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How can we win ourselves?

When you look at the title, you might have thought that, winning is about, winning a position, money, respect, winning friends, winning people, some tangible outcome, but what is it all about ‘winning ourselves’.

Let's try to understand it one by one.

What do we understand by interference? Is this something which unnecessarily involves or meddles in our success? This could be the general thought of interference.

How do we understand the meaning of interference with regards to our growth and success? The interferences can be hurdles, which we come across. Basically, there are two kinds of interferences- Internal and External.

Below are examples of internal and external interferences (Self-discovery- CLF):

Internal interferences:

External interferences:

Ignorance

Poor education

Negligence

Poverty

Anxiety

No guidance

Stress

Lack of family understanding and support

Lack of faith

Political instability

Grudges and jealousy

Lack of finance

 Internal interference is what is in our control and we can overcome if we really try on it. The external interference are things or situations which are not in our control. The internal interferences are mainly factors like our ego which can affect our performance and relationship. Other few aspects such as fear, anxiety, temper, stress, being jealous, not having faith in oneself etc.

The interferences make us much more awaken in the topics to understand the world and ourselves in a new way.

How does 'ego' which is a very impactful interference, affect us.

With ego, we lose touch with reality, and we miss opportunities — to improve, to connect with others, and to achieve our goals.

 “If the ego is the voice that tells us we're better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us”.

To get over on the external interferences we should understand our internal interferences well. And we can work on internal interferences completely, as this is in our hands.

For example:

Lack of poverty, No Guidance or No Financial support, for this external interferences we can fight and win by ourselves by building our internal interference like Laziness, narrow-minded, Negative mind etc.

So instead of stopping ourselves with a belief and thought of ‘no financial support’, we can think broadly and work hard and create opportunities and make money and capability and erase this interference of poverty in mind. We here learn how our internal interferences stop us from growing if we don’t overcome it. And for that, firstly realization of our internal weakness and threat is a must.

Ego plays a dual role in our life it has both positive and negative impacts. This is a very important aspect to understand and ponder, the term ‘ego’.

Example: Positive side- When ego says you are right, it makes us believe ourselves and move forward to our success when on doubtful step.

Negative side- When ego says ‘only I am right’, we may take the wrong step/decisions, and not consider the overall picture.

Image source: 

We are always interdependent and connected with others:

Many a time we try to satisfy others from our outcomes. When the outcome of our work will be dependent on another person’s opinion, that is when we have stopped focusing on our aim but we are more into impressing others. It is important to listen and understand others’ opinion and feelings, but at the same time we need to be focused on what we actually want to achieve

Other aspects that help us in life to succeed can be being positive about situations. We need to understand that everything can't be perfect. We should give space for mistakes of ourselves and others. We should learn to accept the flaws within us and others. We should learn to be adaptive to situations which appear suddenly without prior notice

Everything around us won't be as we expect it to be. We should change the attitude of blaming others for things that go against our expectations. Confidence in oneself is good but it shouldn't turn into overconfidence. When we become overconfident, we lose the ability to handle negative situations. We always expect things to be perfect. We won’t be able to handle failure. That is the extreme part of the ego, where we think our self to be right in every situation

We make an opinion about ourselves to be perfect and don't wish anyone to find mistakes in us. We become arrogant with people who have a different opinion. Our focus will only be on showcasing ourselves to be perfect. When we become self-centred, slowly we lose out with the communication with surrounding people, we become less connected.

What happens when we get disconnected? Example: We fail to share our ideas in many instances and that might lead to external interference like lack of funding for our ideas or something else.

Thus it's very important to be connected to people around us. Not just to share our problems and ideas but also to understand their feelings. In other words to activate our EI (Emotional intelligence).

These aspects bring us closer to a few important facets of our character, Personal, Social and Religious values we inherit.

I will conclude by summarizing how can we deal with internal interferences. The internal interferences are there in every one of us, nobody is perfect. The action we can take is, first of all, understanding our interferences and looking at ways to practically break them into units and see how each unit is impacting in our day to day affairs (SWOT). And the next step is accepting, wherever we need to improve upon. And further looking for ways to polishing ourselves so that we come out of interferences one by one gradually. And as we discussed above, once the internal interferences are in our control, it will, directly and indirectly, influence our external interferences in the effect that our external interferences can be controlled.

Further reading: Why “Ego is the Enemy,” and what we can do about it.

The above writing is organised from a group discussion transcript of ‘Self Discovery’ course (Day 4) of Credence Learning Foundation. For more information mail us at- reach.clf@gmail.com

I thank our Batch 2 members for this wonderful group discussion.

If you would like to support our work 

Please contact +91-9742708717 Or +91-9916 7777 53 

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