Self Hypnosis - Can it really boost your productivity?

Hello Friends!

I want to introduce you to Self-Hypnosis...sounds like a very daunting scientific topic doesn't it? I have been doing a lot of reading since the start of the year and happened to come across Michael Cohen's The Power of Accepting Yourself, a powerfully immersive read. 

Self-hypnosis is a naturally occurring state of mind which can be defined as a heightened state of focused concentration. With it, you can change your thinking, kick bad habits, and take control of the person you are—along with relaxation and de-stressing from everyday life.

How can YOU do it?

I am going to introduce you to a simple but effective technique of self-hypnosis. This technique is called eye fixation self-hypnosis and is one of the most popular and effective forms of self-hypnosis ever developed. We will start by using it as a method to help you relax. After you have practiced this a number of times we will add hypnotic suggestions and imagery. 
Reduce distractions by going into a room where you are unlikely to be disturbed and turning off your phone, television, computer, etc. This is your time. You are going to focus on your goal of self-hypnosis and nothing else.

Then:

1. Sit in a comfortable chair with your legs and feet uncrossed.

Avoid eating a large meal just before so you don’t feel bloated or uncomfortable. Unless you wish to nod off, sit in a chair, as lying down on a bed will likely induce sleep.  You may also wish to loosen tight clothing and take off your shoes. If you wear contact lenses, it is advisable to remove them. Keep your legs and feet uncrossed.

2. Look up at the ceiling and take in a deep breath.

Without straining your neck or tilting your head to far back pick a point on the ceiling and fix your gaze on that point. While you keep your eyes fixed on that point take in a deep breath and hold it for a moment and then breathe out. Silently repeat the suggestion “My eyes are tired and heavy and I want to SLEEP NOW”. Repeat this process to yourself another couple of times and, if your eyes have not already done so, let them close and relax in a normal closed position. It is important when saying the suggestion that you say it to yourself as if you mean it, for example in a gentle, soothing but convincing manner.

3. Let your body relax.

Allow your body to become loose and limp in the chair just like a rag doll. Then slowly and with intention count down silently from five to zero. Tell yourself that with each and every count you’re becoming more and more relaxed. Stay in this relaxed state for a number of minutes while focusing on your breathing. Notice the rising and falling of your diaphragm and chest. Be aware how relaxed your body is becoming without you even having to try and relax it. In fact, the less you try, the more relaxed you become.

4. When ready, come back to the room by counting up from one to five.

Tell yourself that you are becoming aware of your surroundings and at the count of five you will open your eyes. Count up from one to five in a lively, energetic manner. At the count of five, open your eyes and stretch your arms and legs.

Repeat this technique three or four times and notice how each time you reach a deeper level of relaxation. However, if you find you do not relax as much as you would like, do not force it. There is a learning curve involved so resolve to practice self-hypnosis on a regular basis.

Hope you are able to increase your productivity levels by using this technique! 

- Yash

Its 2017 ! Are you up to speed? - learning to embrace failure

Hello all ! 

Let me start off by wishing you all a prosperous 2017!

Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make - don'e be overtly critical of me, but let me start off by saying - I've failed. A lot. I've failed in different pursuits of life in ways that were unimaginable to me.

While some failures were soon forgotten about, some were devastating. Landing my dream job, failing to grow my first venture into a successful idea due to lack of time and my inability to put theoretical knowledge to practice at times...to name just a few. Let's face it: failing sucks. Almost all of us would have loved to be successful the first time, but that is not how life works. And the idea of failure sometimes prevents us from even trying to begin with.

Failure, especially repeated failure, can be hard to bounce back from. It can specially crush your confidence to unfathomable extents.It might get to the point where you might wonder, Why even try? It can be extra tough when you feel you’re doing your best, and your best isn’t good enough.

Failure is inevitable. It doesn’t feel good, but it is a part of life. Instead of fearing failure, here are some ways to help you bounce back and regain your confidence when it does happen.

1. What did you learn? - We often fail so we can learn. If you haven't failed before and are all perfect, you sound pretty boring to me. What can you do differently in the future? How will this set you up for you next project you decide to take up? Most importantly, what did you learn out of the experience? An answer to the above can help us see that our time and efforts aren’t wasted - we’ve come out this a smarter, more able than before.

2. Consider the long-term view of things. Always - Sometimes, we think that we must succeed almost immediately. Maybe you feel that your business will be an overnight success or that new skill that you learnt will be mastered almost instantly. So, check your expectations to see that they don't cause distress to you. Look at the long-term view of things. Consider this: “Success is like growing bamboo.”

Bamboo seems like it takes a long time to grow. For the first five years, you don’t really see much happening. Just a tiny shoot. For five years.What we don’t see is what’s happening underground. Its roots are pushing through the dirt, growing in complexity - setting the foundation. And then, its growth explodes and the tree can rise by up to a meter a day.

Success is the same way. Look at your failures as setting the foundation. Take the long-term view and grow your bamboo.

3. Failure is not a reflection of who you are - Our brains are funny things, and they respond to threats that sometimes aren’t there. Some of those threats are things that make us look foolish or lesser in the eyes of others.We don’t want to fail. But failure is not a reflection of who you are. Your reaction to failure is.

It’s your call whether to pick yourself up or not. If anyone judges you based on your failures, that’s their problem, not yours!!

I hope you all have a great 2017 ahead!!

- Yash

Start your day....the RIGHT way!

Hello folks!

Hope all of you are enjoying your holidays with your loved ones. We are on the brink of 2017 and my, what an eventful year it has been. 

We often underestimate or rather ignore how a positive event at the start of the day can leave a lingering effect to boost your productivity and confidence levels as the day progresses. 

The way you start your morning can set the tone for the rest of your day.
Sound too good to be true? Simple morning habits can boost your emotional well-being and resilience. 

See if this scenario rings a bell: The alarm goes off. You hit snooze once or twice, then rush to get ready for your day, swigging some coffee on your way out the door. You hit the road cranky, maybe hungry, with those stress hormones revved up before you’ve even set foot in the office/college. By the time the afternoon rolls around, you’re off your game.

Now imagine this: You wake up naturally, a few minutes before your alarm. You have breakfast, maybe a workout (I prefer early morning football !), and have enough time to get ready without a rush. You walk out the door, grounded and calm - ready to meet whatever the day brings.

Here are the top 3 habits that I have cultivated through all of 2016, and which have helped me tremendously:

1. Avoid the snooze button - Yes, I know that this is a tough one, but in reality, snoozing repeatedly leaves you more groggy than you would be in the first case. After you hit snooze and drift off to sleep, your brain starts its sleep cycle all over again. When the alarm goes off a second time, you’re likely at an even deeper, earlier part of your sleep cycle, which results in you feeling even worse than you did the first time. 

2. Exercise - No rocket science here. Any physical activity in the morning, a sport, yoga or even a morning run accomplishes the task of calorie-burning in an even better way by kick-starting your metabolism for the day. It also makes you more alert, which in turn leads to higher productivity and focus.

3. Stay off social media - This is the most important one...er and also not possible for most of us to do.If you’re one of the people that checks their social media or email as soon as you wake up - stop that now! I didn’t realize how much it affected me until I stopped doing it for a while. Each morning spent away from social media is so much more relaxed, peaceful, and joyful. We aren’t screamed at by a constant influx of information and messages and our mind has the capacity to just be. Its still not to late to have another New Years' Resolution on your bucket list!

Have a good week ahead folks!

- Yash

The Value of Presence of Mind

Hello again!

It has been a lazy Wednesday and thus I wanted to share with you an incident that has truly taught me a thing or two.

It is an incident about a firefighter  who ran towards the fire to save himself while others ran towards the river. Yes you heard that correct, he ran towards the fire!

I recently read about this beautiful incident that shows how presence of mind is an attempt known in science as “Creative Desperation”. It’s mentioned in the classic book “ Seeing what others don't” by Gary Klien.

On August 15 1949, a team of fifteen firefighters were dropped in the mountain range in Montana to contain and extinguish a forest fire. The Missouri river flowed just below the mountain range.

The fire fighters wanted to extinguish the fire from below as they wanted to stay closer to the river so that they could avoid unnecessary risks. While firefighting the team leader Warner Dodge saw a “spot fire” at the bottom of the valley, Spot fires are caused by embers from fire being carried by wind and can lead to a potential blowup.

Thus specific places near the down slope caught fire, Dodge knew that the fire would come roaring uphill and catch the firefighters in between, thus he instructed the firefighters to move to the northern side of the hill where there was no fire. Their position can be best understood by the graph below:

However the northern slope was steeper and thus made the running difficult. Fire spreads very rapidly in steep slopes and slowly the northern slop was nothing but a great wall of fire. It was at this point, point 7 on the graph that the other firefighters threw their tools and started running downstream towards the river where certain spot fires were raging but not a wall of flame like on the northern slope.

Dodge had a decision to make, either to run downstream with his fellow men or do something different. He calculated the wind speed to find that the spot fire will become a raging wall of fire before the team could reach the river. Thus he knew going downstream was fatal for him and others. He called out to the others to stop but unfortunately no one listened.

Thus is where creative desperation took over, an ingenious counter-intuitive tactic. Dodge lit a fire in front of him, wet a handkerchief and put it in his mouth and nose. and dived face-down into the ashes of the fire he had created to save himself from any flammable vegetation around him.

The other team mates looked up to see what he was doing and thought he had gone nuts. But Dodge had calculated two of the most vital things to save himself. Fire needs fuel, a flammable vegetation to grow, if only he could create an island for himself where in he could devoid the fire of any fuel to burn and he could dive under it to save himself. Ash was the answer as ash never catches fire as there is nothing left to burn in the ash. He could not change the geography of the region or the wind flow but he could make his enemy “fire” his ally. Prey on its weakness. Thus , Dodge “dodged” death by taking this counter-intuitive measure to save himself, while majority of his fellow fire fighters could not make it to the river and died.

This is perhaps the biggest lesson of presence of mind that I have come across to date.

I hope I have been able to share an important message through this story.

Hope you all have a good day!

- Yash

Keep Calm and Carry On!

Hello Friends!

Today I would like to share with you the mantra that I believe is vital to making the most out of the happenings around your life. First and foremost, don't be fooled by the calendar: there are only as many days in the year as you make use of. As the saying goes:

 "One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week".

There are many important things in life.

Your family. Your friends A hobby perhaps. Working out and staying healthy. Reading, learning and growing as a person.

But finding the time for what is most important in life is not always easy. It sometimes feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day. But even if it may not feel like it, there are often ways to improve how you use your time. If you feel like your plans are always getting rescheduled, it is time to start asking yourself these 3 important questions.

1. What are the 2 most important priorities in my life at the moment?

With a lack of focus on what is most important in your life it becomes easy to spend too much time and energy on aimless actions or work. On things that aren’t really that important but you do out of old habit or because of other unhelpful reasons. Make a note of these 2 things and write them down on a piece of paper at your work desk.

To keep your attention in the right place it is essential to remind yourself every day of what is truly most important to you.

2. What are the 2 most common distractions that keep me from having quality time with the people closest to me?

The age we are living in today, the answer to this most often than not is your smart phone or it may be the  TV shows you just watch out of routine and not because you like them very much or bringing your work back home.

Then figure out how you can reduce or eliminate those distractions.

3. What is one piece of unnoticed or misused piece of free time during my regular day?

There is often quite a bit of open travel- or waiting-time during a year.

What will you use such time for as we approach the end of this year and go into 2017?

Perhaps you would like to read more while riding the train or while waiting for a meeting to start. I, for example, often listen to podcasts while I’m out and about or while waiting for a meeting.

Even if you only have 10-20 minutes of commuting time each day you still have a many, many hours in a year that you may want to, at least partly, use in a new way.

I hope you all have a good week ahead!

- Yash

A New Start - Welcome to my blog!

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

First things first ! Welcome all to my blog! Let me start out by telling you all a bit more (actually, loads!) about myself, my background and the reason why I started this blog.

My name is Yashwardhan Banthia (a very long name, let's stick to Yash), and I stay in the small (but fast-growing) city of Panvel, near Mumbai, the city of dreams. I live in a joint-family of 10 people and am currently preparing to start my MBA at Babson College, Boston. I have done my undergraduate studies from City, University of London. More on my college times, passions, just family things and experiences in later posts.

Since my high-school days perhaps, I had a knack of writing stories, essays and even then, was a voracious reader. I liked to read anything; may it be characters as appealing as Supandi in the evergreen Tinkle Comics to the famous Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling to more serious literature written by Hardy and Shakespeare. I am a music fanatic, I believe that somewhere music and reading are intertwined and can help one determine a person's tastes and character traits.

The main reason I started this blog (yes, finally!) is because of my daily self-reflection of the observations that I make everyday, some of which have had a profound impact on which my personal values and belief systems are based upon. Everybody thinks about life, in a way unknown to most people: a self-conscious reflection of the cruel reality that a normal person wants to run away from, to be in a space/surroundings that he is comfortable in. Simply put, a person wants to avoid getting out of his/her comfort zone in search of pastures new (not applicable to all, but true in most cases). 

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you're doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you. I hope over the course of time, I hope to instill positivism in any way, through my blogs. With this, I sign off by leaving you all something to think about. See you soon.

#throwback # 2012 # Mme. Tussaud's

 - Yash (a.k.a Zeus in the Gamer World :p) 😊