Self and Life Mastery - NeoStrategy - Page 6

We will discuss about some of the BOOSTERS for Life Productivity. These enhances overall Life Productivity.  The first BOOSTER that comes to mind is Happiness. Based on my interactions with lot of “Big” & “Successful” guys and observations, I am very much convinced that Happiness is becoming (became) very precious thing now a days.

This why I think Happiness as # 1 BOOSTER …Let me explain. All human beings do things “to feel good”. Beggars to Billionaires  – all crave for happiness. But in the pursuit of achieving “higher happiness” we lose the “basic happiness” and we start hypnotise ourselves saying we need to achieve more to feel happiness. Basically we go into this complex loop. And the hypothesis for achievement (to get happiness) fails. By the way I am not talking about this for someone else. This is applicable for you and me also. What is the use of all achievements if we feel anxious, fearful, angry and empty at the end. Normal assumption starts like this..after we complete good college degree we will be happy…then job..then marriage..then kids..then career success..then kids “settlement” then grand kids…then we can feel happy. Talk to people in 60s..70s..you get an idea…so this loop goes on. If we don’t built the muscle to feel good/happy then this will never happen. As some one says there is “Science of Success” and “Art of Fulfilment”. Science of success is actually procedural but if we don’t know how to feel Happy (Art of fulfilment) then entire our life efforts gets wasted.

Convinced? Why happiness is # 1 life BOOSTER.

We talked about dis-empowering beliefs, negative emotions, wrong goals and patterns under BLOCKERS. Will cover the last BLOCKER – INEFFICIENT BIOLOGY in this blog.

Everybody has different types of body makeup. Some have inborn high energy levels while others have sluggish energy levels. Some have high IQ levels and others may have low levels. Some follow good nutrition which fuels energy and others get addicted to carbs and sugars. The list goes on. In summary, I am referring Biology as combination of energy levels + Brain power + nutrition. We all can improve our biology to the level we need, for sure. But most often this element is taken for granted and we damage our biology to a level it becomes inefficient and becomes a major BLOCKER.  No one looks at this as productivity parameter. I think your physical vitality is the most import productivity parameter. Because this is what defines how you think and act.  Your biology/physiology drives your emotions and thoughts and there by the productivity.

There is tons of information available on how to improve energy levels, brain power, etc on internet. But the point is to recognise how efficient/inefficient your biology currently is. And understand how much % of life productivity efficiency it is giving or reducing. Just replace all bad biology practices with good ones for a week and you can realise the productivity boost.

I have just defined 5 broad level BLOCKERS and you can expand your own list based on your experiences. Main point is to give you the idea. I hope you got the idea and message clearly. We will look at what are the BOOSTERS in the next few blogs.

While dis empowering beliefs,  negative emotions and wrong goals can drag the life productivity significantly, our patterns and behaviours can be more damaging. Most often we would not be self aware about our patterns.

What are patterns? How we get those patterns?. Patterns are simply automatic behaviours. Like the we brush, drive, etc  most of these patterns happens very automatically. Most deep rooted patterns are adopted from the childhood through parents and environment. I am sure you heard statements like ” he behaves exactly like his father” or “she is print like her aunt” , etc. These patterns might have some genetic linkage but most dominant factor would be copying the behaviours – patterns. Lets say if your father used to get angry when some worker is not performing his work, you would have watched this and copied this as is  unconsciously. After you grow up you will almost behave in the similar way. We would have adopted many such bad and as well good patterns without any careful selection process. And this is not possible when we were child. And we continue to think these are correct patterns and worst thing is we might strongly believe that these are very correct. Anyway this is a deep subject.

The point is you need to identify all such unconscious patterns and examine them and eliminate the bad ones. You will have patterns in all aspects of life – starting from your diet, finances, business, career and social interactions. Just take one most critical area for you now and list down all patterns and introspect them.

This is worth doing it. It is like virus clean up exercise. If you seriously spend some time then you will find some of the biggest BLOCKERS of your life.

How did you set most of your goals?. You are the most lucky person if you have chosen your goals and decisions based on your own will. I think many people (not all) set important goals and take decisions based on – parents influence, social expectations or most often you want to be better than some one else or you want to “prove” the world that you are good enough.

How will we know which ones are wrong goals?. Very simple answer – Any thing you regret later.  Can you think of such examples in your life? Did you chose one career accidentally due to different factors like money, fame or just because everybody has taken that career path, etc and then change to some thing which you are passionate about?. Did you change to new company for salary hike then later you realised that hike did not make any difference in your life or at least you felt previous company is better than this new one? How about you have invested in some asset class because everybody rushed like mad to capture the “opportunity”. Did you try to prove that you are capable of some thing and later realised that tempoary ego satisfaction is not worth the effort? In fact you would have got tired proving all the time and one day you would have said enough !!. I am sure you are familiar about people who achieve all the money and fame and still feel miserable.

The list can be endless. Point is achieving some of these wrong goals can yield any where between 1 year to 30 years or more productivity loss. So it lot more worth to understand about if we are after right goals or not. This is 1000 times important than how you order your to do lists and doing them efficiently. This would be like “Operation Successful but Patient died”.

Past is past. At least from now on we must go after right goals (independent and conscious decisions based on wisdom).

Lets start with some of the BLOCKERS of Life Productivity.

BELIEFS are the foundational building blocks of human life. They will give you the meaning of the life, what is good vs what bad, etc. Your life happiness is direct correlation to how close you are living to your own beliefs/value system. You first need to understand how beliefs get formed. I have already written about this topic under “Building Blocks of Human Psychology” . Read this blog => Beliefs Formation .

How beliefs can impact Life Productivity? Actually wrong beliefs can completely damage ones life. Beliefs are of two categories – empowering beliefs and other is dis empowering beliefs. Empowering beliefs are the ones which will take you closure to your goals and bring happiness. Dis empowering beliefs will drag you down. But most interesting thing is you may not know what beliefs  are empowering and which ones are dragging you down. In fact, you will believe both types of beliefs are helping until you really introspect them.

Lets look some of the examples of dis empowering beliefs (you may still believe in beliefs and continue …it is a personal choice)

• Life is DIFFICULT
• I am NOT  good enough
• I need to do better than OTHER people
• I SHOULD NEVER fail
• MOST people are BAD
• I am SUPERIOR to other people
• Things should go in ORDER
• Living in India is difficult
• etc etc

Imagine how your life productivity will go down if you carry these kind of beliefs. Will they help you?. Compare the usual productivity we talk about Vs this life productivity . Un comparable right?.

Now the question is how you can remove these BLOCKERS?. Read my earlier  blog on => Beliefs Transformation.

Write down your BELIEF BLOCKERS and eliminate them. You can see 10X productivity (Life) gain. Test it out !!

There are certain things which will make you move forward in your life and which will give you long term happiness and fulfilment, etc..What are these things? We will see what these are. These are called “Boosters”. At the same time there are many things which will drag you down in your life (real productivity killers), what I call these as ” Blockers”.  What kind of Booster and Blockers come to your mind? These are definitely NOT the superficial things. These are inside out items mostly.

For most people these are unknown for most of of their life. Lets look at what could be some possible blockers first? Listing down few..

BLOCKERS

• Disempowering Beliefs (Beliefs which are not helping you in your life)
• Low Self-esteem or Low Self Confidence, etc
• All Negative Emotions (Fears, etc)
• Negative Value System (too much Ego)
• Wrong Goals (ego driven, revenge driven, insecurity driven, etc)
• Your own biology  (yes, this can be a blocker)
• Any kinds of pattern and behaviours (negative)
• All kinds of addictions

BOOSTERS

• Having a mission or passion for life
• Very strong empowering beliefs
• Good Value system
• Living beyond yourself

Awakening (this is not a light coming on your head but basically means you know what is useful and what is junk)

These are just to give you an idea on what will possibly and REALLY can give you productivity vs what will drag you down. We will go little deep into these boosters and blockers in the coming days.

Serious request to YOU – What has been your boosters and what has been your blockers?. Now think about your traditional productivity stuff in relation to these. I hope you understand where we need to focus when we  really want to achieve REAL PRODUCTIVITY in LIFE.

What comes to your mind when you hear the. word ” Productivity”?. To do lists, tasks, on time projects, accomplishments, time management, etc…what comes to your mind?. There are thousands of the books, tools, frameworks and philosophies on this topic. Most of them deal with task efficiencies, time management, planners and prioritisation. While these are important these are only at surface level touching only 10% of the depth. How does it really matter how many tasks did you complete?

Lets shift the gears now… What if you are super efficient at task completion but suffering with low esteem? How much productive do you feel internally? What if you have achieved super success but every minute you are insecure insider? And lets say you are living your life for other sake  (for parents, society, xyz), how do you measure your life productivity?. Or lets say you are super efficient  (mostly not possible) at your job but your passion lies some where else. Then how do you measure your productivity?

Sum of all our life activities should contribute to your life overall happiness. How much of your activities contribute to your life productivity? Shift the focus from tasks, plans and priorities to life productivity/happiness then you will the get real idea about what is important and what is not important.

The real productivity blockers and boosters are far different from what we have been told and taught so far. When we  see things from new percpective you get different insight. You can look life from new dimension.