Things learnt the hard way.
05 Jun 2021We all have our vices - they are all unwarranted by definition. You obviously don’t want vices in life, right? They may provide a guilty pleasure for a fleeting moments but that’s it. No addition beyond it.
I’ve been reading ikigai which is an insanely popular book which had been on my to-read for a while. The book talks about lot of things and one important aspect it focuses on is “emotional awareness”
The post is about that. It’s not a long - self help post. It’s just one of the things - I’ve deliberately tried to focus in my life and managed to get some good result. Since this blog is literally a void, I can document learning here - much better than doing so in notion. Who knows, this might actually help some stranger :)
We started with vice and landed in some random place. Let me strcuture.
I’ve had a temper since childhood. Maybe because I wasn’t a rebellious kid in general but there was just huge dissatisfication and personal expecatation which resulted is bouts of bad mood and ofcourse, bad temper. The receiving end was mostly my parents who - I believe - passed it off as teenage stuff and didn’t bother until my mom was also in bad mood and gave a good hearing to me. Rare stuff.
Either way, as I grew up - I started thinking in terms of bets and realised it’s not the ideal strategy to be “Angry young man”, it works well on popular culture for portrayal of typical male protagonist et al but in real life, rarely does problem get solved by temper. You end up alienating a lot of people as well. That’s definitely not ideal. Hence, out of complusion - I started assesing things more and delayed my response. And it stuck me how often would my reaction or thoughts change once I didn’t react immediately and had a moment to give a thought or do a retro.
Lot of times, things might have just backfired had I reacted prematurely which would have been case of angry young man!
You see we have been told to think that on the fly, on the feet thinking is something good but in reality what happens is majority of the times you are not required to immediately react and you can take your sweet time to think through things and make sure that your response is very appropriate what is required in the situation.
Speaking from my personal experience I believe I was ingrained with this on the feet response thingy because the aspirational careers that we see - the civil services, management consulting, investment banking requires you to do that but these are highly specialised fields where you are constantly facing with someone - either your team/senior decision makers, CEO, or maybe head of institutional fund in which case this might be required but for most of the people, including those who work in knowledge industry - this might just not be required 90% of the time.
Couple of years back, I went through a breakup and one the complaints were - you weren’t angry when I told you about incident X. Incident X was an unpleasant incident obv. While I was startled, I deliberately tried NOT to react and say something I’d regret in fit of rage. I stayed mum, listened and proceeded to end the conversation. I always think of it. Was it indeed an issue where what I thought was emotion maturity was regarded as being emotionally distant?
I contemplated and realised I was actually hurt by the breakup in a startling order, more than I had ever thought. While nothing eased that pain, atleast I know that I’m not the latter :)
Needless to say - this approach has REALLY helped me in multiple facets specially in my profession where I’m needed to interact with wide range of stakeholders and rarely do things proceed like clockwork. So - to not have an impromtu reaction but a measured response that first focuses on “what” and then “why” eases tension, inspires confidence, encourages teams to be upfront with you rather than shield themselves and helps me effectively lead.
On personal front - it obviously helps you weed out un-necessary people like it did for me :P
All this being said, there’s a long way to go. While this is more dominant response in rather “Serious” episodes, say a disaagreement at work, major conflict with friends or partner. For minor scuffle - I still have a mild annoynace or silent treatment which I’d want to completely avoid and maintain a verison of stoicism . I’ll update if I make a progress on this front :)
Cheers!
Shobhit