Expectations

Entitled

~ Rishi ~ 1 Comment

The clock struck 12. On a bright sunny morning, with the winter winds blowing on his face, Deepesh looked at his phone once again.

He had been walking outside the office building, not in the best of moods, after a call with one of his team members, Vipul.

Vipul was a hard worker and one of the brightest in the team. He was naturally chosen for difficult assignments and Deepesh had taken good care of him over the last couple of years.

However, today’s meeting with him had left Deepesh feeling cheated. Vipul had just announced that he was resigning because he had not got a good enough raise in the recently concluded increment cycle.

Deepesh had gone extra lengths to get him the best increment in the team. He had also discussed about putting up Vipul for a promotion in the next cycle.

After doing so much for him, the news of his resignation didn’t go down well with Deepesh. He had told as much to Vipul, sharing his unhappiness. However, Vipul strongly felt that he was entitled to much more than he had received.

As the day passed, the meeting continued to come back to Deepesh’s mind again and again. At first, he toyed with the idea of identifying how to retain Vipul. But it soon occurred to him that even if he succeeded in retaining, Vipul would not be able to shrug off the entitlement he felt he was owed.

Deepesh had to be fair to the other team members. He couldn’t afford to have other team members develop similar feelings without actually having done enough important work.

He also felt that what Vipul thought of his work was a very personal take on his own performance. And even if he tried to reason with Vipul, he wouldn’t be able to break through the barrier.

More importantly, Deepesh realised that every one, including him, had some feeling of entitlement. It was a natural feeling, based on what each individual thought his work was worth. And as a team leader, he needed to understand his team’s psyche better.

So, he decided to let go. He asked Vipul to wind up his work in the next one month. During that period, Deepesh spent time to understand the expectations and aspirations of his other team members.

He had frank conversations and gave and took feedback from each one of his team members. It not only helped him understand their thoughts but also allowed him to appreciate their feelings and chart out their growth paths.

It also allowed him to reflect about how he thought about his own performance. After all, he was entitled to do that!

States of Mind.

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

Over the last couple of months, I have gone through a gamut of emotions.

At times, I have been elated. Maybe it was a new experience, or it was the feeling of having done something good at work or home. Or sometimes, just the invincible feeling of being in a good place!

And then, just the next day or immediately afterwards, I have felt gloomy and uncertain. Either because of something that occurred, or a worry about how things will turn out for us, or just anxiety about random life-related questions.

A few times, I have even felt frustrated and angry. About how things are turning out or not, or because of certain discussions at work or at home.

As I took some time this weekend to reflect on what’s happening around me, it took me a while to register that my state of mind has been quite haywire over these last couple of months.

I have been troubled, relieved, and happy. All within a short span. I cannot put a finger on why somethings happened the way they did, or why I reacted the way I did.

But as I dug deeper, I realised that I had taken a lot of pressure on myself owing to our move back. I was determined to get things done the right way and didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. In the process, the stress showed on me in these unpredictable manners.

Now that the move is done, and we are settling down, it is of course easier for me to relax a bit. But having lived in a heightened state of existence for a while, it’s not been as easy to switch off.

While I take my time to get back to normalcy, I realise that I shouldn’t have taken things so hard on myself. Maybe, the next time something so life altering is happening, I ought to take it easy. Or perhaps, adopt the same rigorous approach but with the allowance of slip ups.

After all, it’s important to not lose my state of mind in trying to get things done the right way always…

“The one thing I promise”

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There are things we do for ourselves. And then there are things we do for others.

All because we want to.

But then there are things we do because someone tells us to. Because we promised them.

But do we really want to do it? And does that promise really hold any meaning?

This weekend, as I celebrated my bday, my daughter made a big card for me. She wrote a lot of nice things and then left the note with a question.

“What is the one thing you wish I do, Papa”?

I read the entire note, hugged her. And then got busy with the cake!

She asked me nicely, “Can you please write something below my note, to mention what is the one thing you want me to promise”?

I wrote about how I want her to promise that she will always keep smiling and she happily accepted.

As I was reflecting back on that entire exchange, it didn’t seem like the right thing to me.

Not because I don’t believe in her sincerity but because the only way she can learn to keep promises is when it comes from within her.

This is something I have realised over time. The only promises I keep or strive for are the ones I am making myself, with my own heart. If not, they are half-hearted, and have a higher chance of not being fulfilled.

In fact, a lot of times, we promise things to people when they ask for. We assure them about how we will do that one thing because they asked us for it.

And then we forget. Or neglect. Or contest.

Why make the promise in the first place then!

But we still do because we feel if we don’t promise, the other person will feel bad. Or offended that they are asking or requesting us and we are saying a no.

What if we instead remained truthful to ourselves and by extension to others?

Attachment

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How we get attached to those who are looking out for us? And what they mean to our lives?

As I spent a few days with my close family, including first cousins, uncles, and aunts, this question kept coming to me.

There are many people who cross our paths right from our birth, through our life, till we bid our goodbye. But there are very few for whom we really hold affection in our hearts and feel attached to.

I have written about this multiple times from different perspectives, covering friendships, relations, and colleagues. But as I dug deeper this time, I realised the answer is actually very simple.

Most of us are attached to our parents and our siblings, which is most natural. Maybe a couple of uncles and / or aunts, and maybe a few cousins also form our close circle. While we may have a good rapport with the other members of our extended families, these few people matter a lot to us.

They matter to us because the relationship with them is built on trust but without the weight of expectations. It is symbiotic and therefore benefits both.

This group is like our confidant, our punching bag, and also our supporters from the sidelines. We love them and we fight with them but whichever way you cut it, we spend most of our time with them.

In turn this attachment and affection helps both the sets of people to rely on each other for anything, creating a virtuous circle and helping us keep ourselves rooted and bonded. They mean the microcosm of a perfect world to us, wherein we can do whatever and be whoever, without worrying about anything else.

And that attachment continues even as time passes by and people drift apart physically. For the trust without expectations equation still holds true!

I have experienced this personally. I stayed in a joint family in my formative years and am heavily attached to my uncles, aunts and my cousins. That affection and attachment has continued even though we don’t get to meet each other often.

When we do, we all effortlessly sync in whatever setting we are put in and spend time together laughing, crying, quarrelling and caring for each other. More importantly even when that time ends and we go back to our usual lives, the level of affection and care continues in our remote interactions.

All because of trust on each other without any expectations! Important tenets for not just our close relationships but every connection that we value in life…

Unique Innocence

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Children are the bedrock of our vision. We do everything keeping them in mind!

We yearn for them when they are not around, live for them to be happy, work to provide them the best of what we can, take care of them at all times, and ensure that we bring them up to become someone who we would be proud of.

However, often, we try and impose ourselves on our children or worse still, try and force them down a path that we wish to choose for them due to whatever preconceived notions or beliefs…

Picture this –

You have a young kid who you figure out is a prodigy in the game of chess. You get him the best teacher you can, take him to multiple tournaments to hone his play and become the no. 1 kid on the chess circuit.

And then, when he comes up short against one tough opponent, you berate him. You realise that you are doing something wrong but you want the kid to win at all costs. To prove that your investment in his future is right.

But the kid doesn’t want to play now. Fearful of this one other prodigal talent, he almost decides to give up. The teacher you have hired tries to force him to learn better and prepare better. But he is not ready to engage.

When you look at this situation – what would most of us do? We would try and sit down the kid and get him back to playing again. In a lot of cases, without worrying about why he is behaving like this or what is the core issue.

Nothing wrong with this approach – that is how we adults are attuned to behave in our cut-throat competitive world…

Except for one – this will be the most insensitive thing to do and will most probably kill the kid’s appetite for learning further.

And will be the end of the dream that we fostered with his spectacular talent! More importantly, it will be a dreadful experience for the child!!!

This week, with so much floating around in the form of negative news, I decided to get some positivity and focused on reading up and watching a couple of good impressionable movies. One of them was ‘Innocent Moves’ on Netflix or titled as ‘Search for Bobby Fischer’ on IMDB (UK and US versions respectively).

It is one of those real-life child prodigy movies and for those of us who have seen ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, released on Netflix recently, it might seem familiar to some degree. Not going by the IMDB rating, I personally found the movie to be a brilliant showcase of various multitudes – parenting, child psychology, parent-children relationship, societal pressures and viewpoints, and so on.

The story I narrated above, is what happens in the movie. Till the intermission. Post that, it flips…

The father realises that he needs to let the kid be and stops talking about chess. Takes him fishing for 2 weeks. Lets him play baseball and other sports. Reasons with himself that it is more important to see his kid happy.

And then the kid picks back his interest in chess and goes back to playing with his buddies in the neighbourhood park. Enough to get the moves back and to go for competition once again, this time beating the other prodigy through the new skills he acquired.

Sorry, if I spilled the beans. But that’s how most movies related to sports play out. So it’s not much of a reveal I hope!

What I found interesting was the soft nudges in a few scenes which showed a different side of how a prodigal talent can be groomed. And all of those scenes inclined towards the humane touch and the unique innocence of children.

How a father chooses to let his kid be instead of forcing his dreams upon the child, how a friend helps him gain his confidence back, how a mother protects him from being thrown into the competitive ring, how a teacher lets go of his ego against a past opponent and understands that the child can go into a match not being his usual confident self, how the child realises that it is more important to make friends than opponents, and finally how he gives the kids he defeated some of the tips and asks them to just try and play without pressure.

There was a lot to learn for me! About what not to do…

How not to take away the innocence from our children. It is better to let them be and grow up naturally.

How not to push our children to do better always. It is ok to not be good in some cases or not up to our expectations.

How not to beat down a child in the case of a failure but to encourage him to learn and grow. Helping him understand that failure is but a stepping stone to success.

How not to force them on the path that we think is best for them early on. Doing multiple things is bound to help them realise their preference and interests and pick up what suits them more later on in life.

How not to push them to turn everything in life into a race and view others as a threat. It is sometimes better to let things float around and let them gain random experiences before they settle down in to a rhythm. And better to make friends than foes.

Lastly, how not to force them to be a competitive machine always but to remember being human in all situations!

Hope to carry these lessons forward as I continue on my journey of being a parent and let my daughter utilise her unique innocence to grow into whatever she desires to be…

Expectations

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

2021 has started and so have a lot of us with new resolutions, commitments, plans, and goals. The last year was a mixed bag with its share of highs and lows. But one thing that I realised it had in common for a lot of us was a mismatch in expectations.

So while traveling back after the year-end vacation, after this reflection crossed my mind, the train of thoughts ran in related directions. And as I reached home, I firmed up what I ought to focus on in this new year.

Setting right and realistic expectations!

Over the last few years, I have set up some expectations with everyone – be it family or friends or colleagues. And while these expectations are a natural result of what my experiences have taught me over the years, I realised that sometimes they aren’t aligned well, resulting in heartburn or disappointment. Hence the following resolutions…

With my spouse, I have often had expectations of she understanding me completely without me being explicit about the subject matter. Though there is the old school love and understanding that this thought stems from, and it does feel good when it happens, I realise that its not always possible for her to read my mind and I ought to be more communicative sometimes. That I believe will not only help us understand each other better, will also allow us more talk, which is always a wonderful tool to bond.

With my daughter, I have at times tried to make her behave like a grown up and does things like I want her to do. Again, it is a desire to make her do right things. But at times, it leads to curbing her playfullness or fun. And so, I will henceforth let her be her normal self at all times and enjoy her childhood, while willing myself to accept her actions and reactions as a child rather than as an adult.

With my parents, I expect them to listen to me now that I have grown up. But I sometimes forget that they have brought me up and know better than I do and more importantly, have their own world view which I ought to respect. Therefore, I will change my expectations to ensure that I let them choose and decide for themselves, while offering all help I can to make their life as comfortable as it can be.

With my family members and friends, I expect that we stay in touch regularly. But that expectation is for me to also live up to. And to ensure that I communicate with them as much as I can to stay connected and meet that expectation on both the sides.

With my junior colleagues, I have expected them to be able to match my wavelength and do things in the way I do them. I have also expected that they understand what I am doing or why I am doing so. But I realise that each individual is different and as long as they are positively inclined to contribute, I should let them go ahead in their fashion and guide them to the best possible outcome. Hence, going forward I will let them be in the driving seat more and more, while providing the support that is needed. And I will communicate more and convey my thoughts to them appropriately to ensure that we are better aligned at all times.

With others, I expect them to believe me with all sincerity, while at times not setting the stage for that belief to be formed. I also expect them to be honest with me. So in 2021, I am going to act more sincerely and try to build bonds and relationships wherever I can, automatically leading to that belief and honesty in conversations and actions with whomsoever I may deal with.

With such a long list, I am not sure whether I am expecting too much of myself. But then, new year resolutions are meant to be taken to stretch oneself. Hopefully, I will be able to live upto my own expectations!!!