Resilience

Shape of You

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

Juhi was sitting down at her desk. Perplexed.

She had just got out of a meeting with her boss. It was an important meeting because she wanted to flag certain risks and issues in the project she was overseeing.

She had been in the company for a while. After having graduated from a prestigious college in the capital, she had taken to her career like fish to water.

Having shown strong work ethics and commitment, the company had seen her potential and given her a couple of promotions and responsibilities. She was now a project leader.

Juhi knew that as a senior member, she had the onus of not only overseeing her team but also analyse how things were and if they were in the right direction.

Today’s discussion was exactly that. She trying to flag risks and issues she foresaw after her client pushed her back on certain details of the project, and which she believed ought to be addressed. She had discussed the situation with her mentor, and he had given her confirmation that she was on the right track.

So, she had walked in to the meeting with a lot of confidence. However, her boss wasn’t sure if there was merit in her position. He told her that he had seen some of these requests before and if the client wanted something so strongly, it was better to agree and move ahead.

After arguing for an hour on the relative merit of their respective positions, she knew that there was no point in continuing further, so she told her boss that she will think through what he had shared.

Once outside, she ambled toward her seat. She was perplexed because she knew her boss to be a tough nut but also mostly right. However, she read his reluctance to go against what the client was advising as fear of losing the project.

She didn’t know what she could do now. This was a first. Just then, a couple of her team members came up, and she decided to put off her thoughts. The rest of the day went by as usual, and she couldn’t find any time to delve deeper into her previous thoughts during the day.

Later in the night, as she lay down to sleep, her thoughts went back to her growing up years. During her high school days, she was in the Girls Scout, and was a regular at the camps.

In one such camp, she was a part of a group that had to play the role of an advanced party. During their descent from a hill, she had sensed danger and advised her group to take a different route. Although there was some reluctance, she hadn’t given up and instead used logical arguments through her map reading skills to convince her group.

Eventually, her sense had proven right, as there had been rain just the night before in a dangerous section of the descent and the original route had become very challenging for another party. She had been judged a high performer due to this contribution to her group’s success.

That single recollection gave Juhi confidence. She had been shaped by such experiences and she wasn’t going to let her gut be ruled out. She knew she was not wrong and her position merited caution. She decided she will push back.

The next couple of days, she spent time framing her thoughts. She consulted once more with her mentor about the approach being taken, and got a positive sign. She was all set.

She wrote a persuasive email to the client, copying his boss too. She also copied her boss and her team. In the email, she laid out her thoughts with initial hypothesis and requested everyone to consider both sides of the coin. She volunteered to run a detailed analysis of various possibilities, and accepted an independent review.

She half expected a push back again. But the way she had written it down, there wasn’t a single person who could turn down the request. They granted it to her to investigate.

A month later, she had the final report, reviewed and decided upon. Her hypothesis had proven right and the client had to back off the initial requests.

That evening, her boss congratulated her in front of her team, acknowledging how wrong he had been and how right Juhi had been.

She had shown her character during this challenge and it was indeed because of how she had been shaped…

Remember the Highs!

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

I was going through a dull moment. Feeling down and out.

My mind was racing down the spiral, into the nadir. And my demeanour had changed into a sobering, deflated one.

It was a low point. And I was thinking of all the things that had gone wrong. All those mistakes which I could have prevented.

As I gazed into the ether, my inner voice was somewhere egging me to get out of the slump. Trying to remind me of the good things that had happened or which were in store in the future.

But my mind had shut off the good side. The bad side was winning at the moment.

Seeing me lost, my wife came and sat besides me. And told me that when I had overcome so many bigger challenges in my life, what I was going through was relatively minor.

She added that she was fully confident that I would not only overcome this low point but come out stronger on the other side.

As I listened to these words, something stirred in me. I went back to those past challenges and compared those situations with the one I was in currently. I also recalled the success I had seen once I overcame those challenges.

And suddenly, just like a light bulb illuminating a dark hallway, my good side took over and started throwing light over the gloom, pushing the bad side away.

It was just a small statement by my wife. But meant so much to me in that moment when I was feeling low.

My confidence returned and my demeanour normalised. Positive thoughts started coming back and the feeling of I am not alone in this made me sit up with a resolve to fight.

Thankfully, I have her by my side, helping me avoid these pitfalls every now and then!

Who Moved My …

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

Life is uncertain. This is one of the first truisms I learnt. I guess, all of us realise this at some point in time. And then live with it unconsciously.

Until, when life throws a curveball at us…

The most common fallacy we live with till then is that this won’t happen with us. Until it does.

And then we get surprised, knocked out, and end up dejected. Some times, we see this coming. Often times, it is completely tangential.

While watching a couple of movies this weekend revolving around this theme, I relived my own days of despair and came through with these thoughts.

As it so happened, whilst in the Army, I was hospitalised for a long time on account of a cervical spine injury. As days became weeks and months, I was advised to multiple doctors and finally it was decided that I will be medically boarded out.

It took me a while to first accept the fact that this would be the end of my dream. The world I had been building up to in my life. And it took me down a rabbit hole of despair and solitude.

As I was fighting these feelings, I was gifted the book “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson. It is an interesting parable and talks about how life throws a spanner in the works sometimes and how to recover and keep moving.

That book helped me get a new perspective. It made me look at the brighter side of life, where I could go out and get another shot at doing something else rather than being stuck in a frustrating situation with a physical category in the army.

Slowly, I came out of that despair and hopeless situation that I had found myself in and started looking at things with a brighter perspective again.

Time moved on and I got other opportunities to prove myself, gain new experiences, and grow. I of course made more mistakes and lost some keys to some rooms, but I am in a decent place in life.

As I recalled these details this weekend, I was reminded of how most of us are so stuck in the worlds we are building for ourselves, in our own small way, that we often are blindsided by these curveballs.

Believe you me, they are somewhere on their way. Only if we could keep our eyes and minds open to these possibilities of mishaps. But even then, we could completely be caught off guard.

I guess the only way we can keep up and prepare for such scenarios is by knowing deep within that nothing is permanent and tides change.

As long as we can get up and get moving after that shock, we will be fine. And all will be ok!

Resilience

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

The capacity to recover from difficulties; toughness. That’s how the word is described in the dictionary.

It is an internal force that makes it possible for us to move ahead. In life. At any given stage.

It is what fills us with hope. Of the possibilities that lay ahead. Even when the chips are down and the path seems to have come to a dead end.

It is what gives us the strength to continue in spite of what people around us say. To us or behind us.

It is what helps us believe in ourselves when others may not. Even though we may not have all the qualifications or the experience to do it.

But only when, there is love and purpose.

For otherwise, there is no incentive, even for the most hard nosed, to rekindle that spark and forge ahead.

Only when we have love around us and for what we want to do, can we feel the passion to make things happen. Else, what we are planning to do will anyways feel like drudgery soon…

And only when there is real purpose in what we want to achieve. Though we know there could be multiple thorns lying around. And the path is too wound up and convoluted. With a great chance of failure.

Yet, most of us dream of achieving things in a jiffy. Of landing up where we want to be without much struggle or pain. Without being prepared for the many surprises that the path may throw at us.

No doubt, most times we quit. Within a short span or in the middle, when the entire plan seems stuck.

This is true for things in our personal life or at work. Whether it is being healthy and fit, or pursuing a serious hobby. Whether it is a project at work or a business plan in our head. Whether it is for ourselves or for our teams.

So, the first thing that we should ask ourselves then – “Do I have love and purpose for what I am going to pursue? Genuinely?”.

That would be half the battle won. In our minds. And on the field.

Persistent Resilience

~ Rishi ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes, what happens in a matter of days or even hours, scars one for life. And while time heals and life adapts, some scars remain and are problematic to get rid of.

I have had some share of disappointments in life but one such situation has been quite problematic to dissipate from the annals of my mind. It was about what happened with my business venture and why I couldn’t succeed in it, in spite of putting in my best foot forward.

As I winded up my business in 2014, over that painstaking first half of the year, I often spent my days debating in the head what went wrong. I got into a shell and became reluctant to share my disappointment with others. And while life continued and physically and mentally I moved on after a few months, that scar remained.

It would later manifest and trouble me in unthinkable ways – reminding me of my failure and making me skeptical of my abilities, taking me down the what-if analysis road where the possibilities I had seen but not achieved stared at me and making me feel worse, making me question if I was indeed on the right path, and so on. And the more it dwelled in my mind, the stronger the devil became.

I tried to overpower it and got immersed in work to pull me out of it. I spent time with my family and on other things I liked to do, to move my mind out of those stray thoughts. And while I had some success, there were still times, though with reduced intensity, where those thoughts crossed my mind and tried pulling me down.

Until egged on by my wife, I decided to stop feeling sorry about what happened and accept that the mishap could have been worse and that it was a good life lesson for me. I took out the good things from that lesson and stopped blaming myself or anyone else. I made my peace. And then slowly, the scar started healing. It is still not gone, but it surely is not as visible as before.

Sure, I did lose out on some opportunities and fell back a bit. I could not live upto the promises I made to myself and to others. But then, I realised that there’s more to life than one failure. And if I apply myself persistently and be resilient, I would be able to achieve something better. Success delayed but not denied.

As I drove around with a good friend yesterday, we talked about our scars and how we are dealing with them. He had a huge setback in life but due to his resilience and the persistent efforts he has made, he has got out of that zone and is moving ahead. Another friend has had a disappointing 2020 but is now determined to start afresh and has pushed doubts out of his mind and resolutely started seeking new opportunities.

Talking about such dismal things at the beginning of a new year may not be the most appropriate time. But for a lot of us, this is perhaps the best time to move out of whatever disappointing zones we have around us and forge ahead resolutely with a clean mind. For a happy 2021 and beyond…

Upwards and onwards then!