reflection

There are 37 posts tagged reflection (this is page 3 of 7).

Why be positive?

I had a mini-emergency this morning.

I got up early in the morning, to finish this translation project I was working on. I had completed a draft the day before and needed to polish it. I started working on it around 4 am. I had estimated that it would take about 2 hours to complete this task.

Around 4.30 am, I happened to lose this 70% completed document in the ocean of digital data. I was supposed to submit a complete translation by 9 am this morning. The original document was close to 2700 words in length. The amount of words I could translate in one hour considered, I went into a panic mode, because I thought that I had to translate everything again from scratch and that I wouldn’t be able to do it by 9 am.

At first, I tried to retrieve the lost file somehow, but when I realized it wouldn’t work, I decided to translate the whole thing again, because that was pretty much the only option available to me. Luckily, I could focus on translating it and managed to finish it by 10.30 am.

I was devastated at first, but it didn’t last long. I’m glad that the positive mental attitude has been part of who I am, because it helps me recover quickly from situations like this one. I could feel upset for a few hours, but I didn’t choose to do it. Instead, I chose to understand what was going on and chose to focus on what I could do.

Sometimes people ask me why I can stay positive. Partly, it’s because it became my habit. I don’t force myself to be positive or anything. I just choose to focus on what I want to do or what I need to do. If I focus on those things, being negative often becomes an option that I would never consider.

I believe choosing to become positive is a logical/strategic move, too. I could be negative about the situation, but I didn’t choose that option. In this case, the reason was simple: my being negative about the situation wouldn’t bring the lost data back to me, and it would have made me feel bad and hence made me unable to focus on translating. By choosing to stay positive, I could focus on what I had to do and managed to do it reasonably well. Of course, being positive wouldn’t bring the lost data back either, but it does make me feel great, which makes a difference in many situations.

So, in short, 1) whether you choose to be positive or negative towards the situation in question, your choice itself won’t change the situation, and 2) it’s reasonable to assume we tend to do better when we are in a better mood and choosing to be positive puts you in a better mood while choosing to be negative makes you in a bad mood. Positivity 1 – 0 Negativity.

(By the way, I’m not saying that you should ignore your negative feelings. Of course we do feel upset, sad, angry or whatever negative emotions that happen to come to us at a certain time. I believe it’s important to acknowledge those feelings and not to get stuck in them for too long.)

When I started working on this translation from scratch for the second time, I thought to myself that I was very lucky, because the original document was only about 2700 words in length, and not 27,000 words. Also, I got reminded of the importance of keeping backups. It’s possible that sometime soon I’ll get a 27,000 word document to translate and happen to lose that document when I’m about to finish it. But of course, I’ll have a backup ready, because I learnt to do so from this incident I experienced today. We can learn from everything after all.

Yes, shit happens. But remember, ‘shit’ stands for striking&highly inspirational turbulence. Once you go through that turbulence, you’ll learn a lot from that experience.

Do you choose to be positive or negative? Why?

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Photo: Scarleth White

Fundamental moves will take you further

When I was practicing tango with my dance partner last Saturday night, we noticed something. There was a part of this choreography that both my dance partner and I didn’t like. Our teachers had said nothing about this part being obviously strange or awkward, but to our eyes, there was something wrong about it.

This part involves us walking together. I stand right next to her and we walk. It takes only a few seconds… or 5 steps for this part. The problem was simple: We looked bored to death.

It wasn’t a new problem, but we finally decided to do something about it. We noticed the position of our arms didn’t look right. After we experimented for a while, we came to think it would be better if I stood on her left and behind her rather than standing next to her. That way, we could keep our arms in a better position. But, a new problem appeared. In that new position I had a difficulty moving my right leg forward, because her left leg would block it.

Then I remembered the most basic thing I learnt from my teacher: how to walk. When you walk properly in a tango way, you bring your foot forward and almost in front of the other foot. (If you are interested, watch this video.)  Before, I used to bring my right leg just forward and that was all. When I tried to walk in a proper way, I could take a step without getting blocked by my dance partner’s leg.

When I noticed this solution, I realized how important it is to work on this most fundamental move of all – walking. I only started learning tango since April, and there were a lot to learn. Compared to other moves, there’s nothing flashy about walking, at least when you look at it from a beginner’s perspective. I had forgotten about this most fundamental move. But luckily, I remembered about it.

Actually, I bet that fundamental moves like walking make a difference between the good and the excellent when you look at the whole thing from an expert’s perspective. I think this way, because I can apply my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu experiences to this situation as well. I know from my experiences that the fundamental moves are more important than flashy techniques, and I know that many people neglect those fundamental moves, while getting distracted by fancy moves.

I have a few questions for you. What’s the most fundamental thing in what you are passionate about? Have you been paying attention to it? Or have you been distracted by some other things that look somewhat better than this most fundamental thing? If you’ve been distracted, perhaps it’s a good time to focus on the basic things.

Photo: notsogoodphotography

Showing your weaknesses… with confidence

I want to tell you something I know about confidence.

“Masa, you’re not good at seeking help from others,” my good friend once told me. She was spot on; it is indeed the case that I tend to avoid seeking help from others. I believe I did get better at it, but I was rather bad. The whole story is probably much more complicated and something even I don’t know completely, but one of the reasons behind it was simple: I used to think that asking for help was a weak behaviour and I didn’t want to show my weaknesses to others.

Some, like my past self, might think that showing no traits of weaknesses is the way to become confident. That is, in their way of thinking, one can be recognized as a confident person by looking strong and impressive. A confident person doesn’t ask for help!

But is that really the case?

These days I’m inclined to think that showing weaknesses is a confident behaviour, unless it’s overdone. On one hand, a good way to do it is 1) to acknowledge your weaknesses, 2) to be casual about them, and 3) to show them with honesty. On the other hand, a bad way is to do it with the intention of getting attention from others.

There might be various defintions of confidence, but one I have in mind comes from how the Japnese word for confidence (Jishin) is written in Chinese characters. If we translate the two characters used to write this Japanese word, the Japanese word for confidence literally means self trust. Believing in yourself – I like that.

Whether you like it or not, your weaknesses are part of you. Imagine they are like your little babies. I’m sure you can be nice to them and won’t hide them from the world.

I know it can be scary to show up as who you are, which inevitably includes your vulnerable side and your weaknesses that belong to it. But just show up anyway. These elements of you do belong to you; believe in them – in yourself no matter what. I’d say that will lead you to be more confident about who you are.

There are a few more things about confidence, but I’ll save them for another time…

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This post was inspired by the following talk given by Brené Brown at TEDxHuston. It’s a great talk and I highly recommend it. I have some other ideas for blog posts inspired by this talk as well. Stay tuned!

Photo: rolands.lakis

6 things I have learnt from NaNoWriMo so far

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. There are six things I learnt from NaNoWriMo so far, and I want to share them with you.

1. There’s no reason why I should spend time and energy on kicking out my inner critic. While it would be great if he could leave me alone forever, I bet it won’t happen. Rather than spending time and energy on getting rid of him, I’d focus on what I need to do: writing.

2. If you don’t know what your aim is, you can be driven by your inner critic. So, make it clear to yourself what your aim is. For me, it’s simply to write 50000 words of something. Yes. Something. In fact, it’s more like a playground for myself rather than a novel for someone else to read, really.

3. My inner critic tells me that what I’ve written so far doesn’t make much sense, but that’s fine. I’ll keep writing anyway. I’m happy to let my storyteller of this novel be imperfect. We make mistakes and forget things sometimes when we tell stories; why should we expect our storytellers to be perfect?

4. By “focusing on writing”, I mean what it means. I will do no editing when I write or during November. So, it’s pretty much as though I’m splashing words inside me onto a digital scroll of paper so I can have fun spotting something actually nice and pretty on it.

5. Discipline is important. I have been writing everyday, but I need to have a better discipline. For example, I’m writing this blog post on a text editor, and I’ve got 8 tabs open on Firefox; they are completely unnecessary and irrelevant to this post. I tend to do that when writing for NaNoWriMo as well. If I had a better discipline and focus, I would be able to focus more on writing.

6. It’s fun to spend my time on writing. I used to think of stories and wrote poems when I was much younger. I spent the last 8 years on academic writing, including my honours thesis and master’s thesis. Writing these (philosophy) theses helped me sharpen my writing skills in English, but I hardly wrote for fun. I came to love writing through this blog as well as NaNoWriMo.

At the time of writing this post, I wrote 6009 words. I’m slightly behind, but I’ll try my best.

If you are part of NaNoWriMo, how are you going with your project? I’m sure you have something you learnt no matter whether you are a first timer like me or an expert. What did you learn so far? I’m curious about your experiences!

Can you count how many things there aren’t in the world?

Can you count how many things there aren’t in the world? There isn’t a frog that speaks Japanese. There isn’t a machine that lets us experience anything we want to experience. There isn’t a 50m tall human being. I’ve counted up to 3 so far. While I actually made them up and checked that they don’t exist, I believe it’s safe to say they are non-existent in this world as of today. There are many more things that don’t exist, too. Indeed, I’m not sure how many there are — or rather, how many there aren’t.

But I bet… A lot. A countless number of them.

The examples I mentioned above are quite fancy, but note that non-existent things can be more ordinary like a car. If you want a car, but don’t have it, there is a car that doesn’t belong to you (if anything can belong to anything else at all). You could list up things that you want, but you don’t have. Then you could count how many of them there are on the list. Some of you might have a million things on the list, while others might have only a few things on the list. The thing is, there could be infinitely many things that you don’t have.

Now, how about things you have? Even if you have a lot of things and it is tiring to count them all, the number of things you have is limited unlike the list of things you don’t have.

So, the limited number of things you have vs. the (almost) unlimited number of things you don’t have. If a battle is to be fought between these two, what happens?

Let’s say you’re unhappy about what you have and tend to want a lot of things that are much better than what you already have in your view.

The bad news is that what you have seems to have no chance of winning over what you don’t have in terms of quantity. Your list of what you don’t have keeps growing, fueled by your strong desires. You might get frustrated by the fact you don’t have things you want, and that sucks.

The good news is that when it comes to quality, what you have is so much better than what you don’t have. Suppose you have a bowl of rice in front of you and you don’t have a slice of bread. If you eat the rice, you’ll have the rice eating experience (e.g. it gets you full and if you like rice, you’ll enjoy it etc.). But you can’t even try eating a slice of bread that isn’t there. The non-existent bread won’t give you anything. You might get grumpy for the bread not being there, but why should you when you can eat what you do have and enjoy it?

This piece is more like a rant than an argument, but in short, my point is simply: appreciate what you have and stop worrying about what you don’t have.

I’m somewhat intrigued by the idea of ownership and I’m inclined to think that what we can really own privately is our conscious experiences and that’s all. You can’t have my experience of seeing the blue sky at a certain time and place just as I can’t have your experience of seeing the blue sky at the same time and place. This thought leads me to want to appreciate my experiences that occur each moment.

Oh, and each moment seems to be unique in the sense that a moment that’s happening right now had never happened before and will never happen again. This moment is what I have at this moment. That moment is what I have at that moment. I don’t want to miss the beat of this moment by thinking about that moment.

Bang.

Image: Robbert van der Steeg

At least you survived

I was listening to a bonus material of Question the Rules by Johnny B. Truant (@JohnnyBTruant) and Lee Stranahan (@Stranahan) earlier today. This conversation between Johnny and Lee was about faith and belief – going for what you want and really believing in yourself during that process, to put it in a less woo-woo way.

In a segment of the audio, they talk about finding opportunities in seemingly bad situations and seizing them against the odds, so to speak.

After all, we could take advantage of bad situations. For example, we could learn something from those situations. If we do learn something, then those situations become valuable lessons that prosper us.

But it’s up to you to choose how you will respond to those situations. Are you willing to learn something, or will you simply feel bad about what happened and do nothing? It’s your choice.

The next time you are caught in a bad situation, stop and think if there’s something you can learn from it.

If nothing comes to your mind… well, perhaps you should know it didn’t kill you. You survived. And you can stand up again and be stronger than before.

Image: Adrian  Wallett