In yesterday’s post, I reminisced on what I felt during the live SPB concert I attended last year. It has turned out to be an unpleasant quirk of fate.

Today, that legend is no more.

I am still grappling with my alternating feelings of denial and grief. No matter how I tried to envision this post, no words seem capable of capturing the enormity of this moment. Any kind of speech only feels like diminishing his legacy. So I am only going to say this, knowing how inadequate these words are.

As long as people live on this earth, you and your music will never be forgotten.

Rest in peace.

Earlier I had written about my feelings after watching a live SPB concert. How the overwhelming emotion I felt was gratitude for being able to appreciate his music.

Today as I was listening to this great tribute to Rahman by Govind Vasantha, the musician who composed the soulful songs of 96, showcasing the amazing spectrum of Rahman’s music, I felt that same rush of emotion – gratitude – but this time it was for having the ability to get such pure joy from the simple things in life, for being cognizant of how precious that is and not taking it for granted.

Gratitude has such deep impact on how you see the world. It instills real humility that doesn’t otherwise come naturally to humans. This satisfaction in simplicity may not give me the arrogance needed to dream for the impossible but I am happy to have this over the other.

On my way to work recently, I decided to not listen to podcasts while walking. And as I strolled along, I noticed flowers under the shade of a tree. I stopped for a few moments because I couldn’t recall the last time I noticed flowers on the ground in this city unless I was in a garden. I had a smile on my face as I walked past it.

Makes me wonder how many things I have missed out on by trying to be productive and plan for the future instead of being in the present.

Knowledge is gained from a variety of sources – study materials, blogs, listening to experts and so on. But experience is different. It comes from continuously spending time to apply our knowledge, make mistakes, learn and iterate. In a way, it requires the passage of time for the lessons to become clear and more meaningful.

Experience is what connects the dots across the different transition points in our lives.

Moral licensing: When we do an act that proves our lack of bias, thereby improving our perception of self and which then seems to give us the leeway to do immoral actions without our self image feeling threatened.

Speak out about your personal struggles and lessons learnt with authenticity. You never know when those words may give hope and courage to someone who is watching you.

It has been constantly reinforced to me to not bring my personal baggage into my professional life, that it is a sign of weakness. I have believed in it too, very strongly. Probably more so because I am a woman and there is this self-imposed need to prove myself in a world that dismisses women easily, especially once we are married.

But recently my thinking has changed. The hardships we go through in our personal lives strongly influence the kind of people we become and there is no way to keep that separate for 8 hours every day. Even when I do keep those two components apart from each other, I am aware that the influence is still there in the form of overcompensation, added mental stress and so on. On the flip side, we are shaped the most by our hard times and what we learn from those experiences brings empathy, diverse perspectives and multiple dimensions to our thinking which our work benefits from.

With this insight, I now question why we don’t encourage people to openly discuss their personal struggles with their co-workers and managers. Facilitating such interactions would build a stronger circle of trust and camaraderie within the company which will have far reaching long-term effects. No number of team bonding activities can ever replicate that.

We schedule work meetings and calls in our calendar. How often do you schedule your personal agenda – time to read that book you borrowed from the library or to explore that new activity that caught your eye?

We seem to give importance to work commitments, enough to ensure that we don’t forget or double book. Why are we not doing the same when it comes to improving our personal lives?

There is another thing to note within just our professional lives. We are more intent on scheduling interruptions like calls and meetings than we are about blocking time for the real work like exploring a new technology or working on long-term big-picture things.

I recently started blocking one hour every night for reading and have found it to be pretty effective. Even on days when I can’t start on the dot, I still manage to read atleast for sometime. And pre-booking this slot eliminates any need for will power or decision making on when to read. Over time, I can also see a shift in mindset. As I see the value that this one hour gives to me, I no longer find myself grappling with guilt over prioritising it above other urgent commitments.

So, lets begin our weekly planning by first scheduling the important stuff – personal and professional – before we let immediacy take over.

My friend was feeling overwhelmed one month into her new job and had an open conversation about it with her manager, who gave her some solid piece of advice.

Get to the end of your probation and then see how you feel.

As she is nearing that time now, she is much more comfortable. She has adapted to the lifestyle at the new workplace and gotten better at managing her time, stress and the workload.

Those words from her manager were remarkable for a couple of reasons. (A) She didn’t dismiss the concerns and give platitudes to reassure her. (B) She indirectly told her that this feeling is quite common at that particular point of time, that she was not alone.

I find that this principle applies to any new long term task we set for ourselves – be it a new job or a fitness regime. At the beginning, most of us feel inadequate and overwhelmed. Giving ourselves that probation period helps us to acclimatize to the lifestyle changes. And when we evaluate how we are at that point, with emotions no longer clouding our mind, then we can be more confident of our analytical and decision making capabilities.

Give yourself a probation period. Then decide whether to grit through or quit.

What stops us from doing the things that we have made concrete committed plans for? The psychologist, Gabriele Oettingen, claims one of the reasons is that we imagine ourselves doing the task and this gives us a false sense of complacency like we have already achieved our goal.

I could immediately apply this insight to one of the chores I had been putting off for a long time. Everyday I would resolve to get to it at a particular time of day and then imagine myself doing it for those couple of hours. But it never came to fruition.

Picturing the finish line is not a bad thing in itself. It can be a powerful motivator to start on the task. But according to Gabriele, where we err is when we stop with just the visualisation. She proposes a strategy, WOOP – Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan – which guides us to take a few additional steps after that.

• Wish: State what you want to accomplish
• Outcome: Describe the outcome of the task
• Obstacle: What is the obstacle in me that is preventing me from accomplishing it?
• Plan: Frame a plan to overcome or work around that obstacle and achieve the goal

Following this strategy, after imagining the outcome, we go on to acknowledge personal obstacles and design a plan. Needless to say, I was able to successfully adopt this framework to complete the chores I had been putting off.

It always amazes me how much difference a little conscious change in our mental process can make.