Beating Alpha

iterating towards truth

Browsing Category: Mementos

Mementos

It is not about you

When other people are hurt, fear has captured their mind. That fear can produce anger, self-pitty, depression, judgmental behavior and other states of mind. Depending on the severity, people who are hurt take actions they usually later regret. Their judgment is clouded with these emotions and they stop being rational. In severe cases, they attack you. Usually verbal attack is the simplest form of an attack. Especially in written form when they feel safe and not threatend (think about all the internet trolls for example). They are hurt and the way they feel better about themself is to get the fear out in form of an attack so they can feel better for themself. Little they know, that anger produces even more anger and they are by this behaviour creating new version of themself that is even more sad, more insecure and looks even more stupid in front of their internal judge and others. Sometimes we can get absorbed into their world thinking that it is about us! This is so typical for our mind. That the attack, reaction, nasty behaviour is about us. About person who is being attacked, yet it is totally the opposite. Their behavior is completely outside of our control and therefore we should not spend a single minute in their circle of fear and most importantly, we should not take it at all personally. 

Mementos

Judgement of others

Sometimes we don’t tell the full truth or bend the truth. Sometimes we hide things for the sake of not being judged. We either do that to look good (to get approval of others) or to avoid fears of not being hurt by their reaction (judgement of others). Every time we do that, we are getting further from who we are not accepting us in its full spectrum. Maybe you know that moment, when you are reading book with a catchy title and you kind of feel that others will judge you for that. Somehow you care about what total strangers will think about you. Weird, I know. Some put covers on the book so others dont see what you are reading, some are hiding the book cover putting it quickly to their bags once they are finished so others dont see. The same goes for not telling the full story. Fear of being judged is just stronger then our own authenticity. This behavior is a great mirror of our authenticity and self-love and self-confidence. And this is totally normal. This is how we were wired to survive yet it is kind of not useful these days anymore. So what can we do about it? Every day accept yourself and praise yourself for the journey of your life. Either by writing or thoughts. For the decisions you have taken, books you read, people you hang out with, virtues you follow. If you radically accept who you are, with compassion, with all your limits you will slowly lose this anxiety of feeling the judgment of others, seek approval of others and start being proud of your own authenticity, your own weirdness, your own way. 

Mementos

How to never be disappointed again

We spend lot of time in our lifes being disappointed by the actions of others. We are being repeatedly hurt by their "selfish" actions without realizing why are we sad in the first place and maybe that it is us who is a) selfish and b) poor communicator. We all create models of expectations around what others should or shouldn’t do, based on our own "selfish" beliefs, our own little world. Then we go on in our life’s and we are surprised that the expectations we have set for us and others are not being met and that leaves us sad and disappointed. One principle I have created for me is: "never expect for something to automatically happen". Also recently, I have added new principle that says:

Mementos

Poem about balance

I have written a a brief post about balance. About the lute that is not too tight, nor too slack. If you read the post, the poem below is the most beautiful expression of what Buddha meant when talking about the lute.

Mementos

Finding your next calling

Ultimately we are here on this journey to experience everything that life can offer. Good or bad. When thinking about finding our calling, I have changed my view what “our calling” actually is. Looking at it pragmatically you have couple of shots in your lifetime to be true specialist or many calls when you choose to be generalist. By simple math, I choose to be generalist since I have not discovered my calling by the time I was 15. Not that you have to but it gets little but more complicated over time. Our nature is to control the outcome, in this case the outcome is our life. I believe we must oscilate between risking and stabilizing. Without taking new risks, challanges we can live in comfort but never truly figure out what our calling actually is. So why so many people prefers boring comfort over riskier finding of their potential? Fear! Fear that has been defined in our past. So in order to find your calling, I believe you must go to your past and clean the fears you have in order to find your calling. Your calling paradoxically lies in cleaning your past, not in your future. Then you can go and take risks, experiment, be smart, find confluences of contexts you are interested in and create new domains merged by those contexts, unique to your skillset. That is I believe you can find your calling and it can happen at any stage of your life. Good luck!

Mementos

Fear of future and how to turn it around

Our past defines our future. If we understand what things we fear, what beliefs we have formed around those fears to feel more "safe" (which is yet only another illusion), we can free our trapped souls from past and stop fearing future. By talking through situations and uncertainties we have faced when our beliefs were formed, we can clearly see that those beliefs were created based on things that do not make any sense, yet we are still driven by them. When we analyze, in my case what works best for me is free writing, those situations we can free that trapped soul from the past. 

Mementos

Trust as a key collaboration currency

Trust is elementary attribute in a colaboration success. If you feel safe with your colleagues, you know that team has one shared goal and don’t have to compete between each other, you can easily speak up and express your opinion. If all people can freely express their opinion, multiple contexts are then assembled and strong narrative can be build. Trust is also key factor in having thoughtful disagreement when disagreement appears. If we trust each other and we agree on how we should resolve this disagreement we can build this narrative much faster. That is why every leader should focus first on building the trust first within the team. 

Mementos

You are a mammal

Lets face it! We are just mammals with brain enabling for better cognitive skills then our animal competition. Never forget that. As humans we usually forget that we are just animals with all our primary instincts that happened to live in the age of 5G internet and handheld devices smarter then any scholar in the history of mankind. By forgetting who we really are (hairy monkeys with developed prefrontal cortex), we beat ourselves up too much too often for having limits, for not being good enough, for not remembering important information or tasks, for forgetting, for not always behaving according to social standards and on and on and on. Then we have to live with this guilt that is stored over and over deep into our beliefs and later develops into depressions, burnouts or other modern age health conditions. This self-imposing guilt, this not forgiving to ourself, this forgetting who we really are is simply not serving us well and is stopping us from living life the way we have been given it to live: to learn and experience life in all its forms (good and bad). So lets stop being too hard on ourself, we are "just" hairy monkeys with more developed brain.

Mementos

Accepting old beliefs and building new ones

Over the years from childhood to adulthood we build masks and patterns (beliefs) that define us. After we climb at our first mountain (achieve things we always thought will make us happy and achieve success from the society point of view) we realize that lots of these beliefs were false beliefs created to get approval of others, to get their love, to avoid fears and not to get hurt. We have to start unlearning those old beliefs and learning start learning new one. I believe it is our journey in the life we got to learn from this experience. One thing I have been experiencing on this journey has been the sense of accepting whatever fear I have. In the past I was mainly absorbed by the fear and then try to avoid it at all cost but recently I have found out that what we resist, persists. The more we resist it, the stronger it gets. Whenever I feel I am worried or scared, I immediately change my approach and rather then resisting and try to welcome my fear and accept that I can have this fear. I am allowing myself all spectrum of emotions not judging myself anymore. I also try to understand what belief triggered this particular response. 

Mementos

Patience is the crucial skill for the future

Since more and more of what we do moves into the cyber world, we are plugged and becoming more and more reactive. System wants us to be reactive so we can buy more shit we dont need and obey orders of so called trendsetters and fake role models without even knowing it. I believe we are growing into the age when if the page does not load within first 3 seconds or the on-boarding process is not super straightforward, we are out of here. Right? They do not deserve our attention, they did no make it easy for us so fuck them, right? Add little bit of multi-tasking ideally with high degree of context switing and that only certain neurons are firing when we are consumed by cyberworld and no muscles are used (your handwriting is totally different to your keyboard writing in terms of what parts of brain are activated). Sum it all up together and you have a recipe for impatient obediant cyber junkie.