Ankita Samaddar: Self Development

Showing posts with label Self Development. Show all posts

Sunday, 16 August 2020

Best Self Development and Self Help Books in India

Wednesday, 12 August 2020

What does true friendship mean to you?

Sometimes in life, you find a special friend. Someone who changes your life just by being part of it. Someone who makes you laugh until you can’t stop. Someone who makes you believe that there really is good in the world. Someone who convinces you that there really is an unlocked door just waiting for you to open it. This is forever friendship. When you’re down and the world seems dark and empty, your forever friend lifts you up in spirit and makes that dark and empty world suddenly seem bright and full. Your forever friend gets you through the hard times, the sad times and the confused times. If you turn and walk away, your forever friend follows. If you lose your way, your forever friend guides you and cheers you on. Your forever friend hold your hand and tells you that everything is going to be okay. And if you find such a friend, you feel happy and complete because you need not worry. You have a forever friend, and forever has no end.

Sunday, 3 May 2020

This Visual Personality Test Reveals Your Secret Relationship Needs

What do you really need from a relationship?

Take this visual personality test to find out exactly what you need from your relationship to feel more connected to your romantic partner.

Taking a fun visual personality test based on optical illusions can reveal certain hidden aspects of your needs and make you realize what will make you feel truly connected with your partner.

“WHAT YOU NEED AND WHAT YOU WANT AREN’T THE SAME THINGS.” – CHERISE SINCLAIR

All of us have certain expectations and wants that we feel our partner should meet. But we also have some unique needs that enable us to feel closer to our partner and invest ourselves completely into the relationship. Taking this optical illusion test can not only make you understand what you want from love & relationships, it can make a whole lot of difference to your life.

What do you actually need?

Love is one of the most magical feelings we can experience and it can be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy for us. We all have certain mental and emotional needs which we crave in a relationship. When these needs are met, we feel loved, appreciated, valued and desired. Our needs can help a great deal in boosting our mental and emotional well being. Although some of these needs may be obvious, most of them can be harder to identify.

Understanding what you need from your partner will not only improve your bonding and relationship, but it will significantly enhance the quality of your life. In any loving, romantic relationship, we all want to feel –

Loved
Appreciated
Respected
Sexually desired
Independent
Trusted
Protected
Secure
Seen
Heard
Allowed to be nurtured
Reliable

These are some of the basic requirements of any healthy romantic relationship. But is this all you need? Do you still feel something is missing? Is there something more that can make you feel complete in the relationship? Yes. There’s more. There are certain hidden desires and needs which we may not be consciously aware of at present.

Needs make relationships happier

We are born with some specific needs that are unique to each one of us. When we are in a relationship, there are a myriad of needs and it can be difficult to understand each and every one of them. However, when these needs are met, it elevates our human experience and makes our lives seem a lot happier and worthwhile. A properly designed visual personality test can help you understand exactly what you’re missing in your relationship.

We all want to feel happy in life and being in love can help us get a few steps closer. Apart from our natural instinct to fall in love, there are certain wants, desires and needs associated with a loving, healthy relationship which can be beneficial on a psychological, emotional and spiritual level. When we struggle to realize exactly what we want from a relationship, life can become a lot more complicated unnecessarily.

This is why our visual personality test is the perfect solution that you ‘need’ right now to get some much-needed clarity on your relationship needs. Our fun relationship needs test will uncover certain personality traits that determine your attitude and behavior towards your relationship. The accurate results of this optical illusion test will not only help you understand yourself better, but get some clarity about exactly what you crave for from your loving partner.

Take this visual personality test

“WOMEN RARELY NEED THE THINGS THEY WANT.” – ALESSANDRA TORRE

The optical illusion test below will help you understand your precise relationship needs accurately without leaving any scope for guesswork. Simply look at the picture below and observe what particular image you notice first. Once you have your answer, check out the interpretation of what that particular image you saw first reveals about your need in love & relationships.

Check out this image below:

Wednesday, 15 April 2020

I have learned many things in my life. Here are four things I would like to teach the world:

Attitude is everything

10% of your life consists of things you willed or brought about. Don't sweat that small stuff. 90% is all that you cannot control, the stuff that just happens to you. How will you deal with those things? How will you react? What will you learn? The key to these questions is the attitude. That's great news, in a way.

No matter your level of formal education, no matter how far you think you got in your life with your career or relationships. None of these things (the 10%, remember?) matter if you have not fostered three most important attitudes. Both can be infinitely scaled. Their power is limitless if you learn how to attend to them.

First is gratitude, the attitude directed towards appreciating anything and anyone. The ability to assign a value to something that others overlook. The deep, bottomless wellspring of being thankful for your health, your family, your job, anything. This is the secret to true richness. It never runs out. And best: it is not a scarce resource, unlike any other resource in the world.

Always return kindness

You may wonder if this is not just one of those values I talked about above, and I would tend to agree if it were not for the fact that kindness is not just a value. It is something so enormously important I would place it in a category of its own. Whatever your values, whatever you do with yourself, never forget to be kind.

Let me rephrase this since we all forget a lot of the time (we are human): try not to forget, and when you eventually do, make it up by returning to kindness. Don't ask why. If you have to the reason is this: because it's the right thing to do.

Humility

Second is levity or humility, the attitude of not taking yourself too seriously. Never forget where you came from. Never forget what you are: just human. No matter how high you fly or how low you fall, it all just seems so much easier if you tread lightly if you remember not to take yourself and those many projects of yours too important to the point of agonizing about them.

It is fine to strive and seek. But this too shall pass. Don't forget that in your darkest hour and it will set you free.

Resilience

Resilience is the attitude to weather anything from the gentlest breeze to the strongest gale threatening to derail or break you on your journey. Some call it growing a thick skin, a tough hide, robustness or fortitude. No matter what you call it, foster it because you have no idea what people are capable of surviving.

The world is not necessarily cruel by definition, but it can be cruel by ignorance, by the apathy of nature, by forces so large they can toss you around like a speck of dust to make you know your place in the scheme of things. Those times can hurt. A lot.

I wouldn't lie as you will likely have your fair share of hurt even if you did nothing to deserve it. For those times, I wish for you to have the resilience to suck it up and then get back to work.

Saturday, 7 December 2019

Gandhi's 10 Rules for Changing the World that everybody needs to follow

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

--Mahatma Gandhi

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

Mahatma Gandhi needs no long introduction. Everyone knows about the man who lead the Indian people to independence from British rule in 1947.

So let’s just move on to some of my favourite tips from Mahatma Gandhi.

1. Change yourself.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”

If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take. And so the world around you will change. Not only because you are now viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn’t have – or maybe even have thought about – while stuck in your old thought patterns.

And the problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you will still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You will still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact.

And so in this new situation you will still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

2. You are in control.

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

What you feel and how you react to something is always up to you. There may be a “normal” or a common way to react to different things. But that’s mostly just all it is.

You can choose your own thoughts, reactions and emotions to pretty much everything. You don’t have to freak out, overreact of even react in a negative way. Perhaps not every time or instantly. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction just goes off. Or an old thought habit kicks in.

And as you realize that no-one outside of yourself can actually control how you feel you can start to incorporate this thinking into your daily life and develop it as a thought habit. A habit that you can grow stronger and stronger over time. Doing this makes life a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

3. Forgive and let it go.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

Fighting evil with evil won’t help anyone. And as said in the previous tip, you always choose how to react to something. When you can incorporate such a thought habit more and more into your life then you can react in a way that is more useful to you and others.

You realize that forgiving and letting go of the past will do you and the people in your world a great service. And spending your time in some negative memory won’t help you after you have learned the lessons you can learn from that experience. You’ll probably just cause yourself more suffering and paralyze yourself from taking action in this present moment.

If you don’t forgive then you let the past and another person to control how you feel. By forgiving you release yourself from those bonds. And then you can focus totally on, for instance, the next point.

4. Without action you aren’t going anywhere.

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

Without taking action very little will be done. However, taking action can be hard and difficult. There can be much inner resistance.

And so you may resort to preaching, as Gandhi says. Or reading and studying endlessly. And feeling like you are moving forward. But getting little or no practical results in real life.

So, to really get where you want to go and to really understand yourself and your world you need to practice. Books can mostly just bring you knowledge. You have to take action and translate that knowledge into results and understanding.

5. Take care of this moment.

“I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”

The best way that I have found to overcome the inner resistance that often stops us from taking action is to stay in the present as much as possible and to be accepting.

Why? Well, when you are in the present moment you don’t worry about the next moment that you can’t control anyway. And the resistance to action that comes from you imagining negative future consequences – or reflecting on past failures – of your actions loses its power. And so it becomes easier to both take action and to keep your focus on this moment and perform better.

Remember that reconnecting with and staying in the now is a mental habit – a sort of muscle – that you grow. Over time it becomes more powerful and makes it easier to slip into the present moment.

6. Everyone is a human.

“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”

When you start to make myths out of people – even though they may have produced extraordinary results – you run the risk of becoming disconnected from them. You can start to feel like you could never achieve similar things that they did because they are so very different. So it’s important to keep in mind that everyone is just a human being no matter who they are.

And I think it’s important to remember that we are all human and prone to make mistakes. Holding people to unreasonable standards will only create more unnecessary conflicts in your world and negativity within you.

It’s also important to remember this to avoid falling into the pretty useless habit of beating yourself up over mistakes that you have made. And instead be able to see with clarity where you went wrong and what you can learn from your mistake. And then try again.

7. Persist.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Be persistent. In time the opposition around you will fade and fall away. And your inner resistance and self-sabotaging tendencies that want to hold you back and keep you like you have always been will grow weaker.

Find what you really like to do. Then you’ll find the inner motivation to keep going, going and going.

One reason Gandhi was so successful with his method of non-violence was because he and his followers were so persistent. They just didn’t give up.

Success or victory will seldom come as quickly as you would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons people don’t get what they want is simply because they give up too soon. The time they think an achievement will require isn’t the same amount of time it usually takes to achieve that goal. This faulty belief partly comes from the world we live in. A world full of magic pill solutions where advertising continually promises us that we can lose a lot of weight or earn a ton of money in just 30 days.

Finally, one useful tip to keep your persistence going is to listen to Gandhi’s third quote in this article and keep a sense of humor. It can lighten things up at the toughest of times.

8. See the good in people and help them.

“I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”

“Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.”

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

There is pretty much always something good in people. And things that may not be so good. But you can choose what things to focus on. And if you want improvement then focusing on the good in people is a useful choice. It also makes life easier for you as your world and relationships become more pleasant and positive.

And when you see the good in people it becomes easier to motivate yourself to be of service to them. By being of service to other people, by giving them value you not only make their lives better. Over time you tend to get what you give. And the people you help may feel more inclined to help other people. And so you, together, create an upward spiral of positive change that grows and becomes stronger.

By strengthening your social skills you can become a more influential person and make this upward spiral even stronger.

9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”

I think that one of the best tips for improving your social skills is to behave in a congruent manner and communicate in an authentic way. People seem to really like authentic communication. And there is much inner enjoyment to be found when your thoughts, words and actions are aligned. You feel powerful and good about yourself.

When words and thoughts are aligned then that shows through in your communication. Because now you have your voice tonality and body language – some say they are over 90 percent of communication – in alignment with your words.

With these channels in alignment people tend to really listen to what you’re saying. You are communicating without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness.

Also, if your actions aren’t in alignment with what you’re communicating then you start to hurt your own belief in what you can do. And other people’s belief in you too.

10. Continue to grow and evolve.

“Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”

You can pretty much always improve your skills, habits or re-evaluate your evaluations. You can gain deeper understanding of yourself and the world.

Sure, you may look inconsistent or like you don’t know what you are doing from time to time. You may have trouble to act congruently or to communicate authentically. But if you don’t then you will, as Gandhi says, drive yourself into a false position. A place where you try to uphold or cling to your old views to appear consistent while you realise within that something is wrong. It’s not a fun place to be. To choose to grow and evolve is a happier and more useful path to take.

Thursday, 18 April 2019

How Buddha brought a dead person back to life?

An old frail woman crying on the top of her voice came running towards the hermitage of Buddha. She was wailing and shouting, calling out the name of the wisest man of the village. In a moment Buddha came out to address her.

Old woman: I am devastated! My life has turned upside down! You have to do something for me.

Buddha: Tell me in exact detail, what happened?

Old woman: My Young child has died of an unexpected disease. He was the bread earner of the house, I'm alone and old now, why did this happen to me?

Buddha made her sit and eat food. Then he asked her what she wanted of him.

Old woman: I have heard that you are the enlightened. They say you are the lord. I will only accept your prowess if you bring my child back to life.

For a moment Buddha remained silent. Then he spoke -

Buddha: I will do as you say. I will bring your dead child back to life. But you will have to do something in return for me.

Old woman: I’ll do anything.

Buddha: I need the record of the number of deaths in the village in each house. So from today you will go to each house and find a house where nobody has died till now. Find me such a house, i’ll resurrect your son. My disciples will take care of you till then.

She leaves the place in a hurry. Everyday she goes to houses and inquires about any death that has happened there. To her dismay every time she ends up hearing a sad story about a past death that happened there. Months pass, she has now been to every house, heard a lot of sad stories and deaths. Finally she comes back to Buddha empty handed.

There Buddha makes her to sit and teaches her that death is inevitable part of life. That one should not hold on to this sorrow. It should not make us stop living. Everyday people die and get born. One should get on with living no matter what.

The woman understands the point. She accepts her child's death and agrees to move forward. But then she asks Buddha one final question -

“Why did you not tell me this wisdom when I first came?”

To which Buddha says - “When you came here I saw you were troubled. No logic or wisdom would have appealed to you. No point explaining anything to you. You were suicidal, had no purpose to live. So I guided you to a teacher more senior than I - Experience. Looking at others sorrows made you humble. Now you have a purpose to live. Now you are in a state to understand me.”

Assigning her work to do and feeding her in return, Buddha gave the old woman a purpose to live. Thus bringing a dead person back to life.

Thursday, 21 July 2016

What is better the truth even if it hurts, or a lie?

Telling the truth is always the right thing to do even if you think the other person will hate you but then they’ll eventually know the truth. Telling the truth is about being honest to yourself and others. It will always be unpleasant to tell the truth to another person and even when it is someone who you are really close to but you have to think that you are doing the right thing, so let them know! Sometimes it is really hard to make the decision wether to tell the truth or lie to them and make them feel sad about themselves. Mind it one lie turns into the reason behind 100 lies. So better accept whatever it may cause you and tell the truth. I were to do so, then I shall always prefer telling a truth because telling a truth doesn't cause anything but a single lie can even kill a person or it can turn you into a huge trouble then. Thankyousomuch!

Tuesday, 19 July 2016

What should any girl do if she finds herself alone in the company of a strange guy as she prepares to enter a lift in a High Rise apartment late at night?

If the girl requires to reach the 13th floor or so, she should press all the buttons instead for the one she wants to reach. The lift will stop at every floor and in case, no one will dare attacking her in a lift that stops at every floor. If this doesn't works, keep shouting as much as you can, Knock the doors of every room and ask for help. This would surely help you out. At last I would like to advice other girls/womens/ladies to do the same in order to safeguard themselves. Thankyousomuch!