Wait for Your Turn

 

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Ajaw paghakopa tanan, manlusot an iban… The universe seems to consider equity. Some of us want more just to have them all. There is this insatiable need to have all the things we desire. Yet, life teaches us that we can’t have everything. Blessings are equitable to all.

The innate human desire to seek means that we can never truly feel that every desire and wish has been met. There will never be an end to the to-do list, future goals and plans, the things we want to achieve and see. But the fact that we don’t have everything we want is exactly what makes life so fulfilling (Goldhill, 2016).

If we have everything at this moment, what is the motivation to go on? You see, there is always this challenge for us to pursue something. We should NOT have everything to continue pursuing the things that we dream of. And if others have reached theirs, there will always be a time for us to do so.

Whether we’re striving for a new job, more meaningful relationships, or personal enlightenment, we need to actively want something more in order to live well. In fact, neuroscience shows that the act of seeking itself, rather than the goals we realize, is key to satisfaction.

So, there is no need to hurry. We can enjoy the small victories that we have right now and plan for other victories to pursue. There is always that thrill of seeking for the fulfillment of our goals. But, once we are impatient and will compare ourselves to others, we will become unhappy.

You can never make other’s life be yours. You have your own life patterns to create.

When we compare ourselves to others, we’re often comparing their best features against our average ones. It’s like being right-handed and trying to play an instrument with your left hand. Not only do we naturally want to be better than them, the unconscious realization that we are not often becomes self-destructive.

Comparisons between people are a recipe for unhappiness. Let us accept our own lives. We are unique. And, something good will happen to us sooner or later. Let us just focus on the things which we can control.

Just be patient.

Tangible

 

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Planohon an lihok! Although we need to live the day as it is, there is a big difference between doing something than doing nothing. Rest is essential but when we are resting after being tired of doing nothing is another story.

Productivity is a measure of efficiency of a person completing a task. We often assume that productivity means getting more things done each day. Wrong. Productivity is getting important things done consistently. And no matter what you are working on, there are only a few things that are truly important.

Being productive is about maintaining a steady, average speed on a few things, not maximum speed on everything.

Some of us are diving towards work which sometimes have less impact in the future. There are those who consider that technical things can really ease future problems forgetting about being creative and being efficient. Such endeavors wear us out.

Most productivity strategies focus on short-term efficiency: how to manage your to-do list effectively, how to get more done each morning, how to shorten your weekly meetings, and so on. These are all reasonable ideas. We often fail to realize, however, that there are certain strategic choices we need to make if we want to maximize our productivity for the long-term.

This is when long-term planning comes in. Yet, there are those who have wonderful plans but they do not know how to work them out.

It is not necessarily a person’s job to do that task, but they have to take responsibility for it, and be able to explain what progress has been made on it, so they do have to be able to engage in sufficient detail (skillsyouneed.com).

This is a pragmatic approach to enable you to track progress, so you need to take a pragmatic approach to identifying those responsible: you need to know what’s going on day-to-day.

But if your ideas are only limited to words and concepts and they will not turn out into reality, nothing will happen but purely intangible concepts hanging on air.

Let us contribute some action. We can fill up space now for a better change.

Downsize

 

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Simplehan da nato gud! Why complicate life when we can play it well with simple things? If we complicate it, will it warrant an outcome which we can equate to happiness? There are instances when we gauge life as satisfying if we immerse ourselves with tasks for the sake of being busy. Not realizing that these are just mere outputs, not outcomes.

Jones (2014) mentioned that it can be the difference between mediocrity and the creation of lasting and sustainable change. Mediocre organizations and individuals are stuck on making decisions based on outputs. Great organizations and persons are managing to outcomes.

In the work area, there are those who complain about being busy to the point of immersing themselves to performing tasks which might not be conceptualized well by the managers for better outcomes. There are those who design and assign stuff which lack creativity and too technical to be understood by the people in the organization and they impose on the intended outputs to keep the people busy. Not realizing that such activities can be considered as exercises in futility.

Same with the things we do with our lives.

Outputs can be considered as the quantitative things we do and attain. These will oftentimes lead to qualitative results. Those things we feel and perceive that enhance our lives. Of course, we do not have the same orientation on what things do we need and do to produce good emotions and experiences, yet we are gifted with the mind to discern.

Choice is our ability to make decisions when presented with two or more options. The psychology of choice explores why we subconsciously make the decisions we do, what motivates those decisions, and what needs these decisions are meant to satisfy.

Let us then choose things which will eventually become treasures in our lives. The activities and events that need to be faced must be aligned to what we want without sacrificing the greater good.

We need NOT look at our lives with what we do…but what do these things do to us.

 

We Define It

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Hinay-hinay lamang… Success is a mindset. It is not about what you attain or what others think about you. It is all about the meaning it has put in your life – a satisfaction that you feel out from the efforts you exerted to fulfill your envisioned life.

Successful people always find motivation to keep going no matter what’s happening around them or within them. That’s one of their differences from everyone else. Successful people have the drive to move forward. They channel their time, effort and energy towards their life goals. Each of us is unique. We have our motivations to do things to achieve our goals. But regardless, all goals require an effort. That’s why we need to get ourselves into that action so that we can direct our efforts toward them. For that, we need motivation (Nhan, 2020).

Psychologists believe that these are the common things that motivate a person: Money and Rewards; Desire to be the Best; Helping Others; Power and Fame; Recognition; and Passion. Adults and self-actualized persons must understand what pushes them towards the inclination to do something so that they can weigh their options. Else, they will be experiencing crises and will eventually lead to conflicting situations. Once in control, the person can embrace humility and understand his worth.

Research is clear that passion and creativity work together to produce drive. A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that the more inspired participants felt during a given activity, the more activated their amygdala (the emotional center of the brain) became. People are ultimately guided by their own values – not by other people’s attempts to control their behavior or even by external circumstances. This applies whether you want to know what motivates you to work hard, achieve certain goals or change anything about yourself.

The importance of understanding your drives is clear: It will lead to a happier life. You see, all of us have these motivations to work out towards our defined success. Without a deep self-knowledge, a big tendency is that people will drift. That is if they do not understand where they are going.

Again, justifications come in. There are some of us who whitewash the real reasons into something “grand” not realizing that we are concealing the real issue. We lie to ourselves and convince others about our own lies. But in the end, our conscience prevails.

Life is short. We have to define who we are and what do we want. In this case, even the simple sentence we have written on our notebooks is success in itself.

We create success every minute of the day!

Ego Boosters

 

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Uman hanapan man nan lusot? Ever notice that there are those who find justifications of their wrong actions? Worse, there are those who do not accept their flaws and project their mistakes to others. This is the sign when such persons won’t reach the level of self-actualization.

Self-justification is a portrayal of the brain that, despite its stated goals or desires, is not interested in truth, but rather self-preservation. Admitting you were wrong may save relationships and lives, it may prevent distress and war, but it will also force you to admit that the narrative you have constructed about yourself is wrong. And depending on how committed you are to that narrative, you may be unable to even see that you made a mistake, let alone confront it (Tavris, 2019).

It is not the same thing as lying or making excuses. … It is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. In fact, come to think of it, it was the right thing.

Then, these persons find people who, like them, love to justify themselves and do not allow to see the mistakes they have committed. Of course, we have big tendencies to do self-preservation but the concept is also applicable when we accept mistakes and repair damages.

In the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, the authors say that between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there’s a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian – memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

We need to look deeper into us and allow the ego NOT to be diminished by admitting our mistakes and start repairing. Mending things lead to a positive outcome, therefore, the ego is preserved, or better, strengthened.

It’s terrifying when we even use God as part of our self-justifications. The divine’s intervention is for us to feel GUILT and proceed to humility and asking repentance.

Most of the time, we need to understand that WE SOMETIMES COMMIT MISTAKES. We don’t have to justify them since it will lead to being UNHAPPY. Lying to others and your own self is not enriching.