Finding Your Thermal…


Whilst attending the intermediate course of paragliding many years ago, I remember taking a short flight from the top of a 600 feet tall cliff and truly loving it. I recall marveling at the effortlessness of the entire 45 seconds flight, before gravity took hold, and wondering how some of the experienced paragliders managed to stay up in the air for hours. As I learnt, it was their ability, like the migratory birds, to find progressive air thermals that allowed them to stay up and even travel long distances, of sometimes up to a thousand kilometers. Were those long flights enervating for them? Never, they were always effortless and exhilarating, as they soared, in complete harmony with nature. Comparing that scenario to the way we live our lives, I often wonder why there is so much struggle to our existence. There appears to be this constant underlying stress all around us and the innumerable choices that we are surrounded with – of, products, services, careers, gadgets, leisure and so on – instead of empowering us, leave us feeling deprived. Like the migratory birds, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find such thermals that make our lives more effortless, balanced, and peaceful? Those thermals could sweep us away from our daily dilemmas to a life where making choices was much easier, where we experienced minimal effort to move forward, and where we were fully supported by nature in all our pursuits.

The key to this I believe lies in gaining clarity about the purpose of our own existence. Why are we here and what are are we aiming to do? I do believe each one of us on earth is hugely gifted and has a special purpose – but do we take the time to discover it in ourselves; or are we just on a treadmill of activity going almost nowhere. What do you value, what’s most important to you? Do you want to be more successful or do you want to make a more significant contribution? Do you want…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Leadership, Self-growth | Comments Off on Finding Your Thermal…

Our Extraordinary Universe and a Brief Perspective of Who We Are, Where Did We Come From and Where We Are Going


Reading my six year old daughter’s science book with her the other day, I learnt some amazing facts about the universe, space, and pre-historic life. It set me off on a brief but very exciting research that has led me to learning some new perspectives on the correlation between the way the universe is organized and who we really are.

First, a bit about where did we come from. As per the Big Bang theory, the Universe was created ex nihilo (Latin term meaning “out of nothing”) approximately 13.5 billion years ago. Some of the spiritual scriptures also independently mention this. The Bible talks about about “Son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing.” It is believed that the Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago. For the first four billion years or so, the only living things on Earth were microscopic, single-celled organisms. Then about 700 million years ago, the first real animals, such as jelly fish and sponges appeared in the sea. Over the next 200 million years, these evolved into creatures with hard parts (shells and bones). Then came the fishes, then life arrived onto land in the form of plants and insect-like animals. Post the extinction of dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, started the age of birds and mammals; with the first human-like creatures, the hominids, appearing about 2 million years ago. They were small and looked like their ape ancestors. Gradually, they evolved to become taller, with larger brains; the modern humans probably evolved only 200,000 years ago. While mulling through this data, two things came up for me. First, we are a mere organism, although evolved with a developed brain. Second, our entire existence pales in significance to the existence of the universe. If the Universe were 100 years old, human race would have been born only about 80 minutes ago and an average human life span would be less than 20 seconds.

Let me now share a bit about…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Spiritual | 2 Comments

Domination of Our Senses and Personal Mastery


We live in a world dominated by our senses. The five senses are our window to the external world; and eventually, the way we perceive the world through our senses becomes our internal reality. The greatest pleasures in our lives seemingly come from experiences derived from these senses – as eyes admire the beauty, the taste buds relish the gourmet food, the sense of a lovers’ touch makes the heart sing, and so on.

As we begin to experience these pleasures, we tend to want more of them; we desire to increase the frequency of such experiences and also want them to ideally last longer. However, simultaneously, we also experience situations that seem not to go per our desire and make us uncomfortable and unhappy. We hate to go through those experiences, wishing we could somehow totally eliminate them from our lives. This desire to seek only the pleasant sensations and avoid the supposedly unpleasant ones is what sets us up for future suffering – either the excessive want for these pleasures or the feeling of lack of enough of these experiences in our lives then leads to frustration, anxiety and unhappiness.

If we include our mind, along with its conditioned thought forms and mental patterns, in the list of our sense organs, we totally and absolutely live by these senses. The mind adds the unique dimension of attaching judgments to every experience; with the sense of a separate self, the mind also adds the evaluation of whether the experience is good for us or not. The mind also adds the sense of time – making our thoughts (and resultant feelings) always wander in the past or the future. The mind then wants to cling to the pleasant experiences and makes us believe that as we seek out more such experiences, we would be happier on an ongoing basis.

Many of us eventually find our own ways of accepting and living with a mixture of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. While this provides some balance and calm in our lives, how do…

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Nature, Nurture and Personal Mastery


In many of my recent posts, I have talked about the principles behind personal mastery and its relevance to our lives and the world around us. In this post, I would like to highlight how this journey can become an important source of change in our lives, particularly when seen in the context of the ever non-conclusive, biological, social, psychological, and neurological, debate about “nature versus nurture”.

The other day, my wife read out my supposed personality traits from a horoscope website and I was amazed at the quality of matches. While I am not one taken to reading the weekly forecasts or be fatalistic about the future, the accuracy of the assessment did leave me with a couple of questions – is the deepest part of my personality predetermined at birth or can it change? What could create the change? And, that’s what has led me to this article.

The genetic DNA imprint is probably the single most significant factor of the future destiny of a child at birth. The DNA comprising of three billion bases, tied up in one unique combination out of zillions of possible sequences, provides the first perspective of the predisposed personality traits, likes, dislikes, health patterns and inclinations of the child. If it weren’t for the power of genes (and nature), two siblings who have been provided largely the same upbringing, won’t turn out so different in their attitudes, preferences, and behavior – one is totally organized, very expressive, and loves art; the other forgetful, very analytical and crazy about sports. In a spiritual sense, each child is the product of that special circumstance of universe which brings together the ancestral history of several past generations in a unique manner. All medical examinations begin with checking the medical history of the parents and grand parents; sounds like nothing could be more important than the genes we are born with.

But then, decades of psychology research would have us believe in the power of…

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Leadership: the Needed Shift for Wisdom


“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”– T. S. Eliot

A number of contemporary thought leaders believe that some part of the 21st century would belong to the “wisdom” society as against the “knowledge” society that we are currently part of. I tend to agree and would welcome such a shift; in fact hope that it happens sooner rather than later.

While this shift is relevant for the entire society and its leaders in all spheres of life, in this post, let me focus on the need for such a shift in organizational leadership.

The business work place is under tremendous strain today. The pressure to succeed on a quarterly basis is high, with higher competition, fewer resources, and a more unpredictable environment. Leaders face huge challenges – with building a compelling and shared vision for the organization, motivating the team members towards that vision, and finally sustaining quality results in an ever changing and highly competitive market place. In one of the researches by Harris Interactive of over 20,000 employees, it was concluded that only 37% of the employees said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why and only 1 in 5 employees was enthusiastic about their organization’s goals. Regarding employee motivation, a recent research in the UK found that 42% of all workers surveyed felt “used up” by the end of the day; and the salaries they aspired for suddenly don’t seem enough to them. Yet another disturbing research published in the Time magazine suggested that approximately 75-90% of all visits to the primary care doctors are for stress related problems, with job stress being by far the leading cause.

One of the key reasons for this entire scenario, to my mind, is the lack of clear purpose or a broader social context for which the organization exists. I reckon for the leaders to become architects of mission for their organizations, they need…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Global challenges, Leadership | 2 Comments

Personal Mastery and Living our Lives Inside Out…


In many of my recent posts, I have written about the principles behind personal mastery and its relevance to our lives and the world around us. In this post, I would like to highlight how this journey or outlook is so powerful in clarifying our own roles and their context in the world around us.

We all play multiple roles in our life – at work, with family, with friends, and in society and so on. How do we become clear of our purpose in life and its interconnectedness with our various roles? How do we prioritize among the numerous options of spending our time and energies – between personal goals, community work and building relationships…?

I am a life and executive coach and in my coaching practice, have the privilege of working with people often discovering answers to these very questions. These situations are not unique to coaching conversations but are common place occurrences in all our lives. Let me share some examples. A visionary leader of a voluntary organization I was working with, was deeply committed to making a substantial difference in the lives of the under-privileged. Driven by his ambition in his chosen field, he was often stressed and while in his early 40s, had become hypertensive. Now, given that we may often believe that people involved in the area of giving have greater meaning in life and are hence worry-free, the health situation of this leader may seem paradoxical. In another example, consider the case of a courageous single mother who was substantially stretched in her roles as a senior executive at work and as a mother. While she described her children as her clear top priority, she constantly felt torn between working late hours (supposedly to be able to earn more and thereof better take care of her children) and spending time with the children. She also expressed feeling a significant lack of fulfillment in her life. While I am simplifying these situations to bring out a point, I hope you can…

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Our Preoccupied Minds and Living in the Now


Alcoholics Anonymous has a saying – “People often expect different results from doing the same actions”. 

Does the scenario of a busy executive – attending a conference call, biting into his sandwich, intermittently checking e-mails, and browsing through the latest business magazine – and doing all this simultaneously – sound familiar to you? How about a parent at home playing a game of monopoly with one child, helping another child with her homework, finishing a phone conversation, and checking on the score of a football game on TV – all at the same time?

Welcome to the world of multi-tasking!

And what’s the rush about?

There never seems time enough to fit in all our priorities – the desire to gun for the next big job at work at any cost forces us out of the lives of our children; the ambition to succeed at work and be a model parent and spouse leaves us with no time for pursuing personal interests. The result is we are preoccupied all the time – juggling between multiple tasks at the same time and mentally planning about a few others to follow. The choices thrown at us – for career, investments, leisure, education, socializing etc. – are mind numbing. The advertisers would have everyone believe that their life is always short of perfect. How well prepared are we to make the choices?

As I have briefly discussed before, we need to step back and first build clarity about the purpose of our life. What are we aiming to accomplish and why? Are we looking for money or happiness? More success or greater contribution? What’s the role of family, friends in our life? Where does the awareness about community and environment fit in? Answering some of these and related issues most important to us may be a good start to gaining clarity about the purpose of our life. As we begin to make this the anchor of our decision making, making choices suddenly becomes so much simpler – releasing wonderful chunks of time to lead an enjoyable, purposeful…

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Personal Mastery and World Consumption Levels


In one of my initial posts (Personal mastery and the journey within), I had introduced the concept of personal mastery. In this piece, I would like to highlight the relevance of this concept to dealing with potential challenges and mismatches of world consumption levels.

Research on global differences of consumption levels done by Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA highlights that on average a person in the developed world consumes 32 times more than his counterpart in the developing world. The developed world represented by the US, Western Europe, Japan and Australia accounts for about 1 billion people, the rest of the world’s population being 5.5 billion. As developing countries, led by China and India, aspire to match the consumption levels and lifestyle of the developed nations, the world is likely to face a major resource crunch – for food, oil, metals and so forth. Now, just China’s catching up with the developed world would roughly double the global consumption rates; India and China together catching up would triple the same rates. If the whole developing world were to catch up with the developed world one day, Professor Diamond argues, it would be equivalent of feeding a world population of 72 billion people – something our world is not known to be equipped to provide for (at least not at the current time).

What can we do to meet this future challenge? As I had mentioned in my post on personal mastery and communities, the real challenge with some of the global issues like poverty is not that the world does not have enough to feed the poor, it’s the inability of the human race to share and distribute the existing wealth to raise the overall standards of living across the planet. Will we continue to have the chase of higher consumption levels and eventually run out of resources; in consequence, creating high inflation and a new band of poor population – in this case spread across developing and developed…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Community, Global challenges, Personal mastery | Comments Off on Personal Mastery and World Consumption Levels

Whatever Happens, Happens for the Best!


I realize suggesting a topic like this in today’s world – governed by free will determinism and a belief system that relates every outcome to our own actions – is fraught with danger…but here I go.

Here’s a story of a King and his dear friend. The King always liked to have his friend around him and immensely trusted his advice. One of the things the friend always used to say and believe in was “whatever happens, happens for the best”. Once the King and his friend were out hunting in a jungle and had an encounter with a tiger. While the King managed to eventually kill the tiger, the King lost his left thumb in the duel. The King was deeply disturbed by this. His friend, however, kept reminding the King of his favorite saying, “whatever happens, happens for the best”. This bothered the King to no end and he got so upset with his friend’s “unkind behavior” that he asked for him to be locked up in the state prison. As life went on, in a few months’ time, the King went on another hunting trip. This seemed like an unfortunate one as he lost his way in the jungle and got captured by the local jungle tribe. The tribe was extremely excited with this auspicious catch and decided to sacrifice the King to the Gods. As part of the preparation for the ceremony, the tribesmen completed applying a special balm onto the King’s entire body. As they discovered the King’s missing left thumb, they rushed to their leader and asked for the King to be released – as per the tribe’s tradition, in order not to annoy the Gods, the sacrificial body had to be whole. For the first time, the King began to understand the thought behind his friend’s saying. As he went back, he asked for his friend’s immediate release. As they met and hugged each other, the King asked, “While I now understand why the loss of my thumb was eventually for my best,…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Spiritual | 4 Comments

Personal Mastery and Communities


In one of my first posts (Personal Mastery and the Journey Within), I had introduced the concept of personal mastery. In this blog, I would like to highlight the relevance of this concept to serving and building communities.

To me, personal mastery is the journey of self-discovery leading to consistently living the purpose of one’s life. It requires a high emphasis on self-knowledge, clarity of one’s personal vision and its interconnectedness with the people and the world around.

As the definition suggests, the person advanced in this journey is likely to have a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of herself with the people and the world around her. Such a person is likely to well appreciate the interconnectedness of the different pieces that make up her world – elements of nature (the air she breathes and the water she drinks), efforts of people in her life (their love and support), contributions of her ancestors (in bringing her to life) and numerous other people in the world (whose efforts allow her to live her daily life with ease and comfort). As he acknowledges the contribution of others in his life and develops gratitude towards the people and the world around him, he is likely to feel obliged and become keener to pay the society back in some way or another.

Most often when we are unhappy, we have a starved feeling – a feeling of lack, as if we are not getting enough. As Shakti Gawain talks about the concept of outflowing in her book on Creative Visualization, she describes how when we find the place within us that is giving, the flow reverses. True giving, she clarifies, happens not from sacrifice, or self-righteousness or something spiritual, but from the pure joy of it. As we begin the journey within, we realize that we have an infinite reservoir of love and happiness within us; however, we are conditioned to thinking that we have to get something from the outside to be happy. As we learn to…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Community, Personal mastery | Comments Off on Personal Mastery and Communities