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“If you want to feed a person for a day give him a fish, if you wish to feed him for a lifetime, teach him how to fish.” Dr. Ajit Varwandkar is a social entrepreneur by profession and is working in the domain of enhancing employability. Just capacity development is not his motto, enabling youth is the intent. Started his career as a mechanical engineer and eventually drifted into management. He is an avid trainer on behavioral subjects for corporate and educational institutes. He is a music lover and plays Indian classical percussion instrument – Tabla. He loves to write inspirational blogs on self improvement and career development issues. He believes in living life at zero complaint level and is always keen to focus on solutions than on excuses. More about Dr. Ajit Varwandkar on www.aglakadam.org www.aglakadam.org Follow him on twitter: @varwandkar LESS ... MORE
We get what we focus on the most! Whatever we experience in our lives is all we may have attracted unknowingly.
What kind of photographs do you click when you travel someplace and carry a camera? Definitely, the ones which look attractive and make you feel happy. Usually, one would never capture an unhappy-moments, unless you are a photojournalist! Isn’t it?
Imagine someone on a world tour, returns having collected a thousand memories. Out of it, 90% of photographs are of those things which make you sad, say road accident, poor people, natural calamities, etc. Will you ever feel happy to browse through such a photo album that is nothing but a collection of unhappiness?
I am sure you replied in a big NO.
Well, that’s what most of us actually keep doing our whole life. If you disagree, read further to know-how.
Our eyes are the aperture to the camera of our mind. While our eyes are open, many images get clicked by this camera. The pictures clicked by this ‘mind camera’ are permanent and can never be deleted or recycled. What makes things challenging is that this camera habitually clicks unhappy images.
Only a few human beings can focus this camera on all that is positive and possibility oriented. A massive majority of people are the ones who have a default auto-focus setting to capture the negative and non-productive images and store them permanently into the subconscious database. Sometimes, I feel the AI-enabled autofocus technology in today’s smartphones is much better than this ‘human focus machine.’At least, the phone camera is designed to focus on smiles and smiling faces! We get what we focus on because what gets focussed becomes prominent in our subconscious mind. Every time you have an experience, the related neurons start firing together and create a new path. Scientifically speaking, the focus of our brain camera actually changes the neural circuits.
Experience matters, and repeated experience matter all the more. This is explained by the concepts of neuroplasticity. Here is an illustration. A kid goes for her first-ever examination during the kinder garden. After that, the schooling experience exposes her to a hundred more tests. Every time the student gets fewer marks or fails in an examination, society makes it a point to continuously remind and recreate the experience through repeated reminders. Thus, the ‘mind camera’ learns to focus on failures and difficulties. Therefore, we humans become experts at noticing the bad, concentrating on it for long and keeping it alive for years together.
Eventually, the student builds examination fear and starts attracting sorrows and frustration into his life after that.
Human beings have an incredible ability to change those neurochemical pathways that impact life. All that one is required is to deliberately shift the attention and focus to more purposeful aspects of observation. Once we learn to forcefully switch on to the positive aspects of life, the future becomes easy.
One evening, Laddu Pinto was being fired by his boss in the presence of his colleagues. After the ceremonial firing session, Laddu came out of the office and met his friends. After some time, one office colleague joined that group. This man was surprised to see Laddu laughing and cracking jokes amidst friends. He walked to Laddu and asked him, ‘Friend, just a few hours back, your boss shouted at you badly and used so many inglorious words for you. I am surprised how you manage to laugh and be joyous!’ To this, Laddu replied, ‘I may have seen one tough moment in the day, but I prefer to remember the thousand other happy moments which filled the larger part of my day!’
We all need to learn an essential lesson from Laddu. Never get glued to the negative images of your experience. Focussing more on those will only result in creating more of that experiences. Instead, shift the focus of your mind camera to everything positive and see the magic. Well, if you think nothing positive has happened in your day, better go with something lesser in its negative intensity. Practice and eventually settle for something which may be neutral. It’s your mind and your camera. Use it, as you like it!
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Views expressed above are the author's own.
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