Live Responsibly

Three key ingredients for living an Intentional life.

Life could be either joyous, fulfilling and meaningful or it could be dull boring hopeless filled with unhappiness and disappointments.

The difference lies in the choices we make and how we take charge of our life.

We create our own world with our thoughts, feelings, and actions.We have our own internal frame of reference, our day to day interaction with outside world is solely based on our own thinking and self created world we live in.

Our brain responds to thousands of stimuli every day, we give a meaning to all stimuli based on our emotions, our prior experience and our belief system, which in turn dictates our behavior and action to the world.We operates from this internal frame of reference.We create our own movie in our head.

Our brain needs. Choices, Control and Clarity to function in a meaningful way.

Choices

First and foremost we need to make a choice to live responsibly.

With choices, we feel more in control, in a driver seat. Making a choice is the message to our brain that we are ready to begin our journey.It increases energy levels, heighten our intelligence and improves our creativity.

When we don’t have a choice, helplessness sets in, we become a victim, outside forces takes over our lives and we starts giving up, creativity and higher intelligence shuts down.Life without an option is hopeless, helpless and pathetic.

Life is full of choices-Sunil Desai

Control

Being in control is essential to our life and existence.Our brain need to be in control of the situation, brain feels at ease and feels less threatened. Feeling in control often manages our behavior to a more positive state.A sense of control brings on the neurochemistry of pleasure , chemical like dopamine serotonin and oxytocin gets secreted. It is a positive,rewarding feeling, most essential for proper functioning and wellbeing of a brain.

Lack of control is interpreted as hopelessness and helplessness, brain tends to shut down, threat and stress hormones like Adrenalin and Cortisol comes in play, we feel like victim, brain operates in constricted mode ,thinking becomes narrowed down, gets foggy and clouded,it impairs learning and memory. It depletes energy ; fatigue, apathy and immobilization sets in.

There are two types of control, psychologist call them a “Locus Of control”.

• Internal locus of control- when we believe that we have control over what happens to us, we are responsible for our thoughts , feeling and action. We are in charge of what happens to us.Its more self directed.
• External locus of control- when we believe that we have no control over what happens and that external variables are to be blame.We tend to blame circumstances or other people for failures in our life. Blaming gives away the control and makes you a Victim.

To live responsibly one need to have Internal locus of control.

Clarity

Seeing clearly with your mind’s eye is essential.See what we need to see and not what we want to see.

Thinking is higher function of mind.Its an active process.

Brain receives the stimuli form outside world, based on our belief system, our emotions and how our brain is wired we interpret the events and responds with our actions and behavior. We create our own movie in our head.Our interpretation are not the reality out there , its not what is actually happening out there.We create our own version in our head , which is different for different people. Reality just exists.

Mind does not know what eyes sees.-Sunil Desai

Conscious awareness is seeing the things as they are and not get carried away with our own interpretion. We make errors in interpreting events based on our prior experience, our wiring of brain, our belief system and our biases.We become judgmental, we generalized the events, we make certain assumptions, we become mind reader, we ignore facts based on our feeling, we magnify irrelevant minor things or disqualify important facts. Sometimes we are not confortable with what we see.These errors in judgement can lead to disastrous outcome.

Master your emotions try to understand the origin of the good and bad emotions and try to filter the events by removing emotions and personal biases, and see what’s happening.Widen your mind’s eye aperture and see the reality.

We can obtain mastery over interpretion of events.Awareness and clarity helps understating this process.We can take charge of our emotion, thoughts and action.