Stigmatter - Thought(s) that Matter(s)

It’s been long since I’ve posted anything on Stigmatter (no, I still love writing) - it’s just that there are times when you don’t really have one specific reason for not doing something. We all have this unknown force pulling us down from achieving what we love to do. This made me wonder, what if we turned this force around for our own good, instead of it going against us.

Allow me to explain - I believe, strongly believe that every person has this really potent energy inside, that just needs to be channeled the right way. For many of us, it’s dormant. But that doesn’t mean it does not exist, it surely does. It’s like a Gold ore that needs to be mined. I truly think we all have this powerhouse, which is just waiting to be explored.

For example, let’s say you’re having a crappy day at work and everything seems to be messed up, because you had a fight with your spouse in the morning. Everything starts to look so difficult. You try so hard but nothing goes your way. The boss yells at you, your colleagues sound rude, the coffee spills on the laptop and so on. Sounds familiar?

We all have our bad days and if you notice, you feel extremely low on energy at such times. Now imagine, in this situation, you get to hear some sort of “good news” that cheers you up. It could be anything, like winning the lottery, getting a promotion or well, just a *sorry, let’s make up* call from your spouse. As soon you hear something so positive, everything changes. The bad day suddenly turns good. And you feel this surge of energy like never before. You don’t even notice the small negative stuff that takes place around you. Yes, you simply don’t care. Instead, you start harnessing this energy and get your stuff done, that you found difficult a while ago.

This just goes on to show how much we let the external environment affect the way we think, feel and behave. We let the situation control us, and thus don’t feel the energy to keep moving on. Usually when you have this energy sweeping you, you get motivated. This is the reason why you feel like you can face anything when you’re overtaken by strong emotions such as love. But wait, what’s the secret to keep going on, no matter what happens around you?

It’s about maintaining an “energy momentum” as I call it. There are times when you feel highly motivated, so much so that you start doing stuff you never thought you would do. These are golden moments, when you’re at the peak of being yourself, the peak of bringing out the best in you. Seize them, don’t let them go. Utilize these bursts of energy to the maximum, before they die down. Take a piece of paper and write down exactly what you’re going through, your feelings, your thoughts, everything. This will give you a clear idea of where it’s all coming from.

Now, whenever you feel that you’re getting back to your negative self, pull out your secret energy spell and go through it, feel it as you read it. You’ll instantly switch back to that same “I can absolutely do anything” zone. Do this every time you feel you’re slipping back to the previous unwanted mode. And soon you will realize that you no longer need this support, and you’re changing for good. This takes effort, but it pays in the end. Remember, we all live our lives based on emotions, they rule us. By journaling your positive emotions in great detail, you have the opportunity to bring them back to you at will. So, feel any energy? Go on, save it for the future :)

Hello folks! I’ve been kinda off the track since the past few months due to my mom’s surgery and other stuff, and therefore couldn’t update Stigmatter. Well, to be honest, I actually didn’t want to put up something half-baked. But anyway, I’m back - In full swing! You guys ready for some enlightenment? Great! :)

So, what better way to start than talk about focus! Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, the same old yakking on ‘don’t lose your focus’ and ‘focus on your work’. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know I talk anything but pre historic self-help stuff. What I’m referring to here is, focus as a way of life, not a part of it.

I’ve read loads and loads of material on how exactly you must be focusing on one single thing and give it your best shot. I did try that but I still kept getting deviated, distracted and moving away from my focal point. Didn’t make sense. Even when I was giving my 100% (that’s what I thought) and concentrated in every way, I went on losing the track. Why?

The answer did astound me; it hit me hard like all those amazing eureka moments. And no I didn’t discover it in the bathtub, but when I was out on a simple walk. I realized that I was walking without any conscious thought or effort, neither did I have to concentrate on my leg movements in order to move forward. This was obviously because walking became a habit for me, an automatic action. But before it became that, it required me to put in intense focus as a toddler. At a tender age of 1, walking was no walk in the park for me - it took extreme focus! We all learn to walk the same way, by focusing on maintaining balance, watching out for objects, being very careful, just so that we don’t fall and hurt ourselves.

Coming to the real point, realizing that I can walk without any focus was obviously no big discovery. But what struck me was, if we could again start focusing on all the things we do unconsciously, no matter how small, we can make focus a very strong, indestructible habit, a habit that can help us pull through anything. It’s called living in awareness.

Imagine how this could help on the long run. Once you start to put your focus on the smallest of things that you do unconsciously, you automatically create a positive habit of concentrating on the details of whatever you do, no matter how big. Let’s take this example - we all brush our teeth every morning and night, right? How many of us focus on it while in the act? Like real focus? Not many! But try doing that once, and I bet you’ll realize what you had been missing on for a long time. Be it anything, eating, drinking, walking, talking… if you could just focus on what you’re doing, in detail, even if it’s very easy for you to do, you’ll get so much more out of it. Trust me, living in awareness can balance your life like never before.

So that was about the real significance of focusing on the intricate details of your life, in order to make the overall picture perfect. In the next post, we’ll be discussing on how exactly can this new habit benefit and help you get the most out of your life :) Stay tuned!

As a kid, I used to watch a lot of cartoons, but there was one in particular that I always enjoyed. It was “The Road Runner Show” a funny cartoon where a hungry, mumbling “Coyote” chases a long legged bird called the ‘Road Runner’, obviously trying to have it for lunch. However, every time the cunning coyote makes an elaborate, sneaky plan to get its target, it fails. Why? Because the road runner proves to be too fast every time he puts his plan into action! This creates hilarious situations where the hapless coyote keeps trying out sophisticated ways to put food on table. The road runner manages to escape this vicious yet funny predator’s clutches all the time, not because it’s stronger or smarter, but because it’s only faster. I find this very close to real life.

Most of the time, we fail in what we want to do not because we weren’t smart enough or we didn’t have the required resources. We fail to achieve what we want because we lack the speed of implementation. We often forget that we spend more time thinking if a solution would work or not, instead of just implementing it right away. This is what separates successful people from the not-so-successful ones. All those successful individuals don’t have a magic lamp that grants them their wishes instantly, no, it’s just that they’ve figured out the importance of putting an idea into action the moment they have it. Your chances of success with an idea dwindle down and fade off the more time you take to bring it to life. You will start to notice that it only becomes difficult to put it into action later.

There are many reasons why this happens but one of the main factors is your mind starts to put obstacles before you one after another, just like the coyote, as you keep thinking and planning about it. The longer you take, the more hurdles you see, and eventually get trapped. When you implement an idea right away without much thought, you hardly give your mind a chance to create catastrophic fantasies and thus get to see real, practical results.

I realized this the hard way but when I did, it struck me like a brick wall. If you really, really, want to get anything and everything you want in life, implement your ideas and turn them into concrete actions as soon as possible. Your mind, which helps you create an idea, eventually can turn to be its biggest enemy. It will devour you just like the coyote if you aren’t fast enough - don’t let that happen. Become a roadrunner and develop an intense need for speed. So what are you waiting for? Go get running! :)

How many times have you been told by someone to think positive when things aren’t going right? There have been numerous books written on how positive thinking can make your life better and what they say and preach is indeed true. However, it’s difficult to think positively when your mind is ingrained with negativity. Turning harmful, negative thoughts into helpful, positive ones can take a long time. And due to this very reason, we aren’t able to stay positive and firm without getting back to our old self.

Okay now, since we are clear about our thought process, the question comes up, what exactly is positive thinking and what purpose does it serve? It’s nothing but thinking, imagining and believing that the outcome will be in your favor or your benefit. It’s comforting to feel that nothing will go wrong and everything will work out, but again this isn’t easy. Once we start thinking about the outcome, we become judgmental, this leads to our thoughts either turning negative or positive, based on how we judge or assume.

My question is, what if we suspend our judgment about what the outcome will be, and instead just jump into the action needed to be taken? Yes, that’s right, no more assumptions. No more judgments. No more thinking what if it doesn’t work out or things don’t go your way. Simple and plain: Action. Once you act on the situation, and complete the task at hand, you’ll be amazed on how different the result is from what you might have judged. This is like building a firewall in your mind against all those doubtful questions and assumptions that keep cropping up in your mind. This way, you’ll not only be able to take calculated risks but also find that you will easily move yourself from “Positive Thinking” to “Positive Doing”. Think about it, no actually, suspend your judgment and just try it out.

If you ask someone, what’s life made up of, they’d probably say something like, it’s a journey filled with ups and downs or it’s about living till death comes along. However, this merely forms the meaning of life in general, but what is it really made up of? What forms the essence of every moment you are living? What drives you to move ahead and go through changes? Simple - Experiences. I don’t think life can be explained more precisely and elaborately than with the experiences we go through.

Every aspect of our living consciousness revolves around what we experience. We crave for newer, better, more fascinating and comforting experiences all our lives. All the wants we have as human beings are about wanting to experience something. Be it a bigger home, a more fit body or a bungee jump from the Eiffel tower! It’s amazing how all the stuff we want to do or have can be summed up in one word, experience.

It’s also interesting to notice that we totally love moving from one experience to another, and keep on enchanting our senses in the process. The same experience over and over again, becomes monotonous and starts to ring the boredom bell. Hence, we go from one want to another, not because we didn’t get satisfied, but because the want to experience something much better pushes us forward. The biggest example of this can be found in the advertising industry - what do those ad folks actually sell? Are they selling you the product? No! Of course not! They are selling you an ‘experience’ that they want you to have at a cost. They are enticing you with dreams that you would love to turn to reality. It’s all about having that feel good factor about experiencing something that would make you happy. When an individual buys a Ferrari, he isn’t buying cuz its engine is sophisticated or its got multi-point injection fuel system, but rather cuz he wants to experience the speed, the feeling of owning a Ferrari, the want to be admired and looked upon by others.

I am not trying to prove anything here, as such wants exist in all of us. The only point I’d like to make is, keeping in mind life is all about different, good and bad experiences, it’s our job to choose the right ones. That can be done by learning from the others and from your own past mistakes. If for example, someone is into drugs and comes along and tells you that the experience of sniffing cocaine is magical, it’s your responsibility to understand that even though you’d want to go through such an experience, it would do more harm than good. It all boils down to achieving experiences that help you become a better person throughout your life and avoiding the ones which only depreciate your character. Remember, what’s more difficult than choosing between the right and wrong experiences, is choosing the better one between two right ones.

There’s no doubt that we are ruled by our beliefs. What we strongly believe to be true eventually turns out to be true for us. The dynamics of beliefs are many and they depend on various factors such as your knowledge, your ability to perceive, your experiences and your own thoughts. If we were to sum up all of these factors in one place, they actually form a working system. A system made up of different components, which help us believe in something or the other. I call these, belief support systems.

The dictionary defines system as “A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.” Every belief of ours is based on a supporting system that not only helps us confirm truth according to what we think but also determines how deep we go into it. The biggest example of such a system is religion, which is nothing but an organized set of interrelated ideas or principles. Our positive or negative belief about a certain religion is based on how good we know this system. The more we know about it, the stronger our belief gets.

Similarly, we find these small and big systems in all parts our lives. By identifying, developing and learning more about them, we perfect our actions, which are all again, based on our beliefs. According to science, it has been proven that our thoughts and intentions (which are non-physical) have physical effects on things around us. Therefore, to make our intentions more solid, it’s vital that our beliefs are firm. And for our belief to be firm, it’s critical that the factors surrounding it are feasible enough for us to actually be able to believe. For example, it is possible to run without a running shoe, but by putting on a running shoe, you make it easier for yourself to believe that you can run well. Here, the belief that you can ‘run’ is not changing whether you put on the shoes or not. However, the running shoes become one of the many elements of a ’support system’ that makes your belief stronger, and hence helps us perform better.

So, the point I’m trying to make here is, the only way to keep doing things better and better is to keep on finding, identifying and perfecting belief support systems in all parts of our lives. What better way to evolve as human beings than strengthen our thoughts that make our world?

There has been so much written about luck, so I won’t go into defining what it is. However, I’ve always pondered over the thought of what luck REALLY is. Is it just a figment of our imagination? Or a name we give to the co-incidences which occur in our lives?

I believe good luck isn’t something magical, nor is it reserved for the elite few. I truly think luck is of two types, one voluntary and the other involuntary. Now, by involuntary luck I mean getting lucky with stuff we don’t have control of. That includes being born to a millionaire father, stumbling upon hidden treasure and of course winning the lottery. Getting rarely lucky like that is not controlled by you. So chuck it and don’t bother.

What I want to talk about here is - voluntary luck, where you actually choose to get lucky. I bet that sounds exciting to you. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just choose our luck and get whatever we want? Trust me, it is possible. Bringing in massive good luck isn’t rocket science, it’s as simple as - “Concentrating on factors you have control of rather than focusing your energy on what you don’t control.”

As human beings we have a tendency to try to make things easier. Therefore, we naturally seek paths that look short. But the point is, by doing this; we are only making things harder. That’s because every time we try to find a shortcut, we start focusing more on things that aren’t in our control and move away from what is.

Let’s take this example - 2 guys A and B, apply for the same job, A gets it and B doesn’t. What’s more surprising is, it was the first interview for A and a 15th attempt by B. Does that make the candidate who got the job luckier than who didn’t? No not at all. If you look closely, both of these guys did their share of hard work to get a good job. The only difference was, candidate A focused on working internally on himself, his own skills, abilities, knowledge (he worked on what he controlled) and candidate B worked on external factors such as jumping from interview to interview without actually putting in the effort to develop the required abilities (he worked on what he did not control).

We can clearly make out by this, that the only way to get extremely lucky, is to make yourself so worth it, work so hard on yourself, that you leave no other option than getting lucky. Direct your efforts internally, and you’ll see that the external factors, which you don’t control, start to fall in place automatically. After all, it’s worth it to make yourself worthy.

I bet that title sounds confusing to you. It’s okay; you’ll get it in a while. Let me start this off with a simple example situation. Suppose you’ve got 10 different playing cards lying on your table, face down, and you are asked to pick the “Queen of Spades” out of them. You’ve got only three attempts to get it right, how good can your guess be? I know it’s pretty hard. In case you actually, somehow pick out the right one in the first go, it simply means that, your guess matched your immediate belief that the card was indeed in those ten.

However, what if you hadn’t got it right even after exhausting all your three chances? The first thought to hit your mind would be that the card must have been there among the rest of the seven. You would still hold the same belief that the card is in there somewhere, even if the guess proved to be wrong. Now, what if I told you the “Queen of Spades”, which you were trying to find, wasn’t there in the first place? What I’m trying to prove here is, our thoughts and beliefs are limited by our restricted amounts of knowledge.

Life is nothing but a series of co-incidences seamlessly crafted out for us. Still, we try to make things go our way, forgetting the fact that there are better options waiting for us. We make decisions and see things through a very blurry, limited vision. We try too hard, in a direction we are not even sure about, blocking our beliefs and narrowing them down.

Why is it that, even after mapping out elaborate plans, most of the things just happen out of nowhere and occur in a way never imagined before? It’s because there are many unknown ways, better destinations, waiting for us, only if we recognize them.

For example, imagine there’s this room filled with gold, diamonds, etc, and you actually discover the door leading to it, minus the key. Since you know what lies behind that door, the next obvious thing you’d want to do is search for the key. But wait, what if there’s another way into this room, which is open yet hidden? Would you still work hard to unlock the door if you came to know about this secret entrance? I doubt.

Similarly, in life, there are many hidden paths that lead to your goal, apart from the ones you know about. Uncovering these unknown entrances isn’t hard; in fact it’s easier than you think. You just need to let go of your limiting, controlling beliefs and apply what I call, the rule of  “I don’t know how, I don’t know why”.

Whatever you want to happen, whatever goal you wish to achieve, just say this to yourself very firmly, “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I will have/do/get/achieve _______” - That’s it. Just say this statement without any doubts, questions or thoughts. Once you say it with utmost belief, let it go and forget about it. Don’t think about how it’s gonna happen or what exactly will lead you to it. It’s not your job. Just keep working the way you have been. By doing this exercise, you subconsciously remove any mental setbacks or blocks you have, which opens up many more unique ways to reach your dream. Believe me, this isn’t magic, but it works like a charm! :)

I have always been fascinated by ideas. For me, they form the elixir of life. Ideas aren’t just random thoughts, they have a purpose, to help you get where you want. Some might argue saying that not everyone has the privilege of creating breakthrough, earth-shattering ideas. Uh, not really, first of all, an idea in itself isn’t perfect when it’s born. Secondly, what eventually makes you great is not the idea, but rather your ability to skillfully execute it.

“An idea without action is like an army without weapons.” How true is that? We all got dreams in life, dreams that eventually turn into ideas, ideas that are imperfect, yet, give us a wavy road map towards the reality. Hold on to them for long enough, and they start getting concrete, showing you the way to your goal, almost like a wiper pushing off the water from a windscreen.

A time comes, when an idea gets so polished, that it’s nothing but sheer brilliance, blinding you with its potential. I know what you’re thinking, if it’s that simple, then how come so few of us actually get to experience our ideas real-time? That, my friend, is because they’ve got zero value, and aren’t worth a red cent unless you breath life into them with action.

This brings us to the crux of any successful idea - execution. It all boils down to how you execute what’s on your mind to make it a physical reality. An idea is like your thumb and its execution your thumbprint. Think about it for a moment, even though your thumb looks like everyone else’s, your thumbprint is different, it’s your identity. Similarly, ten different people might have the same idea but the way they execute it will be unique to them. This is where you play the game your way, and prove your mettle. The amount of effort you put into your actions will equal to how big your win is.

This law applies to all areas of your life, in almost every situation. Every day being an unknown challenge and with a real jungle out there - you either prey or get preyed upon. So, to make sure you leave a mark and build your own persona, you gotta make flawless execution a second nature.

Want to throw a surprise party for your best friend? or do the interiors of your house yourself? or save the world from evil space aliens? Whatever ideas you have, never mind how crazy they may seem, do it differently. Exceed your own expectations, take every opportunity as a chance to leave a deeper imprint and execute like never before. It doesn’t really matter how you flip the coin, cuz eventually, both the sides are important.

As human beings, we are all programmed to ignore the usual, the common, and the regular. The more something becomes a part of our life, the more we seem to take it for granted. You might disregard it saying it’s human nature. After all, what good is it anyway?

Not so long ago, my one year old nephew (who’s pretty smart for his age) came along and started to tug my shirt, pulling me as if he wanted to show something. I kind of ignored it (told you, we adults are really good at it). He kept on being persistent until he got me up to follow him into the living room. As soon as I entered it, I was astonished to see him childishly asking me in his own language to fix up this painting on the wall, which wasn’t straight.

I was extremely surprised by the fact that something that went unnoticed or blatantly ignored by us grown ups, was observed by an infant. That definitely kicked gears in my mind. A child had suddenly made things so crystal clear to me and sparked ideas in a way never imagined before.

My point here is, that it’s nothing new that we tend to overlook small yet vital things in life, which might make a big difference if worked upon. For me, the painting represented life and its frame our habits, skills, knowledge, character etc. Usually, instead of concentrating on building the right habits or putting in the effort to acquire the right skills, we wonder why are things so messed up or not going our way. We keep looking for answers to questions which are heavily skewed themselves, not knowing the solution lies in fixing up the “frame” surrounding our life. Common sense is to tweak the basic nuts and bolts, which hold our stuff together.

Be it work or home, be it your family or friends, unless you set the external factors to support your internal self, this painting called life will most definitely look crooked. I never knew the innocence of a child would change my view of looking at many critical aspects so drastically. It’s amazing to learn how giving importance and priority to the minor changes can have a major, positive impact rippling into the future. The formula seems simple to me: get the smallest details right and you will never have to worry about the big picture. So, when are you getting your painting straight?