our experiences of life but on how we interpret them and what we choose to retain in our memory. Our confidence then is the net result of the positive and negative deposits we make in our psychological bank. 

The Science of Motivation - MM Feb 13

 

Many times in our personal, social, and professional life we have to play a role to motivate others. The research suggests that with the most popularly used carrot and stick model we may be able to instill fear or exploit greed to force people to act in the short run, but we can not kindle a flame of inspiration in their hearts to perform at their best in the long run.

I believe after survival is taken care of, ultimately the root cause of motivation is the same for all human beings: A desire and hope to live a purposeful life; a life towards experiences of happiness and away from sufferings of sorrows.    

There is no need to plant the seeds of inspiration from outside, we all have seeds for being our best. When those seeds of great capabilities are nourished by the hope of a meaningful life, fueled by the sap of passion, they sprout in the form of positive progressive ideas. These purpose-driven ideas are inspired by the laws of nature to follow the rays of hope for progress and joyful life. 

Therefore, in summary, motivation is not an external force but an inner drive that can be activated by the hope of a meaningful life in the presence of a favorable environment. We do our best when we want to do something willingly, and not when we are forced to do something against our will. 

An inspiring vision and a desire to achieve something meaningful in life nurture commitment, accountability, and ownership - the virtues that form the foundation of peak performance in individuals and in teams. But the human mind seeks a few empowerments to translate inspirations into outcomes. 

- We want to have a say in the decision-making process and have the freedom to choose our actions

- We all want to have the right to be treated with respect, trust, and fair treatment   

- We want our efforts to be appreciated and good work to be recognized.

When we experience such a favorable environment in our personal, social, or professional life; the seeds of unlimited potential that are inside all of us transform and manifest as the fruit of greatness to make this world a better place. 

The question is -  Is the environment in your personal, social, and professional life favorable to inspire peak performance? If not, what are you going to do about it? 

More importantly, if you are in a position of power and influence, are you mindful of what you say and what you do to nurture a favorable environment that inspires people to be their best to perform their best. Because when people are propelled by an inner drive, everything they do becomes the expression of joy. 

When we are happy, we are at our best, and everyone wins. 

4 Dimensions of Inspirational Truth

If we take the analogy of the human brain as a computer, then the human mind will map to its operating system. This inner operating system processes the information acquired through our sensory organs to create the experience of happiness or sorrow.    

With the power of intention, positive thoughts, and practice, we can program our inner operating system to perform at our best. Similarly, we also have the power of words to remotely program the operating system of others and influence their life experiences. We can enhance as well as diminish emotions of joy and sorrow in others with our speech. If we understand this secret and utilize the power of inspirational speech meaningfully, we can inspire ourselves, our loved ones and our colleagues to live a life of excellence. 

You might have experienced that some people take pride in saying they are straightforward and truthful. They believe they speak their heart out and call 'A Spade - A Spade'. Some even believe that the sharper the words, the more effective and useful their truth is for others. Have you ever experienced someone doing this to you? Were you ever the reason for such an experience for someone else?  

Let us reflect on how can we enhance the quality of our speech to ensure that our words do not cause sorrow and do not diminish the confidence of someone vulnerable. 

Inspiring speech should have four virtues: One, whatever we say should be the TRUTH and not a lie, rumor, or inspired by the intent of flattery. But that is not enough. What we speak should be AMICABLE and should not create agony or embarrassment for the listener. The third virtue of an inspiring speech is that it should create some VALUE for the listener, and the fourth virtue is that what we say should be FOCUSED on the intended value and not vague so it is effective.   

Embellished by these four virtues, an inspirational speech has immense power to inspire positive introspection and transform the listener's life. 

With the hope that in the future you will not utilize the pretext of being straightforward to hide your feelings of jealousy and to 'give piece of your mind' to someone; instead, your speech will have the four virtues so that you can touch hearts of people and also experience inner joy in your own life. 

Creating Happy Relationships for Joyful Life

The responses I received during my decade-long happiness research clearly established a strong correlation between amicable relations with our loved ones and joyful living. The absence of relations as well as unpleasant relationships are major causes of mental stress. If you are wealthy yet lack good relationships, would you be able to live joyfully? I think money can add pleasure to our life but without healthy relationships, we cannot have a joyful life. 

Let us reflect on what are the foundational pillars of a good relationship. We primarily form relationships with people with whom we share common values, common interests, common thoughts, and common purposes. But often we fail to give desired time and attention to these foundational pillars of healthy relationships in our personal, professional, and social life, which often causes the weakening of relationships. 

One year from now,  the taste of your relationships with your family, friends, and colleagues will change. It will either become sweet or salty, and that will depend on whether you add the nectar of love, compassion, and uplifting words; or the poison of jealousy, ego, and hurting words to your relationships during your interactions. 

Introspect on your important relationships and identify the factors why you formed those relations and how you strengthened them. Take time to strengthen the foundational pillars of your relationships, and keep adding the nectar of love, compassion, and uplifting words in all your interactions. 

And for all those relations gone sour, let me share a secret to turn them sweet as well. If lemonade becomes too salty or sour, we add sweet water to make it enjoyable. Similarly, keep adding the sweetness of love, sharing, and caring to your sour relations to turn them sweet over time - all this not to please anyone or impress others, but to live a joyful life yourself.  

The Happiness Equation: Happiness = R - E

The deep mysteries of life are often simple but difficult to navigate and put into action in our day-to-day life. The intent of JoyMantras is to serve as a reminder so we can continue to put our best effort towards creating a happier life. 

Today, I am sharing a simple definition of happiness in the form of an equation: Happiness = Reality - Expectations. The experience of happiness is an outcome of the relationship between the realities of life and our expectations from life. When the reality, life circumstances, or outcome of our efforts in life is greater than our expectations, we experience joy. On the flip side, if the reality we face in life or the results of our efforts are not as per our expectations, we experience unhappiness. Since we do not have control over our life circumstances and the outcome of our efforts is also not fully in our control, we only have two alternatives to live joyfully: First, have no expectations or set low expectations - which is often not practical in today's materialistic world; Second, accept the circumstances and reality faced in life with joy. We can not change reality but we can adjust our expectations to reality. Accepting circumstances in life AS IS and taking measures to continually improve the quality of our efforts is the best possibility for bridging the gap between expectations and reality.   

I hope this JoyMantra will come to your aid when circumstances of life are troubling you. Let us accept What is - as it is, and then make our way forward toward the intended outcome from this realization. 

Wishing you a joyful life.