Category: Attitude/Discipline

I am the past, you are the future…

IMG_0701
One of the best lessons I have learnt in life is that the more your share, the more you learn. It starts from our childhood. As a elder sibling in the family, we have to learn to share with our younger siblings and be willing to learn from them. Then you grow into an adult and have a lot to share with younger ones around you. You get into a job and work in a team to share and learn.

As you get married, you learn from each other all the time. Then as you have kids, it is time to give back again. This is the time I realised that the best attitude to share and give back to the next generation is to believe that ” I am the past, you are the future..”. If we live our life with this attitude, we will always be willing to share more, learn more and give back more. We have to realise that we create the future of our choice.

I have to believe what happened in my life is history. I may have succeeded or made mistakes. But the future is with the next generation. Hence, if I believe that I am the past and the next generation is the future, I will happily share my knowledge and skills without expecting anything in return. Many of us conserve our knowledge, skills or experience thinking that if you share you erode your value.

I would argue that it is the other way around. The more you share, the more you learn and grow. I have respected all the people who have shared with me in life and career. I have seen them grow and become more knowledgable and respected in society. On the other hand, people who have conserved knowledge or experience are neither respected nor do they blossom in life.

There is a reason for me to believe that our attitude to life and living should be – ” I am the past, you are the future..”. If we believe, we have experiences of the past, we have a responsibility to share with the next generation as they are the future. If we share our failures and successes, the chances are they will not have to go through the same issues in their lives. If we do not believe in this, the next generation will do the same mistakes we did in our life and their learning curve will be longer than ours.

In corporate life, we always believe that the lessons we learn from our failures are much more valuable even than our successes. Life is no different. We should have the courage not only to accept our failures but the willingness to share what we learnt from them so that the future generations benefit from it. If all of us conserve our knowledge, skills and experiences and take them to our graves, we neither benefit from it nor does the future generations.

This is true in every aspect of life. We need to share and learn in a continual way. We need to believe that the more we share, the more we learn in life. We need to believe that we are the past and the next generation is the future. We are responsible for the past but we also have a responsibility to create a brighter future for the next generation.

We have a responsibility of developing the future generation as in the photo above.

Let us live life king size. Let us learn to give back to others more than we have got in life. I can share that this could be a wonderful way to be happy and grateful in life. We have neither inherited knowledge nor can we take it to heaven. It is this realisation, which will make us give back in abundance. Let us learn every day of our life and let go all that we have learnt to others so that they benefit as much as we did.

The day to start is today and the time is now.

S Ramesh Shankar

Never judge anyone..

IMG_0789
It is easy for us to judge others. We end up judging people all around us every day. I am no different and have been guilty of this phenomenon in my life. However, I did realise through some incidents in my life that it is not fair to judge others without knowing the background or the context. What we see may not be the whole. We generally end up seeing only the part of the circumstances and end up judging.

I recently heard of an incident about a doctor, who was late to the operation theatre. The parents of the kid who was seriously injured were waiting outside the intensive care unit waiting for the doctor. As the doctor arrived, the parents were agitated that he was delayed and their son may not survive because of his delay. The doctor apologised for the delay and went ahead with the operation. After completing the operation, the doctor assured the parents that the kid will survive and left the hospital in a hurry.

After the doctor left the hospital in a hurry, when the agitated parents enquired as to why the doctor was in a hurry, the nurse explained that the doctor’s son had died in an accident in the morning. He rushed to the hospital from the grave yard because of the emergency. Now, he is rushing back to the graveyard to complete the cremation of his son. On hearing this, the parents fainted and felt miserable in judging the doctor without knowing the full story.

Life is similar. We end up judging others without knowing the full story. It happens every day in our lives. If our child is late from school, we scold the kid even without enquiring the reasons for the delay. After we have passed the judgement, we neither have the time nor the patience to listen to the child’s true story. When such an incident repeats itself, the child stops telling us the truth because she believes it is of no use as anyway she will be scolded by her parents.

This happens in the work place too. If an employee is regularly late to work, we assume that the person is indisciplined and pass a judgement even without asking or listening to the employee. We tend to brand such employees and then such employees lose their self confidence. They get branded for no fault of theirs. They lose interest in work and sometimes even in life. On listening to them, we may realise that they are going through a very serious crisis in their personal lives and they need our emotional support the most.

We also take our friends and relatives for granted. If a friend does not wish us on our birthday, we end up thinking that he has betrayed us and even forgotten our birthday. We make our judgement on one single incident without taking the pain to find out why it happened. In today’s world the mobile phone and its messaging systems has also led to a lot of misunderstandings and judgements.

We need to wake up and realise that we shape not only our destiny but also those of our near and dear ones. We not only have a responsibility to be happy in life but also contribute to the happiness of others around us. How can we make others happy if we misjudge them every other day ? Can we resolve to ourselves that we will not judge anyone without getting the full picture ?

Let us promise to ourselves that we will put ourselves in the other person’s position and listen them before coming to any conclusions. This will ensure that we are empathetic. This will reduce misunderstanding and help us cement our relationships. It is time to become non-judgemental. Although easier said than done, it is time to realise the perils of judging others.

We generally think all policeman are corrupt. In this case, this person proved otherwise by being honest through his deeds.

May be time to look at the mirror before judging others !

S Ramesh Shankar

Take nobody for granted…

IMG_5945

We take life and everybody around us for granted almost every day. It starts from the family to friends and even colleagues in the organisation, where we work. Let us start how this evolves from our childhood. As a child, we are respectful of our parents and others in the family and do not take anyone for granted. However, as we grow up as an adolescent, we tend to take our parents and family members for granted. We decide when we want to leave the house and when we want to return and expect our parents to wait for us endlessly for us to return.

We start justifying our erratic behaviour and interestingly demand services from our family members as if they were dying only to serve our needs. We do realise that this is not desirable behaviour when we grow up as adults and even regret our actions. This may be psychological in nature and may not be intentional. Our parents generally understand and tolerate our rebellious behaviour and at times try to counsel us too. We realise how much we took our parents and other family members for granted when we get into college or a job and leave the safe precincts of our home to live all alone.

Now, let us move to our friends. We almost take them for granted always. One may say friends are meant for that. I also thought so till I realised that it is not fair to think that way. After all even our best friends are human beings and have emotions and feelings. We need to respect them and empathise with them. Our friends stand by us at all times, even more than our relatives. Then, why should we take them for granted. We do realise sooner than later that we need to give them space and respect they deserve always.

If we move to the organisational front, the story is not very different. We take our colleagues( as in the photo above) for granted. We sometimes even take our suppliers and customers for granted. In the worst case scenario, we even take our manager for granted. We start believing that everybody is working for us and we deserve to be served by them. We do not realise that we also have obligations towards them and we should first give then expect anything from other stakeholders.

So, this is a vicious circle. Taking someone for granted is a natural state of evolution and all of us fall prey to it sometime or the other. We need to realise that as responsible human beings we have no business to take anyone for granted. Everyone has a right and has an equal measure of responsibility. This phenomenon possibly happens because we remember our rights diligently but forget our duties. Let us reflect how this impacts our behaviour in our daily life ?

As a child, we consider our parents’ duty to take care of us all the time but we do not realise that we have a responsibility to serve them in whatever way we can in return in every stage of our life. As a friend, we are happy when friends help us in distress but we forget them when we doing well in our lives and they may be in distress. At work, we seek guidance and support from everyone when we are under stress but we claim to be busy when others need our help.

This is my learning in life. We should not take anyone for granted in life. If we try to put ourselves in the shoes of others before we take anyone for granted we may realise their value in our life. It is time to wake up. It is time to be grateful to others rather than take them for granted.

It is time to change ourselves.

S Ramesh Shankar

28th August 2017