Once you go to a government office or a public sector bank and see employees working hard whenever they get time from having endless tea, cigarette, lunch and snack breaks, you realise why so many of our brethren are dying to be labelled backward. If Amroha Nagar Palika received 19,000 applications and that too mostly from BA, BSc, MA, BTech and MBA candidates for 114 posts of safai karamchari [sweepers], you can imagine how scary it is out there.

Conquering the final frontier

It is a huge achievement when you finally get an interview call. So what if it’s after 5,874 rejections, heartbreaks, and ‘how-dare-they-think-I-am not good-enough’ rants! Now that you have reached the final frontier, you transform into a marketeer about to sell a ghastly tasting tea as a weight reducing miracle beverage. Not everyone is your Mom who thinks you are the best thing to have happened to mankind after Darjeeling tea.

I’m not suggesting everyone lies to get a job. But then even Yudhishthira ‘misspoke’ the truth to put an end to a bloody war that lasted 18 days. Thankfully, a typical interview lasts anything between 20 and 30 minutes within which you have to convince a bunch of grim looking strangers that you are the harbinger of their achhe din! This is the time when you get to unleash the power-hungry politician in you and make promises you have no intention of keeping. It does help if you package yourself well and try to look and sound intelligent. After all, not many take Rahul Gandhi seriously despite his impressive lineage.

What you really mean

Remember the time you wooed that hottie online? You told her you were a six feet something who loved surfing and stays up all night reading Plato and Plath with the book placed on his six pack abs. How quickly she fell for you! It helped that she lived
in Nicaragua and would never find that you’d never been near the ocean or the gym and you spend all night watching porn.

Likewise, an interview is an opportunity to be as creative as possible with the truth. If you’ve ever doubted your talents, here’s a concise list of your misspoken truths and what they actually mean.

When you say – I pride myself as a team player and have never had disagreements with my colleagues. I’m patient, understanding and kind to every single person at the office. Even those I don’t get along with.

What you really mean – I work well only with those who agree with me. The ones who have problems with my style of working are either jealous of me or too stupid to recognise my genius.

When you say – I just love what you’re wearing!

What you’re thinking – I hope my desperation to get this job is not showing!

When you say – I have always wanted to work for an organisation with mission, vision and values. It would be a dream-come-true to work here.

What you really mean – I don’t even know what these words mean! But they sound pompous and idealistic; besides, they make me sound good.

When you say – I resigned from my previous job because it did not help me reach my true potential. Of course, the management refused to accept my resignation but I was adamant. Everyone cried at my farewell party.

What you really mean – I just need a new job to hate. When I finally put in my papers, everyone at my office cried with relief. I just hope they all die and to make sure they do, I shall fast for 56 consecutive Mondays.

When you say – I always give my 100 per cent to the organisation.

What you really mean – The decimal that comes right after 1 is only visible to me. Hehehehe!

When you say – If there’s anything I do not like about me is my quest for perfectionism. I don’t mind the extra hours I have to put in to deliver the perfect package.

What you really mean – I have never met a deadline in my entire lifetime and my last boss had a nervous breakdown waiting for me to complete the job assigned to me. Last heard he had relocated to an ashram in Rishikesh where he scours utensils in the kitchen.

When you say – I have never shied from taking a tough call. If you don’t drive accountability, you’d have happy employees but a bankrupt company.

What you really mean – I once caught one of the team members spitting in my tea. Last Diwali someone put a live ‘phataka’ [firecracker] under my seat. It’s a miracle I did not die of heart failure.

When you say – I am an avid reader, traveller, wildlife photographer

What you really mean – Lol, are you kidding me? The only wildlife I have photographed is my wife! I am an avid reader of Facebook posts. And commuting two hours each way to reach my workplace is travel, right?

When you say – Five years from now I see myself as a valuable employee of your esteemed organisation mentoring juniors and helping them realise their true potential.

What you really mean – Five years from now I’ll have your job. When I sit on your side of the table, I’ll make sure nobody gets the job the way I did. By faking it.

Such glib talking will ensure that these fools will fall for you hook, line and sinker. You can now look forward to a match made in heaven. Of course, most relationships are made in China [they rarely last forever], especially the ones based on lies. But while you’re still a couple, you can keep pretending your boss dearest is the best thing to have happened to you in public, and bitch about her in private. Thankfully you won’t have to wait seven years to get the ‘seven year itch’.  At the first signs of restlessness, you can start sailing the ocean in search of a juicier new catch and prepare a new set of lies to net that big fish.

The post The lies we speak in a job interview [and what we actually mean] appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

And then there are the people who lie to your face. Right there, in person at the grocery store. You haven’t seen each other in awhile and she’s [let’s call her Dabny] missed every one of your book club meetings for the last two months. She tells you she’s been so busy but she thinks about you every day and oh, have you lost weight? After she rushes off for a ‘work event’ you find out that she left your book club for a much cooler one than yours. So, why is she lying? I’ll tell you why.

An easy way out

Dabny believes you can’t handle the truth. Also, she’s a spineless weasel. Frankly, I don’t understand why you’re friends with her.

Why couldn’t Dabny tell you the truth, instead of letting you waste all kinds of energy and time worrying about your friendship and following her around town and bugging her apartment? And sending her emails and texting her in case she didn’t get those emails, and calling her in case she didn’t get those texts, and messaging her on Facebook in case she didn’t get those voice mails?

Recent surveys show that 95 per cent of people lie at least once a day… and the other five per cent lied on the questionnaires. If one lie was a dollar, we’d all be millionaires. Of course, inflation would skyrocket and you wouldn’t be able to afford housing, food and your cell phone bill but you’d have loads of money.

Lying is all about controlling the behaviour of others. But mostly, people lie because they’re afraid. Like your spineless weasel friend, Dabny, who screens her calls.

Most liars are insecure and starved for attention. The truth is boring, but if you have a ‘filthy-rich’ love interest, or a celebrity who is a ‘good friend’ or worse, a ‘very good friend’, then everyone at the party wants to gather around you and hear about it. Your lies have instantly made you everyone’s ‘best friend’.

Lies that irk me

Like the fictional Dr Gregory House says, “Everybody lies”. I mean cheating Jack isn’t about to tell the doctor how he really hit his head [because he and the babysitter were goofing around], especially with his wife sitting right there in the doctor’s office with him.

Or if you’re standing for elections, tell the people what they want to hear because they will vote for you based on your unrealistic promises. They will scream at you later for not fulfilling your promise. But hey, you got elected and that’s what matters, right?

And don’t get me started on the scam artists who sell pills that will either shrink your whole body or enlarge a specific part of it.

The downside to lying

Here’s the thing—I’m a literal person who expects honesty. If I take Joe blow-things-out-of-proportion literally, I ride his emotional roller coaster with him, reacting to his near-death experiences of wrestling alligators and almost plane crashes as if what he’s telling me happened exactly the way he says it did. After he’s delivered his steaming pile of hyperboles, I’m emotionally exhausted. Later, I will feel like a duped fool for believing any of it. Eventually, I don’t trust him anymore and simply nod along instead of boarding that tiresome train.

If you have a secret, you can tell me or not, I don’t care. I’m not that kind of nosy and I’m not insulted if you keep it from me. I’d rather you say nothing about your closet skeletons than claim you’ve never “had any work done” on your face. Besides, I can tell that you’ve had work done on your face. Nobody’s cheekbones look like that naturally.

As a famous, cherry tree-chopping young lad once said, “I cannot tell a lie”. Though I am fully capable of distorting the truth, it’s too energy consuming for me. I speak from experience when I say that when one lies, one has to store that lie for later reference and I simply can’t be bothered.

I lied to my mother once when I was a teenager. I came home late one day and gave her some lame excuse about breaking my watch and brought in two watch-less witnesses to back me up. But her words indicated that she knew I was lying. In one moment, I’d been caught and punished without being humiliated in front of my friends. I felt horrible. My mother was indeed a clever woman.

When lying makes sense

On the other hand, there are times when lying is a fabulous idea. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable to lie to rude or judgmental people. So what if you have a penchant for squirrel-themed salt and pepper shakers or a late-night doughnut problem? That’s none of their dang business. They don’t deserve the truth for being meddlesome. These so-called friends of yours are emotional terrorists and you can’t let the terrorists win.

Don’t enable their behaviour by answering invasive questions. If you’re a materialistic Judgy McJudgerstein and you ask me where I got this puffy, lime green prom dress and how much it was, I’m not about to tell you I bought it at an 80 per cent discount from a roadside vendor. I’ll say I paid full price for it and had it custom tailored. However, if you’re my trusted friend, not only will I tell you where I bought it from, I will also show you the other cool stuff I bought from him—like an awesome pink chessboard-topped table.

You know, it’s frustrating for those of us who believe in a meritocracy, which doesn’t exist. We watch liars pass us by on their way to the bank because of all this silly integrity with which we are burdened. If only we could tell ourselves, “Well, at least I can sleep at night because I’m not an emotional terrorist,” but then, we’d be the liars.

Nevertheless, we have to keep fighting the good fight because someday, we will win. Someday, technology will advance to the point of reading our brains and everyone will have an app called Polly Graff installed on their smartphones, which flashes holographic emotional terrorist icons above people’s heads when they lie.

Look, I can understand if you don’t want to tell me that you’ve murdered someone or just paid an outrageous sum of money for an awkwardly located tattoo, or you crashed on the couch and binged-watched Spongebob Squarepants all weekend instead of going out with me. Don’t be Dabny, the spineless weasel. You can tell me what you really did, even if it was without me. Or tell me nothing. I won’t take it personally or judge you. If you tell me the truth, I will love you and respect you no matter what everyone else says about you.

And that’s no lie.

The post Truth be told appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Why do we avoid telling the unpleasant truth?

We’ve all done it. We don’t really want to do it, but it comes almost naturally. That’s probably because we would prefer not to hurt the ones we love.

If you have a husband or wife who wants to sing but is a terrible singer, you might be inclined to encourage them to sing; despite their apparent lack of talent. That situation can be applied to countless other scenarios where one person in a relationship lies to the other in order to maintain the happiness level. After all, most people don’t really enjoy conflict, especially if the conflict begins with something that one party could take as particularly insulting, like telling them their voice is terrible.

When we lie to those we care about, are we really doing the right thing? It may seem that we’re saving them from pain. For any person, being in a relationship means that we don’t want our partner to be hurt.

The problem is that by pretending that everything is okay, we are merely postponing the hurt. And when the person finally learns the truth about what you’ve been telling them, they may never trust you again.

“Why do my boyfriends always leave me?”

I knew a girl who was extremely beautiful. She had an exotic look to her that any magazine would have loved and she had the smile to match. Her personality was equally as attractive, so I really enjoyed hanging out with her whenever I could.

One night, she and I were talking about the various guys she’d been dating over the course of the last few years. She couldn’t understand why none of her relationships had worked out. The guys seemed to like her, and everything always appeared to be going fine. But inevitably, the guy would break things off with her almost out of the blue. Each and every time, she was blind-sided by the breakup.

When she asked me what I thought the problem was, I honestly couldn’t say at first, because I didn’t know. So, I asked her a series of questions to get to the root of the issue. The line of inquiry went through every possible avenue I could think of: How were their conversations? Was the chemistry good? Were there any indicators that something was wrong?

Then she mentioned one thing. She said that initially the guys were really into her and always wanted to kiss her. But as the relationship progressed, they seemed to kiss her less and less.

An idea hit me. Maybe she had bad breath… But I couldn’t say that. And I actually didn’t know. Plus, I didn’t want to be the one to test it out. That was something I would rather let one of her girlfriends tell her.

I went about carefully laying the groundwork for building up to the possible solution to her problem. I told her it could be one of many things. I listed several items that might have been a turn off to guys, bad breath being one of them.

She asked me point blank if that was an issue, to which I responded that I didn’t know, but maybe she could ask some of her other friends about it.

Telling the truth: There’s spinach in your teeth

When it comes to telling the unpleasant truth, none of us wants to offend someone else’s personal air space and none of us wants to look like an idiot.

I have become a much more upfront person in the last few years, and am usually willing to be brutally honest with friends who ask me questions with potentially hurtful answers. I never found out whether my friend actually had bad breath or not. But if I were her, I would have wanted to know.

Have you ever gotten something stuck in your teeth? I have. This happens to most people, especially if they’ve eaten spinach because you can’t always feel if there’s spinach wedged between your pearly whites. And if someone doesn’t let you know about it, you will walk around for the next few hours with something green sticking out to everyone you smile at.

Not telling the unpleasant truth does more harm than good

When it comes down to whether or not you should be telling an unpleasant truth in a relationship, you have to ask yourself a very simple question. Would you want to know the truth? Inevitably, you are doing far more harm than good by lying and delaying the foreseeable. How would you feel if someone you cared about told you that you were good at something, only to find out everyone else thought you were terrible? It would be way worse than finding out you had some spinach in your teeth.

Are you afraid to know the truth about something in your life? What are the consequences if you don’t know the truth? Or are you afraid to be honest with someone you care about because you don’t want to hurt them? Ask yourself the simple question. Would you want to know?

The post Telling the unpleasant truth to those you care about appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In couple’s therapy, we talk about change. However, I seldom hear, “I want to learn to do things differently.” Clients are often baffled as to why their partner won’t change — they say, “If you loved me you’d do this for me.” I ask them what they are willing to change, and hear, “I’m not doing that!”

They miss the irony. Each expects the other to change; neither thinks they need to change. The self-responsible person asks, “What can I do to act like the person I want my partner to be?”

I was walking through a mall, and saw a mom shaking her 8-year-old a few inches from her face and screaming, “How many times have I told you not to hit your sister?” Hmm… wonder where he learned to use physical force to make his point?

One of my clients hates it when her husband yells at her. So, she yells at him, “I hate it when you yell at me!” The woman yells at her husband because she thinks she has the right to do so, since he did. The odd part is, in a previous session, she said, “That’s it! I’m never going to yell at him again! It doesn’t work!” So I asked her about that promise.“Well, yes, I did promise, but really, anybody would have yelled over that!” Not much of a promise, eh?

The reason relationships get into trouble is often that one or both of the parties think their job is to ‘sort out’ their partner. One of my clients refers to her husband as her ‘fourth child.’ Nothing he does is right, and she endlessly tells him so.

I think the purpose of a relationship is to relate. And to do that, I have to meet my partner as my equal, not as someone I need to fix. Here’s the truth: Your partner isn’t broken, and your job is to work on yourself.

Here are five ideas to help you make that happen.

1. Honesty

Secrets have a way of circling back and biting us. People get into the “I have the right to my privacy!” stuff, but here’s a suggestion: if you want secrets, keep them. Just don’t be in a relationship. Most of the mess we find ourselves in has to do with not being truthful. We don’t talk about what we are thinking, what we are feeling. We even may assume that our partner ought to be a mind reader—ought to ‘just know.’ Honesty is about describing what you know about yourself. You can’t know a thing about another person [you make guesses, but if you pay attention, you’re mostly wrong] so all you really can talk about is your own behaviour, and internal theatre. Putting off talking about what is going on for you both delays the inevitable, and sets you up for fights, once the truth comes out. Better to tackle things head on.

2. Fair fighting

Fair fighting is an agreement to use self-responsible language, and to separate out angry emotions. For instance “I’m noticing that I am making myself angry about the story I’m telling myself about…[the problem] and I’m wondering what is going on for you?” In this example you’ll see you’re speaking only for yourself. “I am making myself angry” is true. No one “makes me” angry. In order to get angry, I have to tell myself a story. And stories are by definition fictional. Works for all emotions, not just anger.

There’s an exercise called a Vesuvius, designed by Joann Peterson of The Haven. There’s an area of floor, say 8 ft x 8 ft. The angry person stays in this area, perhaps with a pillow to hit. The person can say or do anything within the area, for five minutes, except break things, or touch people. What this accomplishes is upping everyone’s tolerance for angry sounds, while letting the person express the emotion safely. Fair fighting means sticking to the topic, stating your side, and listening to the other person, just like in the above example. It also means taking turns to express, aiming for solutions and not aiming to ‘be right’.

3. Treat your partner as you wish to be treated

Mostly, we’re sitting around, waiting for others to go first. “I’ll stop yelling when you do”, “I’ll speak for myself after you do.” We are excellent at putting the other to the test, and often fail at doing what we say we want to do. “Do unto others…” is a tenet in most religions. There’s nothing in it about waiting for the other person to go first. It’s about integrity: “If I say I will do something, I will do it. My behaviour is not contingent on another’s.” So, what kind of person do you want to be in relationship with? Be that person.

• If you want honesty, be honest.
• If you want good communication, take a course and learn how to be a good communicator.
• If you want to be listened to, stop talking and listen.
• If you don’t hear what you ‘want’ to hear, be quiet and listen some more.

Doing this is the only way to shift your relationship, as you are shifting the only thing you really can—your own behaviour.

4. No blame

Here’s a tricky one. Watch yourself, and listen to yourself. When something goes wrong, even little stuff, like getting cut off in traffic, we immediately blame the other person. They go from being wrong, to being bad, to being ‘out to get me, just like everyone else is.’ We learned as kids to point at other people, and to make it their fault. But nothing happens inside of you without you setting it up. It’s why two people have different reactions to the same situation. Situations don’t cause reactions. Things happen and we react. We might begin to feel uncomfortable, and our instinct is to blame someone. Our partners are typically around quite often, and therefore get a lot of blame. We need to learn to stop ourselves by repeating, “Things happen, and I choose my response.” I can use honest communication and then ask for change, such as: “I’m wondering if you would be willing to discuss how we could do this differently.” Blame games lead to going around in circles, and everyone is in pain. Not a good strategy!

5. Acceptance

In the end, here it is: You are who you are, and your partner is who s/he is. And who each of you are is captured ONLY in what you do. In other words, if I say I am a fair and compassionate person and act like Attila the Hun, the truth of me is ‘Attila.’ Words are cheap, actions priceless.

Acceptance is about waking up each morning, looking at your partner and saying ‘Reset to zero.’ The person opposite you, and all you know about that person, is who s/he is right now. If you can’t accept this person 100 per cent, you’re already in trouble. This ‘reset’ means that I put behind everything that has been discussed, and resolved, and now, we start the day afresh. My choice is to accept my partner just as she is today. I then begin again, with honesty, openness, dialogue, and self-responsibility. I treat my partner as I wish to be treated, day after day. In the end, the part we can fix in any relationship is our part. The best way to do so is to treat others with dignity, respect, compassion and heart. Anything else misses the point. I learn about me, as I relate with you.

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