Hey guys welcome back! I hope you enjoyed doing last week’s activity. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I strongly suggest you to do it! It’s very important! Anyways, before we went into our further topics, I wanted to share with you a small method that would be very helpful to understand the topics that we discuss and actually apply whatever we talk about here. Also this might help you to solve the problems you encounter on a daily basis. So here we go.

Progress!

We all want to make progress in our life. Someone wants to make progress at work, someone wants to be a better football player, someone wants to be spiritually awake, someone wants to have better relationships and so on. Life throws several challenges at us and we have to find out our way out of them. These challenges become more and more difficult as you move forward, just like some video game. For this, even your Problem Solving skills need progress.

With so much going on in life, you can understand people’s obsession with moving forward. But we often forget to implement the right methods, and more importantly be in a right mindset whenever we encounter a challenge. People tend to use shortcuts or try to get the responsibility off their shoulders. Progress requires patience, hard work, dedication and most importantly time. Every challenge has a unique solution. Maybe some of you are better at finding those solutions than I am. I’m not here to talk about solutions actually. I’m here to talk about the process and the mindset that leads to it.

The Four A’s of Progress

This is my personal mantra for Progress. It helps you to be in the right mindset not just when you come across a challenge, but on a daily basis too. Life throws one challenge after another at you. You decide whether you sit and cry, or look at it as an opportunity to learn and grow. If you have the right mindset, you’ll start making progress at a speed you’ve never seen before.

These four words might sound random, but they have a deeper meaning. They’re actually a part of a process that will help you be more mindful, in control of yourself and face the situations you encounter with efficiency. Let’s talk about them in detail.

1. Awareness: There are several problems within and without. Both deserve equal attention and work. Problems in the outside world are quite noticeable, but we are oblivious to the problems going on inside us. Many a times, our inner problems actually affect what’s going on around us! Problems related to our Emotions, Thoughts, Memories etc. which continue to affect our life unconsciously. Hence the first step of bringing them to our awareness becomes extremely important. How will you solve a problem if you don’t even know that it exists? Awareness also refers to knowing which issue needs our attention and some work.
2. Acceptance: I think this is a very important step. Many a times, even after being aware about an issue we refuse to work on it. In real environments, it might look like this, “I know cigarettes are harmful but I’m still going to smoke.” In cases where the issue is within, it looks like this, “I never get angry. I’m never wrong.” If people are aware of the problem, but are not ready to accept it, they will never make progress. Acceptance refers to taking responsibility for your thoughts and actions and holding yourself accountable. It also refers to a deeper understanding of self. Don’t confuse accepting a situation with surrendering to it.
3. Assessment: Assessing is opening your mind and your eyes to understand the situation. To see it from an unbiased perspective. In simple words, looking at the situation as it is and not how you want it to be. It also means learning from it. Once you have accepted your issue, you also have to embrace the learning that comes with it. “Every problem is an opportunity that just hasn’t presented itself.” There is always something to learn from the situation you are in, and you’ll miss it if you don’t open your mind to it.
4. Accomplishment: This step is about the integration of your learnings and your efforts. Use all the things you learnt to find a solution to your problem. Your awareness, willingness and efforts all combine to give your issue a conclusion. But this step doesn’t make much sense if you don’t follow the steps that come before it. And that’s actually what most people do. They try to skip to accomplishment, and they fail miserably. Accomplishment also requires you to thankful to the problem for all the wisdom it provided.

This is a continuous process. You go back to the first ‘A’ after completing the last one. New issues will keep arising and they will bring opportunities and wisdom with them. Its your job to make good use of them. Actual progress requires you to apply all 4 A’s in your life. You skip even one of them, you’ll go back to square one. Sometimes skipping to Accomplishment might even look like success, but unless you learn from the problem and apply your learning in your life, the same problem will pop up in different ways.

Once you embrace this mindset, problem solving will become much more fun and juicy. Problems will bring along fear or sadness which will be momentary, but they’ll leave you with happiness and satisfaction that’s long lasting. From my personal experience, all my “Negative” experiences in life taught me a lot. I won’t even try to change them even if I’m given a chance to do so. If I do that, I’ll lose all the wisdom I received from them. It actually makes me very happy that I encountered them.

There was a specific reason that this topic was chosen today. From now on we’ll be exploring Emotions, Values, Behaviors and Habits in detail. To actually learn from what we discuss, you will have to apply the four A’s. There are several issues that we experience related to all the factors which make up our identity. What we talked about today becomes very important if you actually want to do some self work and come out as a different person after we discuss them.

I’m attaching a little guide for you that’ll assist you in implementing what we learned today. I hope that today’s post was interesting for you! Do check out the guide, I’m sure you’ll find it helpful. See you all next week!

Love, Ninad.