Lewis Howes is a former American football and handball player, and is now an entrepreneur and an author of The School of Greatness. He also has a podcast of the same name. He is looked upon as a super-hero in the States. In fact, he himself used to think of himself as an impenetrable super-hero who could supress his darkest emotions and put up a brave face when challenged by adversity. One freak outburst incident made him change his mind. At the World Domination Summit 2015, Lewis urges us to tear down the facade of iron-clad straight face and be more human and express our feelings. He advocates vulnerability. In his own beautiful worlds, “Don’t be a super-hero. Be a super-human.” Continue reading Why being open about your life’s flawed past makes you better
Category: Self-Development
How Priya mastered long distance bicycling
I love bicycling and have been doing it since learning it during my summer vacation between fourth standard and fifth standard. After marriage, I have been encouraging Priya (my wife) to use her bicycle frequently as well. But what she achieved over the last two weekends has left me immensely proud of her. With me, Priya rode 235km in the rainy conditions of monsoon, one of them being a 160km (or 100 mile) long ride from Pune to Thane. All this, considering that this is Priya’s first year of serious long distance bicycling, whereas it is already my 6th.
What is Priya’s secret to such supreme fitness and determination? Ideally this should have been Priya’s post to write as her own story, but this time we decided to take a different angle, by making me the observer who studied Priya’s success. Continue reading How Priya mastered long distance bicycling
The Four Phases of Successful Habit Building !!
You probably already know that building good habits is the shortcut to building success. Determination and Willpower are good traits. But they are fleeting and limited and to count on them for building a habit is like having Hope as a strategy.
Most people rely on their will power to stick to a new habit. No wonder new year resolutions don’t even last a few weeks. We have all set resolutions to get fit, study harder, spend more time with family, travel more, start a business and we clock another year without doing any of it.
How can we create and sustain change? How do we set our self up to succeed ? If will power does not work, then what works ?
Continue reading The Four Phases of Successful Habit Building !!
Can we really re-wire our brain?
As humans, we always change over the years. Our bodies, beliefs, tastes in food and clothes, the books we read, the TV shows we watch and many others. If you were to look back at yourself 10 years ago, then you’d realise that you are a very different person now than you were then.
However, some things hardly change. It may be the fact that you have either been a morning person or a night person right from your childhood. Or that you have never liked brinjals. Or maybe you never found studying history fun. Or probably you still bite your nails. These traits have been part of you for so damn long that you never thought that you could get rid of them. In fact they are part of your identity. You may have tried really hard to consciously change these traits at one point or the other. However, doing so feels like you are continuously rapping the knuckles of your automatic self and constantly keeping your brain on a high alert to avoid automatic behaviour. That is tiring and certainly not enjoyable.
However, what if it is possible to change these traits using certain methods to re-wire your brain, such that new behaviour becomes part of you? Anthony Robbins is the leader of a method called Neuro-Linguistic Programming and he believes that you can use this kind of ‘programming’ to re-wire your brain so that it behaves exactly as you want it to, without resorting to will power to rap your knuckles.
Would you invest in ‘Me, Inc.’?
Do you know of a company that…
- Has no mission and hence no articulated mission statement?
- Has no vision of where the company wants to be in 20 years?
- Has no values as guidelines to help in decision making?
- Has no council of advisors or board of directors?
- Occasionally sets annual goals but does not review or track them, and soon forgets about them?
- Has no financial plan whatsoever? Does not know its cash flow? Does not have a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet?
- Does not feel accountable to its stakeholders to keep them abreast of significant changes or consult when appropriate?
- Does not have an incentivisation system that promotes the right behaviour?
Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary
Person 1: “Just look at these photos. I too wish to take photos like these. If only I could save up the money to buy a DSLR, lens and filters.”
Person 2: “Would you look at this snow-capped mountain in the Himalayas? How I wish I could trek on it. Our tropical town is no good.”
Person 3: “Just wait and see. The day I am able to gather a team of experts around me, I will start my business and earn millions. But it’s so hard to hire experts.”
We all come across people who repeat such statements every day. They insist that their reasons for not starting are genuine. Lack of resources, lack of facilities, lack of experts and what not! But the one thing that they do not lack is EXCUSES. Instead of starting with what they have, they are willing to wait for the utopian day when they have the best of resources, which they assume will automatically turn them into experts.
Let us discover why it is not a good idea to wait for the best resources and how not to fall into the trap of excusitis. Let’s get started on our dreams today!
Continue reading Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary
iSpeak: From a nervous kid to a competent communicator
The first time I gave a speech to an audience was when I was in school. It was an English eloquence competition. Although I had written good essays for a long time, I had never participated in a speech competition. My motivation to enroll was that there were only 4 participants including me. So statistically I had a 75% chance of getting a prize for just showing up.
Continue reading iSpeak: From a nervous kid to a competent communicator
The 15,500 ft view of life
The D-Day: Preparation and Training
It was the most important day for the batch 292 Basic.
It was the day for which we had all been rigorously training for the last 21 days, waking up at 4 AM to run uphill in the mall road of Darjeeling oblivious to the beauty of Kanchenjunga around , climbing and rappelling rocks, rigorous ice craft training, trekking up the hills of Sikkim with backpack weighing over 25 Kgs and camping at temperature sub zeroes.
Continue reading The 15,500 ft view of life
Circles of Life
Stephen Covey in his very famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
We spend most of our day thinking about and discussing various ideas, thoughts, actions, constraints or problems and challenges or opportunities that predominantly fall in three concentric circles.
Choosing your heroes
What does the term hero mean to me? For me, it represents a person I want to emulate. It is a person whose attributes I want to make a part of my life. It is a person whose life I want to study and learn lessons from, so that when I face a situation that he/she faced, I have an idea and an inspiration about what to do. There is generally an entire tribe of heroes that you follow as they inspire you at different ages, situations and fields. And since stories of heroes can directly affect your decisions in life, it is very important to choose your heroes based on who you want to be and the identity that you want to carve out for yourself.