When "MORE" Makes Life Better !

 

Doesn't it sound ironical to talk about "more" as a means of bettering our lives especially when so many of us seem obsessed with incorporating "less" in our lives for the purpose. Whether it's implementing the concept/ philosophy of de-cluttering, minimalism or essentialism, the quest to "live with less" never seems to end. Many of us are always on a spree to do away with our possessions in a bid to "live better and more meaningfully" through surviving with bare, minimum life essentials.

To many of us, talking about "more" as a means of achieving a better life (in many ways) may sound contrary to the above and we may start to wonder about the possibility of it ! The catch here is the context we put for "MORE" - as long as we perceive "more" in terms of "extra" or "add-on", we may always be in astonishment, but the moment we change the frame of reference to "incorporating the essential" in our life, "More" starts to make better sense and things become much clear. Here, in this post i share about five such ways when "more" brings fulfillment and success and makes our lives much better vis-a-vis "less". Let's look at them 

Living more REAL and Less Digital 

The amount of life we live in the virtual world is so much more than in actual. The social media, social networks has permeated our lives so much that it has blurred the distinction between real and fake. We always seem to be living our "alter ego" in the digital world and have almost forgotten what it is to live our "real" self. The time calls for being more real than digital to remain the "homo sapiens", the species that we, humans, belong to. The biggest danger of living "digital" is the eroding away of basic elements like emotions, feelings and rationality that sets us apart from the rest of the species. Living more REAL will not only help rekindle the lost spirit of brotherhood, but also prevent the pretense of superiority or parity which is not required and help us be more respectful of others' identity and needs. The moment we drift away from the "real" is when we start to see a dip in our esteem, efficacy and confidence. So, let's not compromise on living a fulfilling life and start live Real.     

  

Living more in PRESENT than in Future

We live in a fast paced competitive world and majority of the time we are focused on securing our future. We go all out to accumulate as much as we can, thinking that this will make our lives better in future (a myth, though !). We do not give sufficient importance to the existing moments and let go of all the beauty and pleasures contained in the current moments by allowing the life go by us. All this happens, primarily, because we tend to view life in limited dimensions (like wealth and professional growth) and so keep working towards improving these specific dimensions of our life at the cost of the rest of the dimensions like self, family, health, etc. This ultimately leads to a state of imbalance and our hopes of a better life in future get quashed in no time. When we start giving importance to the present, we, not only, start noticing and feeling the little pleasures of life but also start living life lot better. So, let's live in the Present and bring balance in our life.   

Saying more NO and less Yes

However positive and affirming "Yes" may sound but making it a philosophy of life leads to lot of dissatisfaction in life. We need to realise that every "Yes" eats into our resources of time, effort, attention, money, etc. For reasons obvious and not-so obvious, we may say yes to things, people and situations but that doesn't guarantee success always and later we may regret saying yes to so much. If we can remember that everything is not worth our time, attention and effort then we can start saying NO more comfortably. The best thing about saying NO is that we take a positive and progressive step towards a better life by avoiding taking too much, which most of the times is beyond our capacity and interest. So, let's get judicious in our choices/ decisions and say NO when doing so make our lives clutter-free and better.     

Doing more MONO and less Multi

When "Survival of the Fittest" becomes the sole mantra to live by and busyness takes preference over productivity; when being competitive is not good enough and one starts to outdo others by way of becoming better, smarter and/ or faster than multi-tasking seems to become the norm. Engaging ourselves in plenty, much more than we can handle, gives the feeling of doing more. We try to ape the supercomputer which has in-built capability for parallel processing, but forget that as humans, we possess only single processing capability. For us to focus on multiple tasks together is impossible and how much we may say we are multi-tasking, it's actually mono-tasking that we still do. The reason being, that at any point, humans can just focus on a single thing. The biggest advantage of mono-tasking is that we can focus well and pay undivided attention to the task at hand. On the other hand, in multi-tasking, not only we become more unproductive as a result of many unfinished tasks, but we also tend to spend more time shifting among the multiple tasks and taking longer to restart on the previous tasks (proven by research). So, let's make our lives better by doing things one at a time.  

(Related Article: BUSYNESS - The Utopian Paradox )

Connecting more INTERNALLY and less Externally

With all the attractions and distractions contained in the world around us, it's easy to get swayed by what strike our senses and fall prey to the "pull factor" syndrome, where we just get led by things. This results in ending up operate our lives with an "outside-in" approach, where the control of our life gets passed onto things external and we lose grip on our life. This tendency of going along with the flow of  VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment is not conducive to our growth and development and can be addressed by altering the orientation of our approach to life by making it an "inside-out" approach. During these times, when we are struggling to be authentic and credible, connecting more within gives us access to that inner wisdom that equips us with powers of creativity and intuition, that helps us stand tall during times of adversity. So, if we keep visiting our inner guide, we will end up discovering our best ally.  

(Related Article : Playing Buddha At Work)

Here's ending with a wonderful quote that nicely sums up the entire post 

"Aspire not to have more, but to be more" 

                                                - Oscar Romero

Note : the images in the above post have been sourced from the internet

"ABSOLUTE" is the way to LIVE !

Living a complete and satisfying life is everybody's dream but not many of us manage to achieve it. At times, many of us just meander through life and mistake it as "going with the flow", whereas in reality it's a dilly-dally approach that we seem to adopt to suit our convenience. But this convenience in no way an assurance of a comfortable life. A comfortable life is not about living/ operating in our "comfort zone" but about taking risks, trying new things so that we align with the unpredictable nature of the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world we live in. One approach to identify what ails us in preventing us from living a good life, is to map our life on a YES-NO continuum and identify where we spend maximum of our life. We may be surprised to note that a big part of our life operates along the continuum but never touches the end points of YES and NO. Living like this may be fine as long as we feel okay being mediocre, confused and stressed in our lives. The cacophony inside our head may never let us realise that decisiveness is the key that open doors of opportunities for us and we need to take action to bring clarity in life.

Believe it or not, taking action to build the much needed clarity in our life, is as simple as deciding what we want and don't want in our life. Here, in this post, I share about a strategy that aids us in this process of bringing clarity in life. This strategy is both effective and very simple to implement. The strategy is "Absolutely YES -NO List" and is based on the context of "YES-NO" continuum mentioned in the previous paragraph. I read about this strategy for the first time, in the book Life Makeovers by Cheryl Richardson, where she mentions about creating an "Absolutely" Yes list. There are quite a few variants of this "Yes-No" list proposed by many other life coaches. I provide here my own variant with an aim to simplify the strategy further.

When we talk about goals and resolutions, we make use of techniques like prioritisation and scheduling to make the process of achievement smoother for us. But any technique is useful only when we have the right list of items identified. This is where the "Absolutely Yes-No List" strategy comes to our aid by suggesting making of two different list of tasks/ things -  1. YES List, jotting down everything that you want for/ in your life, and 2. NO List, jotting down everything you do not want in life. The objective of the list is to come up with 5-7 key items that need to be acted upon immediately, whether to be added in our schedule (YES list) or to be removed from our schedule (NO list). This may sound simple but it involves a series of steps to make the strategy work in our favour. Let's look at the seven steps that will help you achieve your desired goals 

• Identify Core Values - First and foremost, we need to identify our values/ core values. These can be thought of as guiding principles of our life. Once we have our core values defined/ identified, a framework is established for operating our life. Identifying all the possible operating values that we can think of and then boiling down to top 5-7 would be helpful. Below is the my list of top 5 operating values (the circled ones). I started off by identifying all the possible values i related to and then boiled down to top 5. There are plenty of downloadable list of core values available on the internet and those could be used to do this exercise 

• List all the daily tasks undertaken - There's always plenty that keeps us busy all through the day. Somewhere, Busyness has overshadowed Business (Related Article : BUSYNESS - The Utopian Paradox) . Listing down everything in front of us brings it all in our line of view. We just need to list down everything that consumes our resources of time, effort, energy, etc. For example, my list of daily tasks include exercising, writing, commuting, reading, family chores, meetings, social media time, etc. ( Related Article : BRAIN DUMP - Declogging a Cluttered Mind )

• List the resources available - We always operate within some constraints and therefore knowing the resources available to us in terms of time, knowledge, skills, etc. helps. We need to be aware of the effective time that gets available to us to focus on and do what we want to and this may easily be calculated by taking in consideration the commute time, sleep hours, important chores, etc. It may happen that from the 24 hours that gets available to us every day, only 9-10 hours turn out to be the effective available time. So, getting to know how much we can invest helps us to become more judicious about investment of resources at our disposal.  

• Identify the current Focus Areas of Life - Life is a composite entity and therefore we should  always perceive it so and look at it in terms of multiple areas like Family, Work, Health, Friends, Finance, Personal Growth, etc. But remember that not every area needs the same level of importance all the time. Different periods of time require us to focus on different areas, based on what's creating imbalance in our lives at that point in time. A good way to select the right focus areas is use the WHEEL OF LIFE tool. (Related Article : WHEEL OF LIFE - Creating a Balanced Life)   

• Establish relevant and appropriate Goals - Once we identify the Focus Areas, we can establish appropriate goals pertinent to that area. This is where we need to refer back to our core operating values to pick up the relevant goals. Few of my own goals are 

• Get Fitter - Growth
• Upgrade my Coaching Certification - Vision and Growth
• Be more disciplined in Blogging - Being the Best
• Read 100 books this year - Personal Development
• Write 2 self-help books this year - Vision
• Establish a Life Coaching Forum/ Helpline - Making a Difference

I have mapped each of my identified goals to my operating core values

• Create Action Plan for the Goals - Achieving every goals requires a set of actions. In this step, we list down all those steps that we need to execute to move closer to our goals. Related to some of my above mentioned goals, few action steps could be

• Get Fitter - Run/ Exercise, Eat Healthy
• Be more disciplined in Blogging - Join Bloggers Community, Create a Blogging Plan, Attach with a Blog Buddy
• Read 100 Books - Join reading challenge (Goodreads), Join Readers Group, Join Book Club

• Match Action Plan with the Daily Task List and Resource Availability to arrive at the final Absolutely Yes and Absolutely No List. It should look something like this ( see the image below ) 

Live ABSOLUTELY to Live COMPLETELY !

Investments That Never Fail Us In LIfe !

Undoubtedly Money is the most prioritised resource for most of us and special care is taken while investing it. It does not require much thinking to decide where to invest money. The most obvious strategy being to invest where it gives the maximum returns. We try our best to invest our money in the right place and at the right so as to get the best returns on it.

Now, let me shift the context to the most crucial aspect of our existence i.e. our LIFE. How many times have we given a thought to the investments that will maximise the returns on our life and enable us to live a more fulfilling life ? I am sure most of us have not even thought about it ever. We just seem to be crawling along and satisfied with whatever comes our way.

In the wake of the decreasing human attention span (which is about 8 seconds), "minimum attention, maximum retention" seems to be the only mantra that most of us swear by and live by in today's time. We live with the principle of extracting the maximum output from the input but this principle aids our growth and development only when we have a clarity about the "inputs". Apart from money, what are those other "essential resources" that impact our life considerably in terms of success and growth ?  It's not easy to identify the other "resources" from the plethora that we confront every day but here, in this post, i cover 4 such resources that abide by the basic principle of "minimising-maximising" of the times. These 4 resources could prove to be a good investment if handled with care and caution (wisely). Let's discuss these four crucial investments that can turn around our lives for good.

• EMOTIONS : Emotions are the bedrock of a complete/ whole personality. Whether it's about ensuring a holistic personality, creating balance in life, excelling at work or building strong relationships, emotions play a crucial role. Investing emotions wisely can help us prevent spiralling downwards in life during crucial events and situations. Imagine getting into a regrettable relationship and wasting crucial years/ period of your life without any gain/ growth/ stability whatsover. Emotions work on the concept of "attachment or bond(ing)". The more attached we feel towards something (person, product, situation, etc.), the more emotions we invest into the thing. An emotionally disturbed person can never take rational decisions and also becomes very tentative in approach towards life. This leads to drop in confidence and esteem which directly impacts the personality of the individual. So, be wary of where you invest your emotions. 

• ENERGY : If momentum is what maintains consistency towards success in our life, then energy is what builds up that momentum. Most of the times, its that surge, that burst of energy that spurs us for unabated action when faced with the likelihood of giving up in life. If we can manage to direct/ redirect our energy at the right moment towards the right task, then we can be assured of accomplishing our goals in a timely manner. So, when it comes to investing your energy, be careful about expending it on the right areas/ tasks/ activity and at the appropriate moment so that it yields the best results. Never let go of any opportunity for the lack of desired energy that may be needed to complete the task. While running the sprint, its the final burst of energy that decides the winner between/ among the sprinters running neck to neck. There have been so many instances in the sprint world when the winner was decided on the basis of fraction of second. The runner who put in that required energy in time came out triumph. So, be like the sprinter and be ready for the "burst" when the need arises. 

• FOCUS : One of the big paradox that we are living today is that of FOCUS. The more we lose it, the more we demand it. Surrounded and bombarded with umpteen distraction, we just can't seem to pay sufficient attention to the things that demand it. With constant dwindling of human attention span, the resource of "Focus" had become more crucial in our lives and gradually moving towards becoming a "rare commodity". The market boasts of many tools and practices (based on the concept of Mindfulness is one such example) aimed at improving focus and attention span. Few examples of the same are Mindfulness, Pomodoro  and TimeBoxing The best strategy to derive the maximum return from FOCUS lies in "monotasking" instead of multi-tasking and paying our full attention to the task till its completion.

• TIME : Everything in our life, whether work, relationship or self-growth consumes a part of our time. But being a perishable resource, we can only give a portion of our time to each of the item and if we get the time allocation wrong, it takes us many steps backward in life and leave us with many unfulfilled tasks and things. The "limited (in quantity)" nature of Time makes it imperative that we make the optimum use of time available to us and the best way to do so is to imbibe the practice of Prioritisation in our approach to work and life. We will always have plenty of things seeking our attention but the moment we gain clarity about the sequence to invest our time is when we extract the best from our investment in time. Few techniques that can help us in this regard are Pareto Principle, Eisenhower Matrix    

Remember, success and happiness in our life will always accrue from making the right investments  !