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Thursday 30 July 2015

Recognize your strengths - Ask your counsellor Q&A column

[The following column answered by me appeared in the Deccan Herald Education page on July 30, 2015)



It is important to get the help of a counsellor to help you regain your motivation, uncover your hidden potential and add meaning to your life.

Dear Madam,
I am a final year engineering student (ECE) in Hubli, Karnataka. During my childhood I wanted to become a scientist and join NASA as I was interested in space. But after completing my second year PU, I don't know what has happened to my goal and my ambitions! 

From being a good student I have become   become average and study  only to pass examinations. I sometimes try to motivate myself to study but it does not last for very long.  Also, I am very addicted to technology and I am unable to come out of it. My campus placements are going to happen next week and I wanted to get placed, but I am not able to study. Please help me.

Mayur M Naravani
Dear Mayur

By the time you get a response to your letter your campus placements may already be over. However, no matter what the outcome of that, I think it is important for you to get the help of a counsellor to help you regain your motivation, uncover your hidden potential and add meaning to your life. 

Obviously your addiction to technology, while it is fulfilling a need for you, it is also coming in the way of your attaining your potential. Any kind of addiction is bad because it makes you dependent on an external factor for your own existence. NIMHANS, in Bangalore, has expert help available to help people deal with technology addiction, should you choose to take that help. 

It is great that you are able to recognize that you have greater potential and that something is blocking you in achieving it. Recognition is the first step. Now get the help you need to help you identify what is blocking you, and how to go full-steam ahead and achieve whatever it is you choose to.

Dear Madam,

I have a Diploma in Electrical and Electronics with 74.67% from Hubli, Karnataka. Due to lots of problems at home I dropped my PU course and completed diploma in E&E. As my family cannot afford engineering financially, I have to begin working. 

Please suggest how I can start to look for jobs and build my career and work passionately. I plan to join B.Com as a external student with a recognized university (Karnataka University Dharwad). Please guide me.

A Student
Dear student

Your question is really meant for a career counsellor to guide you on how to go about deciding on your next step, and maybe possibilities of funding your education through loans and/or scholarships. I really have no expertise in helping you with that. However, I would like to say that even if you don’t have the formal qualifications, with the right attitude and motivation you can learn and progress as you wish. Sometimes qualifications only open a few doors. 

Eventually making a success of those openings is an entirely different story and depends on the person’s soft skills more than anything else, like the ability to communicate, the ability to take risks, the ability to solve problems and think creatively, the ability to work in a team and leadership skills, among other things. So get started, give it your best shot, and keep climbing from step to step – but also remember to look back and take stock of where you started from and how far you have come.

All the best
Dear Madam,

I have completed my 2nd PUC Science and I am very poor in Maths. While I am interested in taking up 5 year law course, my father however wants me to do engineering. I don’t want to regret  taking up engineering even after knowing that it is not suitable for me. I’m confused. Please help me by telling how I can convince my father. Also tell me what the scope for law is.

Shivakumar
Dear Shivakumar

I think you and your father need to have an honest open communication about what you should do. You need to understand why your father wants you to do engineering. I am sure he wants the best for you, and thinks that engineering is the only route to achieve that. You should also be clear and communicate to him about why you want to do law, why you think it is the right choice for you, and why you think engineering is not for you.

I totally agree with you that you should not enter a field that you do not have any interest in.  However, it is in your interest to carry your family along with you in your decision. To do that you may need to do some introspection and self-analysis to figure out why you feel your choice is the right one for you. Remember that your father eventually will want the same end result that you want – for you to be happy and successful at whatever you do. You are not two opposing forces, and you don’t need to view the situation as such. Hope this helps and all the best.
Dear Madam,

I am currently confused about what career options to take. I have completed my B.Com from RC university Belagavi, Karnataka. I'm interested in banking sector and also in the defence sector. I'm writing the relevent exams for it as well. But I also want pursue MBA to complete my post graduation. But I have a third semester backlog of business statistics in B.Com so all my future plans have been kept on hold. Unofficially I have completed B.Com but due to the third semester backlog I am not able to apply for jobs.

I have lost my patience and confidence. In my home nobody is ready to guide me or help me in this regard. I want to have a career- which I like and enjoy and moreover earn respect from my friends, colleagues and family. But financially we are not so well off. This is the root cause of the problem. I have been waiting for a long time to tell you all this and seek your advice and solution to my set of academic problems.
Nikhil More
Dear Nikhil

Liking the career you have chosen, enjoying it and earning respect from your friends is all in your control as it is largely driven by your own thoughts and feelings about yourself and your situation. You can choose to view the same job as boring and mundane and do it in a routine mechanical fashion, or you can choose to be thankful for it and give it your best shot, all the time looking to think out of the box, solve problems, and give it your 100%. 

If you respect yourself your friends will have no choice but to respect you. What the world says about you is a reflection of what you feel about yourself. If you respect yourself, the way you interact and respond to situations will force others to respect you as well. Getting a job per se is not what gets you respect. It is what you bring to the job, or what you give to it, that ultimately earns you lasting respect.

Good luck!

Thursday 9 July 2015

Recognise your strengths - Ask your counsellor Q& A column

[The following column written by me appeared in the Deccan Herald Education Supplement on July 8, 2015]




Dear Madam,
I am a I PUC graduate with an overall percentage of 98.33%. My aim is to get into one of the IITs. But the problem with me is that I have a lot of negative points. I am a very bad time manager, lazy and unsystematic. I am also a procrastinator. I don’t study regularly and my work piles up at the end of the week. When the exams approach, I start studying late nights, trying to finish my portion at the last moment. 
For the I PU exam also, I skipped many topics as there wasn’t enough time. I scored well only because of sheer luck. But I believe I am capable and have immense potential. At present, I am attending classes in a coaching institute. In the first week I was full of energy and enthusiasm. But as the weeks passed, I have become casual, and I fear that because of this habit, I will not be able to perform up to my potential. 
So at the end, I feel bad that I have wasted precious time. To lift my spirits, I have read motivational books, but they don’t seem to work. Please help me in performing well and deleting my negative points.
SP

Dear SP
You are not the only person in the world who has negative points. Each person has negative points and in that you are not unique. However, each person also has positive points, along with the negative, and it is important that we recognize and acknowledge our positive points because that is what makes us feel stronger and better about ourselves and gives us the energy required to achieve our goals. 
Unfortunately most of us are only too quick to recognize our weaknesses and make the fatal mistake of thinking we don’t have any strengths. So I am not too concerned about the fact that you have weaknesses. I would be more concerned about the fact that you are not recognizing your strengths. You are attributing your successes to sheer luck, discounting any role that you and your strengths may have played in achieving them. 
I would urge you to stop here and take some time to take stock of your strengths. And don’t stop at discovering and uncovering only one or two. Try and dig out at least ten because I am sure you will have at least ten, provided you allow yourself to look for them.

If you can find more than ten, then even better. You don’t need to delete all your negative points. You need to know them, and then decide on which ones you want to modify and how you want to modify them. And as you start recognizing your positive points, the burden of the negative points will automatically come down. If with all your negative points that you mention you are able to get a score of 98.33%, you are obviously not giving enough recognition to your positive points and strengths. I am also not sure how much more will convince you that you are indeed achieving your potential!
Watch out from falling into the trap of constant dissatisfaction, no matter what the result. I hope you are not caught in the vicious cycle of never doing good enough! At some point of performance, you need to be able to take stock and enjoy your success and feel a sense of satisfaction at what you have achieved. All the best.

Dear Madam,
I am studying in II PUC. All my classmates in college think that I am completely unfashionable. All the other children laugh at me at school and say my clothes are completely unfashionable. I feel really stupid. I ask my parents to buy me better clothes but they say they don’t have enough money. What can I do?

Dear Anonymous,
I hear you say that you feel really stupid, and that is what concerns me. People around you will only reflect back to you what you are feeling about yourself. If you feel insecure, not smart and lacking confidence, then that is what people start thinking about you. And those are the cues that you pick up from your environment which further reinforces what you think about yourself.

Let me help you understand that a little better. You say you ‘feel stupid’. Because of that you may be thinking thoughts like ‘people don’t like me’, ‘I am not smart’, ‘others are smarter than me’, ‘what must the others be thinking of me?’ and so on. Because you are thinking like that you behave meekly, shyly and without confidence, feeling embarrassed about yourself and your clothes. 
Because you behave that way, your friends think you are not dressed fashionably. In reality, it is not your friends that are thinking you are not smart. It is you who is thinking you are not smart, and therefore behaving in a way that makes them say that. 
If you believe in yourself and your capabilities, and feel that you are smart, then your thoughts and behavior will reflect that ‘smartness’ and people will start thinking of you as ‘smart’. Your clothes don’t really have anything to do with smartness. 
You don’t need to be fashionable to be ‘smart’, and if you feel ‘smart’, think ‘smart’ and behave ‘smart’ then dressing fashionably is not that critical. Most people need to be ‘fashionable’ to project an external smartness which may not have anything to do with how smart they truly are. So the bottom line is to believe in yourself. 


Dear Madam
I am currently pursuing my second year engineering (mechanical) in Karnataka. I am from an orthodox family though my thinking is quite free. I have some good friends whom I talk to and spend a lot of time going out and having fun with. The problem is that, 
I do not have any female friends and I hesitate to talk to girls in general. I don't know how to approach a girl and start having a proper conversation. Sometimes I feel that I have to maintain a distance from girls, so that I don’t fall into some unwanted relationship.
M C

Dear M C
Sometimes our social conditioning and family background entrench in us a set of beliefs from which we operate, most of the time unconsciously. You mentioned that your family is conservative and so your hesitation to talking to members of the opposite sex may stem from messages you got around that from your family while growing up.  I urge you to take help in resolving this for yourself, and deep-seated beliefs take time to uncover and then shed off. 
You should either see a counsellor face to face to explore what your fears and anxieties around interacting with girls are based on and how to overcome them. Or you could call the free Parivarthan Counselling Helpline at 080 65333323  to talk to a counsellor who may be able to help you.

Monday 6 July 2015

Pefect or Good Enough? Selfless or Selfish?

This article written by me first appeared at 


I am mindful of the fact that after reading some of my columns you may start doubting your own capability as a parent; you may be so overcome with fear that you start believing that no matter what you do, you are going to have an adverse influence on your child. As though you are not worried enough already about your child’s future and your capability to deal with it, without my having to scare you and paint a picture of gloom and doom.
My intention in this column, dear readers, is not in any way to take you away from the joys of parenting, or create a doubt in your mind about your ability. Quite to the contrary, it is to make you mindful and aware of how simple things can go wrong, and how easy it is to fix those simple things, provided we are willing to fix them.
Parenting is a journey, like the rest of life. We can view it as a leisurely, luxurious trip, taking time to enjoy the scenery as we go along, and crossing roadblocks as they come along the course. Or, we can view it as a long, arduous trip that we just need to somehow complete, with each roadblock becoming a further nuisance on our course, delaying our arrival at the destination. The choice is ours.No matter what outlook we choose to have with respect to the journey, our views and expectations of ourselves hold a vital key. Are we constantly expecting ourselves to be perfect? In which case we will always fall short of our own expectations since there is no such thing as a perfect’ person. Or, are we willing to accept ourselves the way we are, with all our strengths, ability, intuition and gut feeling, yet with some weaknesses, doubts and anxieties. Are we willing to accept a less than perfect version of ourselves when it comes to our being a parent? Are we able to accept our own mistakes and shortcomings as a normal part of our journey of life and growth?
Nothing makes one feel as vulnerable as when one becomes a parent – “Now I need to be perfect,” “This is one area where I can’t afford to make any mistakes,” “I must never give anyone a chance to say that I did not do my best as a parent,” “Now everyone is going to judge me not on the basis of me, but on the basis of my child.” Yet, nothing also makes one feel as responsible as when one becomes a parent. I remember the immense sense of responsibility I felt when I looked at my new-born baby – this was a life that I was totally responsible for, and a life that was totally dependent on me for its very existence! And then I was overcome with fear – what if something went wrong? What if I am not able to cope? What if something happened to me? Would my child even remember me?
I think the one constant factor through the entire journey of parenting is being overcome with conflicting thoughts and emotions – hope and fear; love and anger; joy and sorrow; optimism and pessimism; trust and doubt; selflessness while secretly wanting some me time; fostering independence while longing for dependence; fulfilling your own dreams while wanting your children to live theirs; the elation of soaring high and the deflation of falling flat on your face – quite like a roller coaster ride.
So is parenting a selfless pursuit, or a selfish one? The first time that question was raised to me, of course I said it was absolutely selfless – how outrageous to think otherwise. But as I think about it now, I am not sure anymore. And maybe I don’t need to be – maybe it is a bit of both. And that is okay!
I believe that in being able to deal with this ambiguity, and the consequent shades of gray, lies a possible answer to enjoying the journey of parenting. You are neither perfect nor awful, and you don’t need to be; you don’t need to label yourself in the extremes. You are good enough and at any point of time, you need to believe that you are doing what you believe is right given your current understanding of the situation. When your understanding changes, or the situation changes, you may choose to do things differently, but as of now you are doing your best – and whether it is selfless or selfish is only a matter of inconsequential semantics. Believing in yourself and enjoying the journey is all that matters in the end. Really!