Tuesday, December 26, 2017

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do

13 Things Mentally Strong people Don't Do

Amy Morin

Oust the weak links in your thinking and behavior patterns.
 

 
For more than a decade in my work as a psychotherapist, I helped clients identify their existing talents, skills and support systems. Then we’d figure out how to address their struggles by expanding on their existing strengths. For much of my career, I felt like this positive plan of attack was an effective way to help people overcome adversity.

But when I experienced tragedy firsthand, I began to rethink this optimistic method. In 2003 my mother died unexpectedly. Then two days before the third anniversary of her death, my 26-year-old husband suffered a fatal heart attack. Seven years later, I lost my father-in-law.
Throughout my grief, I realized that focusing on my strengths—and ignoring my weaknesses—had serious limitations. If I wanted to emerge from that painful period stronger than before, I needed to pay close attention to the bad habits that held me back. Letting myself feel like a victim, complaining about my circumstances and distracting myself from the pain might help me feel better in the short term but would only cause more problems over the long term.
My hardships taught me that it only takes one or two bad habits—no matter how minor they might seem—to stall progress.
Reaching your greatest potential doesn’t require you to work harder by adding desirable habits to your already busy life. Instead you can work smarter by eliminating the routines that erode effectiveness and siphon off mental strength. Here are the 13 things mentally strong people don’t do:

1. Waste time feeling sorry for themselves.

It’s futile to wallow in your problems, exaggerate your misfortune and keep score of how many hardships you’ve endured. Whether you’re struggling to pay your bills or experiencing a serious health problem, throwing a pity party only makes things worse. Self-pity keeps you focused on the problem and prevents you from developing a solution.
Hardship and sorrow are inevitable, but feeling sorry for yourself is a choice. Even when you can’t solve the problem, you can choose to control your attitude. Find three things to be grateful for every day to keep self-pity at bay.

2. Give away their power.

You can’t feel like a victim and be mentally strong; that’s impossible. If your thoughts send you into victim mode—My sister-in-law drives me crazy or My boss makes me feel bad about myself—you give others power over you. No one has power over the way you think, feel or behave.
Changing your daily vocabulary is one way to recognize that the choices you make are yours. Rather than saying, “I have to work late today,” edit that sentiment to “I’m choosing to stay late.” There may be consequences if you don’t work late, but it’s still a choice. Empowering yourself is an essential component to creating the kind of life you want.

3. Shy away from change.

If you worry that change will make things worse, you’ll stay stuck in your old ways. The world is changing, and your success depends on your ability to adapt. The more you practice tolerating distress from various sources—perhaps taking a new job or leaving an unhealthy relationship—the more confident you’ll become in your ability to adapt and create positive change in yourself.

4. Squander energy on things they can’t control.

Complaining, worrying and wishful thinking don’t solve problems; they only waste your energy. But if you invest that same energy in the things you can control, you’ll be much better prepared for whatever life throws your way.
Pay attention to the times when you’re tempted to worry about things you can’t control—such as the choices other people make or how your competitor behaves—and devote that energy to something more productive, such as finishing a project at work or home or helping a friend with hers. Accept situations that are beyond your control and focus on influencing, rather than controlling, people around you.

5. Worry about pleasing everyone.

Whether you’re nervous that your father-in-law will criticize your latest endeavor or you attend an event you’d rather skip to avoid a guilt trip from your mother, trying to make other people happy drains your mental strength and causes you to lose sight of your goals.
Making choices that disappoint or upset others takes courage, but living an authentic life requires you to act according to your values. Write down your top five values and focus your energy on staying true to them, even when your choices aren’t met with favor.

6. Fear taking risks.

If something seems scary, you might not take the risk, even a small one. On the contrary, if you’re excited about a new opportunity, you may overlook a giant risk and forge ahead. Emotions cloud your judgment and interfere with your ability to accurately calculate risk. You can’t become extraordinary without taking chances, but a successful outcome depends on your ability to take the right risks. Acknowledge how you’re feeling about a certain risk and recognize how your emotions influence your thoughts. Create a list of the pros and cons of taking the risk to help you make a decision based on a balance of emotion and logic.

7. Dwell on the past.

While learning from the past helps you build mental strength, ruminating is harmful. Constantly questioning your past choices or romanticizing about the good ol’ days keeps you from both enjoying the present and making the future as good as it can be.
Make peace with the past. Sometimes doing so will involve forgiving someone who hurt you, and other times, moving forward means letting go of regret. Rather than reliving your past, work through the painful emotions that keep you stuck.

8. Repeat their mistakes.

Whether you felt embarrassed when you gave the wrong answer in class or you were scolded for messing up, you may have learned from a young age that mistakes are bad. So you may hide or excuse your mistakes to bury the shame associated with them, and doing so will prevent you from learning from them.
Whether you gained back the weight that you worked hard to lose or you forgot an important deadline, view each misstep as an opportunity for growth. Set aside your pride and humbly evaluate why you goofed up. Use that knowledge to move forward better than before.

9. Resent other people’s successes.

Watching a co-worker receive a promotion, hearing a friend talk about her latest achievement or seeing a family member buy a car you can’t afford can stir up feelings of envy. But jealousy shifts the focus from your efforts and interferes with your ability to reach your goals.
Write down your definition of success. When you’re secure in that definition, you’ll stop resenting others for attaining their goals, and you’ll stay committed to reaching yours. Recognize that when other people reach their goals, their accomplishments don’t minimize your achievements.

10. Give up after their first failure.

Some people avoid failure at all costs because it unravels their sense of self-worth. Not trying at all or giving up after your first attempt will prevent you from reaching your potential. Almost every story about a wildly successful person starts with tales of repeated failure (consider Thomas Edison’s thousands of failures before he invented a viable lightbulb, for instance).
Face your fear of defeat head-on by stretching yourself to your limits. Even when you feel embarrassed, rejected or ashamed, hold your head high and refuse to let lack of success define you as a person. Focus on improving your skills and be willing to try again after you fail.

11. Fear “alone time.”

Solitude can sometimes feel unproductive; for some people, the thought of being alone with their thoughts is downright scary. Most people avoid silence by filling their days with a flurry of activity and background noise.
Alone time, however, is an essential component to building mental strength. Carve out at least 10 minutes each day to gather your thoughts without the distractions of the world. Use the time to reflect on your progress and create goals for the future.

12. Feel the world owes them something.

We like to think that if we put in enough hard work or tough it out through bad times, then we deserve success. But waiting for the world to give you what you think you’re owed isn’t a productive life strategy.
Take notice of times when you feel as though you deserve something better. Intentionally focus on all that you have to give rather than what you think you deserve. Regardless of whether you think you’ve been dealt a fair hand in life, you have gifts to share with others.

13. Expect immediate results.

Self-growth develops slowly. Whether you’re trying to shed your procrastination tendencies or improve your marriage, expecting instant results will lead to disappointment. Think of your efforts as a marathon, not a sprint. View bumps in the road as minor setbacks rather than as total roadblocks.
You’ll need all the mental strength you can muster at some point in your life, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a financial hardship or a major health problem. Mental strength will give you the resilience to push through the challenges.
And the great news is that everyone can strengthen his or her mental muscle. Practice being your own mental strength coach. Pay attention to areas in which you’re doing well and figure out where you need improvement. Create opportunities for growth and then challenge yourself to become a little better today than you were yesterday.

Source : Success

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Engineer Saleem Pirzada Passed Away - 2

Personally I was in a state of hiatus with him. My attitude has been to understand the causes behind the present state of Muslims in India while he was a man of action who was fast running out of time.

I used to sit in the party office for long hours and there used to be a series of visitors with a broad band of age spectrum. Young university boys saw a mentor in him while senior people saw in him an old comrade of those glorious gone by years when they were out there to change the history or recreate it.

To remain close to the unpleasant reality let us record that the youth was not crowding around him and the old company even in its prime did not perform mind bending fete. Saleem Pirzada will go into the footnote of history unsung for destiny decided that he will be the brick that disappears into the foundation of an edifice that gathers only lack of acknowledgement and no share in the grandeur. He is like the supplication that is so delicate that the angels hide it most carefully in their wings so as to protect it from all worldly fame, fortune and glory.

Indeed he would not get credit even to the level that came to the stalwarts of Babri Masjid protection movement - another lost cause from recent Muslim history in India. When I was exploring the life and events of Dr Zakir Hussain a senior friend remarked that it was not substantial. There lies the tragedy of significant Muslim figures of independent India. Saleem Pirzada is destined to get less share in achievements.

This brings us to the question then - what makes some of us so sentimental and emotional about him. He was not a family man - marriage he sacrificed for the sake of his mission. He certainly was a man of friends but this aspect never overwhelmed his vision or made any significant encroachment on his ideals. Mentor he was but only to those who came along and the fact remains that very few did so. Busy he kept himself throughout his life but every single possible outcome that could go into making a glorious bio-data went into the black hole called Muslim Politics of Independent India.

He was a Pathan of Khanqah, Muslim Monastery, lineage but the family has not visible inclination to that angle. Having lost his father at the tender age of six he was brought up by his mother and strangely had a father figure attitude towards so many of his juniors. He was very proud of several martyrs for freedom from his locality.

Arriving in Aligarh he soon got the hand of students politics that is what became the high point of his life and career. The story picks up in late sixties and through seventies of twentieth century. This was global high of students movements in the world. Even in the US they have not understood the phenomenon till today. Main cause might be the Marxist influence and global ideological awakening but ideologically he was placed against it - his ideology was Sir Syed, from beginning till end.

Just like their socialist, communist, Marxist counter parts Lovey and company too honed their political analysis on the road side tea stalls around the AMU campus. In independent India the academic political discourse has been usurped by the leftist intelligentsia rather completely but looking at the documentary evidence in terms of books and recorded speeches and published articles one comes to unmistakable conclusion that these people not only had a Muslim narrative but their oratorical prowess was even better and far superior to that of the left and indeed the demagoguery of AB Vajpayee. Javed Habib, Lovey Pirzada, Ali Amir, Ariful Islam and many more could be counted in this genre.

As mentioned above this spark of intellectual revival of Islam or political underpinnings of Muslims has not reached yet its maturity. The main subterfuge happened due to partition. Sir Syed and his close friends were worried about the fate of Muslims in independent India. The question that exercised the minds of these old men was whether Muslims will end up being like second class citizen and subjugated minority. They worked to obviate such an eventuality.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were of the opinion that the majority community in her magnanimity would take good care of the interests of all the minorities including the Muslims.

Muslim leaders like Maulana Azad and the Muslims belonging to Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind (Muslim Religious Scholars Assembly) bought this theory and assurance. This view came to be known as the one nation theory.

The other point of view was the so called two nation theory and it was pursued by the Muslim League in pre-independence India. They pursued the course where they wanted constitutional guarantee that minorities, Muslims in particular, will not end up in a position of subjugation. Just before independence such a mechanism was indeed worked out by the British - the people who were still in charge of the situation.

This cabinet Mission Plan was the one that was inexplicably torpedoed by Pandit Nehru. The immediate consequence was that the leader of Muslim league MA Jinnah flew off the handle and abandoned the path of reconciliation with Congress. They also abandoned Dr Muhammed Iqbal's idea of autonomous administration of Muslim majority areas in North-East part of India. In the 1940  Lahore session of Muslim League a one paragraph proposal for Pakistan was moved in and passed. Seven years later India was partitioned and the bill of partition came to the Muslims of India.

British in their hurry to leave India failed in a department that was supposed to be their strongest forte - administration. Lord Mountbatten, the then Viceroy, forgot to post even a policeman on the now India-Pakistan border during the population transfer. Muslim-Sikh riots ensued and countless innocent lives perished.

The League was a very strong force amongst Muslims but by no means the only voice. People like Maulana Azad and Hussain Ahmed Madani and a long list of many others were very much pro-India and against the partition but even in secular sections shadow of partition has clouded the sky for Muslims. Organizations like RSS always held the view that once Pakistan came into existence what are Muslims doing in India but today the circle of people possessing such views has become much wider.

This is the legacy with which people like Lovey Pirzada had to operate. Democracy has this inherent instability that it might turn into majoritarianism and that is what has happened in India today. Saleem Pirzada was amongst those brave souls who who chose to work in opposition to this tide knowing fully well that this was an uphill task to say the least. Even naive political opinion holders consider it silly to take the stand that Lovey took.

He took the side of truth and justice in a situation where it was not only politically unwise but plain dangerous as the events of last three years have made amply clear. On December 10, 2017 he posted a status on Facebook where it starkly says that the count of Muslim skilled in last three and half years has been already 39 and be prepared to keep counting. This was perhaps minutes before his massive cardiac attack and hours before his demise.

When you work against such monumental odds the the fair deal would be that your small achievements should be counted as big. What were these achievements? Let us get to these in the next part.


Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Engineer Saleem Pirzada Passed Away

Lovey Bhai, engineer Saleem Pirzada, National President of Parcham Party of India expired in the night between December 12 and 13, 2017 in Apollo Hospital, Delhi. He was referred to that place from our own Hospital of the JN Medical College at AMU via Sir Ganga Ram Hospital following a massive heart attack that left him in a state of paralysis.

But these are dry and mundane details about the sad demise of a political personality of the level of a statesman. Urdu speakers use very expressive words and couplets for departed people and since not all of the departed souls deserve such high assessment these words are mostly lost in their worth. This time all of the seemed so appropriate.

In this view due leverage should be given to the fact that I felt so impressed by his genuineness that objectivity might slip out of my words but I assure all that I am striving not to allow that.

So here we list some of the Urdu expressions first that have been just used for late engineer Saleem Pirzada.

Hazaron saal nargis apni be noori pe roti hai,
Bari mushkil se hota hai chaman main deedawar paida..

Nargis (flower) cries for a millennium at her lack luster life
After mighty hurdles a connoisseur of beauty is born in garden

Muslim community the world over is easily one and half a billion strong. Yet they are in a state of shambles in the world today. I would count him amongst those rare souls who worked selflessly for whole life with every possible sacrifice barring life. the fete is all the more awesome owing to the fact that success could never have come in his lifetime. It need monumental courage and fortitude, patience and utter and complete lack of selfish motives to make that kind of commitment.

Above Urdu couplet is by Dr Sir Muhammed Iqbal, himself an epitome of the same ideals. This couplet is mostly lost on those for whom it is so often applied. Not in case of Allama Iqbal and not in case of Saleem alias Lovey Pirzada.

Nazar Abbas wrote :

Bade ghaur se sun raha tha zamana
Humein so gaye dastan kehte kehte

The world was listening rather attentively
It was me who slept while narrating the tale

Indeed he was telling a tale that was worth listening. Islam is the tale of real purpose of life as ordained by God. Muslim community is the flag bearer of that mission. This is the faith of Muslims. But Lovey did not pursue that angle. His mission was mission of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. It is also called Aligarh Movement. in a nut-shell it can be summarized as follows : To empower Muslims of modern education so that they can take their rightful place in the scheme of things Indian.

This is the tale that was left incomplete by his departure from amongst us. The moment you utter the word Muslim you are very likely to be termed communal in a partisan sense in our country today. That this is not the case was the onerous task he had assigned himself, the task of the proportions of cleaning the fables Augean Stables.

Importance of Nehru's sabotage of the Cabinet Mission Plan, a dry bit from the history of the freedom movement of India, became significant to my mind only after those excruciatingly long discussions that I had with him for years. If a person like me takes that much of time then communicating the same to the country as a whole is task that is next to impossible and that brings the tragedy of being Lovey Pirzada into perspective.

If I allow his life to be cast as a tragedy. My intentions are absolutely otherwise. It is exceedingly difficult to adjust with the most inconvenient reality that he took upon himself a problem that could not have been solved in a single life time. So many people will think of it as a foolish choice. Not me. It was a tough, gutsy and extremely courageous choice. I salute the man.

He was not a flawless man. Who amongst us is? I am not the one to indulge in fault finding in a departed soul. let alone a friend and well wisher like Lovey. Indeed I might add that anyone trying to indulge in this activity will not get much benefit but indeed will be depriving himself of enormous felicity. That was the level of his purity of intentions. In Islamic languages we have word for that Ikhlas.

And that is why the pain of his departure is so excessive. that is why it was so difficult to console two students today in his burial - both of these are absolutely firebrand and feisty activists.

Personally I have no aptitude for students politics. I never had in my student days and nor I am satisfied at the present political exercise in students community. This inevitably brings me in a state of considerable difference of opinion with the departed leader but I am not going to allow that to come in my way while making my observations about him.

Fervour of any political inclination has a fire in it. The heat of this fire varies in degrees. The temperature in case of Lovey was extraordinarily high.

That worldly success could not have come his way and that it did not come his way I have already alluded to. I have also told what makes him monumentally important - his taking up the impossible task in the face of almost certain lack of possible success.

This lack of visible success certainly had its due toll on his health and I am sure he was aware of it - a sacrifice is a sacrifice only when you know the upcoming loss. Ultimately it took his life. This should not be interpreted in any morbid sense - in Islam it is glorious and glorious it was. he never couched his sentiments in religious, Islamic, language. His disposition was not at all communal. This is a fact that will need enormous amount of work to delineate for he used the terminology of political interests of Muslims.

He certainly had regrets for Muslims of India not listening to him and not taking up his call. But then why do I say that the world was listening attentively?

Answer to this question is same as to the question regarding  whether Muslims are aware of their miserable lot in present India. They are of course aware and completely so.

My personal view is that the lacuna in Lovey Pirzada's plan was not his lack of personal commitment on his part but lack of ideological clarification on part of academia - Muslim or secular.

The ideologues who supplied him ideology did little better than telling him - improve the political lot of Muslims of India. that simply does not help. The proposal has to be viable. No academician supplied him that.

In a milieu where talk of the secular interests of Muslims of India ended up in the partition of the country refinement of the same issue for the Muslims who consciously opted to remain in India at the time of the partition was very tricky issue and it remains so till now. problem did not reside in Lovey Pirzada's efforts but in the tools handed over to him by the academia.

I persistently assured him of the rightness of his mission and choice and tried my level best to convince about my point of view but my consolations did not bring any solace to him. This again should not be taken in any negative sense. He was a committed man and he left this world in that state.

Let us not forget that Javed Habib, another product of AMU Students Union, too left this world with the gigantic burden of destruction of Babri Masjid on his conscience.