Smile, because it makes you smile

The only thing that mankind aspire for in today's world is peace, harmony, growth and brotherhood. For this one should never forget to show love, care, good deeds and speak a tone which brings harmony, happiness and prosperity in the society. No doubt we have many organization doing this at international and national level among the people of different ethnics, races and religion on very large scale.

Now let’s us ask ourselves what at individual level, people like you and me can do to contribute towards this beautiful world. Apart from all the above points, which we have to do, there is one thing which we have forgotten in this fast world where everyone is tense about their workload, future security and careers. That one thing is S.M.I.L.E., in which we should all believe.

We all know life isn't fair but we should also know that smiling is much easier than frowning. Yes it’s true based on muscle that are required to smile and frown. Smile have universally the same impact irrespective of any caste, race, gender and geography. We should all smile like a sunshine to the humanity. One should never miss the opportunity to smile to impress someone.

You must be having a lot of questions like - what’s the benefit smile has on me, what is the cause for people to holds their smile, doesn’t too much smiling make us look stupid and many more. Well to answer I can say smile is very much dependent on your situation, circumstances and your surrounding environment. If you are in bad mood or situation or living in an environment which is full of hatred, tensed then obviously you won't have smile that easily. But, if we start building the habit of smiling, we can definitely tune the surrounding to better one or at least will give us confidence to fight our situation.

Your sadness reflects many of the things which holds you from smiling. Few of them are below which we all should work on continuously.

Worry: The first and foremost thing is worry or anxiety which we all keep. We are always worried or anxious what will happen today or in future with you. Where you will stand and so many things. Though it is necessary to worry or think of future, but we need to draw a line where beyond which we don't move in worry state. Make sure you don't do overthinking and just keep doing your task to the best of your limit and rest all will be taken care by your karma.

Depression: Second in the list is depression, which I feel is an advance state of too much worries. Once you go in depression, the whole world seems to be against you. It not only affects you but also your closed and loved ones badly. Don't be pressed too much by your current circumstance and think rational to resolve your issue. And, yes share your problems whom you can trust if things are not under your control.

Fear: Fear makes you afraid of many things and keeps you away from all the good things that might happen to you. One must learn to build confidence by doing daily yoga, meditation and by being in company of good people. Don't let fear control your emotions and heart. Build confidence and bring your smile back.

Socially and economically less privileged: Smile is next impossible thing if you have no friend or closed one and no money in pocket. Passing day and night on empty stomach with no friends, no food for tomorrow is one of the saddest thing in this world. It deprives you away of even a minute of joy. In such case, only others can help us and if you know such people or family, one must try to provide them food or work so they can at least feed their stomach.

We all know there would be hardly any person on this planet who will have an ideal environment to smile. But, such environment can never be created also. So, amid all your worry, poverty, fear make an extra effort to smile. It will give hopes to you and people around you and good start of their and your day. Don't ignore the impact of smile which can make a difference in everyone’s life.

Coming to the benefits smile is very powerful to an extent where it can release your stress, keep you calm, attractive, happy and makes you feel like a leader. Smile may work as follows in your life:

Medicine: Smile is a cheapest and fastest medicine to prevent you from stress and depression. If no precaution taken, stress will eventually break you down. It will take hell lot of time to recover which again depends on your will-power. This will-power can be built with smile when you take on every challenge, every situation in your life with smile rather than complaining or taking stress about it.

Attractive: I bet you would have hardly seen any attractive person without a smile except for fashion models. A smile can do things which even the costliest makeup or dress can't do. It enhances your prettiness, your beauty. It shows you are a  person who knows beauty comes from within.

Caring: Smile shows that you care for people under you and wants them to be as smiley as you. A smile assures that you can be the person on whom we all can depend in times of crisis.

Networking: People always tends to keep person who brings positive vibes while hanging around. Smile helps you to be a person which everybody wants to be in their company of friends. It shows that you are open for friendship and make good relations. Smile somehow gives you that mindset that helps in solving problems or at least an attitude to solve the problem in different and quick way.

And lastly Happiness: The ultimate symbol of smile is happiness and shows you are happy. So keep smiling and be Happy.

There has being many research done on smile and its various impact. What is the chemical and hormonal changes goes inside the body when you smile. What we have seen till now is all emotional aspects of smile. But, have you ever thought what physically goes into when you smile? Now let us see what science has to say about smile.

As science believe, there are more than 18 different types of smiles and only 6 are for happiness. And we thought, smile is a smile. However, they all come naturally depending on the situation and environment and upon learning we can master them.

For one smile, it takes around 50 muscles to work. This makes people understand whether your smile is real one or sarcastic from your eyes. When you smile it release a hormone call endorphin that makes our emotional state better. The other name for endorphin is Happy Hormone.

Smile happens without much thought process. As you might have noticed when you see your friends doing some silly or embarrassing act, you grin, when you know you were let go unpunished for your mistake, you beam and when you excel in your work you smirk. Its natural process to show your happiness.

An action plan for you to do now. Just close your eyes and visualize your happiest moments that made you laugh. That moment can be a joy of watching an innocent new born baby. A smile on wrinkled face of an old person when you show them something which was not there in their time or you see satisfaction on their face that they lived their life well when they look back.

And yes, too much smiling doesn’t make you look stupid just make sure you don’t smile or laugh on other’s problem or pain. So, stop worrying and start smiling as it reminds me of one very common phrase. Smile! It improves your face value.

Blame Game - A Game Without Fun!

Blame - A funny word and you must be wondering why?

Well, the true meaning of blame is to assign fault to someone or to something, but as we all might have experienced or may have done – it has become a word for passing off fault.

It has become every human beings tendency as it is the simplest and easiest thing to do, to place the blame on somebody else for the problems that you confront and the troubles that come your way. One tries to snuggle and find means to run away by avoiding the true fault.

If we have problem with Promotion – Blame the boss, as you feel he/she is biased while giving out promotion.

If you have problem in completing your task – Blame the colleagues, for not handling the task or co-operating with you.

If you are late to reach – Blame the traffic, even if you too are part of it.

If you have any health problem – you will blame everyone including your parents as because of them you are suffering.

Blame culture: Holding Individual, Society and the Nation at the whole backward

Well, we should first ask why we blame or rather why others blame you. The answer is, blaming has an underlying psychological purpose. You blame others for a purpose and it can be anything.

Many people use blame as a tool to keep their status high. We all need social identity and to achieve this equilibrium easily we put blame on others to bring them down which relatively makes us good. Even if you are not that politic freak, you must be reading or watching in news that how opposition or people who couldn’t win election because of their utter poor governance will make utmost use of this tool to bring current government down. They will not play their role in nation building and will keep finding fault and blaming the government who is not leaving any stone to turn around to bring glories to the country. We blame the government for being too involved, and we blame the government for not being involved enough.

Another reason to blame some is because we want them always to be in bad situation or have bad feelings so that it will make us feel better.  Many a times, we are unable to accept bad things happening to us and to overcome that we put blame on others so that we start focusing on bad happening to others and that will take us off of the bad happening to us. However, it can act as a motivation if it doesn’t come at the cost of bad happening to others.

Of the two reasons above, this one is the biggest problem everywhere. And it is Explanation. The entire world needs an explanation for everything that is going around. There is nothing wrong in asking for an explanation but the problem starts when something goes wrong and you have to explain. If you look around whether it is corporate companies, political organization, government functionary, trust, welfare societies etc, they have one philosophy – ‘There is always someone at the fault for every issue and problem’. Hope you all agree to this statement.

Let me ask you this, how many of you have a habit of saying this, "It’s nobody's fault...just bad luck."? We all do have an tendency of blaming our luck or ‘act of God’. It is a big problem when instead of finding ways to put things correctly we are giving more importance to finding blame and blaming luck or God.

You see, many a times, terrible life-threatening mistakes are being made by an organization, government or an individual which can be fatal at times, because of their negligent, will just blame and give compensation. It has become now a cultural pastime rather than accepting the truth. Finding someone to blame (and then blaming them) may give us a substitute sensation for having solved a problem when we haven't really understood cause and effect at all.

Even if you are right at blaming, it is still pure waste of time and energy and achieves nothing

In my opinion, whatever the situation be, blaming can never help and will always create resentment and tension and there is a psychology behind it.

Suppose a person, who is being blamed by you for correct reason, then you are just intensifying the situation by pointing it out. By doing so who is indeed responsible for the situation, will only make the situation worst. Instead of this what if you could say, "It's fine. henceforth please take care."! 

Suppose a person doesn't know that they are to blame, then pointing it out is going to result in a fight between you. You both will argue, which will simply waste time, and then reach a conclusion which is of no help. You will reach above point in case you established that opposite person is to be blamed.

Suppose a person is not really at fault, then blaming them will make situation as bad as it can go. You'll have an altercation, which will be denied from opposite side, and this will go till eternity. Both sides will turn bitter, and the net result will be nothing but just noise.

If you really need to analyse, then analyse the failures, not the people at play. Understand what went wrong instead of who did wrong. That way, you can get something positive out of it. Blaming isn't going to do any good, fixing the problem will.

We just need to have an intention to find a solution instead of just blaming. Take this example of your parents when you fail. Even though they don’t know any technicality of your problems on the matter but their consoling, caring and encroaching words and mostly importantly belief in you, is enough for you to fight back.

It is rightly said, At any given moment, you have the power to say, “This is not how the story is going to end." The day you stop blaming others is the day you begin to discover who you truly are.

Life without Blame Game – A lesson to be learnt

Ask this to yourself:

If everything is someone else's fault, then what part do I play in my own life? Are my actions entirely without consequence? Am I that powerless? Or do all my actions only lead to good outcomes? Am I an entirely new type of human being?

For every single thing that has ever happened to you, either good or bad, it is only you who is responsible, as you are the Master of your Destiny, and whatever you have sowed is what you eventually reap sooner or later. All the problems that come your way are in fact a blessing in disguise and a stepping stone to success and glory. They simply indicate and make you aware that there is something wrong that you are doing, and your only job is to correct that wrong. Whether you are seeking promotion success in business or family, or better Health, just get rid of the wrong elements that are within you. Instead of blaming others’, simply Blame your Self and find the faults within to get on the road of correction. And on this road you will find all that you are looking for.

Remember, "The only genuine way not to make mistakes is not to be in the world."

1. Believe there is a lesson to be learned and consent to learn it. Unless you’re really willing to learn the lesson, even if it feels uncomfortable at times, you can never move forward.

2. Admit that you might have helped create the problem. This doesn’t mean no one else played a part; it just means perhaps you did, as well.

3. Take some alone time and review the situation. Once we review the situation from a third party perspective, we clearly see all the things we could have done better.

4. Let go of your attachment to the problem. The more you “leech” onto a problem, the more it “leeches” right back on you. 

5. Forget blame and focus on where to go from here. Get used to saying out loud: "Okay, it happened! For the time being, we need to focus on making things better!" You can give people feedback later, once you've calmed down and if it's necessary.

I would like to end this with a short story which you might have read. Just a reminder in that case.

Whom to Blame?

A boy was born to a couple after eleven years of marriage. They were a Loving couple and the boy was the gem of their eyes.

When the boy was around two years old, one morning the husband saw a medicine bottle open. He was late for office so he asked his wife to cap the bottle and keep it in the cupboard. His wife, preoccupied in the kitchen totally forgot about the open medicine bottle.

The boy saw the bottle and playfully went to the bottle fascinated by its colour and drank it all. It happened to be a poisonous medicine Meant for adults in small dosages. When the child collapsed, mother hurried him to the hospital, where he died. The mother was stunned. She was terrified how to face her husband.

When the distraught father came to the hospital and saw the dead child, he looked at his wife and uttered just five words.

The husband just said "I am with you Darling." The husband's totally unexpected reaction is a proactive behavior.

The Child is dead. He can never be brought back to life.

There is no point in finding fault with the mother. Besides, if only he had taken time to keep the bottle away, this would not have happened.

No one is to be blamed. She had also lost her only child. What she needed at that moment was consolation and sympathy from the husband. That is what he gave her.

If everyone can look at life with this kind of perspective, there would be much fewer problems in the world. "A journey of a thousand miles Begins with a single step." Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears. And you will find things are actually not as difficult as you think.

Moral of the Story:

Sometimes we spend time in asking who is responsible or whom to blame, whether in a relationship, in a job or with the people we know. By this way we miss out some warmth in human relationship.

Decision Making

We all are living a very fast life. Every second knowingly or unknowingly we are making a decision, that can be right or wrong which we may never know about it.

Everyone of us has some principles in our life. These principles are one of the most influencing factors or may be the only factor in our Decision making. The stronger and deeper the principles, the more effective decision can be made. Ofcourse, it also needs the knowledge about what the problem is and its solution, its environment while making a decision.

All people whether successful or unsuccessful operates by principles that help them to make a decision. Without principles, you would be forced to react to situation that come to you without considering what you value the most and how to make choice to get what you want. This would prevent you from making the most of your life. Principles are reservoir of personal wisdom built by you on foundation of advices, experiences and reflection as you have grown that can be used to make decision moving forward.

Once there was a group of children playing near two railway tracks, one still in use while the other disused. Only one child played on the disused track, the rest on the operational track. Now imagine, a train is coming and you are just beside the track interchange. You can make the train change its course to the disused track and save most of the kids. However, that would also mean the lone child playing by the disused track would be sacrificed or would you rather let the train go its way?

Lets take a pause to think and test your principle or what kind of decision you would make.

Most people might choose to divert the course of train and sacrifice only one child. You might think the same way, may be even I thought exactly the same way initially because to save most of the children at the expense of one child was rational decision most people would make, morally and emotionally. But, have you ever thought that the child playing on disused track had in fact made the right decision to play at the safe place!

Nevertheless, he had to be sacrificed because of his ignorant friends who chose to play where the danger was.  This kind of dilemma happening around us everyday in office, community, politics and especially in a democratic society, the minority is often sacrificed for the interest of the majority, no matter how foolish or ignorant the majority are and how forsighted and knowledgeable the minority are. The child who chooses not to play with rest on the operational track was sidelined, and in the case he was sacrificed, no one would shed a tear for him.

The great critic Leo Velski Julian who told the story said he would not try to change the course of the train because he believed that the kids playing on the operational track should have known very well that track was still in use and that they should ran away if they heard the train’s sirens. If the train was diverted that lone child would definitely die because he never thought the train would come over to that track. Moreover, the track was in use probably because it was not safe. If the train was diverted to the track, we could put lives of all passengers on board at stake! And in your attempt to save few kids by sacrificing one child, you might end up sacrificing hundreds of people to save these few kids.

While we are all aware that life is full of tough decisions that needs to be made, we may not realize that hasty decisions may not always be the right one.

Remember that what’s right isn’t always popular… And what’s popular isn’t always right.

ADVICE + HARDWORK + EXPERIENCE

The world is becoming complex day by day. We many a times feel insecure as to whether I would have mental power to make good decision and how could I possibly succeed in this 21^st century. You can get away with this in life by these three task.

• Advice from mentor
• Hard work or actions on the advice
• You experience of your action

It is very important to have mentor in your life whose advice you can take as gospel. Mentor can be any one like head of state, philosopher humanitarians, business titans who may have wrote down all their wisdom. They may be of any age group, living or dead, in person to remote.

Next comes is Hardworking. It’s time to put action on the advice taken from the mentors.

After applying or misapplying good advice and/or properly applying bad advice, you learn to focus more on part of reflecting of your experiences. Reflection is like adding rocket fuel to your equation, it enable you to get so much more leverage out of every bit of wisdom offered, and eventually helps you show value to mentors by sharing insights about how their advice played out in the field.

Scientific Approach: Rational Decision making approach

1. The first decision making lesson should be to ask yourself if you really have a problem to solve or a decision to make.
2. Gathering information: What is relevant and what is not relevant to the decision? What do you need to know before you can make a decision or that will help you make the right one?
3. Analyzing the situation: What alternative courses of action may be available to you? What different interpretation of the data may be possible?
4. Developing options: Generate several possible options. Be creative and Positive.
5. Evaluating alternatives:- What criteria should you use to evaluate? Evaluate for feasibility, acceptability and desirability. Which alternative will best achieve your objectives?
6. Selecting a preferred alternative: Explore the provisional preferred alternative for future possible adverse consequence. What problems might it create? What is the risk of making this decision?
7. Acting on the decision: Put a plan in place to implement the decision. Have you allocated resources to implement? Is the decision accepted and supported by colleagues? Are they committed to making the decision work?

The main strength of above approach is that it provides structure and discipline to the decision making process. It helps ensure we consider the full range of factors relating to a decision in a logical and comprehensive manner.

Judgment, principles, experience and knowledge with complete and sufficient information all come together when making decisions.

Being Positive:

There is a disease epidemic sweeping through the country and without medicine 600,000 people will die. You have to choose one of the two medicine to make.

If you chose medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose medicine B, there will be 1/3^rd chance of saving 600,000 people and 2/3^rd of saving no one. Which medicine do you choose?

Most people would go with A, the less risky bet, because we’re risk averse when the choice is framed as a gain as in saving people. But what if we framed the question a little differently in the 2^nd scenario.

If you choose medicine A, 400,000 people will die. If you choose medicine B, there is a 1/3 chances of saving 600,000 people and 2/3 of saving no one. Which medicine do you choose?

Suddenly, with the glass-half-empty wording, medicine A seems like a less palatable option. Although the scenario are exactly the same, people become more risk-seeing in the second scenario, wen medicine A is framed as a loss of life and go with medicine B. The researched asked this question to three different groups of students – Americans learning Japanese, Koreans learning English and Americans learning french – and in each case the risk framing effect disappeared when students had to think in their foreign language. They acted rationally. It is important that emotional aspect gets filtered out.

TV is not an Idiot Box, It makes you an Idiot

Television is believed to be one of the greatest inventions for human being. It let you see and hear far off videos and audios at your own comfort and convenience. It became popular among the people from day it was launched in the market. Initially TV was a sign of rich people and even today the size of your TV screen and its thickness defines how wealthy you are. As the time passed, new and advanced technologies were added to it. It went colored from black and white, it replaced the analog knob and button on TV with remote and it uses Dish antenna instead of earlier Aluminum Antenna (Yagi-Uda antenna). It also went Digital from analog reception and a lot more. I bet almost all of the kids and many young ones may have not seen the TV with analog knob to change the channels and adjust settings. 

In spite of the threat from the invention and revolution of Internet in our life, TV never went out of fashion. Even today it is an inseparable part of our household thing and is treated more like a family member. If for one day, your TV goes off, we all fall sick for it, right? 

As every coin has two sides, TV too has it other side; of all the good things about TV it has never earned a good reputation. In fact, it is popularly known as ‘Idiot Box’ because it is something which makes you an Idiot and not because you have complete control on it. If you consider TV as your friend then it is betraying you, if you think TV as your brother then it will destroy your originality and your culture, if you think TV as your son then it is just going to make you sick.

You may have read this somewhere on the internet or in some magazine, where a primary school teacher asks her students to write about what they would like God to do for them. When the teacher started correcting their essays for what they have written, she came across one beautiful essay which made her cry. A student requested God to make him like a TV in his house so his family is always around him and take him seriously. He wanted to be the center of attraction and be heard by everyone without any interruptions. To receive same care when it is not working and have company of dad when he arrives home from work. He further request, that he wants his mom to want him when she is upset or sad and leave everything aside, every now and then and just spend some time with him. His last line was, “Lord I don't ask you for much.... I just want to live like every TV”. Indeed, every child must want to be like TV.

Sarcastically, it is been rightly said “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book” by Groucho Marx. TV has very limited use in our day to day life. But we have given it much importance than it deserve. It is not meant to watch for the whole day. We see in many houses that they keep their TV sets on for the complete day and will mute only when they don’t feel like watching it. They will switch on their TV early in the morning at 7 or 8 a.m. to hear their religious guru’s speech or some yoga. Then they will watch news (the same news which they have seen the previous night) for an hour or two. After that their regular soaps start coming on TV and they will watch it till afternoon doing their household things alongside in the break. And in the evening they will watch some movie or any Reality show and then news channel till they go to sleep. For such people their world is limited to just to four walls of their house. Was TV invented for that? May be not, at least I will say that.

All the time that we spend on TV is huge which will never back us at any point of our life. We don’t know how much TV we have watched over the years but we have only filled ourselves with noise which only produces unwanted output in our life. Time is very precious and one should never waste it on TV where no one cares what happening on reality TV, when reality is being missed out by us outside the TV. The world outside is growing very fast and you won’t even realize that you wasted all your life working hard and watching TV. Our time is meant for our family members, our kids and the world around us.

As I earlier said TV has very limited use. It should be watched for some good sports or any event coming live which we can’t go and see at venue. It should be watched for some breaking news or for some new movies which you feel like worth watching it. Other than this if you like certain channels or programs which you feel that it will help you to enhance your knowledge then you should go for it and watch. But remember one thing which I feel that “nobody has gained knowledge from TV, it just whitewash your brain”. Knowledge is gained in the open world where you explore the world by yourself in the practical world. In Robin Sharma's words "Stop watching TV. (Bonus points: sell your tv and invest the cash in learning and self-education)."

Now, you must be feeling that what about the entertainment part of TV. Well I just have to say that if you switch off your TV you will have more time to entertain yourself and others too. If you are really fond of watching soaps on TV then try reading novels and other books. All Television stuffs are adopted or inspired by some novels or books. They have much information and a lot more interesting stories than the daily soaps. If you are watching the same news again and again on TV then try reading newspaper. Even if you read only the headline you are bound to become one of the most intelligent, caring and responsible person towards society and the country.

It is been rightly said that “if you read too much books you are called good reader but if you watch too much TV you are not called good viewer”. So, it’s time for all of us to act smarter and not get fooled by the IDIOT BOX. We are human beings and TV can’t control us. Use the extra time for sharing happiness with your family, friends and relatives. Explore the creative part of you and try all the things which you always wanted to do one day.