Happy Quest

When a prospective employer asks you to describe yourself, how do you do it? I have conducted a lot of interviews and my observation is that people just pick out the best adjectives to describe themselves which may not be necessarily close to what or who they really are. I don’t blame them. Anyways, the career planning consultants say put your best foot forward, so the intention is really to just describe your best qualities, or if there’s none invent some. In the teambuilding workshops I facilitate, there is this one activity called “Coat of arms” where participants make some self examination in order to share their perceptions of themselves with their team mates. Most often a good majority of the participants grapple with words to describe themselves. Some of them admit that they are perhaps less introspective than others.

Well this blog is not about acing recruitment interviews; or painting a colorful picture of oneself during gatherings like teambuilding, it’s about knowing one’s self better. The first question that may come to mind is, “what benefits will I get if I exert effort to know myself better?” I can think of many but you are free to add some more.

1. If you know yourself better and know what you want, you have a clearer self-mandate to pursue it.
2. If you know what your strengths are, you can capitalize on it and use it to your advantage.
3. If you know what your areas for improvements are, you can begin, to invest time, effort, even money to address it if you really want to become better.
4. If you know what motivates you, you can let people know about it so that they know how to help motivate you.
5. If you know what de-motivates you, you can tell people about it so that they can help you by avoiding things that ruin your motivation.
6. If you know what you value, you can make decisions based on them and completely align yourself with the things that you value.
7. If you know how well, or bad you are dealing with other people, you can adjust your behavior if you want to improve your relationship with them. At the end of the day, good relationship management can help improve one’s happiness level. Remember, humans are social beings, and we will all do well to be able to relate ourselves better socially.

Here are my suggestions:

Craft a personal vision – spend some time determining what you want for yourself, say five to 10 years from now.  Describe in great details how you foresee yourself once your vision is realized and have it written down and displayed in a prominent area in your room. Try to write it in a captivating and inspiring way to keep the fire of desire burning within you.

Create a roadmap that will get you from where you are now to where you want to be. If you hit some bumps in the road, create plan B, C… the alphabet is long and you know what I mean.

Take some personality tests, do some reflections and decide what your strengths are or what you want to be strong in. Develop your potentials and capitalize on them.

Listen to your friends, parents, and bosses. Ask them what they consider as your areas for improvement. When you here them, don’t whine, don’t sulk. Explore your weaknesses and see how you can improve them.

Know what you like and don’t like and be open to people about them so that they will know how to deal with you better. And as the golden rules go, do unto others, what you want them to do unto you, and live happily ever after or something to that effect.

Know what you value in this life. Take note of them and take heed. When you make decisions, consult your values. Your decisions should not run against your values or you will be extremely regretful in the end.

Josef Luft and Hari Ingham developed the JOHARI Window concept of personality wherein they said that our Personality is like a window with four panes  named, OPEN self which represents the things we and other people know about ourselves, the HIDDEN self which represents the things that we know but other people do not know about ourselves, the BLIND Self or the things that people know but we do not know (or refuse to know) about our selves , and the UNKNOWN self representing the things that we and other people haven’t discovered about us. According to Luft and Ingham, it will serve us well to adjust the sizes of these panes by enlarging the OPEN pane and reducing the others.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Increase your OPEN window pane and reduce your HIDDEN window pane by sharing your ideas and feelings with others. When we withhold ideas and feelings, we increase the HIDDEN window pane and leave others guessing. You could be holding ideas that could save a project, or save the world but they are utterly worthless if you keep them to yourself. You could be hurting from what people are doing or saying, but without you saying anything, the hurting can go on until you can’t take it anymore. By then things can blow out of proportion
2. Reduce you BLIND window pane, by listening objectively about what people say, by soliciting feedback from them. If you won’t you will be like a “bull in a china shop.” Breaking a lot of things without knowing about it. Reducing your blind self could lead to a lot of self discovery. I have a staff that I kept badgering about what I think she’s good at, and it took her ages to finally believe me. Think of the time she have wasted by being in denial!
3. Reduce your UNKNOWN self by taking some risks and engaging in self discovery. A singer does not become a singer until she realizes that she can sing or has what it takes to become a good singer. A sprinter doesn’t know he is fast until he decides to run his fastest. It starts with finding your potentials and working to enhance them.

Putting your best foot forward is not really a bad idea especially if it means giving it your best.

Take pride and be happy!

Have you ever felt that you are just floating around, adrift with no particular destination? You wake up in the morning and prepare your self for work. Get to work and find your self with a whole days tasks awaiting to get done and yet at the end of the day, you look back only to find emptiness. You sit there thinking you want some change, you want clearer direction, a goal to pursue, a challenge to face, a bigger contribution, to find your reason for being. “How to start?” you ask your self? “How much am I willing to risk in order to find true meaning?” The answer sends chills down your spine. The prospect of throwing yourself out of your comfort zone scares the heck out of you. So you go to sleep deciding you cannot afford to go out of your comfort zone. “Maybe someday,” you say “when my fears are gone and the time is right, I will do what I am set out to do.” Every night the thought of wanting to do what you really want to do, nags you, haunts you, coaxes you to do something. You dream of a thousand “what-ifs.” What if I have the power to do what I want to do, what would it be? What if pursuing my passion involves taking a lot of risk, would I pursue it? What if I fail, will I be able to accept it? You think of countless possibilities. Until you decide, enough wondering and wandering! This is what you want to do and nothing will get in the way of what you are set out to do. You reorganize your life to make way for your pursuit of passion. Dangers hang like the sword of Damocles over your head. You are aware but you take no heed. You are excited by the chase. You want success but the journey is the one that is giving you joy. You look back at your previous life and see how comfortably at ease back then. It invites you to come back to the comfort of your own box, but you tell yourself, not until I give up trying, which is not going to be anytime soon! It happened to me. Last month, I started pursuing my real passion. I let go of my comfortable full time job as an HR Director, and went into freelance consulting where one can experience feast or famine depending on the amount of effort when exerts and how the market responds. I used to be a full time HR director and part time consultant, now I am a fulltime freelance consultant and a part time HR Director…:D Am I afraid? Of course I am! But I’m happy doing what I really want to do… teach, share part of my self to a lot more people and yes to pursue my passion for communicating as I do now!

You, what is your passion?

The great Plato asked, how does one become brave? The answer is by doing brave things. It is important to note that Plato didn’t say "when you feel brave, or when you are unafraid." That is because a person who says he is not afraid of anything is afraid of telling the truth!

Bravery or courage is not quite the equivalent of absence of fear. This is an important thing to know and remember. I am writing this article because I’ve heard too many people with unrealized potentials who tell me they don’t have the courage or are not brave enough.  Wanting to be able to do something but not feeling brave enough to take the risk can be a great cause of unhappiness. People who are overwhelmed by their fear of failure or rejection are the subjects of that saying "its better to try and fail than not to try at all. Please note that I said "overwhelmed by fear" rather than afraid of failure. The reason, those who risk failing are not unafraid of failure. I do not remember anytime in my life when I am not afraid of failure, I am always afraid of being called a fool or  of  being rejected. But my fear of regretting not being able to discover what my  real purpose is in this life far outweighs my fear of anything else. I would bet that those who make it in this life have fears of their own. The difference is that they do not let fear command them.

So, how again can we become brave or courageous? By doing brave things. Here are my suggestions:

1. Know what you’ve always wanted to accomplish for your self.
2. Know the hindrances that keep you from pursuing it.
3. Know your fears, recognize them.
4. Accept that you could fail and that you should prepare yourself for it.
5. Do what you need to do despite the fear.
6. When you fail, accept it gracefully, take a look back and see how you can do better next time.
7. Try, try again, remember, quitters never win.

Remember, the journey is sometimes more important than the destination!

Be happy!

Sometimes, not all the time, but a lot of times, I could liken other people to a wall, and us a person playing squash. The amount of strength we exert in throwing the ball to the wall determines the amount speed by which the ball will be returned to us. If we throw real hard, the ball will go back with a great deal of speed. If we throw the ball softly, it will go back softly. People react to us in much the same way that we behave towards them. I remember this story that I read somewhere about a school principal, some teachers and a class. The principal called a group of teachers and told them that they were chosen by the school to work on a special group of students because the school believes that they are outstanding teachers and that they are expected to do well in this experiment.  The principal told the teachers that the class they will handle is composed of students with outstanding intelligence and that they expect the teachers to do their best in ensuring that the students get the best education from them. The teachers excitedly went to work with the students devising everything they can think of to help the students succeed. All their efforts bore fruit as the students succeeded in achieving their scholastic goals. Now comes the good part. After the experiment, the principal called the teachers to tell them that it is not true that they are considered because they are outstanding, they were randomly chosen and so were the students. The big question here is what made the teachers and the students’ succeed?  Our impression of ourselves and our impression of others affect the way we deal with people. When we think well of ourselves, we develop confidence, when we think well of other people, we develop confidence in them. They feel the confidence and become confident of themselves. By becoming self confident, we become more effective in helping others, when we show confidence in other people, they become more confident of themselves and help other people better including ourselves. I would bet that a negative self impression and negative impression of others do the same thing in complete reverse.

So, what is the message of the day? Believe in yourself and believe in others. Give yourself and others a chance to be good. Yes it’s true, you may fail, in fact at some point, you will fail. The same holds true for other people, this goes with the fact that we are only human. But if we continue to believe that despite our imperfections and the imperfections of other people, we are capable of succeeding and so are they. We can always try again and we can make this world a step closer to becoming a better one.

Mushy! Too touchy, feely! What kind of twisted idea came to your head to talk about something so opposite what is going on in this world? These might be what you are thinking about upon reading the theme of this blog.

I do write about a lot of things everytime I get a chance to. If you are one of those who really know me, you know that I have several blogs on different subject matters. What drove me to pick this theme is what I see everyday in people like you and me. How we react to the situations and the people we meet that affects rather negatively. I thought that maybe what we need is to assess these situations and see how we can make things better in order to make this a better world if only for you and me. If we are lucky, people will get to see these posts and your inputs and give inputs themselves about how to achieve the goals of this blog.

Frankly there is so much ideas going on in my mind that I do not know how to properly start, so I’ll just grab whatever I can and put it down here, ok?

A few rules… I’d like for this blog to be as interactive as possible. Meaning, if you are reading this, I will expect you to put in something constructive as a comment. You can probably add your opinion on some of the questions I ask, or add insights, constructive ones I hope. I would love for you to post questions for people reading this post to answer (including myself of course!). Not that I do not like to be challenged but I might not entertain postings that contradict the purpose of this site.I’d like to be focused on something that, as I said, worthwhile. What we need are ideas that will help and encourage, not discourage.

The first order of the day is to define what  we are trying to  pursue.

• How to find happiness amidst discontent (an oximoron, I know but let’s deal with that later.)
• How to find the right way to react to a negative situation or person
• How to achieve grace even under fire
• How to deal with failures and move on
• How to deal with heartaches
• How to pursue our dreams
• How to inspire ourselves to dream

I know that this project is quite ambitious. And the fact that I do not have a concrete answer to all the questions we will come accross,just makes it all the more exciting for me. I hope you are excited too, to join me in this quest and see how things unfold.

Oh, and just a quick reminder, I also hope to hear from you soon!

See you soon!