As I started writing about this topic, many things poured in. When my sister and I fight and she does not want to listen, she will cut the call. This is the easiest and first technique: remove yourself or the cause of distress. I remember my school days when I used to get stuck in a problem, and I tried again and again only to make the same mistakes. In those times, I used to stop doing math, go for a stroll or have some food, or watch a scene on TV and then come back to solve it again, and this time, I succeeded. This is because a temporary break from stress freshens up, and we can take the problem from a new perspective.
I still remember my early professional life when taking leaves was all in the hands of my manager. I often found myself in situations where I was forced to take annual leaves at one go and work the rest of the year. I always felt I had no leave when I actually needed them the most. On the other hand, planning for vacations and visiting new places had been super relaxing. I still remember visiting the beeches after tiring work schedules had been a great boon. These all things always carried me to my nostalgic childhood summer vacations when my mom would take us to our aunt's place, and we would enjoy it a lot. Professional life was the total opposite of this; that was painful.
So, all this distancing cuts your deep, ingrained roots of prejudice, egocentrism, and negativity and helps you refresh your tired mind and think again in a new way.
The second way is the Eisenhower Matrix (below).
| Urgent | Less Urgent |
Important | 1 | 2 |
Less Important | 3 | 4 |
In this method, we write our important and less important works and categorize them in urgent and less urgent columns. Quadrant 1 is both urgent and important, which means we need to give it our full attention. It could include a deadline that is approaching soon or a health issue that needs to be attended to first, etc.
Quadrant 2 is important but not so urgent, so we can attend it a while later. These could include a long-term project or a family function that is a couple of months away, etc.
Quadrant 4 is neither important nor urgent. This could include social media watching or sitting and gossiping, etc. We should see that we give the least time to this section.
The purpose of this matrix-making is to analyze how much time we invest in each quadrant, and are we justly investing in purposeful things?
I will explain this with one example; the rest can be explored
here. This example is about personal productivity.
| Urgent | Less Urgent |
Important | Paying overdue bills, attending to a family emergency, finishing the assignments whose deadline is today | Sticking to exercise schedules, acquiring new skills, and spending quality time with the family. |
Less Important | Attending a marriage event that you don't want to attend, accompanying your friend in his/her personal work | Unnecessary tasks like watching a TV show etc. |
The third way is to watch oneself from a distance. In this technique, we try to visualize ourselves from the third-person point of view rather than a first-person point of view. So, now the "I" thing has changed to "he/she". Now, it is not about me, but about him or her. I no longer see myself as the one who is a victim, but now I try to analyse the victims and the assailant's perspective. I am no longer self-centered; rather, I have taken an open-minded approach to understand why I became the victim and why he or she could assassinate me. This is actually the concept of self-detachment. I was very happy that I landed on this page and found this example. In a London newspaper, this advertisement was given: "Unemployed. The brilliant mind offers its services completely free; the survival of the body must be provided for by an adequate salary." This was quoted by Viktor Frankl in his book "The Doctor and the Soul," where he emphasised the different ways that people see them when they address themselves as unemployed.
The fourth technique is watching oneself from the future. Here, we place ourselves in a situation I want to see myself in and then analyze my current position. How would you reflect on this situation had you attained your set goal? There are various ways of doing this which can be found here. Think of some time in the future. How would you be at that time? Now, analyze how your present can contribute to making you like your future self. I think I have done this a few times and yielded good results, but recently, I forgot about it and got stuck with what life is giving me as an experience. This temporal distancing teaches us that the quality of our life is so much dependent on our thinking. This reminds me of a line from the Proverbs: "For as he thinks in his heart, so is he." A person is what he thinks about himself. When we are overwhelmed, we often forget ourselves in the light of our feebleness. Only our failures are visible, and all those success stories have lost their glamour. That is the point to see yourself as you want to be in the future and fight the evil of past failures. Mahatma Gandhi saw the future of India as free, and he did all to make it free. Ratan Tata ji idea of Ford was rejected, but he never gave up. He went back and came with a new version of the car, which was an instant hit. He saw himself in the future, so the present failures became the stepping stones to improve and bring a better version.
Comments
Post a Comment