Adversity

Get Everything Out of Your Head

September 9, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When there’s so much going on in your head, you’re constantly playing mental ping-pong. All those unfinished tasks can indeed affect your ability to be present with anything that you’re doing.

Sitting down to write out all the things that are weighing on your mind can boot out the clutter. Per the Zeigarnik Effect, interrupted tasks and unfinished thoughts tend to inundate you with a constant stream of reminders. Just the simple act of capturing a task can achieve a sense of completion for the moment.

Clear off your cluttered desk, pour some tea, put on some relaxing music, light a candle, mute the phone, and write down all the things you need to pay attention to. Work stuff, home stuff, kids stuff, paperwork, school stuff, friends stuff—all the stuff! Get it all out of your head.

Writing down everything that’s occupying your mind right now won’t solve your problems, but it makes them evident. This exercise makes it a lot easier to make good intuitive choices about where you should focus now and where it’s okay that you don’t focus now.

Idea for Impact: Stop what you’re doing right now and write down everything you have in your head. Not only will this exercise put in perspective all those things you need to keep track of, but also it’s a great way to reset your day.

Mental Health Issues are Much More Common Than Acknowledged

June 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Japanese tennis superstar Naomi Osaka generated enormous attention when she withdrew from the French Open earlier this month. Osaka was penalized $15,000 by the organizers and threatened with expulsion for refusing the mandatory media assignments required by the tournament’s rules. (Osaka has announced that she’ll skip the Wimbledon, too, for personal reasons.)

Osaka said she experiences “huge waves of anxiety” before speaking to the media and revealed that she has “suffered long bouts of depression.” She framed her decision as a mental health issue, declaring that answering questions after a loss can create self-doubt.

Osaka’s withdrawal has brought to the fore the fact that celebrities—just like regular people—struggle with mental wellness at work. No one is immune.

Osaka must be admired for talking about mental hardship openly. Her actions empower others with anxiety and depression to take care of mental health first.

It’s very human to be terrified of stuff that makes us very vulnerable. Not everybody is comfortable with public speaking, and few people feel they’re good at it. And, more to Osaka’s point, almost everyone hates talking publicly about what they did wrong after a defeat or a setback.

Idea for Impact: Bringing depression out of the shadows is a tough thing to do. Nobody has the right to invalidate or question how someone is trying to cope, especially when they’ve been strong enough to open up about it.

Five Ways … You Could Be More Optimistic

March 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Manage negative emotions and yourself. People who lack the capacity to withstand psychological distress such as anger, fear, frustration, and sadness are at a marked disadvantage in life.
Let go of sunk costs. Don’t become stuck with poor decisions hoping that they will eventually work out in your favor. Cut your losses when something’s not working for you. Too much persistence can often be bad.
Stop thinking in absolutes. Shun blind optimism. Discard the myth of perfection. Even the most optimistic outlook may do little good without realism and flexibility. Learn to accept and forgive—there’s good and bad in all individuals and things.
Do without the word ‘should.’ Instead of telling yourself, “I should have finished that task last week,” substitute the word ‘could.’ Realize you have the option of exercising your own choice.
Practice gratitude. Make a list of all the people and things in your life for which you are grateful. Reflect on the richness of the events and relationships that have enhanced your life. Recognizing that you are deserving of all these good things will make you feel good about who you are and what you’ve done.

Bonus: Give yourself time to feel good. When you reach a goal, allow for a period of celebration before taking on the next goal. Treating yourself occasionally, but avoid escapism.

“What Am I Sad About?”

March 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When you’re struggling with sadness, part of your feelings may involve experiencing a lot of distress and shame about how sad you feel.

You probably won’t even realize it’s happening, but you’ll feel like “I shouldn’t be this sad” and that “my sadness is a weakness.”

It shouldn’t always feel like it’s just you.

When you acknowledge your sadness, you can actually perceive how you’re tunneling yourself into more gloom. Then you could do a much better job of accepting your sadness as it is, as the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke reminds in the masterpiece Letters to a Young Poet (1929):

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Thinking through “What am I sad about?” can help you get happier

Try to redirect the blame from yourself and recognize that sadness is a natural and reasonable response to the miseries of the world—some of them personal, some collective.

Yes, believing in yourself in the face of self-doubt can be challenging. But the extent of sadness isn’t immutable.

You can trigger a vast shift in how you feel by dropping self-criticism and embracing a more kind, non-judgmental relationship with yourself. Sadness isn’t a state of sin.

Change “I can’t do this” to “this will be a challenge for me; it’s normal to feel anxious.
Accept “I hate this” with “this is a tough situation to handle, and I’m doing my best.”
Persuade yourself to substitute “I hate myself” with “I’m overwhelmed with low self-esteem at the moment, and I need to cheer myself as I would a friend.”
Instead of repenting, “I can’t believe it slipped my mind again,” let yourself off by acknowledging, “it’s difficult to balance so many things. Perhaps I need to let go of some of them.”

Idea for Impact: Befriending your feelings and not identifying with these feelings as your self can affirm not only who you are but also what you believe you can be. Even when you feel disturbed because you’re falling back into past patterns, bear in mind that simply being aware that you’ve retreated into going over the past is a precursor of growth. Self-awareness can pave the way to a great leap forward in your personal transformation.

Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

February 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It’s okay to be wrong about things. It’s okay to be upset. It’s okay if things don’t go the way you purposed. It’s okay if you say something embarrassing. It’s okay if you make a fool of yourself. It’s okay if you failed. It’s okay if you disappointed a loved one.

We’ve all made mistakes—rushed decisions, careless oversights, and lapses of judgment. Even after taking the thoughtful time and overanalyzing them, we’ve not been able to avoid faults.

And after their immediate effects come to pass, our minds are assaulted by those woulda-coulda-shoulda ruminations.

Mistakes are a natural part of your journey. They’re patches of rough and bumpy ground that will eventually help you get where you need to go. Life is a long game, and you’ll never know what your current experiences will mean over time.

Mistakes can offer a kind of insight and perspective that nothing else does. After all, you don’t learn quite as much from a right decision as you do from a wrong one.

Curb the idea that you have to be successful at everything you attempt. In the grand scheme of things, no one’s going to care about your failures, and neither should you.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so hard on yourself. You are not your mistakes. Perhaps, when life rejects you from something good, it may be redirecting you to something better, whether or not you realize it at that time. Seek ways to move forward.

How Can You Contribute?

January 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The celebrated management guru Peter Drucker urged folks to replace the pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution. To him, the existential question was not, “How can I achieve what’s been asked of me?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker wrote in his bestselling The Effective Executive (1967; my summary,)

The great majority of executives tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than with results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they “should have.” As a result, they render themselves ineffectual. The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in a person’s own work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in his relations with others—his superiors, his associates, his subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports. The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results.

Peter Drucker: Focus on Contribution - How Can You Contribute? Focusing on contribution versus (or as well as) typical metrics of success pivots you away from self-focus and helps engage in meaningful relationships with your employees, peers, and managers.

In his celebrated article on “Managing Oneself” in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, Drucker clarified,

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress—as it was for domestic servants.

There is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

Focusing on contribution instead of efforts is empowering because it compels you to think through the results you need to deliver to make a difference and identify new skills to develop. “People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves,” as Drucker remarked in The Effective Executive.

Choose Pronoia, Not Paranoia

January 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Pronoia is a weird, incredible feeling that everyone out there is helping you and cheering you on. The world is showering you with blessings.

Yes, that’s the antithesis of paranoia.

Pronoia is the delusional sentiment that people are conspiring in favor of your well-being, speaking nice things behind your back, and rooting for your benefit. The American astrologer Rob Brezsny has written, “Pronoia is the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect, so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.”

Pronoia is a convivial orientation—one exemplified by feelings of hope, trust, confidence, and affection. Choosing to cultivate optimism thus opens up a new identity. You no longer harbor bitterness and misgivings towards others.

Idea for Impact: Embrace the mindset that life is happening for you instead of against you. It’s a fantastic way to experience life!

Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”

November 2, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the mid-1950s, Gillis Lundgren (1929–2016) was a draftsman living in a remote Swedish village of Älmhult. He was the fourth employee of a fledging entrepreneur named Ingvar Kamprad.

Kamprad’s business was called IKEA, an acronym combining his initials and those of his family’s farm and a nearby village. He had founded IKEA in 1943 and got his start selling stationery and stockings at age 17. In the 1950s, Kamprad had launched a low-cost mail-order furniture retailer to cater to farmers.

Constraints have played a role in many of the most revolutionary products

In 1956, Lundgren designed a veneered, low coffee table. He built the table at home but realized that the table was too big to fit into the back of his Volvo 445 Duett station wagon. Lundgren cut off the legs, packed them in a flat box with the tabletop, and rushed to a photoshoot for the IKEA furniture catalog.

And in so doing, Lundgren unintentionally birthed the flatpack furniture industry. He modified his simple design and drew up plans for a disassembled version of the table. Lundgren’s Lövet table (now called Lövbacken) became IKEA’s first successful mass-produced product.

IKEA and Its Flatpacking Took Over the World

IKEA’s trademark, easy-to-follow assembly instructions are a central ingredient to the company’s success. Manufacturing and distributing prefabricated furniture via flatpacking has proved enormously successful. It has dramatically facilitated the shipment and storage of pieces that otherwise took up much more space.

According to Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design—The IKEA Story (1998,) the concept of ready-to-assemble furniture is much earlier than that. But IKEA was the first to systematically develop and sell the idea commercially.

Flatpacking contributed to many of IKEA’s products’ enduring popularity—they’re affordable, sleek, functional, and brilliantly efficient. In 1978, Lundgren designed the iconic Billy bookcase, the archetypical IKEA product that currently sells one in three seconds.

IKEA’s aesthetic of simplicity and efficiency reflects in its exclusive design and marketing approach. IKEA constantly questions its design, manufacturing, and distribution to create low-cost and acceptably good products.

The method has been adopted by numerous other business enterprises, transforming how products are made and sold globally.

Out of Limitations Comes Creativity

One problem with creativity is that sometimes people face an open field of creative possibilities and become paralyzed. Constraints can be the anchors of creativity [see more examples here, here, and here.]

Constraints fuel rather than limit creativity. Use constraints to break through habitual thinking and promote spontaneity. The mere experience of playing around with different constraints can stretch your imagination and open your mind’s eye for ingenuity.

Idea for Impact: Use constraints to help stimulate creativity. As the British writer and art critic G. K. Chesterton once declared, “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

How to Bounce Back from a Setback

August 12, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Bounce Back from a Setback When life deals you a blow, and you can’t seem to make yourself move on, consider these simple actions you can take.

Think positively. Allow yourself a modest amount of disappointment, but don’t wallow in it. Whenever negative thoughts enter your brain, say “Stop” and turn your attention to something constructive, hopeful, and optimistic. Focus on what you want, not what you fear you’ll lose.
Be grateful for everything life has given you and for every step forward you can take. A conscious focus on gratitude can remind you of unassuming plusses that get lost in the vicissitudes of a hurried life.
Let go. Don’t look back too often. Keep yourself open to today’s new opportunities. Know what’s beyond your control.
Take decisive action. Tackle each critical task with an explicit goal; don’t avoid problems. Scale back your expectations; alas, sometimes you simply won’t be at your best.
Take a long-term view and re-examine all those short-term decisions. Don’t get hung up on a particular outcome, event, person, or experience. Stop focusing on what you don’t have or don’t like; focus on what you do have and do like.

Idea for Impact: Often, just knowing that you have some control is enough to change your perspective from bleak to hopeful. What’s important in life is not what’s happened to you, but how you’ll react. What’s a baby step you can take to improve your situation?

What’s Wrong With Giving Advice

August 10, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it,” somebody once remarked.

What really happens when you offer advice is … you instinctively send a message to the other person that they don’t have the resources to solve the problem themselves.

Your advice is probably rooted in your expectations, not in the understanding of the other

The best way to give advice is to not give any advice at all but to listen attentively and emphatically.

People who relate their problems don’t really want your advice, even if they seek to sound you out about a problem.

They want you to listen to their problem, perhaps ask open-ended questions to help them think through the problem, and help them explore the options they have.

People Want You to Listen, Not to Talk

Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour notes that parents can’t help but offer direct solutions to their kids’ problems. In her insightful ‘Adolescence’column for the New York Times, Damour suggests,

Rushing in with suggestions carries the risk that it may strike our teenagers as a vote of no confidence when they are mainly seeking our reassurance that they can handle whatever life throws at them.

Instead of proposing solutions, we might bolster adolescents as they sort things out. Saying, “I’ve seen you get through things like this before” or “This is tough, but you are too” can effectively loan teenagers a bit of perspective and confidence when their own feels shaken.

Even teenagers who have already addressed a problem may still seek our reassurance. [A teenager] said she sometimes tells her parents “about a situation and what I did to solve it” in order to get validation that she made the right choice. When this happens, she says she’s “not really looking for their solution, just checking that they think I did the right thing with my limited problem-solving experience.”

Adolescents often feel vulnerable, perhaps especially so when they open up to adults about their jams and scrapes. In these moments, well-intentioned guidance can land like criticism, and lectures or “I-told-you-so”s—however warranted—may feel like outright attacks.

More often than not, offering our teenagers an ear, empathy, and encouragement gives them what they came for. If your teenager wants help solving the problem, divide the issue into categories: what can be changed and what cannot. For the first type, focus on the needs your teenager identifies and work together to brainstorm solutions. For the second type, help them come to terms with the things they cannot control.

Often People Want You to Listen—Sharing is an Act of Self-Reflection

When people open the door of their confidence, tread delicately.

Open the ear of your heart. Don’t impose your perspective, but help them find a solution that works for them.

To empathize, say, “You are in a tough situation,” “gee, that stinks, it totally not fair to you,” “I understand why you feel this way,” “You have every right to be offended,” or “I’m so sorry you have to face this kind of difficulty right now.”
To help clarify, say, “I might be wrong, but it seems to me …,” “Are you concerned that …,” or “what if ….”
To expand perspective, say, “This may seem like a big deal at this time, but how will you feel about this in a week? A month? A year?” or “what do you think is the worst fallout of this?”

Idea for Impact: Often, the Best Advice You Can Give is Not Providing Any At All

If pressed to offer an opinion, tease out the options they’re considering. Ask, “What do you think you ought to do?” or “What would you like to happen?”

Don’t offer a solution that pleases you more than it does the other. The best solution to a problem somebody is facing is the one that works for the other person, not you.

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Adversity

Wondering what to read next?

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Wondering what to read next?

It shouldn’t always feel like it’s just you.

Thinking through “What am I sad about?” can help you get happier

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

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Constraints have played a role in many of the most revolutionary products

IKEA and Its Flatpacking Took Over the World

Out of Limitations Comes Creativity

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Your advice is probably rooted in your expectations, not in the understanding of the other

People Want You to Listen, Not to Talk

Often People Want You to Listen—Sharing is an Act of Self-Reflection

Idea for Impact: Often, the Best Advice You Can Give is Not Providing Any At All

Wondering what to read next?