Category: Self-growth

Reinventing Ourselves in Times of Trouble


In the background of how the current economic and financial crisis is impacting individual lives and families, a leading Indian newspaper had recently asked me to write a short piece on some thoughts around reinventing ourselves in such challenging situations. The same is reproduced below.

Every time we are faced with a real personal crisis — loss of job, onset of a terminal illness, divorce or financial crisis — some of the questions that cross our mind are: Why did this happen to me? Will it ever get better? How will this impact my social position? It is only natural to start feeling down and feel anxious about the future. However, people who have weathered such storms, and whom I have had the opportunity to meet during my corporate career and my life coaching practice, usually say that the crisis was the best thing that happened to them. It made them to get off their treadmill of maddening activity and do some real soul searching towards creating a better and happier future.

Drawing from those experiences, it may be useful to look at ways of dealing with such crises in multiple dimensions.

First, it is critical to maintain a healthy sense of optimism about the future — not because we want to psyche ourselves into positive thinking but because things do get better from points of high pessimism. Surveys of people faced with a personal crisis demonstrate that the same people generally feel much better about themselves and life in general just a year after the initial event. It is equally important to have a strong sense of self-belief — the belief that not only will things get better, but that I will also have a meaningful role to play in it. As Graham Bell said, “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

If the crisis involves some form of financial impact, it may be useful to also…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Global challenges, Self-growth | 3 Comments

Maslow’s Hierarchy Revisited…the Eastern Way!


Reading through some of the ancient Vedic texts, I was amazed to notice some uncanny similarities between Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs and the text’s description of the sequence of psychophysical energy centers in our body. Even though the two theories are drawn from very different perspectives, and during substantially different time periods, it was their curious similarities and differences as well as the resultant implications for personal growth that got me energized to write this piece.

You are probably quite familiar with Abraham Maslow’s work – a theory in psychology, written in a paper published in 1943, which set out five fundamental human needs and their hierarchical nature. Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass, along with the healthiest one percent of his college student population, to postulate this theory. As you will notice from the pyramid below, the five needs are physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs. A key aspect of the model is the hierarchical nature of these needs. The lower the needs in the hierarchy, the more fundamental they are and the more a person will tend to abandon the higher needs in order to pay attention to sufficiently meeting the lower needs. For example, when we are ill, we care little for what others think about us – all we want is to get better. The first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called “deficiency needs”; if they are not met, the body gives no indication of it physically, but the individual feels anxious and tense. Maslow believed that while the deficiency needs may be seen as “basic”, and can be met and neutralized (i.e. they stop being motivators in one’s life), self-actualization is a “being” or “growth” need and hence can be an enduring motivation and a driver for long-term behavior.

Let’s now briefly examine the concept of the psychophysical energy centers in our body….

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Personal mastery, Self-growth, Spiritual | 5 Comments

Where is Our Mind Located…and its Powerful Significance!


When our mind is at peace, our bodies look relaxed. When we are physically hurt, we become more prone to experiencing unpleasant feelings. Feelings of joy reflect on our faces as do feelings of anger and anxiety. Every time we are scared, our bodies go stiff. If the brain is the nerve center of our thoughts, and the heart of our emotions, how does our body so well reflect what we are thinking/ feeling at any time? Is it possible that our minds reside throughout the body and not just in the brain? Also, if we didn’t have some degree of innate intelligence all through our body, how could we experience sensations everywhere?

There has now been extensive research on the presence of mind in our bodies, that suggests that the neuropeptides, chemical substances that form the communication network of our emotions, are present not just in the brain but everywhere in the body. As Dr. Cadence Pert, chief of brain biochemistry at National Institute of Mental Health in the US writes, “These findings go beyond the often-mentioned concept of power of mind over body. Indeed, the more we know about neuropeptides, the harder it is to think in the traditional terms of a mind and a body. It makes more and more sense to speak of a single integrated entity, a body-mind”. So, while the brain remains the primary analyzer, our mind is not located there and is instead more like an information-processing field spread across the body. Every cell in our body is capable of feeling; every cell can express emotion. No wonder then, people’s thoughts, emotions and expressions sometimes change after undergoing an organ transplant.

Once we recognize that feelings are essentially felt in the entire body, it is easy to appreciate how emotional problems can manifest into physical disease. As Marshall Glickman writes, “Neuroscientists have learnt that there is a sophisticated communication network between the various cells throughout the brain…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Self-growth, Spiritual | 4 Comments

The Olympics, Transcending Ourselves, and Personal Mastery


“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well” – The Olympic Creed

The underlying emphasis in the above message seems to be based on a human being’s journey towards overcoming one’s own limitations and achieving personal peak performance – in a way, somehow transcending oneself. Watching the Olympics over the last few days has brought to fore the ability of certain individuals to do this with uncanny consistency. While Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, and Roger Federer are great recent examples of this in sports, various individuals like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and Neil Armstrong have achieved this state at the very highest levels, in other fields as well.

In this post, I have attempted to capture what I believe are some of the most critical ingredients for achieving this level of peak performance in any type of profession or vocation we maybe engaged in.

Is it your calling?

For starters, is it a job or a career or your calling that you are pursuing? A detailed study of attitudes and general orientation towards work, done in 1997 by Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of business at the New York University, showed workers broadly divided into three groups – those who saw their work as a job, those as a career, and those as their calling. The people in the first group are in employment because they really need the monthly paycheck and may be willing to move to another organization for higher salary. The second group is focused on building a career – for them it’s more about the position, growth, and the prestige. However, they may get disenchanted when the string of promotions stop. Finally, there is a small percentage of people engaged in what is their true calling…

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

Attachment, Suffering, Ignorance and Personal Mastery


Enough and more has been written about attachment being the primary source of human suffering – attachment to money, fame, power, relationships and so on. Buddhism has strong grounding in it, Hinduism talks at length about it. Simultaneously, most spiritual scriptures also talk about the journey of self-awareness, leading to gaining knowledge about the ultimate truth about one self.

One of the things I have been lately wondering about is the sequencing of what comes first – detachment or self-knowledge? Does one lead to the other? Further, are the two related in some manner? What all does the context of detachment encompass – ambition, money, relationships?

My sense, based on coaching engagements with a wide diversity of individuals, coupled with my personal experiences, is that it’s the journey of self-awareness and gaining knowledge about the truth of our existence that is at the core of overcoming our daily frustrations, anxiety, regrets and suffering. As we embark on this journey, it allows us to get closer to our inner selves, the true selves. As we become aware of how our world is created by our perceptions, it moves us towards realizing that we are not our minds; even though we find it hard to not be controlled by our minds. As William Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. It initiates us into becoming an observer to our conditioned minds and witness the games the mind plays – how the mind stays focused (and anxious) of the imaginary future, or the regrets of the past, keeps us closed to several opportunities for love and sharing, loves to remind us what we don’t have rather than encourage us to feel grateful for what we have. This then leads to the question of who are we then? As we search for the answers and begin to appreciate the truth about our reality and the manifestation of that reality in multiple forms, including our current existence, we move significantly forward…

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The Cycle of Karma…and How Come Nice Guys Don’t Always Get The Top Job?


Must be their karma? Many a time when we are faced with an unusually challenging situation or get a windfall, we tell ourselves, “Oh, this must be our karma”. In India, where the word karma and its related concepts originated around 5th century BC, often times the contentment on the faces of the financially poor people is explained as their reconciliation with their karma. It appears the word karma is often used to describe the correlation between one’s past deeds and one’s current or future circumstances. While that’s a fairly accurate expression of the concept of karma, here are some additional insights into the subtleties of what it is and how we can better apply it to our lives.

The ancient Indian literature on karma brings it forth as the notion of a cyclic process of our every action or intention leading to lasting impressions on our psyche, that in turn impact our future behavior (action or intention), leading to new lasting impressions being formed. As Chip Hartranft explains in his book on the teachings of Patanjali (an Indian sage who lived in the 6th century BC), any kind of volitional body or mind movement, physical or mental, constitutes a kind of karma. Each action, or even intent, leaves an impression in the deepest part of our psyche and comes up in the future at the time of a related thought or action. This is how our childhood impressions of relationships, role of parents, money, success, social conformity etc. create an inner perceptual map that shows up to determine our response in relation to similar issues in the future. The outcome of that behavior, in turn, creates new inner impressions, thus continuing the cycle of latent impressions and activation. As Eckhart Tolle illustrates in his recent book “A new Earth”, this cycle can also be explained through a scientific principle. As Newton’s third law of motion states, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since this law applies to all types of energy forces, it must apply…

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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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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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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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