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Jeroline | Posted on | 2 min Read

Hustler’s Mantra: Live with personal accountability

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Success comes to those who take responsibility for their actions. How much of your success, do you think is up to you – your choices, your beliefs, your actions, and your behavior versus external factors?

 

More often we blame the other people in our life like our parents, friends, colleagues, boss, government, society, God and even our heredity for our conditions. It’s so easy for us to let off the hook and blame someone or something else for our failure or negligence. This kind of thinking is not useful and downright dangerous. If we blame our problems and failures –be it big or small, personal or professional on any other person or circumstances beyond our control or just bad luck then we are doomed to fail!

 

In order to be what we want to be, the most important thing that we must do is to take personal accountability. Personal accountability is accepting that we are fully accountable for our actions and being willing to be answerable to the consequences of our choices, decisions and actions. It’s a belief, mindset and an expression of integrity that we are consistent in our thoughts, words and actions. Some of us might exhibit it more than others but it is something that everyone can get better at as it is a foundation to be successful and prerequisite for a happy and thriving life.

 

Practicing accountability is a choice; it would be the most powerful choice that we can ever make. Choosing accountability would empower us to overcome obstacles, beat challenges and succeed in everything we do. Never forget that everything is about – Our choice. Sometimes, situations can be overwhelming but getting up after being knocked down is again a Choice that we make.

 

I would like to mention an event here that I came across in the book “The wisdom of Oz”. In 1989, Adam Walsh, the six-year-old son of John and Reve Walsh, was kidnapped and shortly thereafter found dead. Yet even in the wake of such a brutal act, the couple managed to take accountability for what happened and took action to help others. Since then they worked to create support systems, develop preventative measures and improve legislation for cases of missing children. Here the couple could’ve just grieved the loss of their son and blamed the police and government for not creating a safe environment for citizens from criminals instead they held themselves accountable and worked tirelessly to battle criminal behavior. How we react to events like these are always our choice. We can point fingers, ignore and deny responsibility or we can look at a problem constructively and try to solve it.

 

As Sanjeev Himachali rightly said: “You are the reason of your own good-luck and bad-luck; success and failure; happiness and pain. Your choices are responsible for your present. Don’t blame someone else for your sufferings or failures.”

 

Moreover, to be personally accountable for a situation or problem, we have to take ownership over our actions. We should develop the ability to embrace the good, bad and the ugly that results from our actions. Always focus on what we can do and what we can control rather than thinking about the things that we can’t control. Owning our actions includes seeing how we have contributed to the current issue that we want to change. Instead of blaming others and making excuses we have to think of ways to make amends when things go wrong. Nothing great will happen until we do something.

 

Making mistakes is never fun but don’t think of them as failures, rather think of them as teachable moments that will make us better and more successful in the future. Resist the urge to plant the blame on external factors and instead use what we have learnt from the mistakes to explore new options in the future. After all, Something bad happens; something good results!

Jeroline | Posted on | 2 min Read

Hustle Mantra – “Don’t just get motivated, be obsessed “

Motivation changes exactly nobody. The bad hand that was my life was mine, and mine alone to fix.” David Goggins
 
Few months back I read a book called “Can’t hurt me “by David Goggins. It’s a story about how the author transformed from being an abused and unprivileged child to being an overweight bug exterminator to eventually becoming the thirty-sixth African-American Navy SEAL. I figured I’d share with you one key lesson I’ve learnt from this man.
 
I noticed Goggins is an obsessive person in some aspects of his life. He became obsessed with learning, running and physical fitness training. He started from an extremely low level in all of that he was obsessed with. Before taking the test to enter the Air Force, he read like a second grader, so he had to teach himself to read so he could pass the tests. Before joining the Navy SEALs, he weighed nearly 300 pounds, more than a hundred pounds over the weight limit for entering into NAVY, and with only two months to lose the weight. He did it with an insane amount of obsession.
 
He says that Motivation doesn’t last. It comes and goes just like feelings. We watch/ read something inspirational and get motivated and then we have one bad day, all our motivation is gone. If you want to achieve something in life, we need to focus on giving our best consistently and that focus comes only with Obsession.
 
Be obsessed with whatever you are doing. It can be anything, learning, writing, technology/coding, goals or your work. When you are obsessed, you won’t let go easily. Get to a point in your life, when you don’t do what you are supposed to do, it should haunt you and eat you away for not doing it. Also, obsession helps you push yourself to go further and harder than before. Pick something you want to improve in your life, which you struggle to get “motivated” to improve. Get “obsessed “with that and see yourself achieving it ! If it doesn’t kill you for not putting enough efforts to achieve it you are not there yet!

Jeroline | Posted on | 2 min Read

Hustler’s Mantra : Cultivate Mental Toughness

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”― Mark Victor Hansen
 
Have you ever wondered what makes someone successful? What makes someone good at academics? What makes someone a top performer? Why do some people achieve their goals while others do not? When we answer these questions, we usually think that their talent and intelligence is what makes them successful but researchers say that talent only accounts for 30% of their achievement. Then what makes a bigger impact than talent? It’s their MENTAL TOUGHNESS.
 
Mental Toughness is the ability to move towards our goals, irrespective of what the circumstance might be. People who are mentally tough, just don’t adapt well in face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or stressful situations but they also thrive in such situations. Irrespective of whatever the situation might look like, they face the challenges head on and find ways to thrive.
 
Have you ever heard of astronaut – Chris Hadfield? I’d like to share with you a really fascinating story about his experience during a spacewalk where he exhibited incredible mental toughness. During his first space walk there was contamination inside his suit that got into one of his eyes and stopped it from working but he kept doing the work he was doing with the help of his other eye. Since there is no gravity the tears from the contaminated eye balled up and flowed to the other eye through his nose. Now, his other eye was also contaminated and he couldn’t see completely.
 
Imagine if we were in this situation what would our reaction be? I bet we would’ve been cripplingly scared and panicked but Chris maintained his calm. Instead of being worried and overly dramatic with the problem he was thinking of ways to try and solve the problem. He says in an interview “In this case I was incapacitated to some degree but I could talk, I could think, I was still fine, I could communicate with everybody, I just couldn’t see.” In the end he did come up with a solution, he opened the purge valve of his suit and let the contaminated atmosphere exit. Once the contaminated air was out, he was able to see again.
 
He says that there were only two things on his mind in that moment when he completely lost his vision while floating in the outer space.
 
1) He was thinking about what caused the problem and what the solution could be.
2) He was frustrated because he couldn’t do the things that he was supposed to do.
 
He should be building this huge robot arm on the outside on the spaceship but he was floating uselessly. Even when he wasn’t sure if he’d regain his sight, he was all concerned about finding a solution to the problem and completing his mission. To become successful we need to cultivate this kind of mental toughness – the grit – the perseverance and passion to achieve our goals.
 
In ordinary course of events, our life holds some good times and some bad times as well. Everybody has to face some stress, challenge, pain and tragedy in one form or another. But the way we respond to such hardships makes a difference. Some people wilt and crumble and quit when things go badly but others seem to consistently rise to the situation, no matter how bad it is, meet their challenges courageously and confidently. The one thing that separates those who weather the storms in their life well and those who are consumed by them is their Mental Toughness.
 
In the recent months, we all have seen a redefinition of life in an unprecedented scale. The shifts we’re seeing have affected nearly every aspect of our lives, so it’s essential to develop the mental toughness to stay strong and resilient in the face of adversity. We cannot have control over all the difficult circumstances in our life, but we can retain a sense of stability by controlling how we respond to hardships. Feeling strong and balanced allows us to adapt to changing circumstances more readily and find creative solutions to problems, which is important to achieve our goals.