Youth Talk on Happiness and Success in Life on July 5, 2019
On 5th July, 2019, Management
Development Centre and Institute of Leadership and Governance in association
with Chinmaya Mission Vadodara arranged the youth talk on Happiness and Success
in Life by Swami Swatmanandaji.
Notes from his talk as below:
Happiness is the most
fundamental motivation to act. Success is the tribute that life pays to
excellence. Success and happiness are intertwined. When mind is happy,
performance is best. According to positive psychology, if we are happy, we can
become successful easily. In fact, if we are happy, we are already successful.
The question arises here: How to
be happy? Happiness is acquired through the calm mind. But popular belief is
that happiness is obtained through desires fulfilled. If something specific
happens, we are happy.
In order to make people happy, we
must be happy first. Happiness is not goal, it is journey. Agitation is the
worst enemy of happiness: more agitation, less happiness. Enjoy the process for
life-time happiness. One of the key factors of sadness is indecisiveness.
Less the desire, more happiness.
But why not to develop yourself to have more strength Management Mantra for
success is applying priority, focus and execute. In other words, first thing
first- Stephen Covey.
There are ways to attain
happiness:
1. Alignment
of Body, Mind and Intellect
In order to function fully and
effectively, our body, mind and intellect should be at same wavelength. The outmatching of any of these three aspects leads to ineffective performance. i.e.
If your mind wants to read a book but your body is tired, the reading will be a
cumbersome task. How to align them? Follow this mantra is: Do what you love,
Love what you do. In short, integration bring happiness (Geeta – II-66). This
interaction can be regulated and strengthened by the following formula:
20-20-20
20
minutes of exercise
20
minutes of meditation
20
minutes of studying spiritual/self-help/ personal development material- books,
audio or video.
2. One
thing at one time.
Multi-tasking is the myth. Even
the word itself is confusing because 90% people are not able to do
multi-tasking, what they call multi-tasking is in reality- switch-tasking.
Switching creates fatigue, stress and longer time. Science has proven that 1
hour of focused work= 3 hours of multi-tasking. The more we switch, the more we
are tired and stressed as mind must remember a lot between the switching of
tasks and chances of errors are also more than mono-tasking.
Tips:
- Go to media diet once a weak (mobile upvash)
- Not to touch the phone in the first and last hour of the day
- Find out the most important 3 tasks for the day and do it. Learn to prioritize the tasks because no one can do all the things, but everyone can do something.
Bring your mind where your hands
are.
- - Swami Chinmayananda
Increase single-mindedness. Learn to focus on one thing at one time. Focusing requires the elimination of distractions. Delete unwanted/ unproductive tasks.
3. Work
for the sake of work
Work is love made visible. When
we do the anything with some other purpose, we are disappointed most of the time.
e.g. If you are going the gym for getting appreciation from the society but not
get fitter. You may lose the motivation if you are not appreciated for
work-out. If you are dieting (upvaas) for getting favours from the God, you may
lose motivation when your efforts are not heard. It is better to fall in love
with process of doing anything. Exercise for exercise sake, diet for diet sake,
love for love sake. See the example for mother; she loves her infant child for
the sake of love but as the child grows up, expectations are started to be
built upon and hence, disappointment enters in the life.
4. Place
Yourself at the Center of Your Life
Humans are not the TV screens
that will display different moods, thoughts, emotions and behaviours as per the
pressing of buttons of remote control. This looks are a very idealistic
statement as we are remote-controlled by many people and factors. We ourselves
have given the remote of our lives into some else’s hands. If someone does
something, we feel happy or sad. If something is done as per your expectation,
you are happy or otherwise. It means that we are not at the centre of our life-
other factors have crowded us.
Words of Advice: Don’t give keys
of your happiness in someone’s hands. You need to govern yourself, not others.
Don’t be slave of expectation. Focus on the growth, don’t waste in comparing.
Let’s focus on ourselves and our works. Self-confidence and self-assurance make
people happy. Learn to love yourself with all your merits and demerits. Lift
yourself from where you are and never condemn yourself.
5. Unbiased
Performance of Duty
We as humans are hard-wired in
such a way that if we are growing, we are happy. If we become stagnant, we are
unhappy. Keep growing daily, explore, innovate, discover, design, …
Do something that make you happy
in your profession. Make goals that make you happy. Performance is nothing but
our potential minus our limitations + interference faced by us. Maximize the
potentials and minimize the interference.
6. Aspiration
Time between birth and death is
called life. With such a grand gift- named life, aiming low (nearsightedness)
is crime. One must have vision. Not for himself but the organization where he
serves, the society in which he dwells, towards the profession, we have chosen.
Unfortunately, many a times, we find that institutions are headed by headless,
senseless egomaniacs whose sole aim is to satisfy their ego- no more, no less.
When their selfish goals collide with organizational goals, they chose petty
goals only; as result, ultimately organization, society and nation suffer.
Those who are at the higher positions should have grand visions and liberating
ideas to excel thus, we can bring happiness in their own as well as other’s
lives also.
7. Acceptance
Life is unpredictable; ups and
downs are parts of life. Going up is full of fun but going down creates
sadness. We are not sthitpragna who is unaffected by the havoc of life,
but we must learn to accept the uncontrollable aspects our lives and design the
life accordingly. One real example, I have seen in my life: The man named ___
wanted to be a successful businessman. He was working hard and moving around in
India and abroad for it. Unfortunately, due to degenerative disease, his both
the legs got useless. He could not move even from his home. For one and half
years he was not able to accept his conditions and declined into depression.
After 3 years of depression, he realized that it was useless to find solutions
of unsolvable equations. He started exploring new possibilities and finally he
ventured into the software business. Now he is co-founder of success software
company with 75 employees working under him. He has the same limitation now but
he has accepted it and learn to build the life around it. He cannot walk but
business walks to him through internet. His office is mobile- nothing one
high-configured laptop. Anything is possible once we learn to accept and
move on.
So, dear readers, here, Swami
Swatmanandji from Chinmaya Mission made us aware about the fundamentals of
happy and successful life. Points covered by Swamiji are practical, idealistic
and eternal. Most of the things we know but we need a person to remind us. Re-brushing is inevitable. Swamiji did the same. The fundamentals of happy and
successful life are as follow:
- Alignment of Body, Mind and Intellect
- One thing at one time.
- Work for the sake of work
- Place Yourself at the Center of Your Life
- Unbiased Performance of Duty
- Aspiration
- Acceptance
The
session was prescriptive in nature. It depends on us how to utilize this
prescription now.
Regards
Dr. Bhavin Chauhan
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