Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is something which would be bothering many of us with the blurring of lines between our work lives and our personal lives. The reasons for this imbalance is due to fast paced changes in the demands of business in the world where we live in during the past few years. Globalization is provoking increased competition, there is cost containment and downsizing which means work needs to be done by fewer people and also the technological advancement is making it so easy  for people to be available 24x7 whenever wherever without any boundaries. Everybody is busier than ever and there is too much to do in too little time. Customers, employers’ expectations are higher than ever and it is not always possible to keep up with all the expectations of various stake holders.

Robin Sharma has defined work life balance as a fluid balance between performance and pleasure. To get to world class in work life balance is managing performance on one hand with pleasure on the other hand. This he calls as platinum equation. Work-life balance is subjective and hence cannot be defined objectively. It is fluid because it is ever changing and varies from person to person. What is a balance for one person may not be same with you. It is something which each one of us has to work on each single day. It is a daily challenge, the real thing is to be aware of how to get to a better balance. The key is to have a balance of performance to pleasure.

A metaphor can be used to explain the platinum equation. Platinum equation is something akin to climbing a mountain and being able to strike that dynamic balance between keeping your eyes on the mountain top and still enjoying the climb. The mountain top in the metaphor are the “to do’s” and “your goals” those giant objective you want to get to, to live your dreams. And “the climb” in the metaphor is all about the journey of life, living in the moment and experiencing the pleasure so that you not only realized your human potential and played your best game and showed genuine leadership but you also had an amazing time doing it.

Performance balance with pleasure will take one to greatness and that’s going to give a work life balance. This balance is an ideal, it’s not easy and it’s a daily challenge, every day one will have to balance performance with pleasure and sometimes getting a little too far on performance side and on other day spending little more time on enjoyment and pleasure side, but with awareness and with the discipline to make those course corrections or those self -corrections one need to bring oneself back into a better balance.

There are lots of benefits of arriving at work life balance, some of them are given below:

• You will be more effective rather than being busy just for the sake of being busy as there is no point in being so busy climbing a mountain that when you get to the top you realize that you climbed a wrong mountain.
• You are going to be happier, you are going to have a better health and more energy in what you do. Energy is contagious, when you are a positive source of energy your team mates, your family, your friends will feel it.
•  You will experience a greater sense of control, you will not have that out of control feeling all the time.
• You will have a great time with your family and friends and will take time to do the things that makes you happy.
•  You will have a richer relationship at work and at home.
•  You will have superior connection with life and a feeling that you are in the game of life rather than falling into the trap so many people have fallen into and living by accident, being reactive rather than being proactive.

Given below are few ideas which would be helpful in  building a world class life:

• Devote yourself to daily self-care: This can be better explained with the metaphor of oxygen mask on an airplane. Essentially when you get on to the airplane, the first thing you hear from the flight attendant is “in the event of an emergency oxygen mask will come down from the ceiling, put the oxygen mask on your mouth before you try to help anyone else even your children.” The point of wisdom is pretty clear in this announcement, if you can’t breathe you cannot help anyone else. If you do not have any oxygen you will not be of service to anyone around you.A parallel to this can also be drawn from the fact that we all use mobile phones and we all charge the mobile phone battery daily for it to work for the day, similarly for human body to work at its best it is essential to charge your body every day. Taking care for yourself is a selfless act. Taking care of yourself allow you to be more for others. Too many people needs a crisis in their life for them to wake up to what is truly important and begin to care for themselves and focus on their inner work. Few tips for daily self-care can be, getting up early and take sixty minutes for yourself every morning, during that time work on connecting with the person you truly are, work on your character, think about your fears, think about your
  
  weaknesses.Write a journal, this will allow you to spot a pattern, it allows you to build awareness. After you continue the journal for a little while, you will start spotting pattern and you will start seeing the consequences of your actions. It allows you to put down the lessons you learn from life. Journal helps release negative feeling in a healthy way. Journaling helps in searching your beliefs. We treat the people we love the most in the worst ways.Get to a world class fitness level. Nothing is more important than health, it is more important than your family, because If you do not have good health, you cannot be there for your family, cannot celebrate with your family. Often we take our health for granted until we lose it. When we are young we would sacrifice our health for wealth and yet when we get old and figure out what life is truly all about, we would sacrifice every penny of our wealth for one good day health. To commit yourself for self-care take care of your health. When you are in really a good physical condition life is lot more fun, lot happier.

•  Enrich your human connections: So many people in business spend most of their waking hours in building their careers and becoming successful so that they can get to a point where they can have fun, pleasure and enjoyment with people they love but the tragedy is once they get there the people they love are no longer there with them. There is no point of being really successful but all alone, without family and friends alongside of you as you journey to the mountain top. Love and belonging is essential to realize your best on the pleasure side. We need to connect with human-beings to develop ourselves as human being and realize our potential. Building relationship and feeling a sense of belonging and a sense of community, a sense of love our thinking and our very perception of reality can be altered. Most of us are out of balance on the pleasure side of the equation and big piece on your pleasure side is enriching your human connections especially with your family.
•  Get brilliant at life planning: Failing to plan is planning to fail. Nothing will so focus your mind than a clear plan. Every one of us in the planet today could do extra ordinary things with their life if they had clear plan and then took focused and consistent action to execute nearly flawlessly around that plan. Most people have no idea about the fullness of their human potential and the real challenge most of us face in this wired and uncertain world that we find ourselves in is that we are trying to be all things to all people and as a result we end up being nothing for anyone. It seems so obvious yet most people do not plan for what they want to create. They are very good at being busy but they are not aware that they are busy climbing the wrong mountain. A plan relieves you of the torment of choice and a plan also gives clarity.
• Practice gratitude and celebrate more: It is very common to postpone living, it is very common to say that when I retire I will celebrate more, travel, give more and enjoy my life.  It is essential to celebrate while you climb to the mountain top. Go out and play out your best but enjoy your journey, celebrate the little things while you reach your bigger goals. Practice gratitude, keep a blessing list, write down all things that you are grateful for. Our lives becomes what we think of because our action determines our destiny. Focus on good things, good things
  
  will happen because good things would drive actions which would give good results and you should celebrate and pay gratitude.  Always be thankful for everything and say 'thank you' a lot.
• Make the time for fun and adventure: See the life as lot of fun and adventure. What is the point of achieving great things and realising your mission if you have not enjoyed it along the way and not had fun along the way. You need to take time to laugh with team mates, go out with family for a funny movie, life is not more than a one giant adventure, you are meant to experience good seasons as well as challenging seasons. Life is meant to be lived fully. Life is like a river, as you go down the river you would bump against the two banks, on one side would be the bank of joy and on the other side is the bank of sorrow, every single one of us will reach both the banks from time to time, the real key is not to be stuck on either bank for too long. See life as an adventure, the person who experiences the most wins. Collapse the timeline by experiencing more.Build micro-adventures in your schedule, try different food, go to see a foreign film, go to see a senior citizen home and talk to them to understand life better, pull out some music you loved when you were growing up, this is essential as human brain craves novelty.
•  Focus on impact and meaning: What is most important in life is not what we get from life, it is what we give to life. Ultimately what fills our heart with greatest happiness, joy, fulfillment and sustainable happiness is what we have given back to others and the contribution we have made to people around us. All great lives has been defined in so many ways with the impact they have made to the lives of the people. Living with a sense of purpose, making a difference each day, making a difference to the people with your presence, leading by example, being a world class human being and have an impact on the people around you.

Taking the above ideas, if you were to improve the way you show up to the pleasure side of the equation, only 1% improvement every day, in 60 days you will see 60% improvement in that area. Life you are living today is not necessarily the life you are going to be living in the future. If you keep on doing the same thing that you have always done, you are going to see the same results you have always experienced. But if you make changes, you can be living at a whole new level professionally and personally in a matter of time.

As Confucius said, “the journey of thousand mind begins with a single step.” Better awareness, leads to better choices and when you make better choices, you will see better results.

Source: Learning from Robin Sharma's audio sessions

Attitude

You could currently be faced with a thousand problems, many or most of which you have no control over, however there is one thing where you have absolute control over, that is your own attitude. Attitude is the most powerful word. Attitude is the magic word.

When you surrender control of your attitude to what appears to be a negative situation you will then do only thing you would be capable of doing. You will react to the situation and when that happens you lose. On the other hand if you are to remain objective, you will respond to the situation appropriately and that is always the winner’s choice. The end result of these two different approaches are poles apart.

 

There are many things wrong in this world, unfortunately that is all some people are able to see. These people live dark, narrow lives, they are unhappy and have accomplished little which is of any meaning throughout their lives. Their lives are one of lack and limitation and it seems they continue to move from one bad experience to another. Unfortunately their attitude is the cause of their problems. It is unfortunate that they are generally not aware of the cause of their unwanted lifestyle. They are losing at every turn on the road of life and they do not even know why they are losing. Conversely there are those who are forever winning. They are the real movers and shakers, the lucky ones. Lucky because good things keep coming their way. They focus their attention on the beauty that surrounds them wherever they go. Their life is exciting and adventurous. They go from one major accomplishment to another. This group enjoys a wonderful family life and they develop deep and meaningful relationship with others. They are in control of their life. They know where they are going and they know that they will get there. They are real winners in life and their wins are a matter of choice.

Winners knows that everything can be better. Attitude is everything to the winner. Attitude can be defined, it can be understood and can be controlled by anyone. Attitude is the composite of your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. Attitude is actually a creative cycle which begins with your choice of thoughts. You do choose your thoughts, and that choice is where your attitude originates. Thought is energy and is considered by many as the most potent form of energy in existence. As you internalize your thoughts and get emotionally involved with your thoughts you set up your stage in forming an attitude. You move your entire being, mind and body into a new vibration. Your conscious awareness of this vibration is nothing but feeling. Your feelings are then expressed in actions or behavior and this is the final stage of forming an attitude which produces various results in your life. Attitude and results are inseparable, they follow one other like the night follows the day.

For you to make the progress you are capable of making, you must understand the cause and effect relationship of attitude to results. A person is what they think about all day long. A person’s life is what their thoughts make of it. The results you achieve in life is nothing more than an expression of your thoughts, feelings and actions. Everything in life has two sides, positive and negative. We all decide to choose to look at the positive or negative sides of any situation we come across in life, however you need to understand that you are able to see only one side at a time, the conscious mind is not able to think of two things at once. Those who win are aware of the negative, however their conscious mind focuses always on the positive. If they are not able to see positive, they keep looking at it till they discover the same.

If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results. If you think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results. Taking control of your attitude and maintaining control of your attitude is not necessarily an easy thing, however if you are able to do it you are a definite winner.

If you are not in control of your attitude but you want to get control of it, you can get it by reviewing your results and the actions. List down everything that you think is wrong. One thing is for sure that everything has an opposite, you cannot have a bad without a good, up without a down or hot without a cold. You can take anything on this list of what is wrong and find out what is good about it. You have to think and look for the good side in every action. Our own attitude begins with our own thinking and we must remember we do have a choice. We can consciously make winners choice and respond to the situation or react to the situation. If we react we lose, when we respond we winner.

The problem with most people who continually lose because they are generally not making a conscious choice, they are doing this unconsciously. It’s a habit, they have the habit of reacting to life rather than responding. Having a poor or negative attitude is frequently a part of the persons conditioned nature, it is habitual. The same is also true for positive attitude.  

Winner’s attitude is contagious. A negative attitude is a dis-integrating force, a positive attitude is a creative growth force. Love the negative person, if for no other reason but at least for the opportunity they give you to practice developing a conscious control over your attitude. Always remember, God never gives us a problem we are not equipped to handle. There would be no mental growth if everything was always rosy, there would be no need for it. Even the winner may go astray at times, they may get knocked down and lose it, however they will not stay down. Everybody makes mistake, no one is perfect. Perfection is what the winner strives for, but has not yet reached. The winner is aware of the basic truth that attitude is the foundation of all success. It is the power principle which every winner has mastered. Turn it into a habit. The winner can go broke, they may lose everything they have and may do so number of times, however they refuse to lose control over their attitude and as a result they are back on top in a short time.

Your attitude towards the world and everything in it, will determine the world’s attitude towards you. By maintaining control over the way you think, feel and act you causes good things to happen in your life and you magnetize yourself to good. Those who have poor attitude actually attracts actually negative situations into their life. These people fervently believes that winners are lucky. That is the very reason why most losers do not even try to win. They believe in luck and they are never very excited for the luck they are having. To get luck on your side and to make an evergreen attitude for yourself, you should focus on the following ten attitude forming emotions:

1.       Love and warmth: the consistent expression of love seems to be able to melt almost any negative emotion it comes in contact with. For example, if someone comes to you in a state of hurt or anger and you consistently respond to them with love and warmth, eventually their state will change and their intensity will melt away.

2.    Appreciation and gratitude: Appreciation and gratitude are two of the most spiritual emotions, actively expressing thoughts and actions for all the gifts life has given. Cultivating this emotion is cultivating life. Live with an attitude of gratitude.

3.       Curiosity: If you really want to grow in your life, learn to be as curious as child. Children know how to wonder – that’s why they are so loving. Cultivate curiosity and life becomes an unending study of joy.

4.     Excitement and passion: Excitement and passion can add juice to anything. Passion can turn any challenge into a tremendous opportunity. Passion is unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before. Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

5.       Determination: To create lasting value in this world and to deal with upsets and challenges, you need to have a strong determination. Determination means the difference between being stuck and bring struck with the lightening power of commitment. With determination you can accomplish anything. Without it, you are doomed to frustration and disappointment. Our willingness to do whatever it takes, to act in spite of fear, is the basis of courage and remember courage is the foundation from which determination is born.

6.       Flexibility: Choosing to be flexible is choosing to be happy. Throughout your life there will be times when there will be things you will not be able to control. In these situation, your ability to keep yourself flexible in your way of working will determine your long-term success or failure.

7.   Confidence: The only way you can consistently experience confidence, even in environment and situations you have never encountered previously is through the power of faith. Whether you have confidence or not is nothing to do with what is happening outside of you, it is determined by what is going on inside of you. It will be your confidence that will keep you going when your ideas are rejected, you got to be your own best friend, you got to learn to love yourself.

8.    Cheerfulness: Cheerfulness enhances your self-esteem, makes life more fun, and makes people around you feel happier as well. Cheerfulness has the power to eliminate the feelings of fear, hurt, anger, frustration, disappointment, depression, guilt and inadequacy of life.

9.       Vitality: If you do not take care of your physical body, it’s more difficult to be able to enjoy these emotions. Make sure that physical vitality is available, remember that all emotions are directed through your body. Realize that sense of vitality is a critical emotion to cultivate in order to handle virtually any emotions that come up in your life.

10.   Contribution: The secret of living is giving. There is no richer emotion in life than the sense that who you are as a person, something you have said or done had added to more than just your own life, that somehow it has enhanced the life’s experience for someone you care about or someone you don’t even know. Each day we should cultivate that sense of contribution by focusing not only on ourselves, but on others as well.

Plant the above emotions daily and watch how your attitude changes in all situation resulting in your whole life growing with a vitality that you have never dreamed of before.  Believe and succeed.

Source: Mind Games by Bob Proctor and Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins

Picture Sources : From Robin Sharma and others

Confidence

The presence of confidence free you to go where your heart leads you and to do what you want to do. Confidence gives you strength with style. It generates a non-physical aura which captures the conscious attention of people around you. It is something which other admires and is a trust in your ability. With confidence, you will always solve whatever problem you will ever be confronted with. Everybody already have confidence, however one might probably not have it when one wants it or where one wants it.

Confidence is knowing, it is an inner certainty and an absolutely nothing can change it, it comes with super conviction in the mind. Confidence is a mental state that you can develop if you are prepared to pay the price. Confidence is something you cannot afford to be without If you want to live a meaningful life.

If you are an average employee in an average position, you will require confidence to start and build a successful company. Any athlete will tell you, if there is no confidence there will be no medal, rather there will be no Olympics. Without confidence you will have a great difficulty meeting and greeting a stranger. Without confidence you would look as clumsy as a baby attempting to walk for the first time. Confidence is a passport to a fun-filled and exciting life. Confidence is without question strength with style. Confidence is a most powerful attention grabber.

Take the example if you are going to parachute out of a plane, you need to have a lot of confidence on the parachute, the materials, how is it constructed, how it is packed etc. the more you know about the parachute, your confidence would increase or decrease. If the material used is good and the quality of construction is also good, you will gain in confidence and if the material used is bad and the construction is also not up to the mark you will lose on the confidence in the parachute. Your confidence in parachute is determined by your knowledge of the parachute. Similarly, the more knowledge you have and understanding about yourself, the greater will be your confidence. Self-confidence is what permits you to move ahead in life. Self-confidence is what gives you a license to have a positive attitude about your ability to become competent in any area you presently know little about.

For example, a person who has always held a position in an administrative role in a company, suddenly shows a desire to move to a sales role where their major part of salary is paid based on commission. If the person has abundant of self-confidence, he will know that he can with proper study and effort become very competent sales person. Conversely, a person with low self-confidence will mentally entertain nothing but doubt, every time the thought of selling comes to his mind and when the thought of commission linked to sales comes to his mind, fear would dominate his mind, mentally paralyzing him. He will not be able to make such move, because of lack of self-confidence and he will in most cases end up doing the same thing, even though is largely frustrated with what he is doing and always suppresses his heart’s desire. This frustration effect every aspect of life for the individual – mentally and physically.

People who have done great works do not possess any special quality, only difference is that they have merely developed an awareness of how to do something greater than you and I may be doing. It is said that “to think that they can and you can’t is an error”, in reality it is “If they can, you can.” Confidence is a feeling which is created when the soul and the spirit connects. Confidence is the feeling which comes to you when you know you can. Confidence is feeling at home regardless.

It is also important to know that your heart will never truly desire to do something that you are not capable of doing, it is as if God has placed in each one of us a genetic governor which prevents us from wanting to do something beyond our own level of awareness and capability. You can live your dream, how this will happen is not important, knowing that it must happen is important.

Whether you have confidence or not is nothing to do with what is happening outside of you, it is determined by what is going on inside of you. It will be your confidence that will keep you going when your ideas are rejected, you got to be your own best friend, you got to learn to love yourself. Nobody pursues meaningful goals by thinking they are not good enough, you are good enough, you are better than good enough. There is no one formula to follow for believing in yourself, you have to strengthen your mind, be persistent with your ideas, and courageously follow your dream.

When you connect with your spirit, the result is confidence. Confidence is essential to live a free and creative life. The world is full of nice people with no confidence, they lose and they keep losing year after year. They remain in dull and boring positions of employment, business and personal life. They lack the confidence of making a change. A very high percentage of these nice people are also very intelligent with excellent and impressive academic results but they are losing frequently because they lack confidence. They do not even expect to win, they are not happy and their frustration seems to be endless and they do not know what to do.

It is essential that one should get out of this situation and instill self-confidence and courage to take action and create a free and creative life. Three steps are suggested to improve on confidence:

1.       Check your self-image:  What kind of the picture come to your mind when you think of yourself. When you build a picture of your dream, see yourself as a happy, healthy and prosperous individual. As long as you hold the image of your dream, the image will drive the action in that direction. It will also dictate what is attracted into your life. The more you permit the ideas to move into the feeling side your personality, the more confident you will be. Your level of confidence is doing to be in direct proportion to your awareness;

2.       Check your strengths and weaknesses: List down your strengths and weaknesses. You manage your weaknesses and put your disproportionate energy into developing your strengths. Keep getting better on your strengths until you have absolutely mastered it. People generally do what they enjoy most, they enjoy because they are good at it. You will get lot of conviction in what you do by strengthening your strengths;

3.       Train your mind to see in all people what many do not see in themselves: Begin to see all person you come in contact with as the most important person in the world. Look for what they do well and let them know you noticed it. Give everyone a sincere and merited compliment. The good you find in others, is the reflection of good you see in yourself. You should have confidence to turn big dreams into reality. When the dream is big enough, facts do not count. Compliment everyone, every day;

To sum-up confidence is a key ingredient for leading a successful life. When you feel confident you are in complete harmony with the universe. It gives you style with strength and sets up a vibration which causes others to trust your ability and it instills in them a feeling of safety. Lack of or no self-confidence causes life to be filled with doubt and fear. Confident people never permits failure to reverse their growth pattern nor do they permit other peoples criticism to impact them.You are not born with confidence but however anyone can develop confidence if one is ready to pay the price. The only difference in people is in appearance and results, we all have the same potential.

Source : Power of Mind Games by Bob Proctor

The power of questions

Most of us when we see someone of extraordinary capability or someone who seems to have super human capacity to deal with life’s challenges, think things like, “They are so lucky!”,  “They are so talented!”, “They must have been born that way.” But in reality, the human brain has the capacity to produce answers faster than the “smartest” computer on earth. True, this five kilograms lump of gray matter can give you more firepower instantly for coming up with solutions to challenges and creating powerful emotional sensations than anything in this ever evolving world of man created technologies.

Just like a computers have tremendous capacity, without an understanding of how to retrieve and utilize all that’s been stored, the brain capacity means nothing. If you want access to the files of valuable information in a computer, you must understand how to retrieve the data by asking for it with the proper commands. Likewise, what enables you to get anything you want from your own personal data-banks is the commanding power of asking questions.

The difference between people is the difference in the questions they ask consistently. Some people are depressed on a regular basis. They conduct their lives with limited movements, but more importantly they focus on the things that make them feel overloaded and overwhelmed. Their pattern of focus and evaluation seriously limits their emotional experience of life. When people are depressed, it is more likely due to asking themselves dis-empowering questions on a regular basis, questions like “What’s the use ?”, “Why even try , this never seems to work out anyway?”, “God – Why me, what have I done to deserve this ?” Remember, ask and you shall receive. If you ask a terrible question, you will get a terrible answer. Your mental computer is ever ready to serve you, and whatever questions you give it, it will surely come up with an answer. So if you ask, “Why can’t I ever succeed?” it will come up with answers like “Because you are stupid,” or “Because you don’t deserve to do well anyway”.

Questions determine everything you do in life, from your abilities to your relationship to your income. For example, many people fail to commit to relationship simply because they keep asking questions that create doubt: “What if there’s somebody better out there? What if I commit myself now and miss out?” These are terribly dis-empowering questions! This fuels the fear that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and it keeps you from being able to enjoy what you already have in your own life.

Think of the questions you habitually ask yourself in any area of your life. Invariably, if a person is not doing well in that area, it is because the questions he asks are creating a great deal of fear within him – the fear that keeps him away from taking any action which would lead to a path of success. We all have a capacity to evaluate life at a level that produces outstanding results. To change your life for the better, you must change your habitual questions. Remember the pattern of questions you consistently ask will create either pain or enjoyment, misery or magic. Ask the questions that will uplift your spirit and push you along the path of human excellence.

How questions work ?

1.   Questions immediately change what we are focusing on and therefore how we feel:  If you keep asking questions like “How come I am so depressed?” or “Why doesn’t anybody like me?” you will focus on and look for , and find references to back up the idea that there is a reason for you to feel depressed and unloved. As a result you will stay in those depressing state. If instead you ask, “How can I change my state so that I am feeling happy and am being more lovable?” you will focus on the solution. Even if your brain initially responds, “there’s nothing I can do,” but if you persist with a sense of certainty and expectation in spite of it all, eventually you will get the answer you need and deserve. You will come up with authentic reasons for feeling better and as you focus on them, your emotional state will immediately follow suit. Instead of just lifting you up, questions provide you with actual reasons to feel the emotion. Anyone can change how he feels in an instant just by changing his focus. By failing to consciously control the habitual questions we ask, we severely limit our emotional range and thus our ability to utilize the resources at hand. Get leverage: ask yourself, “If I don’t change this now, what is the ultimate price ?” and “how will my whole life be transformed if I did this right now?” interrupt the pattern, create a new, empowering alternative with a better set of questions; and then condition them by practicing them until they become a consistent part of your life.

Ask yourself some empowering questions right now. What are you truly happy about in your life right now? What’s really great in your life today? What are you truly grateful for? Take a moment to think about the answers and notice how good it feels to know that you have genuine reasons for you to feel great now.

2.    Questions change what we delete: Human being are marvelous deletion creatures. We have do many million things going around us that we can focus on right now, however we can consciously focus on only a small number of things simultaneously. So the brain spends a lot of its time trying to prioritize what to pay attention to and more importantly what not to pay attention to or what to “delete”. For example, if you are feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it is because you are deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good and conversely if you are feeling good, it is because you are deleting all the bad things you could be focusing on. So when you ask someone a question, you change what they are focusing on and what they are deleting. If someone asks you , “Are you frustrated as I am with this project?”, even if you are not frustrated, you will begin to focus on what you were deleting previously and you may start to feel bad too.   Similarly, if you are asked “what is really great in your life?” and you keep focusing on the answer, you might find yourself excellent immediately. Questions are the laser of human consciousness. They concentrate our focus and determine what we feel and do.

3.       Questions change the resources available to us: In the realms of business as well as personal life questions do open up new worlds and gives us access to resources we might not otherwise realize we have available. Learning to consciously control the questions you ask will take you further to achieving your ultimate destiny than almost anything you know. Often our resources are limited only by the questions we ask ourselves.  One important thing to remember is that our beliefs affect the questions we will even consider. Many people would never have asked the question because everyone around them had told them it was impossible. They would feel it was a waste of their time and energy. Be careful not to ask limited questions, or you will receive limited answers. The only thing that limits your questions is your belief about what is possible. If you continue to ask any question, you will receive an answer. All we need to do is to create a better question and we will get a better answer.

      Suggestions on problem solving questions:

     All of us know that no matter what we are involved with in our lives, there are going to be times when we come up against these things we call “problems”: the roadblocks to personal and professional progress. Every person, no matter what state of life they have achieved, has to deal with these special gifts.  The question is not whether you are going to have problems, but how you are going to deal with them when they come up. We all need a systematic way to deal with challenges. It is essential to develop a pattern of consistent questions that empower you. These are five suggested problem solving questions which you may find useful to get out of such situation:

a.       What is great about the problem?

b.      What is not perfect yet?

c.       What am I willing to do to make it the way I want it?

d.      What am I willing to no longer do in order to make it the way I want it?

e.      How can I enjoy the process while I do what is necessary to make it the way I want it?

By having the list of these five questions in front of you on a regular basis, you have a pattern of how to deal with problems that will instantly change your focus and give you access to the resources you need.

Every morning, when we wake up, we ask ourselves questions. When the alarm goes off, what question do we ask ourselves? Is it, “How come I have to get up right now?” “Why aren’t there more hours in the day?” “What if I hit the snooze alarm just one more time?” and as you get in the shower, what are you asking yourself? “Why do I have to go to work?” “How bad is the traffic going to be today?”, “What kind of stuff is going to be dumped on my desk today?” What if every day you consciously started asking a pattern of questions that would put you in the right frame of mind and that caused you to remember how grateful, happy and excited you are? What kind of day do you think you would have with those positive emotional states as your pattern? Obviously it would affect how you feel about virtually everything. There are certain emotions we all need to cultivate in order to be happy and successful individuals. Otherwise, you could be winning and feel like you are losing, if you do not keep measuring and take the time to feel how fortunate you are.

If you really want to create a shift in your life, make this a part of your daily ritual. By consistently asking these questions you will find that you access your most empowering emotional states on a regular basis, and you will begin to create the highways to these emotions of happiness, excitement, pride, gratitude, joy, commitment and love. Very soon, you will find that when you open your eyes, these questions will fire off immediately just out of habit, and you will have trained yourself to ask the kind of questions that will empower you to experience greater richness in life. 

Source: Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins.

Pictures : From Robin Sharma