Tag: Adults

A hero is not born. A hero is self-made, and that distinction is the whole of the subject.

The qualities below are not exotic. Every one of us possesses some measure of all of them. What sets the hero apart from the rest of us is not having virtues nobody else has. It is being the fullest embodiment of the ones everybody has.

Courage

The first quality and the foremost. A hero overcomes his fears and meets a challenge directly rather than circling it.

The claim made here is strong: that not even the faintest trace of fear is left lingering in a hero’s heart. Whether you accept it fully or not, the direction is right. Courage is not the absence of the feeling, it is the refusal to let the feeling decide.

Sacrifice

This one stands apart from the other virtues, and it is what makes a person’s deeds noble rather than merely effective.

A hero is willing to put aside their preferences and their personal comfort at the moment those things become an obstacle to a higher cause or to the welfare of other people. Note the condition. Not always, and not for display. Whenever it becomes necessary.

Determination

For a hero the word impossible always breaks apart to read: I am possible.

What follows from that is an unflinching determination, and a belief in one’s own ability without a whiff of doubt about it.

Compassion

A true hero is empathetic, showing considerable tenderness towards anyone who is ailing or in distress.

The mechanism is worth naming. Compassion here means setting aside the thoughts that are oriented towards yourself, and taking up an attitude that serves others instead. It is an act of attention before it is a feeling.

Honesty

In everything a hero undertakes, honesty is the base the rest is built on.

It earns the respect of other people, and respect is what allows a person to lead followers towards the goal rather than merely instruct them. Courage without honesty produces something else entirely, and nobody follows it for long.

Without noticing, we let toxic people shape our thoughts, our behaviour and how we feel. Here is how to keep some distance from that.

Guard your time

A negative person can monopolise your time even while they are nowhere near you, which is the part people miss.

It is entirely possible to lose two hours to dread ahead of a meeting that lasts one. That is three hours gone to a person who was present for one of them. Do not let them steal time that way.

Choose your attitude

Time spent with negative people is the quickest route there is to ruining a decent mood. A pessimistic outlook and a gloomy manner are catching; they lower motivation and change how you feel by the end of the afternoon.

But letting someone else dictate your emotional state hands them far more power than they should have. That is a decision, even when it does not feel like one.

Behave productively

Negative people bring out the worst in us when we are careless about it. Certain pessimists genuinely seem able to raise a person’s blood pressure, for reasons nobody can quite name.

The counter is to choose your conduct rather than react. Behave productively and the encounter costs you less.

Think wisely

Think clearly and make sensible decisions, and do not let your own negativity spoil your happiness. Take what is positive wholeheartedly and get on with your life.

Keep a positive view

Do not let your opinion of a person curdle because of one bad situation.

Hold a fair view of the person and of the circumstances, and do not leap to a conclusion about either. Most of what looks like someone’s character is a snapshot of their worst week.

Rather than trying to control the world and dodge every failure, you could take a risk and stretch past the edge of what is comfortable.

Does life feel like an endless run of struggle and stress? The cause may sit with your confidence, meaning your belief in your own ability to produce a good outcome when things get difficult.

What low confidence actually looks like

Not timidity. Most of it looks like effort.

We are fine while things go well and struggle to stay motivated the moment they harden. We turn severe on ourselves the moment we slip. We overwork and over-prepare, trying to stay ahead of a failure we imagine waiting just round the corner, and we become anxious and unwilling to risk anything.

And when success does arrive we do not let ourselves feel it. The joy of having accomplished something gets waved through without being enjoyed.

The three parts of the change

Being kind and caring towards yourself instead of harshly self-critical.

Framing your own imperfection as part of the shared human experience rather than as private evidence against you.

Seeing things clearly, which means neither ignoring a problem nor inflating it.

This is habit change, so it wants patience, attention and effort rather than a decision. The return is measurable: people who meet themselves with compassion are markedly less prone to depression and anxiety, and they carry more confidence in their own ability to succeed.

Notice how you speak to yourself

Particularly at the moment you have slipped up in your own eyes. Becoming aware of the existing pattern is the first step and most people want to skip it and get straight to fixing things. Do not skip it.

Gently practise a different response

It will feel faintly ridiculous at first, and the more entrenched the critical voice is, the sillier it feels. Persist anyway. Even small changes make a surprising difference to how you feel and to what you turn out to be capable of.

Borrow a kinder voice

When you are stuck in a judgemental pattern it is very hard to shift it in the moment. So let somebody else hold that voice for a while. Spend time with a person who actually embodies kindness, compassion and self-acceptance, and let the tone rub off.

Then practise, and practise

Change comes from consistent effort over time and not from one large attempt. Stay with it and it will make all the difference over a long stretch.

That is the path to a confidence that does not depend on how the week went. Do the work, stay attentive, and build a new way of relating to yourself.

However tough a person is, emotion remains a powerful part of a life, and there are moments where what you feel simply swamps you.

Start with what this is not. Learning to control your emotions does not mean learning to suppress them. It is closer to the opposite. Once you accept that you, like everybody else, react to particular inputs with particular feelings, you give yourself the chance not to let those feelings run your thoughts and your actions.

There is generally nothing wrong with expressing what you feel. We are wired for it. But anger, anxiety and fear are the three that need handling, and the question underneath is simple. Are you running your emotions, or are they running you?

You are in charge of your thoughts

Do not accept the idea that your own thinking is beyond your say.

Emotions certainly influence thoughts. What gets forgotten is that it runs both ways, and thought can be used to guide feeling, either strengthening it or working against it. The two are closely linked and they are not the same thing.

Try to look at the situation objectively. If you cannot, put it to a friend you trust, someone who can see it with less bias than you currently can and help you sort out what you actually think.

You are in charge of what you do

Even when the feeling stays stubbornly negative, what you do about it is still open.

Acting on a feeling, or declining to, is within your gift. Take a step back and look at the options instead of moving on instinct.

Be clear about what this buys you. Choosing the next action well will not make the feeling disappear. It reduces how much power the feeling has over you, which is a different and more achievable thing.

You can only control yourself

Run through the difficult emotions and the same thread shows up in all of them, which is control.

We are angry because we cannot make other people do what we want. We worry because tomorrow is not ours to arrange. We grieve because we lost someone or something through circumstances that were never in our hands. We are afraid because something is threatening us that we cannot govern.

Once you see that almost the only thing available to you is yourself, letting go of the rest becomes easier. Not easy. Easier.

Which leaves one place to put your attention, and it is enough. Not the event. How you respond to it.

You have walked into a room and known immediately that something was wrong, without being able to say what. You wanted to turn round and leave and could not explain why.

Or you have noticed that some people are effortless company while others leave you tense within minutes of arriving.

People who describe this call it being an empath, or a highly sensitive person. Both terms are too broad to be much use. There is more than one kind of sensitivity, and a person can carry several at once. Some carry all of them.

The emotional empath

In this account, you act as a sponge for the thoughts and feelings of the people near you. The classic example given is thinking of someone moments before they message you.

The downside is the real content here. You absorb other people’s feelings without registering that they were never yours, so your own state gets pushed around by whoever you spent the afternoon with. It tips into overwhelm easily.

The physical empath

Here the description is of a sensor rather than a sponge. You pick up what is in the room in your body, which has an obvious use: you can tell how someone is doing and adjust yourself to put them at ease.

The cost is physical. By the end of a day among people you may want to be alone, not out of dislike but to recover.

The inner empath

The third kind is turned inward. What matters is not the atmosphere around you but a persistent inner voice, an intuition that seems to be trying to say something. Those who describe it sometimes claim more than that, an aptitude as a medium.

The difficulty named is an honest one. You cannot easily tell a genuine intuition from your own imagination, and there is a fear that once you start listening the floodgates open and will not close.

What if none of this is you

The piece makes room for the sceptic, and says that even a person who feels entirely unsensitive is still affected by what is around them or within them.

Take the framework or leave it. Some of the claims here go well past what anyone has demonstrated, and the piece states them with more confidence than they have earned.

The part that survives either way

The closing observation is worth keeping whatever you make of the rest.

Next time you are at your desk and a mood washes over you for no reason you can name, consider that it may not have started with you. It may have drifted in from somebody down the corridor.

You do not need any theory of energy to accept that. Mood spreads through a room and through an office, and most of us have felt a bad afternoon arrive from somewhere else. The useful part is that noticing it is often enough to stop you picking it up.

A generation that arrived in junior roles has been moving steadily into senior ones, and the workplace will have to change to keep up with it, exactly as it changed for every generation before.

Harness what Gen Y employees are actually good at and you find they are productivity powerhouses. Here is why.

They know technology, and more importantly know how to find out

They grew up with the internet and with computers, so they are unusually shrewd about putting those resources to work.

The behaviour that matters is not the knowledge, it is the reflex. A younger colleague who does not know how to do something will find a tutorial that explains it, rather than spending an afternoon on trial and error. They know which tools raise their output and they use them constantly.

They treat productivity as a route to happiness

A Microsoft survey put it at 93 percent of Gen Y respondents holding that productivity is what makes a person happy. That is a striking thing for a generation to believe, and it shows in what they reach for.

A free meditation app to stay calm. A free CRM to run a new sales job. Automation tools for testing. The common thread is a premium placed on getting more out of the same hours.

The article is candid about where this comes from. Highly scheduled childhoods produced adults for whom busyness, and the finishing of tasks, is what living well looks like.

They strategise rather than simply work harder

The same survey found that 92 percent of them keep a to-do list, which is the detail worth holding on to.

The list tells them what their priorities are and when things are due, so that the work finishes on time rather than eventually. It now lives on a phone instead of a notepad, and it is exactly as functional there.

What an employer should take from it

Not that one generation is better than another. That this one arrives already carrying a system, and the workplaces that do best out of them are the ones that do not get in the way of it.

Though it is worth holding the middle claim a little more lightly than the page does. Equating busyness with living well is a belief, not a finding, and a generation that holds it will burn through people who cannot sustain it. The to-do list is the part to copy.

Productivity, innovation and efficiency are what every workplace says it wants. Everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap, and to build it before anybody else does.

Here are the four things that actually move the number.

Delegate like a boss

Requesting help, and passing work to other people so more of it gets finished, is not an admission of weakness. It is the central skill.

Two things decide whether it works: communication, and trust. Play as part of the team, and know the moment reinforcements are needed rather than discovering it a week late. And when you hand something over, hand over the whole of it. Tell your colleagues the deadlines that apply, and make sure they have the tools to do what you have asked.

Make a to-do list

Order the tasks by how much time they will take and how urgent they are, then keep track of how far you have got.

The obvious benefit is the small satisfaction of striking things off through the day. The less obvious one matters more. A list you have kept for a few weeks starts showing you your own patterns, which hours actually produce work and which ones quietly disappear.

Disconnect

Social media is everywhere and it is both an easy distraction and a serious drain. The damage is not one long lapse, it is the accumulation. Small checks of a phone add up, across a day, to a startling total.

Do not go down the rabbit hole. Put the devices away, power down, go off grid, and keep the attention where the work is. Personal devices belong in scheduled breaks rather than in the gaps between sentences.

Check yourself

Keep asking, through the day, whether what you are currently doing is actually productive. Not whether you are busy. Whether this is producing anything.

Productivity can always be improved, which is either encouraging or exhausting depending on the day.

The contradiction worth noticing

Advice of this kind usually opens by inviting you to become a master multitasker with laser-like focus, and those two things do not sit together.

Plenty of office cultures treat handling several things at once as the highest skill available. Some psychologists take the opposite view, that attempting to manage several tasks simultaneously reduces how well you perform at all of them.

Read the four points above again with that in mind and they point one way rather than both. Delegating, listing, disconnecting and checking in are all methods of doing fewer things at a time. The multitasking was never the skill. Finishing was.

You will have noticed that some people move through life easily and seem to get ahead regardless of what is happening around them. They turn up as entrepreneurs, artists, innovators, leaders, motivators.

For most people, a good deal of what they would like to do does not fit the life they currently lead. There is no shortage of reasons why you should not attempt to make your life extraordinary. Very few of them are good enough to actually stop you.

Be more confident

Drop the shyness. You are extraordinary and it would help if you knew it.

Confident people carry an assurance that gives them an edge. It comes from understanding your own competence and the value you provide, and from being at ease with yourself in full knowledge of both your strengths and your weaknesses. Convey that to others without tipping into arrogance.

The physical side helps more than it should. Exercise, dress better, and use the open postures that read as confidence, arms out rather than folded in.

Watch who you let into your life

Your energy rises or falls with the task, the company you keep while doing it, and who else is in the room.

Where the people you have allowed close drain you and leave you exhausted, remove them. Where they energise you and leave you ready to go, keep them near and draw on that. It is the difference between achieving more and slowly running down.

Tell the truth

Honesty can be frightening and difficult. Telling it sets you apart from most people, and it also sets you free, because you never have to worry about contradicting yourself or keep track of which version you gave to whom.

A reputation for honesty follows, and people notice and start returning it. Begin today and do not stop. Tell it to yourself as well as to others. Tell it when it is easy and when it is not, because that is what shows you are serious about living honestly.

Practise mindfulness

Mindfulness means paying attention and staying aware of what is around you.

Life moves fast and more of us need to stop hurrying through it and stop doing four things at once. Slow down and notice where you actually are.

Smile and laugh more

This is the simplest of the lot and you can add it today.

Genuinely extraordinary people often seem happy for the plain reason that they decided to be. Optimists, who look at the brighter side instead of wallowing in what is wrong. A well-lived life is full of humour, and humour is the flipside of tragedy.

Laughter leaves a person looking younger and more appealing, and it lowers stress, which is not a small return for something free. Better still, it is contagious. It spreads to the people around you and brightens their lives too.

Happiness beats spending your years in regret, craving what you do not have. We all want it, and we work at it daily, hoping for one true moment of the genuine article. Here are the simple ways in.

Notice the smallest things

A big house is not required. Nor a large salary, nor some grand gift. The little things carry more of it than people expect.

The smell of freshly cut grass. Wet sand. A cool breeze, gentle sunshine, a heartfelt hug, a genuine smile. A good meal, a proper night’s sleep, a hot cup of tea, an absorbing book, or simply some quiet time alone. Any of these can bring real joy.

Find satisfaction

Try not to see the glass as half empty as a matter of habit. There comes a point where you have to stop and ask why you keep postponing your own happiness.

Peace will not arrive while you remain permanently discontented with what you already have. Pause, and find contentment in what you already have.

Let the small things go

One of the easiest routes to happiness is refusing to let little things bother you. Cling to every fault you can see around you and it will never arrive.

Meditate

Meditation calms the mind, allows you to look inward, and focuses you on your own strength. It trains the mind to walk away from what is negative and move towards what is positive.

There is a side effect worth knowing. As you become a more positive person you start attracting others who are themselves at peace.

Learn to forgive

Letting go of old grudges and old anger is essential rather than optional. You have to learn to forgive other people and to forgive yourself.

It is only after summoning that strength and that courage that a peaceful mind becomes available.

Hand happiness to others

Nothing will make you happier than making someone else happy. Learn to value the act of giving for its own sake. Make another person glad and your own heart opens; something in you blossoms.

Love yourself

Only once you love yourself do you begin to be at one with yourself. Accepting who you are, and being aware of your own flaws rather than hiding from them, turns you into a more positive person.

It is unreasonable to expect others to find you pleasant while privately disapproving of the person you are.

Lose the expectations

A great deal of sadness comes from expectations that went unmet. We all hope for things from other people, especially the ones closest to us.

As long as those expectations sit with other people, there will always be a reason to feel let down. Learn to be responsible for your own happiness rather than depending on anyone else to supply it.

And let the anger go

Holding a grudge, or holding on to anger of any kind, produces nothing except resentment. Dwelling on the past only keeps a better future out of reach.

Hatred is heavy luggage. Put it down.

We try to invite the divine into our lives in a great many ways. The awkward question is how we would recognise it if it ever turned up.

Sadhguru’s answer is that nobody can say in what form or by what route grace reaches out. Devotion, he says, means keeping all the doors and windows open, so that a person is always available to it.

Why the form cannot be predicted

Once someone begins to turn their energy towards a higher and subtler possibility, there is no telling how many ways and how many forms the source of existence will use to reach them. That has been the experience of everyone who has allowed it into their life.

So the important thing is to keep every door open, every window open, everything open, without carrying fixed ideas that this cannot be that and that cannot be this. Those ideas are the greatest impediment there is.

The risk you are actually choosing between

Yes, there are risks in leaving the doors open. Set against them is the far larger risk of never letting life happen at all, and that one disappears the moment you open up.

It may arrive as a bee. And what were you doing all this while? Just bee-ing. If the divine approaches you in the form of a bee, are you going to say no, come back as a hornet? Do not do that to yourself.

Devotion is receiving, defence is avoiding

It comes like a gentle breeze. It may come as a bee, it may come as a fly.

To be in a state of devotion is simply a way of receiving. To be in a state of defence is simply a way of avoiding. The problem is that we are lost in the instinct of self-preservation, and that instinct works as a shield against everything indiscriminately. Devotion means being without that shield, and simply being here. It means being open to the possibility of life.

The suction pump

That is what devotion actually is. A suction pump.

Be a devotee and the thing is emptied of you; you do not exist, so you become a vacuum. And wherever he is, he has to come out. Tree or bird or animal or man or bee, he has to come. He cannot escape.

The beggar in San Francisco

A beggar sat outside a restaurant every day, and every day a businessman came there for breakfast. On his way out the beggar would stretch out his hand, and the man would put whatever small change he had into it and go.

Then one morning the businessman noticed the beggar holding out both hands. He stopped. For years, he said, you have put out one hand. Why two now?

Business has been so good, the beggar said, that I decided to open another branch.

Open all the branches you can. Business is good, so every branch should be open, and any branch that stays shut amounts to being disabled in that direction. It is time to open the lot.