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Thursday, August 11, 2011

Stress Management: Either You Can be Right or You Can be Happy

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia Management Universe at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/

For free tutorials on “Train the Trainers” program, refer: http://train-trainers.blogspot.com/

Either You Can be Right or You Can be Happy: Its Less Likely that You Can be Both

One of the less thought about and talked about reason (but very important one) for feeling stressed from time to time is one's desire to be "right" or "perfect" all the time. And what is "right" is cooked up by the same person who is trying to be right. Agreed that he/she might have thought about it pretty seriously within the ambit of his own cerebral capabilities and after having read lots of literature on it or by being very observant of the people who seem to be right to him/her etc. Yet, finally, it is solely his/her own perception.

So, despite much of such research, the question is: can he/she be absolutely sure that what he defined as perfect or right was really right or perfect? No one can be too sure about it. It definitely is not sacrosanct or the ultimate truth. Yet some people pursue these mirages of being right and perfect all the time with missionary vengeance. In addition, such tribes do not want to fail or be seen as failing against the benchmarks set by them.

And see below what they try to achieve in pursuit of meeting this perfectness! They seriously practice it in most trivial things of life as well as things of medium and high importance. Here are some classic examples:
  • Pronounce each and every word of each and every language correctly.
  • Being dressed prim and proper every minute and every hour of all the days of an year.
  • Never squeeze the tooth paste tube or shaving cream tube or moisturizer tube or for that matter any such other tube in its middle.
  • Following each and every dining table manner and telephone etiquette and every other social etiquette to the letter as described in numerous etiquette and manners manuals authored by all kinds of self proclaiming experts.
  • Never leave the clothes on the beds of the bedrooms or on the floors of bathrooms even for a second.
  • Make sure that toilet seat is always covered without fail and flush at least twice after having done the thing in the toilet.
  • Always eat the perfectly nutritious food in every meal everywhere. Never ever exceed the calorie and other specifications set out by the numerous nutrition experts.
  • Always sleep on the right side of the bed and let the spouse sleep always on the left side of the bed.
  • Sticking to punctuality in each and every situation.  
  • Loading the washing machine or dish washer in the right way- as thought out as right by self.
  • All the time trying to set out goals of all kinds and trying to meet those goals and getting upset when not meeting them.
  • Pushing the son(s)/daughter(s) to become champions in many things right around their age of 5 or 6 and feeling upset when they fail to meet such expectations.
  • Presenting self, spouse and children as the most mannerly creatures of the earth.  
  • Never miss the deadlines in professional or any other type of jobs.
and the list can go on and on.

Trying to be reasonably effective and efficient is understandable because that can be met within your capabilities and within your other resources. But then excess of anything is bad. When you set out some crazy ideals for self and are likely to expect them from your spouse, children, parents, subordinates and colleagues,  it becomes too much for yourself and everyone else around you. And then stresses and strains develop because such tall expectations are beyond the available capabilities and resources. That leaves you and others not only stressed but it is likely to disrupt the human relations from time to time. That further adds to your and others' woes.

Many times what is right or wrong is never very clear. Different people do things differently and to each one that may be right. So, on trivial and many other issues, insistence on achieving a particular "right way" may be inviting unnecessary stresses. Yet, on some important issues of life what is realistic and achievable must definitely be discussed and what capabilities and other resources of self and others will be required to achieve them must be assessed.

The whole discussion here does not promote accepting a compromising or sloppy attitude towards life but warns all of us against being obsessed about being "right" or "perfect" (as defined by self) all the time.

Being flexible and setting realistic and achievable goals within the means of capabilities and resources is the golden path traversing on which will be least stressful and yet meaningfully fulfilling.

For More Guidance, Assistance, Training and Consultation
Contact: prodcons@prodcons.com

Training in all the soft skills and various management functions/techniques is imparted by Prodcons Group’s Mr Shyam Bhatawdekar and/or Dr (Mrs) Kalpana Bhatawdekar, eminent management educationists, management consultants and trainers- par excellence, with distinction of having trained over 150,000 people from around 250 organizations.

Also refer: (Prodcons Group) http://prodcons-group.blogspot.com/, (Training Programs by Prodcons Group) http://training-development-function.blogspot.com/, (Productivity Consultants) http://productivity-consultants.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Stress Management: Most Sound Albeit Bit Difficult Way to Tackle Stress: Developing Competencies

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia Management Universe at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/

For free tutorials on “Train the Trainers” program, refer: http://train-trainers.blogspot.com/

Four fundamental elements of improving your overall competencies and therefore, your capabilities and effectiveness[1] at any given point of time are:
 
· Values
· Knowledge base
· Paradigms
· Willpower

More quality and quantity of these elements within you make you more effective.

These elements are acquired by the human beings from the environment from any of its entities and these can be acquired at any age. Even if you missed out on acquiring them early on, you can catch up with them later in life.

Everyone is free to acquire them and anyone can acquire them. There is no restriction of any sort on any human being.

These four elements finally culminate into making a human being more skilled and more competent. Human beings develop and improve continuously their skills and competencies based on these four elements. Then they use these skills and competencies to perform all kinds of tasks and activities required to achieve the goals set by them for their personal, family, professional and social lives.

The more skilled and competent the human beings become by the acquisition of the four elements, the more effectively they are able to perform the tasks and activities and to achieve the resultant goals or objectives. They feel confident of meeting any kind of challenges in life. They feel that they have the required capabilities to tackle the demands put on them and therefore, stresses and strains do not get created.

So how do we make this model work for you? We give below certain doable recommendations:

1. Set your short term, medium term, long germ and life time goals for your personal, family, professional and social life. The guidelines given below in serial number 2 through 30 are to help you acquire the right kind of overall competencies to make you effective to accomplish your chosen goals.

2. Sharpen your desire to learn the right kind of values, knowledge and paradigms. Become a strong willed person.

3. Learn about the various basic human values. These are not too many.

4. Correct those values that you might have already formed but now you realize that they need review and correction.

5. Formulate your own value structure that will guide you throughout your life. These values will normally not change under ordinary conditions. They are more permanent (as compared to the paradigms).

6. Then always be guided by your values or principles.

7. Do not waver from your values under the trying circumstances. You may face many dilemma situations in your life.

8. There are principled paths guided by values and there are unprincipled paths without any value structure. Both run parallel to each other and never meet. Both may give success. But the principled path will always give you more overall effectiveness in your life. Unprincipled path may even destroy you completely.

9. Knowledge is unending. It is enormous. Try to acquire as much knowledge as you can. It is extremely difficult to acquire all the knowledge.

10. Therefore, start with the knowledge that is required for achieving the goals or objectives of your personal, family, professional and social life.

11. You will need to acquire three types of knowledge: rational knowledge, emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge pertaining to all the four spheres of your life- personal, family, professional and social life.

12. New knowledge will emerge continually. No one can stop it. Your existing knowledge may become incorrect and obsolete over a period of time. So, keep acquiring new knowledge.

13. Always look out for the most authentic sources of knowledge. Acquire knowledge only from the authentic sources or otherwise you are in a danger of assimilating incorrect or erroneous knowledge and related information.

14. Knowledge backed up and validated correctly by the relevant facts and figures, supported by experiments and real life results is likely to be more authentic. Other pieces of knowledge may be mere hearsay.

15. Read a lot. Read every day. Read authentic literature. Do not waste your time reading inferior or erroneous literature.

16. Attend courses, seminars and workshops to listen to the real experts to enhance your knowledge.

17. Acquire knowledge to help you enhance and sharpen your “willpower to do” or “willpower to perform”.

18. Often revise those concepts and their related details that are very important in life and may be difficult to understand and assimilate.

19. Teach others what you learnt. Your learning will become more effective. You will get more clarity on the subject when you start teaching.

20. Always be on lookout for the implementation aspects of what you are learning so that you can implement the knowledge properly.

21. Paradigms or your day-to-day thinking patterns guide you to take particular directions and steps towards accomplishing your various tasks and activities that ultimately steer you towards your goals or objectives. There are hundreds of them in your mind. Therefore these should be absolutely correct and up-to-date.

22. You should derive your paradigms essentially from your values, knowledge base and related information base. Keep checking frequently to ensure that these three remain in consonance with each other.

23. Since a repository or directory of all the latest paradigms is not available or published anywhere, keep your eyes and ears open to sense the new and emerging paradigms in all the spheres of life. Grasp them and internalize them.

24. Keep introspecting the appropriateness or correctness of your paradigms on an on-going basis. Frequently correct your wrong paradigms or mindsets.

25. Develop flexibility for accepting the correct paradigms even if they are quite in divergence with your existing mindsets.

26. Develop those paradigms that will help you to sharpen your “willpower to do” or “willpower to perform”.

27. Decide on the skills and competencies that will be required by you to effectively tackle the tasks and activities that will lead you to your goals and objectives.

28. Use your values, knowledge and paradigms to learn, develop and master those skills and competencies. Practice them lots to achieve the highest level of expertise in them.

29. Implement those skills and competencies to carry out your tasks and activities.

30. Keep moving towards achieving your goals or objectives by applying your values, knowledge, paradigms, willpower to do and skills/competencies.


[1] HSoftware (Human Software) (The Only Key to Higher Effectiveness authored by Shyam Bhatawdekar and Dr Kalpana Bhatawdekar

For More Guidance, Assistance, Training and Consultation

Contact: prodcons@prodcons.com

Training in all the soft skills and various management functions/techniques is imparted by Prodcons Group’s Mr Shyam Bhatawdekar and/or Dr (Mrs) Kalpana Bhatawdekar, eminent management educationists, management consultants and trainers- par excellence, with distinction of having trained over 150,000 people from around 250 organizations.

Also refer: (Prodcons Group) http://prodcons-group.blogspot.com/, (Training Programs by Prodcons Group) http://training-development-function.blogspot.com/, (Productivity Consultants) http://productivity-consultants.blogspot.com/