Writing a blog every day means at the end of the year, it comes down to 365 days and 365 blogs… And amongst all of those blogs, writing about life, mindset, self-improvement, point-of-view of looking at certain things, every now and then, a particular blog stands out from the rest. Through this post, I want to highlight a few of those
So, here are my top 15 blog-posts of 2022 –
1. Our Sources of Imitation (Part 1)
We are beings of imitation, the trait is rooted within us and we are born with it. Everything that we admire, we try to imitate. Right from when we see someone walking, as an infant, we imitate walking as well. When we see someone read or write something, we try to imitate that as well.
While these are instances from our childhood and are bigger but necessary forms of imitation, as we grow up, the inspiration of imitations becomes narrower…Read more here.
You are the Average of the Five People you spend time with (Part 2)
While we can be mesmerized by anyone, online or offline, and try to imitate any one of their traits or their life wholly, we may have also heard of the following quote quite a few times already in our lifetime, “You are the Average of the Five People you spend time with”. We read the quote, but did we ever understand what it meant? Read more here.
Choosing the Five People to spend time with (Part 3)
Going into the depth of this topic, it is we who choose the five people around us, whom we spend the most time with. But do we always choose? Most times, by subconscious design or by nature, the constant five or more people get attached to us, maybe altogether or maybe individually, and as more time is spent, gradually we tend to imitate those individuals more. Read more here.
2. Are you jealous of something/ someone? (Part 1)
It’s undeniably too good to be true to say you haven’t been jealous in life. Why is that so? Because from the time we are born, and as we grow, we are either compared to someone else’s life, in any of the categories possible (academics/ looks/ materialistic things/ quality of life etc) or brought down for not having what someone else has.
While the factor of jealousy increases over time and its roots grow from within, its sources are always exterior, early on in life. Read more here.
What can one be truly jealous of? (Part 2)
As you grow mentally, you realize the realities of insecurities (a source of jealousy) and emotions attached to those insecurities, and by working upon them, you can get rid of many of these, but that doesn’t mean that jealousy is all bad.
While its feeling is bad in most circumstances, if moulded properly, and while this may surprise the reader, jealousy can be used by you for good as well. Read more here.
3. Impressions Fade Away, Values Stay
There’s always an underlying thought in our mind of how other people – whether the close ones or strangers – are judging us or how much are they rightly or wrongly understanding us?
This is where the concept of first impressions comes in… People focus on how they dress and how they speak, they work on their presentations, they work on their style, they study the other individual/s, with the ultimate objective of impressing them.
Irrespective of the type of relationship being spoken about… It is approached with the concept of that first impression, but ultimately, those impressions fade away. Read more here.
4. Should you have an opinion?
Every other topic is trending, and usually, whenever you enter that conversation, you’ll see people of different age groups, different ethnicities, etc sharing their opinions on these particular topics. Some will agree, some will shower their support, and some will debate/ argue/ troll and whatnot.
Moreover, when you carefully observe these scenarios, you’ll notice that most times, individuals don’t even have the entire information on a particular topic and yet share their opinions on it – those opinions root from their associative opinions on different topics, or from peer pressure, or just simply to fit in. Read more here.
5. The one thing that is not said about diets
When you look back at hundreds of years, and with everything that the industrial revolution changed, the bottom baseline remains the same – you need to understand the ingredients that you’re putting in your body.
With that being the holy truth of the industry, there are a few things that people who follow diets don’t realize or aren’t told in the first place… Read more here.
6. Hacking vs Optimising
If you have scrolled through any of the social platforms, you’d have come across the term, “hacks” or “hacking” with special respect to the mind or the body, or going deeper, the mood/ the emotions.
“5 Hacks to Change your Mood immediately”
“10 Hacks to Improve Your Life”
“3 Hacks to Start Becoming Happy Today”
and so on, the never-ending list. Read more here.
7. The What, Why, and How of Judgments
No one wants to take the stand or start asking questions, understanding the fundamentals of these “rules” and “norms”. If someone is externally doing better, then we’ll start comparing them with ourselves… If someone is doing something different from us, then we’ll start judging them… If something is doing better at something that we desire, then we’ll become jealous of them.
All of this eventually originates from the lens through which we see the world… Read more here.
8. What can you do to mentally relax?
When do you get the break? When are you able to mentally relax? Is a physical vacation, being on a beach or the mountains, a solution to that? While the answer to the first two questions is solvable or rather, practicable with the solution at hand, the answer to the third question is a definite no.
Irrespective of whether that voice in your head is a supportive one or not, and whether your perspective is healthy or not, the chatter continues at its pace.
But, there are a few things that can be done to limit its supply, to direct the flow, to have the ability to mentally relax for a while… Read more here.
9. The cost of a third choice
You have two choices, A or B.
You must make a decision and choose one.
So now you weigh the pros and cons, or the advantages and disadvantages, or however else you’d like to compare the two choices.
But, now you’re in a conundrum. You cannot decide. You like A. You like B. It all seems difficult now.
In order to lessen the confusion, you think, “How about a third choice?” Read more here.
10. The urge to show-off
You have probably met someone who constantly shows off their materialistic wealth, don’t you? This individual would, even without a discussion on that topic, start sharing about what they have, what they own, what is their overall or a particular item’s financial worth, basically anything that has been accumulated on their own or because of their family wealth. Read more here.
11. Our thoughts root from 5 categories
All our thoughts root from somewhere. There’s an origin to everything, and that applies to our thoughts as well.
Right from the moment we are born, we are collecting information (now we may not remember everything is not of concern). These origins break down into 5 categories. Read more here.
12. The mindful execution of bad habits
The blend of mindful execution and bad habits immediately strikes us as something in two opposing directions because we have heard those terms in very different scenarios and here we are mixing the two.
In a phase of working upon yourself and working upon your growth, and only approaching this topic from that lens, where do the bad habits come into the picture? Read more here.
13. Feel the Negative, Appreciate the Positive
When you’re a hardcore fan of a food item and you have eaten it thousands of times, that one time when you try out one that’s not made properly, you not only criticize that particular experience, but you also start appreciating the other good times when you have had it and enjoyed it. Read more here.
14. Awareness is not equal to Learning or Unlearning (Part 1)
On that path, there is a lot that has to be learned, when you acquire this knowledge for the first time, and start to utilize it for yourself. There is also a lot that has to be unlearned.
Here’s the twist. Just being aware of something doesn’t equate to learning or unlearning anything. Two paths, whilst parallel to each other, are different paths, where you must walk on one to walk on the other. Read more here.
Step Three is the Actual Execution (Part 2)
While becoming aware of something (usually for the first time) is step one of the process towards change/ towards becoming a new you, towards improving yourself, and while the process of learning or unlearning entails step two, the actual execution of step two in practical terms becomes step three of the process. Read more here.
15. Why Me?
There are various moments in our life when we ask the question – Why Me? and most times that question doesn’t pop up in a positive context, but rather in a negative context.
Why Me?
Why is this happening to me?
Why do I have to face this?
On the opposite end of that perspective lies several other perspectives. Read more here.
RTH24 