Is your decision making driven by others?



Are you a puppet while making decisions?

 Decision-making is an important activity you do every day. Many of your decisions are taken subconsciously by you without you even realizing it.

What most of the decision makers like you do not realize is that many of the decisions taken are heavily influenced by others.



The question you need to ask yourself is that are you allowing too much influence of others in your decision-making process?


Look at some past decisions and search for the ones you have blindly followed other's suggestions.

You may be surprised that some of the decisions you are living with, suggested by others are giving you sub optimal results.


Here are some tips that will prevent you from following others suggestions blindly:


• Be aware that others are giving you suggestions
   that will affect your decisions


• Pause and reflect on it briefly as soon as you
   receive a suggestion


• Fix a time in near future to reflect on the
   suggestion.


• Ponder over the positive and negative
   consequences of following that suggestion


• Check whether the person who gave you the
   suggestion has any vested interest in your decision


• Brainstorm and generate more alternatives


• Compare all the alternatives, including the
   suggestion


• Choose the best alternative for yourself


It is very easy to be led astray and reach decisions that may be detrimental to you. Many a times you may realize it only after a long period of time, maybe even years after.


Take charge of your decision making from this moment onwards.

What is motivation and how you can sustain it the entire day?



Take charge of your motivation

What is motivation? It is the drive you feel within yourself to get things done.

You may surround yourself with all kinds of motivations from people, motivational quotes, videos and any other means by which you may want to inspire yourself, however, if you do not set your motivational level first thing in the morning, it will soon dissipate.


What do you need to do to have high energy levels and drive throughout the day?

Here are a few tips:

• Set what you want to achieve for the day

• Get rid of all distractions

• Grasp your attention and hold a tight rein on it

• Channel your attention towards the tasks you want
   to accomplish

• Take periodic breaks

• Cut yourself off from the Internet whenever you
   don’t need it.

Attention is a priceless commodity. Your attention is held to ransom by zillions of distractions around you.

If you have set a game plan for the day and put your attention on it, you will have sustained motivation.

Motivating yourself is a very important task that will take care of all other tasks.

Attending to this task and staying motivated is what motivation is all about.

In a rut?

Choose a fun activity

I am in a rut! Is that the thought that is occurring to you lately? If so, then you need to take immediate action to feel good.

While there are many causes for this thought and its corresponding feeling that would require detailed analysis, you can, however, take action to get rid of the feeling of boredom you are facing right now.



Here is what you need to do.


List down all the activities that gave you lot of enjoyment in the past. A sample list is given below:


• Movies
• Drawing
• Math
• Public speaking
• Playing a sport
• Trekking
• Painting
• Singing
• Travel to a new place
• Visiting your aunt
• Going out with your friends


Here is how to get out of the rut. Make an exhaustive list. It will be a good idea to take inventory of all the fun activities you enjoyed right from your childhood.


The next step is to go through the list and choose an activity that you have not done in years.

Plan to do it. You will be surprised how such an activity can lift your mood to such a high level that people around you will ask you what it is that is making you so happy.

The more you do this the quicker it will be for the “in a rut” thought to recede and vanish altogether.

What to do when you are depressed?

Search for beautiful things to focus upon!

What to do when you are depressed? This is a common question everyone of you has to answer day in day out. When I talk of depression, I am not talking about severe clinical depression. I am talking about everyday garden variety blues.

You may be feeling low because of something that has happened to you today or yesterday, or last week.


Typical problems that drive people to feel low are given below:


• Fight with the spouse
• Made a bad presentation at work
• Troubled with a self-centered colleague
• Overwhelmed with work
• Missed a deadline and your boss reprimanded you
• Didn’t study well for the exam and got low grades
• Lost a match


These are the times when you beat yourself inside through an internal dialogue that can cause your mood to slip down.


How do you know when you are depressed? Here are some of the symptoms to watch out:


• Feeling sad
• Low energy to do anything
• Need to be left alone
• Loss of interest in things that excite you
• Procrastination


Let me give you one tip you can do right now that will lift you out of your sad feeling. It is the easiest one to do and doesn’t cost anything.


Here is the tip:


Start focusing on the external world. Observe carefully what is around you and pick up an object and start observing it through all your senses.

Let’s say you are in front of a tree- touch it, feel the bark, look at the colour, touch the leaves, look up and observe the sway of the leaves.

Keep doing this until you are totally lost in the world of that tree. You will find a magic sweeping all your blues away.


How does this work? You feel better just by externalising your focus and thus stopping that negative internal dialogue beating you up.

The mundane things around you have an unique healing property and focusing on them is what to do when you are depressed.

Some tips to safe guard yourself from the negative environmental influence.



Protection shield

How do you protect yourself from negativity in your environment? One of the best ways is to safeguard yourself from them in the first place is to take an inventory of various environmental stimuli reaching you day in day out.

Pay attention to the sources of negativity.

What kind of TV programs do you watch? Is there a lot of violence in the programs you watch? It is time to stop watching them completely.

Furthermore, stop reading newspaper stories about violence, corruption and any other negative articles you may come across.

How about people you come across every day? Are you surrounded by negative people who discourage you? While it is impossible to cut the relationship with everyone who is negative, it is possible in certain cases. You need to single out the ones whom terminating your contact with them will create no harm to you and stop interacting with them.

Another way to cut negativity in your life is to stop reading trashy novels. Only you can decide which ones are not good and should never be read.

I will give you more tips in the future. Meanwhile, try these out. You will immediately feel a profound sense of relief.

You will sleep better and smile more while your peace of mind grows.

Are you aware of the impact of the environment on you?

Sports counter

Environment has tremendous influence on how you think, feel, and act. While its influence is always present, the fact about it that is frightening is that it is invisible and its most of the time negative.

Look around you. Your environment is defined for you largely by what you see around you and hear about.


Here are some common sources:


• TV
• Newspaper
• Movies
• Magazines
• Internet
• Radio
• Hoarding
• People


Let me suggest an exercise for you. All you need is a sports counter and a determination to track everything negative in your environment.

Click the sports counter each time you see or hear anything that you feel is detrimental.

Try this for one full day. You may end up horrified at the results when you examine your counts at the end of the day.

Do write about your findings in your comments about this post.

In my next post, I will be writing about how to tackle this problem.