A PHOTOGRAPH THAT LIFE IS…..
Ever been to a photographer’s studio or dark room? As a child, I used to find the place pretty intriguing. Did you ever realise a stark parallelism with life there? The photographer develops the negatives into positives to create memories for us to cherish for a lifetime. We are a bunch of weaknesses, imperfections, vices & negatives, negatives that we need to work on, develop and translate into positives so that life becomes a treasure of overwhelming happiness.
How do we accomplish this? Well, let’s take up a real-life instance for inspiration. I am sure everyone knows Hrithik Roshan, a Bollywood actor with immense popularity, success and fame to his credit. A myriad of roles that he has played through movies like Jodha Akbar, War, Super 30, Koi Mil Gaya to name a few, he has proved his acting prowess & mettle time and again. He has been part of both content driven and commercial movies and has done extremely well in both.
Life was never a bed of roses for him. He started stammering at the age of six. For this reason, he was bullied and teased in school. Oral tests at school were a nightmare for him. Life then was as bad as hell for him. In an interview with ace choreographer & director Farah Khan, he once mentioned, “The minute you start talking, you get stuck and you don’t know why? Right from your toes to the ends of your hair strands, you are in complete shock. Your heart palpitates, you don’t understand and you are aware of people looking at you. You can compare it to hell.”
So, what did he do? Crib, complain, grumble, curse like most of us would have? What he did was, sit and read aloud for hours, sometimes alone in the bathroom, every single day. He would record his voice and play it back again and again and again to know the specific words he had a problem with. Then he would practise those words repeatedly till he got them right. This was not one-day practice but was a ritual for him that continued for a span 22 years. Of course, he did consult speech therapists simultaneously, but no one can deny the fact that it was his grit, determination and will power to succeed, that he was able to achieve what he wanted to. From being unable to speak properly due to an overwhelming stammer to making people talk about his self-confidence and acting skills, he has indeed come a long way. Not only has he created some beautiful memories for himself but also for his audience.
A perfect example of “A Photograph that Life is!!”
“Confidence is water to life. It nourishes it, helps it grow and flourish. Lack of it can cause havoc but beware, just as too much water causes the plant to wilt, so can too much confidence cause decay and stagnation in life. Tread life with the right amount of confidence to it to savour its goodness and beauty. Balance is important”
Suggested Reading: You could read about some more famous personalities that have faced the stammering disability but have still done wonders with themselves. These are Marilyn
Monroe, Joe Biden, Elvis Presley, Bruce Willis, Hugh Grant, Tiger Woods, Tom Sizemore, Jimmy Stewart, Rowan Atkinson & Emily Blunt. Ready for your dose of inspiration?
NOT JUST A STORY
I am sure we have all heard of the famous Aesop’s fable, ‘The Thirsty Crow’. Let’s tweak the story a little to understand the significance of making the best of what we have, through courage, out of the box thinking & presence of mind. Heard of something called optimization of available resources - of converting negatives into positives. So, let’s assume there were two crows in our story. Let’s call them Boho & Fomo (the crow that indeed suffered from the issue of Fear Of Missing Out). So, once they took to a flight across several lands and after a long flight, they started feeling thirsty. Soon the two came across a pitcher with some water in it. They both perched on the head of the pitcher only to realise that the level of water was not enough for their beak to reach it. It seemed impossible for the crows to quench their thirst. Without a second thought, Fomo decided not to waste any more time (due to that constant fear of missing out) and flew in search of water which it wasn’t even sure of finding at another place or time. Boho however, decided to stay back. It thought for a while and looked around. An idea struck it as it saw a few pebbles around. It took a pebble one by one into its beak and kept putting it into the pitcher. Steadily the water level started rising. After an hour, the water level rose to the brim. The crow drank the water, satiated its thirst and flew away. After a flight of about two hours, it found Fomo dead in a forest. Boho thought, “If only he wouldn’t have given up so soon. If only he would have tried to see a positive opportunity in a negative situation, he would have been alive today.”
HOW I BRIDGED MY CONFIDENCE GAP?
Since childhood, there have been several occasions when I have thirsted for increased levels of confidence. It wasn’t as if I totally lacked confidence but yes, I did feel certain gaps on certain days or on certain occasions. I was an eloquent speaker at school and an academic topper but would fall short of words when I needed to indulge in small talk with people especially people who were strangers. The issue continued to haunt me even as I got married. Meeting new people gave me the “JITTERS”. It was the bubble of my comfort zone which probably never let me out of it and I too never dared to burst lest it should expose my vulnerabilities and weaknesses to people. It’s like being confident about writing answers in your answer sheet calmly till the time the invigilator does not stand on your head watching you write. You may be extremely confident about your preparation for the exam but the minute there is someone watching you put it on paper, you get cold feet. Psychology calls it “Evaluation Apprehension”. The fear that people will judge you for what you say, what you do, what you write. You feel intimidated but then that’s the time I decided to do something about it. I had to choose my future self as someone with an attitude that exudes confidence. I started observing people around me, people who stood testimony to the fact that [POWER IN YOU > POWER IN THE WORLD] and based on these observations, I drafted my own manual about how to be confident everytime, everywhere. So, how do I manage it?
1. Have my EVM intact irrespective of the situation that I maybe in. Situations maybe adverse, situations maybe overwhelming, situations maybe pressurizing but I never give up on my Ethics, Values and Morals. When you know that whatever you’re doing is not depreciating your EVM, you’re bound to feel confident.
2. Remember that juggler in a circus? Do you think he developed the confidence of juggling several balls confidently in the first go itself? Obviously NOT! Do you remember the time, when you first started playing a video game? Well, the first one I played was called The Western Sheriff. I couldn’t even complete the first round when I tried the game out the very first time. Did I give up? NO! Rather, my first failure drove me zestfully to keep trying for better scores, better bonuses and higher (more difficult) rounds all the time. In a short interval of time, the obstacles in the game seemed to have become more predictable and this way I started getting more and more confident everytime I hit that START button. So, what do we learn here? Divide your end goal into several sub goals. Move from the easy to the more difficult, scale the way a juggler does and then keep practising till you get used to it. This way you will feel more confident all the way through till you reach your goal.
3. Physical appearance makes a lot of difference too. First is your attire. How you dress affects your perception about yourself. In a study conducted by Dr. Adam D. Galinsky (Professor at Columbia Business School), he found out that students who wore lab coats in class showed more focused attention than those who didn’t. So, dress to address the problem of under-confidence and nervousness.
4. Get that power posture right. Richard Petty, professor at Ohio State University conducted a study on 71 students at Ohio State and as an end result put out that students who sat up straight were more confident about themselves and their beliefs than those who slouched and slumped over. Amy Cuddly, a Harvard
psychologist opined at a TED Talk that when people assume an open and expansive stance, they feel more powerful. This, she said on the basis of a result of her study where using this stance, participants took more risks in gambling, performed better in mock interviews, established better relationships with others. Mia Skytte O’Toole, Professor at Arhus University at Denmark also suggested the same, “To me, it is noncontroversial to say that the way we approach the world with our physical bodies, shapes the way we think and feel”. Why don’t you try it out for yourself right now? Try the slouching pose and then the upright pose. Feel the difference?
5. Did you CAP today? Capitalise on your own Advice for Progress? Hear yourself out more often. (When it comes to helping out others, solve their problems, we are so good at giving valuable advice. Let’s follow it ourselves for once). Listen to your gut feeling. Follow your intuition. More often than not, you will turn out to be right and that will help you build confidence. You could also follow the popular aphorism, “FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT”. Appear to be confident even if you don’t feel so. Use your posture, your body language, your attire to do so. Ever been to the movies? I am sure we all have. What we observe there in the form of moving picture is called the phi-phenomenon –an illusion caused when motionless pictures are projected one after the other at an appropriate rate. Creates magic, right? Create that same illusion, keep moving at an appropriate rate to create magic.
6. Conduct a SWOT analysis on yourself and your progress on a weekly basis. SWOTStrengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats. Did you seek your strengths to complete your weekly goal? Did you work on your weaknesses by upskilling yourself and facing your fears? Did you take advantage of opportunities that came your way or did you just let them go? Did you perceive threats and challenges before they actually faced you? Were you ready for them? If your answers to most of these questions was a “YES”, you’re treading on the path to confidence. If not, you need to work harder.
7. Remember, “I CAN’T” is the creation of your self- limiting beliefs. Beliefs that limit your energy, limit your zest, limit your potential. You need to realise that “YOU ARE UNLIMITED”. If you do not realise this, you are at the wrong end of the spectrum called LIFE. There is nothing wrong in being wrong but you do yourself a lot wrong when you fear being wrong. Expose yourself to challenges, experience challenges and strive for excellence out of them. Think innovative every time some challenge comes up and hence level up your confidence calibration.
8. Learn the Art of Positive Visualisation. Treat it like a mental rehearsal for all the positive outcomes that you seek in life. I just recently had the chance to watch the movie King Richard that continuously brings out the fact that father to William Sisters (ace tennis players Venus Williams & Serena Williams) had actually charted out a plan in his journal wherein he had, step by step visualized how he would move step by step hand holding his daughters on the path of success. As experts would have it, most of what he had mentioned there actually turned out to be true in the future. Powerful, isn’t it? You could accomplish positive visualization by using journal writing. You could use meditation as a tool for visualizing your wants and goals. Vision board is another way of following this. Use a simple chart paper, or drawing
board or bulletin board, add to it pictures or phrases pertaining to what you seek in the future. Look at it every day and visualize the same to bring positive changes to your life. Set a realistic goal, visualize it when the mind is quiet, body relaxed and eyes closed. Use imagery and imagination to reach that goal and keep doing it regularly, and you shall see your imagined scene into reality….. and with it comes oodles and oodles of confidence as a byproduct.
