You're In Charge

Do you ever have mood swings? Does it ever feel that everything and everyone around you has turned against you all of a sudden? Blame your brain for such feelings.

You may think that you are in charge of your life completely (with the exception of 'nagging' elders pretending to understand your life better than you) but this is so hypothetical. It's your brain controlling your every action, not only from the scientific point of view, but in all view points. Sometimes you find a task boring and you can do anything to get away from it and some other time you love the same task so much that you go on doing it for hours. A glance of a dark and gloomy object can fill you with negative feelings and the one which is bright and colorful can do the opposite, and we all know the aftermaths of either events.

The point here is that if we humans boast of universal supremacy over all living and non-living things, what about the supremacy over ourselves and by that I mean our actions, emotions, expressions and feelings which are controlled by the brain. I've read and heard that the most powerful person in the world is the US president, which is true to a great extent, but there is something more powerful than him (other than the first lady of course!), his mind. Instead of blaming Mr.Bush Jr. for the Gulf crisis I would blame his greedy mind. Had he had his mind under his control he wouldn't have declared war over Iraq and executed the dictator Hussein. My scarce knowledge on this issue doesn't permit me to discuss this topic in detail and it isn't the point I'm trying to bring into focus either. What I'm saying is that if we really want to conquer the Earth we have to conquer ourselves first. We need to conquer our mind as that is what defines us, right?

I would like to place an example here of myself. I'm trapped here in Mumbai doing internship in a pharmaceutical company. I'm assigned work which can be completed in at the most two hours but I'm expected to work on it for about four to five days. I don't know what I can do after I've completed my work in just 2 hours. I still have a couple of days ahead of me to work on it but my work doesn't need any optimisation and even if it does I'm incapable of thinking of any. To add to the problem, I can't take leaves for unmentionable reasons, I can't cut down my working hours, so what do I do? My office has become the most boring places I've ever been and I feel I'm trapped like a bird yelling for freedom but no one wants to listen. This is what I used to think when my mind was let free by me. But now I love going to the office and I can sit there for eight hours with very little, rather than no, boredom in company. Earlier I wanted to terminate my training before the official date and that would have also made me lose the valuable certificate I will receive at the end of it. But now it's just the opposite (not that I want to extend the official date but I'm comfortable with what it is right now).

So, how did this transformation happen? I just associated my mind with the positives of my internship.

When I was made to sit idle I used to surf the net for personal reasons, browsing through many sites looking for information on various topics, checking mails and working on my blog. Even this article is written sitting in my office. Because my time was spent on constructive tasks only (it's a different story why I started using the net for constructive purposes explored in my article My Four Pillars for Success)  and I had the liberty to say, if questioned on why I'm doing my personal work in the office, "I have not been assigned any work" I had no fear of higher authorities. I started associating my training with the time spent on the net which was so fruitful and entertaining at the same time. Thus, my perception of the boring and gloomy office changed to a 'happy-happy' place for fun and it was some days later that I realised that it was all in my mind. Even today if I think of work before leaving for office my legs start to hurt but if i think of everything other than that I want to rush to the office. No matter what my mind tells me, I keep enforcing the idea that office is fun and that has made life a lot easier and happy.

If you follow this approach of associating everything with the positives every task would become easier and eventually your mind would be in your control. It tells you something negative and you empower yourself over it by thinking about the positive.

Had Mr.Bush Jr. thought about the positives about his nation by thinking about the high standards of living of his citizens and his nation's rich economy, his mind would never have won over him by making him greedy for more treasure from oil.