The Key Ponderer

Practicing mindfulness helps you in increasing your consciousness so you can make deliberate choices rather than relying on emotional and subconscious habits.

To effectively practice mindfulness, learn the art of observing the link between your feelings and the events in your life, and vice versa.

Remember the law of cause and effect. At the same time try to find the effect and the cause of events – it’s a chain reaction.

If you train yourself not to react to what you feel within, it provides you with a pearl of new-found wisdom. This wisdom helps in making better decisions. It starts reflecting in the way you will carry yourself and people will notice it. Some might resent that change in you, while some will start heeding to your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. 

Refrain from judging what you experience through life’s everyday events as good or bad and learn to describe or define what you experience (maybe through Journaling), the myriad of feelings you go through when you encounter the spikes and valleys in your day to day living experience. This metacognition exercise shows a new you, to you.

 

Cheers and good luck.

– Arun

A physical workout that makes you sweat at the start of every single day at home or gym, or a quick swim at a nearby pool, works wonders for at the workplace.

Given that today’s corporate workplace is mostly sedentary while staring at the computer and phone screens, a mild or heavy physical workout that makes you sweat profusely provides that extra energy that we miss while not even having time to walk during the day.

This additional energy adds vigor to our results, the way we think, the methods we use to analyze problems, providing extra nourishment to our hearts and brains. Not only is it helpful during the workday, but we could also possibly feel less stressed after our workday is over. This additional oomph, thus, carries forward to spending quality time post-work schedules, with family, friends, our children, or throw ourselves into any social causes or community works.  You won’t always love the workouts but you’ll always love the results.

Additionally, as a bonus, make use of the tools, browser extensions, and OS that offers eye protection with their Night Light settings. Although not fully, this provides a little help in soothing the eyes, instead of letting the blue rays entering our eyes.

 

Cheers, and good luck!

Arun

We don’t spend and replace some of our valuable and expensive equipment, tools, windows, shoes, walls with new ones immediately after its first damage.

Similarly, if there are people with improvement needs in your team, try to enhance their skillsets and confidence by investing more in them than replacing them at their first mistake.

It’s partly their problem and partly ours, in terms of our mindset and attitude towards them. If we trust they can become better with more attention, care, learning opportunities, then it’s our duty to expose them to such improvement opportunities.

This shift in attitude not only improves the morale of the company but also saves a ton of money. This approach should not be confused with any pre-decided standard Performance Improvement Plans (PIP) for employees. Such (often) blanket plans demoralize the contributions of such employees done so far. It also questions the HR and interview rounds done for that employee when they joined. On the contrary, if a manager debates that interviews and HR cannot predict employee’s peak performance in the future – then such an employee’s dip in performance can also be equally not predicted – thus, it gives all the more reason to help them get better in an amicable way.

More often than not, such dips in performance occur either because the work isn’t exciting or challenging, or their personal life could have altered resulting in a reduction in their workplace contributions. This has to be sorted out by their reporting manager with personal connection and one on one meetings.

 

Cheers, and good luck!

Arun