Category: Relationships

Is Extroversion Overrated?


“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.” – Bertrand Russell

What do Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Abraham Lincoln, Julia Roberts, J K Rowling and Clint Eastwood have in common?

Yes, they are all well-known introverts. While varied other personal traits may have contributed towards their becoming masters of their own fields, being an introvert was surely one of them. Reading a fascinating book called Quiet, on the power of introverts by Susan Cain, I was inspired to write this post.

Clarifying Introversion and Extroversion

Usually, people who are more talkative, social and outgoing are referred to as extroverts while quiet and shy types get branded as introverts. However, much of psychology research on personality types relates the idea of extroversion and introversion to two other factors.

The first, popularized by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, bases the distinction between extroversion and introversion on an individual’s attitude-type characterization – extroverts are characterized by their greater interest in the external world, while the introverts in their inner, emotional-mental, world.

The second is based on our orientation for how we spend leisure time, de-stress and resolve issues. Extroverts prefer being with other people – it relaxes and energizes them; introverts prefer being alone – in fact, they are commonly uncomfortable spending significant time with others. Given a choice, an extrovert would love to join a party and an introvert read a book or the like.

Most people possess a combination of these traits – although one of the two may be more dominant, and perhaps active more frequently, than the other. Further, the trait of shyness or boldness might be an independent factor present in either of the two personality types – so you could have a shy extrovert (comedian Chris Rock) and a bold introvert (Mahatma Gandhi).

Misplaced Overemphasis on Extroversion

Propelled by a growing sense of individuality, rapid…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Leadership, Relationships, Self-growth | 4 Comments

Life Lessons From My Seventeen-Year-Old!


We get brutally tested in our closest personal relationships – while they offer the greatest source of joy, somehow they also have the potential to bring out the best and the worst in us. Parenting is a good example of that.

Firstly, among all our roles, we invariably find ourselves least trained for the responsibilities of parenthood. Second, children have a mind of their own and often their behavior is at odds with our expectations. Finally, our heightened attachment with their progress, although founded in love, actively interferes with our ability to be objective in our interactions.

Teenage years are particularly testing

As children start growing up, the generation gap between them and us can be a recurring source of communication breakdown. Teenage years are particularly tough. Children’s transition from a state of dependence to newfound independence, accompanied by the biological and psychological changes they experience during this time, is usually exceptionally taxing for the parents.

We routinely lose patience, get upset, worry excessively about their future and feel dejected when they talk back or break agreed rules. As someone wisely quipped, “Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.”

Being curious instead of judgmental

While I would like to believe that I have been a loving and supportive dad to my son, I have noticed that the keenness to see him build a strong foundation towards fulfilling his personal potential readily clouds my thoughts and perceptions. I am then more prone to judging his actions and results against my own beliefs and expectations.

I have lately been trying a different approach though. Letting go of the temptation to judge, I have been practicing being a bit more detached – choosing to merely watch his thought processes, actions and behavior as a neutral bystander. This has been revealing!

Children are a powerful mirror…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Relationships, Self-growth | 6 Comments

Stop Judging, Start Loving!


We judge others all the time. Rarely does a day go by before I catch myself judging someone. We judge our spouse, children, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. We feel at liberty to label them as self centered, inconsiderate, lazy, aggressive, overambitious, uninteresting, irresponsible and so forth. These labels then prevent us from connecting to them more deeply.

As Mother Teresa said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

Not only do these labels shape our interactions in the present moment, but they also often lead us to forming longer-lasting opinions about others. My husband never cares; my daughter doesn’t have the hunger and will never be successful; my business head is very selfish or too political and the person I met at the party was so aggressive. As such, we classify others’ personality based on their current behavior and can be dismissive of them.

We judge ourselves

Besides others, we routinely judge ourselves. I can never punch above my weight in a meeting; I am never the life of a party; I am not that talented; I don’t have in me to be successful; my writing is so amateurish and so forth. This subconscious commentary is our perpetual companion.

This self-judgment impacts us in wide-ranging ways. It pervades our thoughts, making us feel inadequate; creates self-doubt, negating our commitment towards the task; leads to self-blame, making us undeservedly feel guilty; and generates residual stress in our bodies, resulting in reduced immunity and increased propensity to physical ailments.

How do we become judgmental?

Besides our karmic imprint at birth, comprising innate preferences and predispositions, we acquire much of our judgmental nature from our childhood experiences. Being routinely judged by our parents, teachers and peers during our formative years does two things. One, our self-esteem takes a hit and we feel inadequate within. Second, we start to believe that it is desirable to…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Personal mastery, Relationships, Self-growth | 1 Comment

Expressing Difficult Emotions


“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” – Kahlil Gibran

George blamed his wife for not sufficiently demonstrating her love for him and felt sad but hesitated to express his feelings to her. Mary was routinely stifled by her boss’ aggression but was at a loss on what to do about it. Geetika was deeply troubled by her uneasy relationship with her seventeen-year-old son but struggled to get him to listen to her.

Till they found a new approach. If you too sometimes feel frustrated about not being able to share your real feelings with someone close to you, read on to find out how you can improve that relationship by expressing yourself differently.

Limitations of our approach

We routinely encounter situations where we either hold back our inner feelings or end up expressing them in an inappropriate manner – we generally fall into the classical trap of ‘flight’ or ‘fight’. Either way, we are ineffective.

In the first case, preferring to avoid any risk of confrontation, we tend to hold back our feelings. However, just because we avoid dealing with it, the problem does not go away. We still feel let down, sad and frustrated.

With recurring incidents with the same individual (partner, colleague, child), these feelings keep getting accumulated within us. Lacking the emotional bandwidth to deal with our disturbance, we sulk, internalize a sense of helplessness and feel like a victim. George and Mary suffered from this trait.

In the second, the psychological response to ‘fight’ the situtation, we accost the person apparently causing this emotional disturbance. We see the other person as the source of violation of our rights and blame them for it. Our comments tend to have an aggressive tone and are emotionally charged. This rarely shifts the other person’s behavior either. Geetika’s situation with her son was a testimony to this.

What are you after?

In any of these situations, you…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Personal mastery, Relationships, Self-growth | 2 Comments

Are you the Aggressor or the Victim?


Photo by Tiffany

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new lands but seeing with new eyes” – Marcel Proust

Our childhood experiences, coupled with our genetic makeup, significantly influence the type of emotional personality we acquire as adults. Our sense of self-esteem, temperament, perceptiveness, relationship skills, and ability to give and receive love are directly impacted with these factors.

Based on different combinations of these attributes, there are surely a large number of distinct personality types possible (please also see my earlier post on Being Myself). However, there are two types namely, the aggressor and the victim, that are prominently displayed in our relationships. Unfortunately, living either of these archetypes limits us from enjoying deeper and more loving relationships.

The Victim
As the title suggests, people with a Victim personality believe that they are the victims of the world – that the others do not care for their emotions and that they are routinely left alone to fend for themselves. They tend to be inward looking and are easily given to self-blame. Experiencing any setback, they are quick to judge and blame themselves for their situation. These aspects are partly a reflection of their low self-esteem.

They also have a propensity to be reserved, introverted and uncomfortable with any form of confrontation. Operating from a strong fear of rejection, they would rather conform than confront, to avoid the risk of being in the wrong and not being loved. Consequently, instead of sharing freely, they are prone to instinctively suppressing their true emotions.

However, these suppressed emotions of frustration and disappointment eventually do get released, in the form of sudden bursts of anger. To the others, these bursts are usually unexplainable, as the immediate trigger is generally somewhat insignificant. Some of these factors make it challenging for such individuals to have deep and honest relationships – in fact, many of them have difficulty with intimacy, lest their true selves be discovered.

The Aggressor
The Aggressors are almost the opposite. They…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Relationships, Self-growth | 3 Comments

OMG…kids these days!!!


“Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.”

Are you too a parent struggling to cope with the stress of bringing up a teenager? Do you often catch yourself screaming, audibly or otherwise, what all is wrong with your children? “Why can’t my son remember to throw his laundry in the basket rather than leave it on the bathroom floor or put away his shoes in the shoe rack and not in the living room, despite daily reminders?” “How do I get my daughter to be more focused on her studies, she just doesn’t seem to care about her grades?” “Why are kids these days so irresponsible, when are they going to start putting some real effort towards achieving results?”

It is our nature to judge people. And as parents, we seem to appropriate a carte blanche to do so with our children – constantly evaluating what’s good about them and what not, what’s acceptable and what not? All their perceived shortcomings are then a source of disappointment and angst for us. To make matters worse, when our coaxing often does not yield desired changes, we feel frustrated and stressed.

I believe it is important to understand that it is not what happens to us that’s the real source of stress, it’s our thoughts attached to what happens to us. No sooner than we notice something about the kids that seems amiss, our hyperactive minds race ahead with thoughts of concerns – how his lack of responsibility towards organizing his life is a precursor of a distraught adulthood, how her limited zeal for excellence is bound to result in recurring under-performance, and how their inability to follow parents’ guidance spells doom for their capacity to deal with the real world. As these thoughts recur in our mind, they gain traction and solidify as definitive future scenarios. Needless to say,…

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Did You Love Enough?


The last couple of months have been a real trying time for my family and me. However, they have also been a source of receiving a wonderful lesson in life. During these weeks, I lost my mum-in-law, who I dearly loved. As she received treatment in Singapore, she spent the last five weeks of her life with us. The initial shock of her sudden diagnosis of a lethal cancer, and later, losing her within weeks of diagnosis, despite our best efforts to get her treated, have left my wife, her family and me distraught. Strangely enough, despite the emotional turmoil, there’s been a certain amount of peace and strength within all of us. As we reconcile to this irreparable loss, we have been reflecting on the entire crisis and searching for the lessons it offered us. While there are many lessons to be learnt from this experience, I would like to share what I felt was the most important one for me.

As her serious illness engulfed our lives, numerous questions flooded our minds. Besides wondering about why after leading such a loving and meaningful life, she has to experience this early and difficult end, what disturbed us most was the coming face to face with the meaning of life and questions around what remains of a person and their life’s actions in the end. The consistent answer we received was what sustains life, and what sustains after life, is purely love. Despite the challenges of the situation, somehow we were all quite calm, positive and strong all through. Besides our meditation practice, I believe it was really the strength of our love that gave us this special strength during this troubled time. The tender moments all of us had the privilege to spend with her in her last days were truly special. It was the depth of our love that held the family together and made those short five weeks so precious. It is also the anchor of love and compassion that is now slowly beginning to provide the…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Relationships, Self-growth | 6 Comments

Parenting: Love, Boundaries and Inspiration


We all want our children to do well and be successful. While there can be any number of expectations from our children, when asked about what they want their children to accomplish most in life, most of my coaching clients respond with goals like, “we would like them to be successful at discovering and fulfilling their true passion”, “we hope they can get involved in happy and meaningful relationships”, “it’s important that they grow up to be good and caring people”, “we hope they can be responsible citizens and someday contribute to the broader community” and so forth. Parenting can be a really challenging experience. While we all intend to make the best effort towards helping our children achieve their dreams, more often that not, we are operating from limited experience and are at best learning from “on-the-job” training. It is further onerous to realize that childhood experiences indeed substantially shape the future the children have as adults and in a way, unless we pay attention to make amends, impact of ineffective parenting can continue to perpetuate from one generation to the next. Decades of psychology research clearly brings forth the power of childhood experiences – about how children of preoccupied parents grow up to be avoidant individuals or how sometimes loved and sometimes ignored children become anxious adults. Research also proves that childhood experiences can predict the personality traits in adults in terms of their being secure, anxious, or avoidant, with up to 70% accuracy.

Based on my personal coaching experiences, here are three powerful thoughts (love, boundaries, and inspiration) that I believe can significantly contribute to effective parenting.

Love
“If you start judging people, you will have no time to love them.” Mother Teresa

Love provides for a very basic need of a child – the need to feel secure. Loving parents can create a strong foundation of inner security for a child to spring forth other values and skills. Loving environment at home builds a child’s self-esteem and self-confidence – a sense of knowing their unique and special place in…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Relationships | 2 Comments

Madly in Love…


They say marriages are made in heaven. At the time of marriage, all couples seem ecstatic about their relationship and sound crazy about each other. They all express that relationship to be the best thing that ever happened to them and they are willing to walk on water to please each other. However, as time passes, some things begin to change. Somewhere down the road, the intensity of that love begins to wane; for some, all it takes is the honeymoon trip for the feeling of disappointment to surface. Consequently, many marriages eventually go through a significant deterioration in the relationship. Some of the stats are scary – in many western societies, one out of every two marriages results in divorce; and, in some, only a third of all second marriages survive. While the numbers currently look much better for Asia, the trends are equally alarming. What happens to all those beautiful marriages? Where do we go wrong in our relationships? There are obviously many perspectives to this, but let me point out a few key aspects related particularly to our emotional make-up that are at play here and how we can learn to deal with them. First, it’s the limitation of our emotional intelligence – our inability to understand and manage our own emotions and that of our partner. How well do we know ourselves, our triggers, our filters, our hot spots? How deftly can we read our partners’ feelings and emotions? Even if we can understand the partner’s emotions, what choices do we make in reacting to them? At the start of the relationship, all mannerisms of our partner seem so adorable – over time, as the magic of initial infatuation begins to wear off, many of the same habits begin to annoy us. Because of our limited emotional bandwidth, and consequent impatience and discomfort with giving space to the partner, we have the tendency to want the partner to be identical to us – in our likes and dislikes, behavior patterns, parenting style and so forth….

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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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