Peel the onion

Today to her (wife’s) surprise, I volunteered to cook dinner. I am not that expert in cooking; however, the easy recipe is of course Khichdi, easy and fast to cook. You only need rice, dal, spices, tomato, chili powder, salt, onion etc. You can add ginger, curry leaves, coriander and garlic to make it tasty. Finally, I could cook the Khichdi. My wife and son enjoyed eating that. While preparing for the Khichdi, thought came to my mind, that isn’t in our life everything is like Khichdi and onion? The same taste as Khichdi and different layers like onion? When you peel one scale, you get another in onion and we have a lot of ingredients in life like Khichdi. Our life is full of emotions like different spices.   

When we go in deep, we have different meanings in life. Such layers are everywhere in life. While communicating and understanding human beings you can use the metaphor of onion. Outer layer sometimes is fragile, sometimes rigid, sometimes dirty, but as you peel the layer, you get different insights.

Human beings are made up of upbringings, culture, value systems etc. overall surrounding and society has an impact on our lives. In emotional intelligence, we always use the word, “empathy, understanding the perspective of another person”. However, it is interesting to understand how those perspectives are built over a period of times. Sometimes, it is necessary to build trust by tearing layers and self-disclosing and sometimes just being curious and making another person included to understand him/her.       

Different researchers and authors have come up with different theories around the onion and that is very cool to understand. Few are related to the culture; few are related to change management but underlined philosophy is the same.     

In case of organizations, organizations also have their own personalities, i.e. culture of the organizations. The outer layers are composed of the patterns of behaviour observed while interacting with employees and managers. The next layer encompasses the beliefs, norms and attitudes of that culture. The middle of the onion represents the underlying cultural assumptions and values. As the most hidden layer, these aspects of culture are much harder to recognise and understand, but all of the other layers are built upon the center of the culture onion. Therefore, careful analysis and a better understanding of the different layers as well as how they interact and influence each other is necessary.

You can very much analyse those behavioural patterns of human beings and also employees in the organization by applying this model. Sometimes the underlying reason of behaviour may be totally different than what we assume. Even though we say that values and upbringing decide the behaviour, it is also the experience a person has in the specific situation in past and recent. Responses are always interpreted and manipulated differently. The question is how we are accurate in understanding those. You can be closed to accurate by peeling the onion.  

Please read the print replica of my latest book written for leaders on amazon kindle, Vitality in Human Resource: Adding human dimensions in HR processes

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organization)    

Control your negative thought and be happy

Everybody is speaking about Corona and it is too much, I think. Hence I have decided to write about feelings which are created because of such types of events in life. Let's take a small break from corona. However please take care and follow guidelines issued by the government on time to time.     

There was one incident which didn’t give me positive feeling. I got disturbed. When I started thinking, I realised that this is a very small incident and I was disturbed because of somebody else. I was unnecessary worried because of his behaviour. You also must have experienced similar things in your life. Do you know how many though come in our mind? Experts estimate that the mind thinks between 60,000 – 80,000 thoughts a day. Our mind continuously processes the information which we receive through different channels and events in our life and around us; mind also analyse the information based on our past experiences and assumptions. And then we interpret the situation which gives us good or bad feelings. We become happy or unhappy depending upon the situation. Situation is not important; the analysis and interpretation are important.      

Based on such events, we express 6 types of emotions.

Happiness is always good but what’s about other emotions like sadness, fear, disgust, anger and surprise? Why these emotions generated?

Negative feelings come because of few following reasons:

Overthinking: Few people have the habit of over thing. We think so much without no reasons. If some incident happened, the brain will actively start thinking, analysing, reading between the lines. Excess thinking gives the stress and we become unhappy.    

Fear of losing somethings, like power, money etc: If there are some changes in the organization or in the life, most of the people tend to resist the change. The reason is they feel that they will lose something. And this fear of loosing something creates havoc in the life. 

Uncertainty: Few people will always think about the future challenges. Thinking about the future is very good, but that should be for the learning and development purpose. But when people take this personally & without much taking action, they unnecessarily get worried about the issues which even does not exist.

Fear of failure: people don’t take actions. They think that if they do something, they will not succeed. They always are worried about their targets, goals and this creates stress resulting unhappiness. 

Apart from above there are few reasons like bad roads, bad traffic, behaviours of people around. If something does not happen as expected, we get worried and it creates negative feelings.  

What should we do to overcome such negative feelings? Try some following tips.

Accept the reality

Accept and recognise the situation. You can’t blame always to bad roads, bad traffic, indiscipline of the people. Accept that you can’t change the whole world, but you can change your world. 

Decide your response wisely.

When any negative feelings come because of some events, just hold back. Think that am I overthinking because of this incident? Is it necessary to think much? Recognize your feeling for time being and then decide what do you want. Perhaps the issue may be little, and you can solve it by proper response. Think about the best way to express your emotion.

Learn how to change your mood.

At a certain point, you'll want to shift from a negative mood into a positive one. Otherwise your thinking may get stuck on how bad things are, and that can drag you down into feeling worse. Try doing things that make you happy, even if you don't feel like it at the time. For example, you might be in the mood to go out after a fight with your spouse but just staying back silently and then initiating the communication can lift you out of that negative space.

Build positive & constructive emotions.

Reflection and insight are keys of happy life. Try to understand what went wrong so that you are feeling bad. Positive feelings create a sense of happiness and well-being. Make it a habit to notice and focus on what's good in your life, even the small things, like the praise your peer, colleague etc. Noticing the good things even when you're feeling bad can help you shift the emotional balance from negative to positive.

Get a help

Talk about how you're feeling with a trusted friend, spouse, parent etc. They can help you explore your emotions and give you a fresh way of thinking about things. And nothing helps you feel more understood and cared for than the support of someone who loves you for who you are.

Exercise

Physical activity helps the brain produce natural chemicals that promote a positive mood. Exercise also can release stress build-up and help you from staying stuck on negative feelings.