Ananya

I also want to incorporate some new beliefs and mindsets in my life. But I found that it is not a single step process. For quite some time, I have been playing around with an idea, that can help me integrate all the desired character traits in my life. Step 1 : What is a character trait ? How and when do we decide that a particular person is self confident, or calm ? I believe that since character traits are intangible things ( for example, we can't touch or hold confidence, or resilience ), they must be concepts, more appropriately labels. And a person's character is an extrapolation of his daily activities and behaviors. It seems to be human nature that we label things. For example, if we see a person doing very well on tests and making deductions quickly , we extrapolate those events , and call that character an intelligent person. If a person talks confidently with everyone , maintains his composure in unfamiliar situations , and shows that he stays true to his beliefs by the way he lives, we would say that that person, is self-confident. This means that we first observe a person, or imagine a person doing certain things, and then we decide that the person is confident, or cool or level-headed etc.... This means that if we do the same things as our role models ( who may or may not exist) very single day, until the day when those actions become second nature to us, we would have acquired the required character trait. Step 2. : Take a character trait, and then break it down into every day activities. For example, what would a person that didn't care about fitting in act every day ? 1. He would write down who he was, what his goals were, what his best version would behave like 2. He would make an actionable plan to meet his goals by creating baby steps. 3. He would be skilled at recognizing feelings and effectively change them. For example, suppose what you do doesn't fit in the group. For example, you don't use social media for four hours a day, or party, or slack off playing video games because according to you these are low conscious behaviors. Some 'cool' dude approaches you and tell you how weird you are for standing out, in front of a group of people. What do you do ? 1. Well, the first is the influx of chagrin and discomfort, maybe anger. . These are the feelings you have always experienced until now. 2. Don't give in to the feeling ! Instead run the same thoughts in your mind that the ideal self confident person would experience. The ideal person, the person you want to become, would act indifferent and won't pay any attention to the crowd. What would his thoughts be ? Maybe something like : " The only person who will decide what I'll do in my life is me." " So what does cool mean anyway ? Just a concept created by humans. Or an excuse to stay mediocre and not change oneself by handing over the control to the crowd. " " Do I really want this person to decide for me ? No." " Let me not waste any energy on this interaction. I have work to do... " I believe that if I can successfully run these thoughts in my mind BETWEEN the moments of trigger and reaction, I could react differently . And every time I do this, it becomes easier to think the thoughts I want to think, not the thoughts that come naturally. Eventually, I will think the same thoughts for every situation like this, until they become involuntary. That is when I would have acquired the characted trait of not caring about what is cool and what is not. It's like reprogramming your mind by running programs . Programs, as in a sequence of thoughts and actions you must repeat whenever a stimulus approaches you. I think Systems Thinking helps a lot in visualizing this process. Working the System , by Sam Carpenter, and the blog posts in the Asian Efficiency website are great resources. Imagine if you design a system for your entire life...... The cool thing about this idea is : 1. You don't have to be born with confidence. You can become confident by doing the daily habits and thinking the thoughts of a confident person and become confident. 2. You don't have to rely on your own feelings for your personal development . By just doing it, you can create the life that you want whether you feel like it or not. This model of thinking emphasizes on doing first. It's cool because you can control everything in your life. I created as many as 6 systems to make myself the strongest version of myself. I am still working the habits....the tricky and hard part of Systems thinking is that you must follow the sequence of actions and thoughts by becoming mindful of every moment of your life. Seriously productive people have a timer that never stops...it just runs in the background forever. They make a note of every hour spent, and then analyse the time log at the end of the week. That is what you have to do here as well, be aware of every single moment, and implement the sequence of thoughts whenever a trigger appears. 1.

You know, my life has been the paragon of a victim mentality until now. But this mentality is not invincible. In the words of Steve Jobs, Everything changes when you realise that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. Now, I am only 18 and have not entered university yet, so I don't know much about life myself. But I know this - when you sit down for a few minutes each day and be grateful for recieving the gift of life and the gift of consciousness, you are thankful foryour own existence. Just being alive and having the power to think and change your life is a gift, and when you realise this you find unconditional self love that stems from this gratitude. And I stress on unconditional because this self love remains with you no matter what your situation is. So nothing can truly hurt you, or victimise you. Furthermore, when you realise how lucky you are just to be alive and have a thinking mind, you want to make sure you dont want to waste your life, and that you will break any beliefs that do not empower you - even if that means you have to fight against some of your own beliefs. I can tell by my own personal experience that becoming aware of your beliefs by monitoring your thoughts when they come and looking at them objectively really helps in shedding off the victim mentality. Gratitude is the key. It does not allow you to feel sorry for yourself. It does not allow you to lament on this wonderful thing that belongs only to you - your power to change your life.

You are not alone . Keep on trying, you can do this thing !

February 8, 2016 11:26 am IST. Day 1 I am creating this journal so that I can preserve my journey of aligning myself to my core values and reaching the highest possible level of personal productivity. Writing everything down in a notebook felt vulnerable, because the story of my life, my journey of Positive Disintegration, and all my existential crises are recorded in that notebook. In short, that notebook contains a part of me that I don't want to forget at any cost. That is why I want to record my journey in this journal, where I can be assured of it's safety. I also think that this is the one place where my thoughts are truly safe , this is the one place where I can be completely honest without starting an argument with anyone. To anybody out there who is reading this, please note that I do not write this journal in order to preach or generalise any belief system. So treat it as a diary of one insignificant person in this very large world, and be free to criticise anything I write. Waking up. Uptil this point, I have been drifting through my life. Because drifting is easy. It's easy to lose yourself in distractions, to tell yourself that you just can't do certain things , and settle down with compromises. After all, you have all the distractions you need to immerse yourself in. You don't need to challenge yourself, just do what everybody else is doing, fit in the group. And please don't try to go against the current. If it is not in your destiny ,it will not happen. So just accept that already, okay ? You can't change. If you are mediocre and lazy and weak hearted, then that's just who you are, who you were all this time and who you will be for the rest of your existence . This is what I heard from everyone around me. And this is what many people who I have met believe, not only about me, but also about themselves. And subconsciously, I believed in it too, although I fought with this issue open the outside. Being weird helped, because people always expected that I would turn out different. After all , I was the unpopular, overweight kid who cared more about astronomy than the pop music culture, that pondered and asked too many questions. The one who was never cool enough to fit in any group. It was only when I was suicidal, and I seriously contemplated the utility of my existence, that a tiny voice jolted me awake. " So they say you are unworthy, that you can never change, that you are a burden. That you are to remain stuck with this life of yours because this is who you are ? Are you going to continue with your self sabotaging habits just because you think you can't change ? That you don't deserve success because you are not the right kind of person , that you wasted a lot of your life already ? Let me tell you this, I am not going to tolerate giving up anymore." This tiny annoying voice was fighting with amother stronger voice who relied on my past failures and shortcomings to come up with logical, realistic reasons on why I should just quit trying to change my life. My mind was sinking into depression, falling deeper and deeper with every passing day. With no one to tell me how to get out of this pit, I felt alone. And when I was alone, and free from my distractions of the outside world , the questions I had been trying to avoid all this time, became unavoidable. Why am I here ? Why should I go on living ? Is there something I can look forward to when no one else needs me ? Is my value in this world determined by something else other than that which is assigned to me by other people ? If society were to crumble away and all the concepts and beliefs and the security that comes with them were to shatter , would I have some place inside my heart where I could return to ? Could I be all alone in my journey and still have the strength to complete it ? It was that moment when I decided I was not going to fall away into depression despite the feeling being so overwhelmingly powerful, that I became aware of an enemy that I didnt know existed - my own mind. The sheer amount of force it required to lift myself up from the bed and walk up to the desk to write the first few paragraphs of this post drove me towards personal devlopment. Fighting with others is easy . Fighting with the hard set mould of your own mind, now that is a different story altogether.....