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Friday, July 14, 2017

Going with the flow, at least trying to

There are those days when everything seems to be easy, everything seems to flow. These days, alas, are not very often, at least not as often as we would like them to be. Yet some people seem to be in their 'element', in the flow all the time. Maybe they are, hopefully they are. Being in the flow means to me being in harmony with my mind, body and emotions. Those are the times when you don't need to overthink everything, no need to re-phrase the email 10 times looking for just the correct wording, no need to try very hard to remember the name of the coworker you have worked in the past with, no need to strain the brain muscles for solving rudimentary technical and operational problems of the day, but to just go with it. Go with the flow. Those days you know for a fact that you are going in the right destination, no need to jump up, no need to turn to the sides, but to accept the conditions, and do the best with them.

Other days can we quite the opposite. Not much sleep at night, the traffic is horrible when you leave the house and there is no parking once your reach the destination. The coffee is gone and the A/C unit is failing. Before it is 9am there is a production outage, and the partner teams come to you with urgent requests that all have to be addressed immediately. Meetings get scheduled at conflicting times, the interviewee does not show up and internet connection starts failing around 1pm. By the end of the day your big project gets cancelled and your neighbor calls you at work to alert about water somehow leaking out of your house. 

Well this is a bit of an grim picture. But those days happen to, that is a fact. For the most part, the days are not completely rosy or completely brown (i.e. shitty) it is more about what we make of them and how we think of them. 

I am working on this actively - assume best intentions of the person you are talking to. 

Sometimes it is easy to think that the world is against us, especially on those brown days. Therefore, everyone has conspired to get us. But the fact of life is that everyone else is just as self-centered as we are. Let's agree to at least assume the best intentions to start with. Let's become genuinely interested in other people and try hard see things from their perspective.

I am very thankful for an amazing mentor and coach Maggie Helm for helping me identify what was missing in my flow. Contact her for proactive suggestions how to make sense of things and improve life. The flow. It is my journey to restore it. 

Have a good night. 

P.S. As I looked for pictures of a flow in my photo archive, I found the colorful scarf picture above. It resonated more with how I picture my flow currently than my numerous pictures of rivers and waterfalls. Find your flow. It might not be a river, or a scarf or even anything conventional to associate with, or it might be just this.


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