Grow Your Mind

Grow Your Mind Self Reflection

Take a minute to reflect

Grow Your Mind / By

Have you ever come across times in life where you are just busy getting things done one after the other. You are tackling challenges at all ends. Sometimes even not having the time to review the results. And then there are situations you face again and again, you want to solve them once and for all but somehow it does not go the way you want. It is frustrating, at least for me.

You end up questioning yourself, questioning your actions, questioning everything. And is the beginning of the end. If you have ever faced this then you should continue reading as I tell you about how I deal with such situations.

The key for me was to just take some time off. To recollect and gather. Little did I know that what I was doing has been professed and practiced by humans for long. Interestingly, even some religious practices have their roots in this idea.

And the key is reflection. Better known as self-reflection.

books, pages, open

Telling a Story

Grow Your Mind / By

It begins early in our lives. Remember the goodnight stories our parents used to tell, which we listened to very intently before we went to bed. And us asking them to tell another one if we were not tired out that day. Those stories fired our imagination, taught us valuable lessons and above gave us sweet dreams.

It was no different with the grandparents, whom we pestered to tell stories about the past or in the day-care where our teachers read stories to us from books or later when we used to read books, spellbound by the narration unable to let it go even though we hear the calls for coming to the dinner table. We discovered the world through these stories. Many of them had key messages which shaped us as people.

Why am I reminiscing here about those days gone by? Simply because I believe that stories are an awesome way of communicating complex messages in a form which people can comprehend. Stories help others to see, imagine and feel what we have to narrate.

Somewhere down the lane, as I got busy with academics then the day to hassles of life I

  • Understand your audience
  • Paint a picture
  • Make it relatable
  • Take them on a journey
  • Have a clear destination

My 5 goals for life

Grow Your Mind / By

Life is too short for running after hundreds of things but long enough to achieve five goals you decide upon.

Before I went into defining the goals, it was very important to get one thing straight: It is my life.

My goals have to be designed in a way that helps me live well, helps me accomplish things important to me and gives me a sense of awesomeness. What it also means is to stop comparing it with others, they have their own goals and lives. Surely some can be inspirations for me but also nothing more.

Secondly, the goals I define should be measurable. Why? As it will allow me to see when I have succeeded. Here it is very vital to understand the meaning of success for yourself. This might not be the same definition as what people and society around me preaches. It is something which will give me the notion of having achieved something which is meaningful to me, give me the feeling of being awesome.

goal noun

1 : the end toward which effort is directed : AIM

2 a : an area or object toward which players in various games attempt to advance a ball or puck and usually through or into which it must go to score points

b : the act or action of causing a ball or puck to go through or into such a goal

c : the score resulting from such an act

3 a : the terminal point of a race

b : an area to be reached safely in children’s games

Excerpts from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goal

Once I had this cleared up, the task to define the goals. That’s the most difficult part. Doing so I could feel the clutter of numerous thoughts crossing my mind telling me to do this and do that. I often drifted away in my mind, focussing on tangential thoughts. Every time I had to keep reminding myself, “What are my goals for life?”. And not starting to think about what I have to do, we will come back to it later.

Once I had this answer. Things started clearing up in the mind. As I was doing a lot of things which were not contributing towards my goals. Moreover the things I needed to succeed were not going to happen overnight. So if I were to walk a path that would lead to this success, I needed to set some goals for me.

You surely have read about my rule of five where I wrote about my way of simplifying things. That is what I applied here. I interpreted by definition of success into a single goal which would reflect the success I was trying to achieve. Once that was on a piece of paper, I went ahead to think of what were the stepping stones to this goal. These I limited to two for medium-term and further two for the short-term. The idea is to work on the short-term goals.

I often hear successful people saying – “I live life by the day”, “I take life as is comes”. I thought that it does not sound right. For all I have been taught was to think ahead, plan for the rainy day, you need to have a plan and many more such pieces of wisdom.

What was I missing? I decided to take a step to the side, for a minute to reflect.

colorful, five fingers, kid

My Rule of Five

Grow Your Mind / By

For everything you will want to do there are some many others you have think about, consider and evaluate. This made decision making very complex for me. The advent of the information age certainly added to the information I had to process. Nowadays, even deciding on where to order your next take-out meal can be tiresome. There are all these nice places and then there are all these reviews, adding to it there are the various sources for all the reviews. Once you know what to get and where to get it from, there all these different apps offering the delivery services with different pricing and coupons.

Now writing about this alone gave me a headache. And it was just a dinner. When I was trying to decide on other things in life which have a higher impact than a mundane evenings food, I started to feel lost. Hence I came up with my way of reducing the things to what matters most. These factors I limited to the number 5, simply because I can count it on a hand.

My Rule of Five simply states,

When facing a decision or task, just break it down to a maximum five most relevant factors which are important for you.

Since I have been doing this I was able to reduce a lot of clutter in the mind. Turn my focus on aspects which mattered the most to me. Got along faster with planning and decision making.

Let us see how it works for the dinner order tonight,

  1. I want something warm
  2. I am really hungry and want something which can be delivered quickly
  3. I plan to have my dinner on the couch while watching Netflix
  4. Nothing fancy and expensive
  5. Something tried and tested

“Get a Pizza from the nice little Italian restaurant round the corner.”

Now this was not very groundbreaking. As I was going through the 5 factors, I was already zeroing in on what I really wanted at that time. In a different situation the result can be different. But the purpose is to find simple ways of getting an awesome solution.

In the stories to come, I will share with you different situations where I will keep things simple using my own Rule of Five for confronting real life questions.