All Entries Tagged With: "Breaking bad habits"

As you grow up and gain experience, you absorb assumptions which then drive your life and limit your choices. You can break away from them with a simple tug if you want to but you don’t. As you acquire more and more experience, your repertoire of blind assumptions grows too, correspondingly limiting your choices. Your experience becomes a hindrance in your being creative.

I have decided to incorporate a new habit/attitude every week for the next 49 weeks. Every week, I will try to add on/inculcate a new habit or attitude. All these 49 may not be for you. Do pick up the ones that resonate with you and add some of your own too! I will of [...]

“Tsk-tsk.” The sound sets my teeth on the edge and I feel like giving that person an earful. Often enough we see people who seem to think that words like ‘excuse me’ do not exist. Their favorite form of calling attention is to purse their lips and hiss like a serpent that has caught a cold.

It is human nature that we never fully value what has been given to us in life. God gives us life, and a particular set of circumstances for myriad reasons that pertain to personal growth and spiritual evolution.

I see so many children in the park coming out to play with their servants continuously admonishing them, don’t run – you will fall, don’t do this and don’t do that – you will get hurt. As by shouting from far they have done their duty. What kind of upbringing is this?

Have you noticed how some people can speak their part only in outbursts of some kind? They would be otherwise nice, sane people going about their lives in a circular routine that they have built around themselves. Yet, under their calm exterior there is always some undercurrent of judgmental thoughts flowing quietly which keep them perpetually irritated about something or the other.

How can we stop wasting water? First we will have to change our attitude. We will have to feel responsible for the world that we will create for future generations. And what is the solution? How can we make everybody aware of this problem? Through public education programmes, water metres and higher water rates perhaps? As far as I am concerned I have always felt that the children can make a world of difference. Let’s also begin by adding water conservation and environmental studies as key subjects on schools’ curricula.

It is eerie how disparate news items are related to each other in a manner that provides interesting insights if you look at them closely. First came the news about how iconic athlete PT Usha was ill treated at Bhopal where she was present as the manager of an athletics team. It was sad to [...]

One tends to see people rushing around either being busy or trying to be busy. Nowhere is it more evident than in an aircraft which has just landed and everyone jumps up, pulls out their bags and switches on the mobiles. They impatiently wait for the ladder or aero bridge and rush out. I would [...]

The birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi that fell on 2nd October, was also a time when we recalled the 3 monkeys that we have always associated with him. But the symbolism has changed. They now stand for: See No Criticism Hear No Criticism Speak No Criticism Let me explain. The character of a people can [...]

During my workshop/training program I always touched upon food, and the concept that I started in 1994, “Abhudaya” under the heading of “Ethical Approach to Food and Life”. We are one with nature and nature is one with us. We live in an interconnected world. It is important to choose the right food for our [...]

When Jaswant Singh wrote something about Mohammed Ali Jinnah the ensuing brouhaha in the BJP told a tale about India that needs to be analysed. I suggest that we as a nation are prisoners of the past in many of our activities in daily life. In other words we are like the car driver who [...]

A few of us were drinking beer and discussing movies when the conversation veered round to Bollywood screen villains. Milind, a film fanatic felt that yesteryear villain Pran, was the finest bad man ever. His evidence? AFTER PRAN’S ADVENT NO PARENT IN INDIA DARED TO NAME THEIR NEW BORN ‘PRAN’! The implication was that no [...]

A friend of mine who was a therapist in a half way house described an incident where this big burly nut-bar barged into a group therapy session hollering and waving his arms around. He was like a beefy Hell’s Angels guy, and he was having one of his meanie episodes that would have scared the [...]

Man has always perceived time in diverse ways and it has always been his intention to solve the its mystery. How can we define time? There are hundreds of definitions but as far as I have understood, time is irreversible. Since we are a part of this universe with finite life-spans our existence is dependent [...]

Should the mobile phones be allowed in schools? Whatever for? There is nothing wrong in owning a phone and having it alongside for emergencies but to have one alive and in use when one goes to school or college; isn’t it rather self defeating? I mean, you are at school to study and learn new [...]

One of the really hard but powerfully effective skills of communications is to speak with good purpose. Speaking with good purpose means conversing with others in a way that is honest, straightforward, and with the aim of building better relationships. Take for example the following phrase: “You’re so sloppy. Your work area is such a [...]

am not against using Facebook. I believe it’s the best networking site (I am a Facebook user as well). But I am amazed to see the outrageous Facebook fad taking control of so many lives among people of all ages.

Two events in recent times brought to my mind a  characteristic of human thinking that needs examination. The media hype and mass hysteria surrounding the death of Michael Jackson was, to put it mildly, a case of overdose. It was said  that MJ was an ‘icon’, a world class performer and had a magnetic stage [...]

Ali McGraw to Ryan O’Neil in Love Story:  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Puhleeze. That famous one-liner set real intimacy and personal responsibility back by bounds. We screw up. We trample over people’s feelings, we let our insecurities get the best of us, we make big fat unfair assumptions based on the past. [...]

Sometimes we make promises to ourselves about habits we know we need to change. With determination and firmness we say, “I will never be impatient again” and for a day or two we stick to our resolve. Some of us use the additional tools of reiki, affirmations or visualization to help us in our quest [...]

Do we value knowledge and learning? Do we accept charity with grace? Do we have our priorities straight? These questions flashed in my mind when at a party in Washington DC, an NRI who is a reputed medical practitioner told me this story. He happened to meet the Indian ambassador in the US some years [...]

Since our early childhood we are taught ‘Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’. It’s also supposed to be the way to our finest life and somewhere we all want to live it. In this pursuit one habit which we all want to inculcate is the habit of [...]

Owning a business is an audacious task. There are numerous things that need to be completed in a day. It gets so frustrating that owners and fitness professionals question how all will get accomplished. The crux of the issue lies not in the amount of time or lack of time, but organization. The successful entrepreneur [...]

The other day my 20 years old son announced that he had given up smoking. He had picked up this ‘cool’ habit in the first year of college and had smoked cigarettes for almost three years now. I had accepted this ‘fad’ as his right to choose his own life style; but the news of [...]

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and to be understood.The best way to understand people is to listen to them. Listening is by far the simplest process a human body undergoes. But most of us have yet to learn the art of listening. Good listeners are becoming extinct among [...]