In these bleak times, when the future seems grim and uncertain, we may stand to gain by cultivating “learned hopefulness”. Instead of falling prey to negativity and its concomitant emotions, we may nurture hope so that the present pandemic is not followed by an epidemic of psychological issues.

Making hope a habit

According to psychologist, Dan Tomasulo, we can intentionally promote our wellbeing by practising certain habits. In his book, Learned Hopefulness: The Power of Positivity to Overcome Depression, he provides seven strategies for enhancing our hope after surveying the psychological literature. As there is no unifying theory of hope, Tomasulo provides different tools to inject more hope into our lives.

He argues that people with high levels of hope believe they are in the driver’s seat of their lives, and are filled with zest to accomplish goals they have chalked out for themselves.  When they encounter obstacles, they exhibit resilience and resourcefulness by seeking out alternative paths. So, instead of waiting for hope to knock at your door, you can bring hope into your life, however stark and stormy it may seem in the moment. When you make hope a habit and don’t let yourself succumb to the doomsayer in your head, you have acquired learned hopefulness.

The 7 strategies of learned hopefulness

1. Look for possibilities

The first habit of hopefulness entails seeing possibilities even in the face of roadblocks. Instead of being stymied by setbacks, how can you maneuver around them? Develop what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset” wherein you believe that abilities, talents, skills, habits and personalities are not set in stone but amenable to change. Whereas a fixed mindset compels you to dwell on deficiencies and limitations, a growth mindset impels you to focus on possibilities and progress. Failure is not the end of the road but a reminder that you may have to course correct.

2. Focus on your blessings

Next, Tomasulo coaxes you to look out for “beauty, benefits, and blessings.” Cultivating a habit of gratitude can help you notice flecks of light even in the dimmest of days. Though the times are tough right now, list three things you can be thankful for. Most people admit that the pandemic has made them realise how much we used to take for granted before Covid catapulted our lives. Inculcate gratitude into your daily or weekly routine so that you appreciate all that is going right for you.

The post The 7 strategies of learned hopefulness appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

HELP!

New year, new resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions are the promises you set in motion immediately after the clock strikes midnight on December 31^st [ok, so maybe immediately after you kiss your honey and have a toast]. Work less, have more fun, travel, exercise, find love, spend less, eat well, eat more, eat less, lose weight, forgive and forget—all these resolutions are eagerly waiting. So many things to do… Whew, I am exhausted!

Who created this resolution idea anyway?

With the New Year bell we give ourselves a list of ‘new beginnings’ that is a mile long. Some of us write out our New Year’s resolutions with big bold colourful markers on huge flipchart paper and hang it in our office, living room or bathroom walls in an attempt to keep the ideas fresh in our minds. It can be so easy to forget what we have committed to [this is especially true of  me!]. Seriously, do I really need another reminder not to eat that lime cheesecake, which is full of 750 delicious calories? Yes, yes, I believe I do!

Meet the resolution setter

There are those who outline their laundry list of New Year’s resolutions in an electronic document with elaborate spreadsheets, graphs and tracking systems. These are what I call the ‘serious’ resolution setters. They want to see measurable outcomes in order to look back and see how far they have come, and where they still need to go. I confess I have pretended [many times over] to be this person. I start off with a bang, creating beautiful lists and spreadsheets with timelines and success factors only to stumble across them months later to find just one tracking entry. I then get surprised like this is the first time I have seen this gorgeous ‘to do’ list. For this purpose, it serves me well to have an out-of-sight, out-of-mind operating system!

After I am done patting myself on the back for having created such an amazing document [yes, this is a ritual—you would think I would eventually learn!] I then and only then, take time to read what I originally wrote. It goes something like this: Get in shape—lose 15 pounds [the same 15 pounds I have lost and found again several times in the past 15 years];  Eat healthy—no sugar, carbs and especially no beer [now, that is just self-punishment!].

So far, not looking good!

Soon, the impressed state with my own being starts to dwindle. The self-pity kicks in; the tears begin to well up in my eyes [no wonder my brothers used to call me faucet—let’s not go there].

This beautiful tracking tool that was meant to give me support, guidance and measurable outcomes has been reduced to a list of non-compliant, incomplete to-do’s, climbing on to my back like a very large, very heavy monkey who gets more enjoyment in weighing me down than playing in the jungle!

Dealing with my inner monkeys

Once we get in that spin of beating ourselves up, it gives free reign for the monkey to clamber away on our back. This can suck our energy and not leave any fuel in the tank [or the backup reserves] to deal with the unavoidable everyday stressors. Our bodies thrive on having some levels of stress; it is like a little power juice to keep us driven. It is when we let the stress grow into a full family of monkeys that it feels like an uphill battle to see any measure of success [even when we are having some].

If you have ever had such a creature on your back, then you know it can be very difficult once he or she, and their entire family has landed and grabbed a hold. And it can be very difficult to push, pull, shake or knock the critters off. Yes, I know they are cute, yet they sure are heavy buggers! My mama always said you get more bees with honey than vinegar; so I akin this to you get more monkeys with bananas than you do with turnips. It is about finding the sweet spot!

Out with the traditional New Year’s resolutions

In recent years, I have taken a step back from making traditional New Year’s resolutions, as they do not work for me. I may get some short-term satisfaction in setting the resolution and creating my beautiful flip-chart or Excel spreadsheet, yet it does not sustain itself or me. I have read that anywhere from 45 – 80 per cent of all New Year’s resolutions set at the strike of 12 will fail. This seems less about moving mountains and more about keeping the monkeys off our backs.

So now I have become an intention setter, using the late weeks in December and early January to reflect on the passing months—to fully acknowledge and honour the successes that I have had [yes the little ones count too]. This involves taking the time to sit in quiet; it does not need to be for hours on end in a locked away chamber; it is more about giving yourself ‘intentional’ time and space away from the daily hub-bub; taking a walk in the woods, journal writing, meditating or whatever method gives your mind some rest to hear ‘itself’ think. Yes, this can be scary!

How I make my resolutions work

I have found success in using a gratitude jar to ‘track’ activities, a-ha’s and all around grateful moments. I write them down on a little piece of paper, fold it up and put it in a jar; there it sits until December when I read them. It is a great reminder of my accomplishments, activities and human connections lived in the past entire year.

January gives way to taking what I have learned in the past year, and what I want to learn or do and that’s how I set intentions. It  is less about flicking the New Year’s switch, and more about a process; one that changes and morphs as the months ahead tick away. I can feel the monkeys beginning to start  their descent!

I revisit my intentions at the New Moon each month. What works, I continue, what does not—I let go of or modify. Easy peasy! No beating myself up, no crying, so stress. Ok, sometimes I have to breathe a little to let things go.

Success with intentions comes through building habits to support what we want to happen; the action to keep the energy moving. Our parents knew what they were doing when they taught us to brush our teeth at the same time each day; it became a habit—not something as adults we typically have to give much energy to.

My intentions in the New Year

This New Year an intention for me is: write every day for five minutes. I hear you saying, “What the heck are five minutes going to do for you?” Habit building, that is what! Baby steps, people, baby steps! This is the stuff that success is made of!

January is a rebirth; and you thought we only did the born thing once! It is not only the beginning of the calendar year but a time for feeling the excitement of what might be and finding your happy self by putting your intentions out there and creating action around them. What do you intend for the New Year, what do you dare to dream, and what actions are you willing to put into place? It is all up to you—it is your dreams, your goals and your life—no matter what those monkeys tell you!

The post No more New Year’s resolutions appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Do you rush to rescue your child?

Some parents personalise their child’s failures. When we over identify with our child, we feel all of their experiences as if they were our own. This is not only unhealthy for us, but it is unhealthy for our children. Our children have their own strengths and weaknesses. Their struggles are not our struggles. We are only there to support our children along the way. When parents feel the bumps of their children’s lives too deeply, they will do anything to rescue their child from hurt, pain or failure. They are quick to rush to the school to argue a low grade. They are at the sidelines, yelling at the referee during a sporting event. They are up late at night finishing their child’s school project because their child didn’t manage their time well.

When we rescue our children, we steal from them an important life experience—failure. We create a false sense of success. When these children grow up they are ill-equipped at handling failure because they never had to experience it as a child. Instead of rescuing our children, we inadvertently set them up for long-term struggle. As parents we have the opportunity to teach our children how to move past failure and disappointment. We can give them the tools to not only get through failure, but to thrive past it.

We can do that by conveying these messages to our children:

Everyone fails

Let your child know that everyone fails. That failing is a part of life. Tell them that they didn’t come out of the womb walking. They had to fall hundreds of times before their body learned the art of walking. Tell them that some of our greatest minds failed. Albert Einstein didn’t learn to read until he was seven years old. Thomas Edison’s light bulb invention failed 1,000 times before he was successful.

Share with your child some of your own failures. Letting your child know that you are fallible will help them see that failure is normal and that it happens to everyone.

Failure is part of success

Without failure none of us would ever experience success. When we fail, we are given the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and do it better. Help your child explore what they have learned from their failure. How would they do it better next time? Try to be motivating and not overly critical. Most children are already feeling pretty bad about themselves when they experience failure. You berating them won’t make them do better next time. For instance if your child did poorly on an exam you may say, “You didn’t study. You deserve that grade because you didn’t put in any effort.” While this may be true it isn’t going to inspire your child to do better next time. Instead, re-frame the failure by saying something like, “When you study you do well. You are intelligent and I love how you learn things so quickly. Next time, I know if you work harder on your subjects, you’ll do great on the exam.”

Failure is part of the process

Failure is often part of the process. Thomas Edison wouldn’t have been able to develop the light bulb if he hadn’t failed a thousand times. It was in those failures that he was given the clues on how to continually improve his project and eventually make one of the most important inventions of our time. Ask your child if they can think of a time their failure made them improve. Did they get better at a sport after practising? Did they learn how to balance on a bike after falling? Help your child make these connections.

It is your effort that matters

Focus on praising your child’s effort. If one child studied for five hours and got a low grade on an exam and the other didn’t study at all and got a perfect score, which child deserves more praise? When you only focus on results and not on the process, your child can get the wrong message. You want to foster hard work and praise effort, even if the end result is less than perfect.

As parents we understand failure well. Parenthood can be a struggle and most of us have felt failure at some point during the journey. If we can help our children see failure as a learning opportunity, we will be teaching them one of the greatest life lessons.

The post Have you taught your child the importance of failing? appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In this awe-inspiring Super Soul talk, she talks about how trying too hard and focusing too much on what you want can actually be counterproductive. When you want something really bad and it’s not coming to you, what you probably need is less of trying and more of surrender. But how does one surrender? Gabby gives us five exact steps to follow, for spiritual surrender.

More about the speaker

Gabrielle  Bernstein is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Universe Has Your Back and has written four additional best sellers. She was featured on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday as a “next-generation thought leader,” and The New York Times named her “a new role model.” She appears regularly as an expert on The Dr. Oz Show and co-hosted the Guinness World Record largest guided meditation with Deepak Chopra.

The post 5 precise steps for spiritual surrender appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Many instructors offer this as a tool at the beginning of the class, often along with a poem, a quote, a story, or a suggestion for what your intention could be. But no one ever really talks about what an intention actually is.

The Purpose of Intention

Considering we’re still in January, it is a good time to revisit the purpose of setting intentions. Back in 2015, I ran a 21-day healthy habit building challenge that talked about the importance of setting intentions. It’s a great introductory post to setting intentions, but here I’m going to dive deeper.

An intention can guide you back to the present moment. Intentions are not goals. You can achieve a goal but intentions are embodied and integrated in all the layers of your Self. Intentions can be adapted because it’s not about the outcome but how you show up in your action.

How to Set an Intention

The first step towards setting an intention is to get quiet and still. Take a deep breath, do some simple movements to release stored energy in the body and take a few moments to listen deeply to what your body, mind, and senses are trying to tell you.

Ask yourself what you most need. Watch to see if an answer seems to appear spontaneously without you having to analyze too much.

If nothing comes, ask yourself why you showed up on your yoga mat in the first place. Is there something you’ve been searching for?

Try to boil your intention down to one word or one short phrase that is easy to remember. Peace, Love, Quiet, Truth, Breath, Strength, etc. are all great examples. Feeling words tend to be easier for the mind to comprehend.

How to use your intentions throughout class

When you set an intention at the beginning of an asana class, you are choosing to focus on a particular way of being. If you find yourself feeling other than how you wish to be, then your intention can help you customize a yoga posture to fit your needs.

It’s common to set an intention at the beginning of class and then not even remember what it was by the end. If this is the case, the intention you chose is probably not that meaningful to you.

Throughout class, during every posture, every breath, every transition, you can ask yourself if you are embodying your word or phrase.

This is the part that tricked up one of my students. He was trying to reconcile setting an intention for say, peace, and then trying to push himself into and through difficult postures. My suggestion to him was to customize the posture so to help him achieve more peace, but that way of thinking was almost foreign to him. That’s because, it’s more common to hear suggestions such as “push to your edge,” “take one more breath,” or “do XYZ so that you don’t tear your muscles, ligaments, tendons,” etc. While that language does have it’s place in certain circumstances, the beauty of a group yoga class is that everyone can be doing the same physical posture but with a different intention. If one person’s intention is strength, their individual expression will be quite different from the person who’s intention is peace. And that is okay! This is how intention guides your personal practice. This is how you know when it’s okay to go a little further and when it’s time to back off.

A Word on Sankalpa

There is a Sanskrit word called sankalpa that often gets translated as intention. If you set an intention at the beginning of every class, that intention naturally adapts to your changing needs. Sankalpa, on the other hand, is a larger intention you wish to live your life by. Values such as peace, love and strength are good intentions but, on any given day, you might not feel strong, for example. Sometimes, we need to feel supported too.

That is why setting a Sankalpa is important. It is an exercise in understanding our deepest values and desires. It is a vow that we are determined to keep not because we are trying to change something about ourselves but because we need to be reminded every once in a while about our deepest held beliefs and desires and the importance of aligning with them.

A Sankalpa is often more than one word or phrase, but a short sentence — a declaration. Our Sankalpa is beyond the ego and mind. It comes from the heart.

Sankalpas can change over time too. The lifespan of a Sankalpa is best measured on the scale of months and years unlike intention that are usually meant for a few days to a few weeks at the most.

As you practice setting intentions, notice if any patterns arise. Are there intentions that keep popping up over and over again? If so, consider spending some time reflecting on your beliefs and desires and crafting a Sankalpa that you can take with you into every practice. It is possible to have both a Sankalpa, a mantra of sorts, and an intention that changes day-to-day.

Good luck setting your intentions! Remember, it’s called yoga ‘practice’ not yoga perfect.

This blog has been adapted from the original, which appears on the author’s website.

The post How Intentions and Sankalpa Strengthen Your Yoga Practice appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

The good news is that the game is still on. There is still that chance, the last lap to victory still holds good. Why not brush the dust off those aspirations that you had, those ideas you wanted to put into action, the kilos you wanted to shed off, the hobby you wanted to take up, the strength you wanted to regain physically and emotionally, and more? Why not end this year with the resonating echoes of the word “done!”? That would be the best goodbye to the year that you had welcomed with the vision of a new world for yourself.

Here’s a plan to change things around

Go ahead and use the next six weeks to re-align your life to keep distractions at bay. Set a DND on your Whatsapp and other meaningless messengers and get cracking on the goals you had charted out for yourself. Attention creates realities. Distraction only leads to confusion. It’s not too late yet. Ask any sales team and they’ll tell you that the maximum deals are closed in the last two days of the month. Do you recall the difference the last minute study made to your grades? It’s the last minute pressure that sets off the “magic button” to performance.

Ask any sales team and they’ll tell you that the maximum deals are closed in the last two days of the month

This is the time to believe in the philosophy of “Ask and you shall receive”. Don’t hold back, go all out and ask: ask for business, ask for help, ask for ideas. Share your purpose and also share your urgency. People like to help, but don’t impose and disturb. Ask with grace, and with gratitude, whether that help is granted or not. Some people will join hands with you and support you, while others’ hands would be tied for reasons beyond their control. Be graceful and be grateful to both. What have you got to lose, when you have not won the race yet?

Make some time for yourself

The one thing most people postulate at the beginning of the year is to make time for themselves. In the busy world, the growing numbers and the towering expectations from others, whether at work or at home, we tend to forget ourselves and become a work machine. Make time for yourself, starting now. Considering the pressures are high at the last lap of your race, if you can make some time now, you will be able to sustain it out of habit in the year to come. If you can’t do it now, you certainly will fail at it the next year too. Things are not going to get easier. You have to adjust things according to your desires. Invest some of your time in yourself; read a book, take up yoga, join the gym, take daily walks, or just be.

Use the festive time to create and forge connections

It would be a great way to end the year with warmth and support. If there was one thing you can build on now, which will give you guaranteed rewards in the future, it would be good relations with people. Invest in relationships. Work is an opportunity to make a new friend, to build a mutually beneficial relationship. Even if the opportunity for business eludes you at the moment, build that relationship for a future possibility. If relationship building is the foundation of business success in today’s changing economy, build that now. You both stand to gain.

If there was one thing you can build on now, which will give you guaranteed rewards in the future, it would be good relations with people

2017 will be about synergies, gear up for it. Create your think tank, your professional and personal pool of intelligence. Use the festive season to make connections and collaborations. When the cheer is in the air, it’s easier to get people’s support. Invite and involve people in your purpose and your goals. When you share your dreams and aspirations with people, you inspire them to take charge of their own too. When people are inspired, and if they find you at the source of that inspiration, they will maintain the connect and continue the support.

2016 will end and 2017 will arrive, that’s a certainty. Whether you will have accomplished what you had set out to achieve is the doubt you want to dissuade from becoming your destiny.

Hope for a better future is always there. It is there now, as it will present itself on the 1^st of January yet again. What you can do tomorrow, you can certainly do today. Instead of putting all your stakes in hope, invest some time in action now and make it come true.

The goals and resolutions you made in the beginning of the year were your goals, your resolutions. No one asked you to make them; your heart urged you in that direction. Success and achievement is therefore not an option, it’s a must—for your sake! They call it the last lap to victory for a reason, because there is victory at the end of the race; finish it, get there and may 2016 be the year of fulfilment and glory, just as you had envisioned it.

A version of this was first published in the November 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

The post There’s still time to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Wallenda’s feat—one of his seven world records—made us think about the purpose of the safety nets we so routinely seek in our everyday lives. Are they coaxing us forward, offering us the protection we need, or holding us back? So we asked Wallenda, a 37-year-old father of three, for his take on safety nets, and he graciously shared with us the wisdom gleaned from a legendary seven-generation family of high-wire artists. “Our minds are extremely powerful,” he told us. “You can learn to control what comes in, and filter out the negative. Fear is negative. You can either be overtaken by it, or you can overcome it.”

Performing without a safety net, to Wallenda, is more of an assertion that he is in control than a scary reminder of what could happen should he lose it. It’s not that he has a false sense of security, or a cavalier attitude toward risk. But we found that what Wallenda does applies just as much to those of us who prefer to view the Grand Canyon by tour bus—a grit mindset that can help us conquer the comparatively mundane risks each of us face in our lives. It comes down to becoming, in essence, your own first responder: identifying worst-case scenarios ahead of time, then training yourself what to do if and when they occur. Should that moment arrive, you will have the training—and the confidence—to calmly respond, rather than hastily react. This is where guts, resilience, initiative and tenacity truly payoff.

All it takes is mindfulness—an ability to zoom in on the problem at hand.

“Some are born with grit, and it comes easier,” Wallenda allowed. But, he went on, “we are all growing, all the time. You can gain more and more of it, or you can also lose it if you don’t practise it. Scary is not in my vocabulary. Fear is really just a deep respect. I clearly remember the first time I grasped this: I was six or seven years old and sitting on my father’s shoulders while he was riding a bicycle across the wire. I had been around wild animals in the circus all my life—elephants, tigers, chimpanzees—but I was never afraid of them. I was raised to respect them, knowing they could kill me. On top of my father’s shoulders that day, even though I knew it was something my dad could do in his sleep, I still felt this jolt. I understood that I could either sit there and shake and tremble, or tell myself to be calm and collected. I chose not to be scared. I realised that I’m in control of my mind—my mind is not in control of me.”

Although performing on the high wire has long since become second nature to Wallenda, he continues to respect what could hurt him. That keen awareness and respect, in turn, has taught him to prepare for the worst so he can do his best. He and his team spent five years studying terrain and conditions in the Grand Canyon before undertaking the stunt described at the beginning of the article. While there was no way to predict how much fine desert dust might settle on his two-inch-wide cable the day of his walk, or how powerful the upward drafts of hot air from the canyon floor might get. Wallenda prepared himself for those conditions and rehearsed manoeuvres he could do in response. Before the Grand Canyon walk, he practised for hours every day in his Florida backyard, using wind machines to create 91-mph gusts—stronger than any ever recorded in the canyon itself.

When Tropical Storm Andrea slammed ashore in Florida a week before Wallenda’s historic walk, he seized the opportunity to experience the unpredictability of the fierce storm by practising on a 35-foot high wire in the wind and rain. When the momentous day came and Wallenda found himself making his way across the gorge and feeling the wire bounce beneath his slippered feet, he reminded himself: You trained for 90-miles-per-hour winds, even though they never get above 60 here. You prepared for this; you know what to do. As he neared the other side, Wallenda broke into a sprint, and nimbly leapt back onto solid ground, before going home to ponder what challenge to take on next.

When confidence becomes a muscle memory, panic is replaced by peak performance.

Don’t fear disasters, plan for them

Flight attendants are trained to evacuate a jumbo jet filled with passengers in 90 seconds or less [in the United States, it’s a federal requirement]. Airlines and training academies drill trainees over and over again using realistic mock cabins and simulated emergencies, such as a crash or fire.

Lee Yoon-Hye put her training to the test on 6th July 2013, when Asiana Flight 214 hit a seawall on approach to San Francisco International Airport, broke apart, then cartwheeled down the runway and burst into flames when the jet’s fuel ignited. You might remember seeing news images of Lee: the petite 40-year-old cabin manager from Seoul, South Korea, could be spotted carrying passengers to safety on her back. What you didn’t see was the phenomenal grit she displayed inside the Boeing 777 cabin, where an emergency slide had deployed within the wreckage, trapping terrified passengers. Lee grabbed an axe so that a co-pilot could puncture the slide. Seeing flames erupting in the back, she tossed a fire extinguisher to another crew member as she began herding passengers to safety. All but three of the 307 people aboard the plane survived. And not surprisingly, Lee was the last one off. The San Francisco fire chief hailed her as a hero; doctors later discovered Lee had been assisting the evacuation with a fractured tailbone.

“We followed our training,” she modestly told reporters afterward. “I wasn’t really thinking, but my body just started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation.”

The fear and trepidation most of us face in our daily lives falls far short of having to save trapped passengers in a burning plane or potentially free-falling to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Yet we routinely rig our lives with the kinds of safety nets that would suggest otherwise. If you wait to act in a situation until it’s risk-free before venturing a toe out onto your own proverbial high wire, what you’re really risking is a lifetime frozen at the starting line.

A woman creates a multimillion-dollar business she started online in her dorm room, while her ex-boyfriend shows up at the class reunion with a job he hates and vague proclamations about waiting to get all of his ducks in a row. Sound familiar? Perhaps you fantasise about taking salsa lessons but refuse to sign up until you lose 12 kilos because you want to look good. Or you’re heartsick over your town’s plans to level a small old-growth forest for a strip mall, but can’t summon the time, energy, and political savvy to fight it. Rolling over is a lot less painful than falling on one’s face.

Too often, our typical default setting is to fear disaster, rather than actually plan for it. And that, Nik Wallenda tells us, is the true catastrophe.

“It’s easier to settle for what’s comfortable than to push on and excel,” he explains. Too often, we live life avoiding what we fear, a hundred times a day. And what we fear often comes down to failure or rejection.

If you wait to act in a situation until it’s risk-free before venturing a toe out onto your own proverbial high wire, what you’re really risking is a lifetime frozen at the starting line

Get rejected

When hypnotist Jason Comely invented an online game called Rejection Therapy a few years ago, one of his stated objectives was to teach people “to be more aware of how irrational social fears control and restrict our lives.”

The game had only one rule: You must be rejected by someone every single day. In fact, rejection equalled success in the game. If your target didn’t reject you, and instead granted your request, it counted as a failure because you evidently didn’t ask for enough.

Chinese immigrant Jia Jiang came across the challenge after quitting his tech job in Austin, Texas, to devote six months to pursuing the dream he had hungered for ever since Bill Gates had spoken to his high school in Beijing: to become an entrepreneur. Four months into his six-month sabbatical, though, Jiang looked down at his vibrating phone in a restaurant to see a devastating text message from the major investor he thought he had on the hook to finance his start-up: No, was all it said. Jiang excused himself to go outside and cry.

“My choices were rejection or regret, and both stunk,” Jiang recalled in a TEDx talk that has since made him a YouTube sensation. Jiang considered cutting his losses and going back to a “real” job two months early. “But in the end, I chose rejection and kept going, and the world was never the same again.”

Intrigued by Comely’s game, Jiang decided to desensitise himself to the pain of rejection by challenging himself to endure one hundred days of rejection, and record it on a hidden camera for his video blog. He immediately began racking up points. Costco refused to let him talk to its customers over the store intercom. A stranger declined to loan him a hundred bucks. FedEx wouldn’t send a box to Santa at the North Pole. “But then a funny thing happened,” Jiang reported. “I started getting yeses.” He knocked on a stranger’s door and was granted permission to play soccer in the family’s backyard. A guard let him dance Gangnam-style on the building’s security camera.

Then there was the time Jiang walked into a random company and asked to speak to the CEO. “Why?” the receptionist wanted to know.

“Because I’m going to challenge him to a staring contest,” came the reply. And he was invited in to see the CEO.

[The CEO turned out to be a her, and she won.]

Rejection, Jiang discovered, had turned him into “a better communicator, a better negotiator.” And the customary sting he had experienced upon being rejected had been replaced by a feeling of liberation that he found exhilarating, pushing him to take ever-greater risks.

When Jiang strolled into a Krispy Kreme shop to request doughnuts customised to resemble the Olympics logo, an obliging employee said she’d see what she could do, then returned shortly to proudly display her creation—a box of five-interlocked doughnut rings in the Olympic colours. “It’s on me, get out,” she said with a grin when Jiang asked what he owed. Jiang’s hidden-camera video of that encounter drew so many viewers on YouTube that the media took note, and the rejected Jiang became a star.

His experiment, Jiang told his TED audience, “taught me to see rejection eye to eye and remain calm, and see it as what it is. It’s not this monster bag of hurt that I thought. It’s not some universal truth about who I am. It’s just someone’s opinion, and it says as much about that person as it does about me.”

There’s a big difference, Jiang pointed out, between remorse over not having done something, and rejection. Rejection is getting shot down and surviving; remorse is never taking flight in the first place.

He has yet to hear back on his hundredth request—an interview with President Obama—but Jiang did score a yes he never foresaw the night he received the text message that had crushed his dreams: he landed a deal to publish a book about the power of rejection.

Facing constant rejection can be devastating. But it can also be the impetus you need to work harder than you ever thought possible.

The customary sting he had experienced upon being rejected had been replaced by a feeling of liberation that he found exhilarating, pushing him to take ever-greater risks

Draw on your inner resources

Selling a cartoon to The New Yorker magazine takes a Herculean amount of diligence, dedication, stamina and grit. When Bob Mankoff first started out as a cartoonist, he submitted thousands of entries to The New Yorker before one was finally accepted for publication. Almost 30 years later, after penning some 950 New Yorker drawings, Mankoff is the cartoon editor of the magazine. He and his team laboriously sift through as many as two thousand entries a week, knowing that only 17 or 18 of them will make the cut. And many of the submissions are from regulars, talented artists who face an acceptance rate of only 10 per cent.

Yet they refuse to give up, drawing on a reservoir of creativity and wit that seems to be limitless. Mankoff believes their creativity is actually fuelled by The New Yorker’s low acceptance rate; like a gambler’s high, the artist never knows when, and which, of his drawings will be a winner. “Every so often,” Mankoff told us, “you will get that jolt of positive reinforcement to fuel your resilience.”

It is often exactly the motivation artists need to reach deeper into their creative imagination and spur their sense of grit.

Go with your guts

The hypercompetitive tech industry, with its take-no-prisoners culture, seems to breed a lot of introspection about grit. As a female engineer in the testosterone-driven Silicon Valley, senior Google manager Sabrina Farmer frequently battled self-doubt and harsh self-criticism. She realised that questioning or downplaying her capabilities had become second nature. When an acquaintance mentioned plans to run a triathlon, Farmer instantly responded, “Oh, I could never do that!” Later, she found herself wondering: Why not? What made me say that? She summoned the grit to sign up for the race, train and compete, then went on to run a marathon. It wasn’t, she confessed later, something she particularly enjoyed, but the insight it gave her was well worth the effort and agony. She realised that her habit of belittling herself served as an air cushion from failure’s hard falls. But that emotional safety mechanism was also holding her back.

Farmer attributed her tentativeness to what psychologists call “impostor syndrome.” In her book The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, Valerie Young writes that people with impostor syndrome tend to dismiss their accomplishments and abilities “as merely a matter of luck, timing, outside help, charm—even computer error… that they’ve somehow managed to slip through the system undetected, in their mind it’s just a matter of time before they’re found out.” And it strikes successful women more than any other group. It’s what prompted actress Jodie Foster to confess on 60 Minutes that she thought her Academy Award was “a fluke” and that “everybody would find out, and they’d take the Oscar back. They’d come to my house, knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, we meant to give that to someone else. That was going to Meryl Streep.’’’

Now, when Sabrina finds herself clinging to the safety net of self-doubt, she stops to ask herself three questions:

1. What is the problem?
2. What’s the worst that can happen?
3. Is the worst-case scenario real, or just my perspective [an emotional response]?

She then pinpoints what it would take to fix the problem at hand. If it’s a tool or skill she doesn’t have, she figures out how to obtain it. Using this approach makes taking on something unfamiliar a challenge to solve instead of a humiliating failure waiting to happen.

Linda’s favourite impostor story was of the time she almost got her bough of holly decked one Christmas when she jingled the wrong bell. A struggling actor in her mid-twenties, Linda was just getting by on a string of part-time gigs, giving piano lessons, teaching music theory at City College of New York, acting in off-off and more-off Broadway shows, etc. When the extremely wealthy head of a yogurt dynasty offered fifty dollars—more than half Linda’s rent!—to play Christmas carols at the family’s annual holiday reunion, Linda grabbed the gig. But there was a problem.

“I was a poor Jewish girl with, shall we say, a limited repertoire of lyrics that included the words ‘Jesus,’ ‘saviour,’ ‘Christ,’ or ‘Bethlehem,’” she recalls. “But I was a pretty good sight reader and I needed the 50 bucks, so I took the job, and bravely walked inside an apartment so huge it had its own zip code.”

The yogurt patriarch turned out to be a formidable man in his early 50s who clutched a baton in one hand and a scotch in the other. He demanded to know if Linda knew all of the 37 carols he placed on, the beautiful Steinway concert grand she was about to play.

“Well, not really,” Linda answered, a tad too honestly. “But I’m a quick study.”

Scrooge McYogurt turned several shades of purple, he was so angry. “He leaned over to me—I can still smell the scotch on his breath—and warned me that if I played just one wrong note, he would bodily throw me out the door.”

Linda might have succumbed to the impostor syndrome in that moment and walked out. But she was so incensed by the guy’s attitude toward her that she decided to prove her competence instead of questioning her qualifications. And her inner sense of grit served her well. She played not just well, but brilliantly. Not only did she play every note perfectly, but she began to improvise and embellish the music, dazzling the party guests with her impassioned interpretation of each tune. “By the time we got to ‘Silent Night,’ there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Family members surrounded me at the piano singing with me and asking me to stay long past my allotted time. And the best part? Scrooge McYogurt gave me an extra 50 dollars!”

And she came home with far more than a bulging pocketbook: “What I learned that evening was that even when I took the risk of going out on a limb, doing something I wasn’t really qualified to do, I was able to step up to the plate, stretch my limits, and accomplish more than I ever thought possible. Instead of feeling scared, I felt emboldened. I ended up proving to myself that, just maybe, I had underestimated my talents and abilities.”

So our advice? When in doubt, ring those bells!

Take a Leap

Robin faced down her own imposter syndrome moment when she was approached in 2013 by a recruiter seeking a CEO to run the American Legacy Foundation, one of the nation’s largest non-profit organisations. Legacy, recently renamed the Truth Initiative, was the antismoking advocacy group that had been established in 1999 as part of the $206 billion Master Settlement Agreement—the largest civil litigation in history between the major tobacco companies, 46 states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories. The recruiter needed to know within 30 days whether Robin was interested.

Accepting the job would mean dismantling every safety net Robin had. It would mean leaving the advertising industry, where she had focussed her professional efforts for her entire career. It would mean leaving a for-profit enterprise for a non-profit one. It would mean leaving her native New York, her beloved friends, and a career’s worth of business contacts for Washington, a city where she knew almost no one. Robin’s husband, Kenny, would have to quit his job as a hospital administrator and find a new position in DC. Everything in her life added up to that one thing we all set out seeking: security. “It was absolutely terrifying to think about leaving all that, to take a step off the edge and challenge myself again.”

When the Kaplan Thaler Group merged a year earlier with Publicis New York, we went from an agency of 250 people to one with 700 employees. Much as Robin welcomed the chance to lead Publicis Kaplan Thaler, she realised that after many decades working in the same business, what she really craved, as scary as it seemed, was the chance to have a “second act”, one that would bring an opportunity to learn something completely new and use her years of marketing experience to do something that would have a positive impact on people’s lives. Linda assured Robin of her heartfelt support and told her to “go for it”.

So Robin picked up the recruiter’s letter, and with the deadline a few days away, wrote a passionate response. Going from selling shampoo to saving lives seemed like an unfathomable leap. On the other hand, Legacy’s “truth” public education programme for teens was legendary. The campaign had won every major award in the ad industry and had been proven to have prevented 450,000 young people from smoking in its first four years. As she drafted her response, it became clearer and clearer to her how strongly she felt about the organisation’s crusade. She saw herself as twice victimised by the tobacco industry, first as a pack-a-day teen smoker duped by cigarette manufacturers who hid the long-term health effects from the public, and second as a marketer whose entire field was tainted by the money and muscle of Big Tobacco.

Robin knew how hard it was to quit—she had stopped smoking for two years and then relapsed, before kicking the habit for good at the age of 28. Though we had never represented tobacco at Kaplan Thaler Group, no one in advertising could escape the shoot-the-messenger backlash from consumers who felt horribly betrayed by advertising campaigns promoting smoking.

She finished writing her letter and went to bed. You know what, Robin, that’s probably the end of that, she told herself.

But it felt good to convey how the tobacco companies had made people in advertising look deceptive, manipulative and dangerous.

“Of course they’re going to hire you,” Linda predicted when Robin told her what she did. And after a couple of gruelling rounds of interviewing, Robin had indeed beaten out more than one hundred candidates and got the job.

Accepting the new position was both liberating and terrifying, all at once. Peering down into that metaphorical career canyon, Robin steeled herself by flashing back to the toughest question that had been thrown at her during the final interview with toe board of directors, when she had been asked how she would feel about running a controversial organisation whose rich and powerful foes might well decide to go against her personally. It could, she was warned, get very ugly. Her answer, immediate and straight from her native Bronx roots: “Bring it on.”

Excerpted with permission from Grit to Great by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval and published by Crown Business

The post Why you should give up your safety nets! appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Published by: Crown Business

ISBN: 978-0804141239

Pages: 272

Price: INR 1219

Face it: At some point in your life, you have set goals for changing certain behaviours in yourself, and failed to follow through to achieve the results you envisioned. Perhaps you wanted to be a better neighbour, or not raise your voices at your children—whatever it is, you are able to easily identify what you want to change about your behaviour, but somehow, are unable to effect the change. In Triggers, leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith takes a look at why most people find it difficult to change their behaviours as he offers practical suggestions to overcome the obstacles.

The book is laid out in four parts. In part one, “Why Don’t We Become the Person We Want to Be?”, the author explains that it is easy to find excuses and blame circumstances for our inability to change our behaviour. Our reactions are impulsive, not thoughtful. For those of you who have identified the behaviour you want to change, and are motivated, the author encourages you to find the triggers, both internal and external, that are holding you back.

In part two, “Try”, the author introduces the acronym AIWATT: Am I Willing, At This Time to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? Every time you are faced with a choice to either engage or to “let it go”, the author encourages you to ask yourself the AIWATT question as a first principle to become the person you want to be. The answer to that question at the given time, under the given circumstances, will determine how you react to that situation, thereby helping you create the behavioural change you aspire.

In part three, “More Structure, Please”, you learn that structure not only increases your chances of success, it makes you more efficient at it. Not all structures are the same, so you must arrive at what works for you in the given situation. When you make a shopping list, you impose a structure by clearly stating what you need to buy and what you don’t. You schedule your appointments on your calendars and set reminders to impose structure on your daily life. Yet, when it comes to interpersonal interactions, or your own reactions, you prefer to wing it and go with your instincts, hindering your attempts at changing your behaviours in a thoughtful and structured way.

The author also points out that your environment constantly conspires against you and depletes you. Perhaps a big part of your day is pacifying irate customers, or perhaps you sit in a too-long meeting without accomplishing much, or you battle with technology all day to get even simple jobs done. All of this drains you, depletes you, leaving you prone to less prudent actions that you might regret.

The book suggests that there is an infinitesimal ‘space’ between a trigger and your reflexive response. If you can learn to recognise this space and increase it to allow for awareness and choice, you can learn to redirect your impulse to arrive at an appropriate response. When you transform your thoughtless impulsive response to a thoughtful chosen response, you begin to achieve the change you want.

In the last part, “No Regrets”, the author asks you to imagine what a drudgery it would be to go through life never changing the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the social and political views you hold. You know that change is the only constant thing in life. Yet, when it comes to changing how you treat people or how you interact with others, you wear the badge of changelessness with pride. You tell yourself: “This is who I am.”

When you cling to a negative behaviour that affects you and the ones you love, you are choosing to be miserable and make others miserable too. The book concludes by asking you to think about one change that you won’t regret later on. Be it the scolding response to your misbehaving child, or the sarcastic remark you are quick to blurt out—if you can change one thing and continue doing it forever without regretting it, now is the time to do it.

The post Changing strategy: Triggers By Marshall Goldsmith appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

One day at a cocktail party which had many other writers attending, Isaac Asimov asked someone, “When will you be publishing your next book, Miss Coolidge?” “When,” Miss Coolidge wryly replied, “will you not be publishing your next book, Mr. Asimov?”

Asimov was an eminent scholar and one of the most published authors of the 20^th century. Although he is renowned for his great repertoire of sci-fi writings, he authored well-written books in almost all the categories of Dewey Decimal System of library classification—from religion and languages to pure sciences and even arts. He also wrote about 90,000 letters and postcards in his lifetime. He received tremendous recognition and his works won him several prestigious awards including many lifetime achievement awards.

How could he write so much so well and on so many varied subjects? What was the source of energy and ideas of this prolific writer? What was his secret? I believe what kept Asimov going right till the end of his life was his enthusiasm.

Everything that anyone has ever done well can be attributed to his or her enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a power; we can use this power to achieve whatever we imagine for ourselves. Inspirational keynote speaker and Hall of Fame broadcaster Sonny Melendrez tells you how to access this power in this month’s cover story.

Using examples from his own life and of others, he illustrates how enthusiasm takes you from dreaming about a good life to living it. “When you truly believe in what you see, your vision begins to take on a life of its own. People, resources and circumstances will begin to appear,” he says as he shares the six elements that unleash the full force of fervour. He suggests ways in which you can bring enthusiasm into your everyday life and also offers advice on how to enthuse your team members.

The story is lucid and packed with wisdom. But words only inspire; action is up to you. And unless you use the insights and put into practise the author’s suggestions, your life will not change. As 2015 comes to an end, how about stocking up on the vibrant power of enthusiasm so that when the New Year arrives, you march into it with the confidence to achieve your most cherished goals?

The post December 2015 issue: The power of enthusiasm appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.