Bamboo In The Wind

If you face a situation where you feel you are not progressing, then stop and think. If you are in a position where no effort results in solid relationships, stop and think! You must check if you employ a trust-first approach to engaging with yourself and your surroundings! The trust-first approach can attract the best. Best thinking, best effort, best outcome, best people. The trust-first approach defies the logic of being judgemental. It avoids the side effects of self-expectations.  The trust-first approach underlines that people generally reciprocate with greater trust. So trust we must. At the start!

We are logic bullies! We only realize it sometimes.  We fall prey to our biases and form a firm understanding of how the world works. That understanding is based on how we perceive the situation, the observations we make, the evidence we collect, and the inferences we draw from it.  Collectively, such understanding can be inherently flawed. But we don't know it. We use our knowledge everywhere we have an opportunity to interact. That becomes our logic to explain things to ourselves and those around us. When we develop our understanding into a firm one, it can turn into a fixed belief. When we use our thoughts daily, we turn that into the logic that explains what is happening around us. It becomes our opinion. The trouble is we are often blindsided that our logic and underlying understanding could be flawed.  If we persist with our opinion, we will likely be impressing our thoughts on others without their consent. That is logic bully in action crippling the environment! Th...

  Trained under abusive coaches, NBA (Americal Basketball) players  performed poorly throughout their careers, even when playing for different coaches! Weak leaders can make people who work with them fragile!

Everyone has a wild side to their self that can look like it!  Usually, Gump has a tendency to be non-compliant. The one with uncommon imagination.  Gump is an exploratory unfazed by the outcome. The one that goes on with equal curiosity to accept the result, in their favor or against! Gumps are open to accepting that they are unfinished products, unlike us, who like to portray a conscious image of what we are not. Gump is unpolished and yet unpretending. They are original, and that counts for a lot when it comes to seeking development! Gump represents a learning style - a way of being ambitious but with low expectations - until we are sure!

It's a perceived status. Falling short has an assumption built into it that there is more to be done.  Instead of beating ourselves, thinking we are falling short, we could think more about our problems. We could deploy different techniques to solve them. We could be more creative about what we want to convey about them so there is enough enthusiasm around our effort. Or, better still, we could inspect the results we have much more imaginatively. And wholistically understand what has been accomplished and the learnings it embeds for the future. Falling short is a state of mind that must be tackled by furthering our understanding of where it comes from and what actions to take to overcome it!

Projecting perfection protects your ego but not without a side effect. Projecting perfection inadvertently shuts people out and affects the balance in trusted relationships. Unsurprisingly, projecting perfection in the short run is attributable to success, but a loss of trusted support in the ecosystem over time begins to stunt your growth. Revealing struggles, on the other hand, shows humility and personal touch. It, too, comes with a side effect. Revealing struggles might help you gain trust that you are courageous and willing to share your shortcomings.  On one side, some might perceive it as an attempt to garner attention.  But undramatized revealing of struggles might open the door to new avenues of support and strength.

Vulnerability is often misconstrued as weakness. In fact, it's a powerful tool that demonstrates your authenticity. Vulnerability is messy. It shows a momentary loss of control. Yet it offers the ability to present the state of mind transparently. Resilience, on the other hand, is persevering to last longer when faced with adversity.  Persisting when there no options appear. It shows control of the situation and willingness to keep going when it feels like quitting.  Vulnerability is not the opposite of resilience. Vulnerability builds resilience. Together, they build a strong foundation for dealing with all sorts of experiences!

Are we replacing connections? Are we reducing connections? Are we renewing connections? Are we adding new connections? Do we see no need for connection? The vitality of connections and what actions we take determine what we achieve. In the absence of any one of them, we have diminishing relevance in the environment we live and work under. A lack of real connections makes us feel empty and unreal. And the reciprocation of this feeling is us finding ourselves irrelevant. The way around it is to start making different connections, new ones, interesting ones, the ones that teach us, those that expose us to the unseen, or those that ground us.  Choose any one of these connections. Choose as many as possible. But start by making connections and opening the doors! For your own sake!

It is possible, and it must be made! New beginnings are full of new energy, hope, and excitement that comes from newness. Beware, new beginnings are not extensions of the old ones, however! Things around us must change. It must expose new connections. So it must tell further limitations in us!  That is what drives new learning about how we think and respond. That is what we are made up of! Until we begin to notice. This streak will run through us for a long time until we can see through our responses as soon as they occur!

We are overwhelmed when we find ourselves alone deep into the ocean. We are on a path of no immediate return and are far from calling for help. What if we cannot escape the dangers of a rough, unpredictable deep ocean? The very thought we need to get ourselves out of the lonely sphere is paralyzing.  While the situation is daunting and untenable for our confidence to hold for too long, the real question to ask is what drew us to the deep ocean in the first place. Did we embark on the journey to discover different ways toward our goals and desires?  Did we imagine that no one would ride with us along this path? Or, did we simply not trust the available journeymen in the hope that we had to be on our work and we were self-sufficient? Most things happen in an environment of balancing forces with us as one actor. The best skill to develop is to spot an opportunity to use our resources to find other balancing forces that amplify our effort and not overwhelm us into inaction!