Career Advice

What is holding me? What is pulling me?

Sometime, we get into situation when we have to decide between two good options thrown in front of us. Many a time, we loose out the opportunity due to lack of decisiveness – our inability to take decision at the right time.

Whenever you are faced with such situation, there is a model available for handling the situation – what is pulling me? What is holding me? You ask yourself the question and put it in this model.

“Every attempt that I make, it leads to another failure. How long shall I keep trying?”

In most of the failed situations, the cause of failure lies in how long we pull the things. It is another thing that you took the decision without much thinking, but then there are no substantial instances that vouch in favour of thinking prevents failure too.

In our life we do not have an option to avoid the failure – what we do is we look at someone, some instance, some case study and design our life based on that. But, life is not a production floor where you can produce similar thing.

Each one of us have failure, many times. May be we are not vocal about our failure as we are for success.

Think of every highly successful person you know. Do you know any one of them who got lucky by being successful at the first try?

So if you’re experiencing failure or next time you fail, keep going on. Highly successful people didn’t stop — and neither should you.

We all do things everyday but, we get caught up in the day to day activities. Though we aim to be productive, we Instead just make the list, checking things off as we go and waiting to get to the end of the list only to start it all over again the very next day.

Do you want to get out of this state and reclaim your focus today? I’ll tell you a simple trick which you can do in 3 minutes. Ready:

1) Once you finish reading this, for one minute, sit straight, close your eyes, take deep breath pumping as much air as you can in your chest. Try to bring your focus to the point of your forehead between the eyelids.

2) For the next one minute, take a piece of paper, consider one thing that you would like to accomplish today and write it down on the paper. For example, submit the project proposal to a client, complete the business plan, generate 3 sales leads, read for an hour, etc. Use strong action verbs.

3) Once again close your eyes and reflect on your today’s goal which you have just written on the paper and do deep breathing for one minute. The aim is to instil it in your mind and also find the way to get it done.

Now, go and complete that 3 minute focus exercise. You’ll be glad you did it in the evening when you will realise that you really achieved what you planned for.

Many people step into things either ill-prepared or unplanned, whether it’s a job, career, entrepreneurship or role.

As a result, they get stuck, as things don’t move as they imagined. The other problem they encounter is that they get stuck there for too long.

They don’t exit it thinking about what others will think, how they would face people around them, etc. Their indecisiveness causes more trouble for them and their loved ones!

Here’s the thing—nobody is watching you, and nobody is following you around taking notes. If you mess up, it’s not that big of a deal. Ditto if you do or say something stupid. Feel free to act on what is important to you. You can save your energies and experiences for something better.

“Is my salary raise going to be better than last year?”

“Can I work little less than I have been working throughout the past several months?”

“Can I get the promotion to the next level?”

These are the questions mostly people ask during the performance review. I don’t say these are not important. I understand work is a big piece of our life and work must be rewarding enough. In my approach, I’ve always been a bit vocal about having balance in life and make sure that you don’t look at economic gain alone as sole motivator.

I have seen that people who are fulfilled on a much broader basis, having real balance between faith, family, friends and hobbies live really well. They completely, single-mindedly focus on and get their value out of work.

We, as a society, have started gauging our progress in improving our economic situation. When we look at our kids, we ask, “Are they going to do economically better than we’ve done?” I think we need to pursue and tell people around us that socioeconomic wealth is not the only most important measure of personal happiness; having a sense of fulfilment certainly is.

I was badly stuck in my life. There were problems, but there were no answers coming. It felt like a never-ending road.

I went to my father for advice. Without giving ears to what I was going through, he said ‘take off.’

Both figuratively and literally, take. Off.

Take off in the direction of your dreams.

Take off and explore the world because getting out of your comfort zone will help you find your voice, your values, and the very things that make you you.

Take off over that hypothetical ledge, because you’ll be surprised at how much you’re capable of.

The rest is history — whenever I get stuck, I remember what my father advised, and I take off without thinking too much about where it will land.

You don’t lack creative ideas, you lack the focus to move forward

He asked, “I see there seems to be a mysterious conspiracy in favor of our competitors and it seems I am just unlucky.”

I replied, “To maximize the probability of success, it is imperative to set yourself up with an environment where you can focus on your goals and eliminate paths that push you to easily allow you to quit. Most things don’t show up the results because we quit at 90%.”

I must tell you, “Just move forward. It just needs one push with full focus and force.”

Just don’t let your doubts get the better of you when faced with inescapable situations

There are times in life when you question whether you have what it takes to be successful and times when you question whether all your sacrifices are worth it. In my dictionary there is only one answer – “Giving up is not an option.”

You won’t get the response from your potential customers, your team will fail at delivering projects on time, you’ll face customer dissatisfaction, you’ll get caught up in day to day, etc. etc.
These and there are several other inescapable situations in the life that keeps coming in the life.

In year 2008 when the world was struggling to fight the financial meltdown and depression, a legendary businessman opined me, “Whenever faced with the tough spot, my philosophy is to bow the head and let the storm pass by. Tomorrow will be another day and that would be mine.”

Recently, I came to know about the eagle, which has capability to fly at the highest length. When faced with the storm, an eagle goes at the top of the storm, floats there and allows the storm to pass underneath.

When I started up my entrepreneurial journey in 2010, I had a plan to leapfrog the success using my talent, skills, expertise and personal magic.

However, when inside the game the experience has been very different.

I believe the fun lies in being there and being around instead of mingling too much about the “destiny or destination”.