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Help is a beautiful thing. It lets the other person know that they are cared for. It helps us feel good for getting out of our own selves and extending a hand to another person.

However, help sometimes does more harm if not done with the right frameworks. Two frameworks are: Do they need my help? Am I stable in my life?

Do people need your help: They may not. Or they may do. If they don’t but you believe they do, a great thing would be to share your experiences. They’ll get a perspective. To pick help or not, becomes their choice.

Am I stable in my life: You may be going through your own fair share of valleys. Going out of your way when you do not know your own way isn’t an act of courage. The best help, in that case, is to help yourself first.

The best help is to get yourself in a position of being able to help.

A good project coming your way. But you’re not too excited.
You have an important task. But you don’t want to sound rude to a friend calling to play video games.
You want to study further.

However, you might just avoid it because your parents want you to get a job and settle.

In all these cases, the easy choice is to say yes to how things are and let them just be. A more difficult choice is to stand by what you want to stand for. And say no to everything else.

We say yes more often than no because we humans are hardwired to be wanting to be accepted. Thousands of years ago we moved in groups in the savannah, because of fear of being prey to the wild animals. 

The savannah lifestyle is long gone. What is still left behind is fear. Fear of being out of the group. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being called a rebel. 

Thus, we never face these fears and end up living a “fearless” life, which ends up as not living a life.

To be truly fearless is to face your inner fears of rejection, say no politely more often and see how fearless life actually becomes when you say yes to yourself. 

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Anger is an unhealthy emotion. So we want to control it. However, when it arrives, it arrives in a wave sweeping all our resolutions away.

No matter how much you resist it, anger wins each time.

The key is in not resisting it. Yes, you read that right. Don’t resist anger. Rather spend time with it. 

Why do I feel what I feel?
Which need of mine is unmet?
Why am I letting my denial take over where I could have an open mind by rather being a skeptic?

As we answer these questions honestly, there would be no need to resist anger. Because then it won’t arise in the first place.

The extreme emotions are usually a result of not spending little time consistently with our own selves.

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When we are appreciated, we feel powerful. When criticised, the motivation goes down,
When the economy is at high, things look in control. When it plummets, so does our feeling of control.

Ever since our childhood, we were coined as “good boy” or “good girl” when we recited poetry in front of guests. Otherwise, we were just a shy kid not trying to open up. 

That conditioning led us to believing that we needed to depend on external factors to feel powerful. Or worse, it made us believe we could control them.

People’s responses, micro or macro are a product of their conditioning and moods. If not aware, the human brain is wandering in different directions and unable to control itself.

Thus, falling for others’ opinions is a recipe for disaster. It succumbs us into a false belief of valuing things that we cannot control.

True power is when we are able to do things that we can control (self talk, our habits, our mindset), instead of whining about things that we can’t.

Someone is not respecting you for your work.
Someone else took your important project lightly. Someone else made fun of you.

All this keeps you questioning yourself.

Am I doing things right? Do I deserve to be here? Maybe they all are right!

People, when they don’t treat us right, it’s rarely because of us. They’re themselves dealing with a lot. Sometimes even without being aware.

Your value is a measure of what you bring to the table, your confidence and cool, and how you have the courage to figure things out when the plan has failed. It is rarely a function of what others do to you.

Pegging your value to how others treat you is like pegging your health to the health of others. Hardly correlated.

The other day I had a 40 year old doctor join my Instagram live. Despite having worked so hard to get that degree, and she was now a full-time life coach.

“What made you make the shift?” I asked.

My daughter attempted suicide. She even left a note. Not only that, thrice she had tried escaping the home. This finally made me think and work with a psychologist about where I could be wrong.

As she continued to tell her story, she added it was much fun and thoughtful to work with youngsters as they are easy to learn and flexible to unlearn.

It was so beautiful to see someone take responsibility for her relationship even though it was flexible for her to avoid it completely.

Isn’t it strange how much we discover within ourselves if we are willing to look within instead of poking fingers (even subconsciously)?

You’re starting something you’ve never done. It’s making you anxious. You find yourself lacking confidence.

What if I fail? What if I’m laughed at? What if my critics say: “I told you!”

It’s impossible to have 100% confidence when you’re starting something new. It’s however 100% possible to know that you will figure it out. That you care about your progress more than what people think of you. That even if you fail, you will own it and make it better.

Confidence that you don’t have confidence as of now but you will figure things out is the only confidence you ought to have.

If it made you happy yesterday, don’t put the pressure on it to make you happy today as well.

We humans change. External things don’t.

A wiser choice is to pick something different that matches your current state of happiness.

One of the happiest definitions of happiness is to know that happiness isn’t rigid. Nothing could be a happier realisation!

Most of us have been raised to study, work hard and get a comfortable job.

Except that most of us want to pursue something else that we love. So we work toward it. Waiting for that big break. Waiting for someone to recognise us. Or the least, to get at least one chance.

If we work hard and if we’re lucky, we somehow get that chance. 

But what happens after that chance? Do we work harder or do we become complacent? Do we underpromise and overdeliver or do we commit and don’t fulfill it? Do we become more fierce or do we lose our fire?

Shah Rukh Khan was once asked the reason behind his success, to which he replied, “Most people work hard to get a chance. But no one works as hard as me after getting a chance.”

Working hard when you don’t even have to, gives success when you don’t even ask for it.

Our parents want us to choose a risk-free path of life. Engineering, CA, lawyer, doctor. Stability was something they craved for. Stability is something they wish for us as well.

However, we have a different take on life. Rightly so, because we have way more exposure, opportunities and options than they had. And most of us want to go against our parents’ wishes and choose the path of risk and see how things unfold.

As we have these conversations with our parents, they may understand our PoV. Or they may not. However, there’s one thing that we ought to communicate to them:
We disobeying them does not mean we are disrespecting them.

Most important things in life that need to be said are unsaid.