Category: Self-growth

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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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Community, Global challenges, Personal mastery, Relationships, Self-growth | Comments Off on Personal Mastery and Living our Lives Inside Out…

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 the Journey Within


Most of us are so often driven by external evaluation and relative success. We tend to assess how we are doing based on external and visible parameters of evaluation – be it the career, job title, size of bank account or the car one drives. A lot of us also seem stuck in the idea of relative success – no matter how successful one is, there is an element of seeing it in relative terms to people around us – the guy driving the Mercedes c-class is watching the guy in e-class and the guy in e-class is thinking when’s he going to get the BMW 7-series and so on…as a result, we are living a poor man’s life because we are all the time thinking of what we don’t have rather than be thankful for all the wonderful blessings we do have.

It is this thought process that leaves a vacuum in people’s lives. No wonder the results on the happiness test for the very same “successful” individuals maybe substantially scattered**

Often, people are also consumed by the pursuit of money. However, does seeking money and other pleasures create sustainable happiness? There’s enough body of research to suggest that while there may be a positive correlation between annual income level and happiness until you reach a reasonable level of income (say, US$20,000), there is necessarily no correlation after the income level crosses that threshold. In 2002-2003, the New York Times reported that the real income in the US had risen over 16% during the previous 30 years, but the percentage of Americans who described themselves as “very happy” had actually fallen from 36% to 29% during the same period.

In a more spiritual sense, this constant struggle can be explained by the sense of duality and separation created by the human mind. Based on how the mind gets conditioned from all the past experiences, it forms perceptual maps to operate in the physical world. Over time, the mind’s identification with this map becomes so strong that it begins to see it…

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