DARE TO BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAMS
Believe in your life
There must be something you were born for
Search for your purposes
Search for your meaning
Learn from your past
It doesn't ever last
What's remaining in your hands
Are the grains of sands
Don't control your wishes
They have hidden powers
Don't control your desires
They make you who you are
Challenge yourself, dream big
One life, one moment, one day, one chance
Push yourself harder
Trust in yourself and your future
Time will fly, you can never stop it
It will show you where you stand today
If you struggled time will take care
But for results you must prepare
Destiny is changed by those who believe
Who dare to prepare
Who vision to succeed
Who ignite their souls by passion and commitment
Now is the hour,
Now is the time,
Now is the word,
Now is your life
Live, dream, desire, explore
Think, believe, achieve and adore
This moment is yours
No matter who you are
You can change your time
DR PRIYANKA KRISHNAN
HOW THE POWER OF BELIEF CAN TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND
“Living is believing Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense”. — Buddha
My quest for seeking motivation began way back in 1997. I still remember feeling helpless sitting outside ICU Unit of sector 9 Hospital. The Unit was on fifth floor if I remember correctly and we were waiting for my brother’s diagnosis report. He had started loosing weight suddenly and within a month he had lost 20 kilograms. We all had vivid speculations of which the most common being stress because of his 11th standard examination and expectations from family and kin.
Hell did we know what was coming next. There arrived his report and the doctor requested us to call someone elder. After the meeting with the doctor as we were teenagers having no clue that time, I jumped back in our black kinetic Honda and headed back home.
I can never forget that moment in my life ever after reaching home. He and my aunt ( buaji) arrived with rolling tears in their eyes. He came running towards me and hugged so hard that I could barely move. His eyes wet, his grip tight so tight I couldn’t act as if I was frozen. There were no words but complete silence. Nobody said anything. In the evening all family members from distance gathered. I could still not understand what was going on. I was just fourteen and was wearing a pink salwaar suit and my father said Priyanka you have to visit hospital everyday, as you and Gaurav are the only one who knows how to drive. His words pierced my years and the pain was excruciating – words that shook me to the core. Gaurav had been diagnosed with cancer. Third stage and we are taking him to Nagpur for treatment. My soul froze. My mind was jammed. My breathing paled down and my body experienced black out for the first time.
Here I was playing table tennis with him a month before and suddenly I am watching my only best friend, my brother getting prepared for his last journey.
Those visits to hospital made me believe the very truth about life. From fifth floor of ICU when I used to push the ground floor button the last floor was delivery floor. Everyday while I sat in front of ICU some family broke into tears, somebody was loosing their family member and I saw people breaking, the very intensity of emotions and outbreak when you loose someone. My journey of reaching from ground floor to fifth floor was my journey of hope and belief. When I entered that elevator I saw new babies, new mothers and their families smiling with new beginning and in between all this was the extreme opposite: injured patients rushed to trauma unit, burn victims and cardiac patients .
I learned a very important lesson that time, my 10 seconds of elevator taught me that no matter what we collect, we have to leave everything completely and will be born again for a different journey. We all have this life, which is special, but very few of us value it. I always ask this question to myself, “ Why only people who have seen grave things close to death value life more”.
One day when I was sitting beside Gaurav, one young newly married woman arrived on bed, her face was pale and a white breathing tube was wrapping her face. Her eyes were still and her husband was arranging for urination setup. Out of curiosity I asked him what happened and he said; she hung herself and now she is half paralyzed. This was my first encounter with life and death and something in between.
I asked him how long have they been married for and he said 4 months. Everyday I saw her husband sponging her, kissing her, holding her hands and reading motivational books. I asked him again,why do you read books to her when she is in such critical medical condition when she cannot even react. He said one day she will and I don’t want to loose that moment. He said I am trying to save her with words.
Hope, faith & believe, these mere words had a very different meaning to me know. But with these incidents, I could feel their power and understanding in the meaning. I bought my first book by Anthony Robbins – Unlimited Power and started reading it at the age of fifteen.
Belief – My first Introduction on belief happened when I read these lines:-
“Belief! Every religious book on the planet talks about the power and effect of faith and belief on mankind. People, who succeed on a major scale, differ greatly in their beliefs from those who fail. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can, precisely determines what we will be. If we believe in magic, then we’ll live a magical life. If we believe our life is defined by narrow limits, we try to make those limits real. What we believe to be true, what we believe is possible, becomes what is true and what is possible. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting beliefs about whom they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it”. Anthony Robbins
I realised our beliefs make us who we are. I wanted to spend as much quality time with Gaurav because no matter what or how hard we try we will not be able to save him. I learnt that you can study again for exams, get another job, but you can never get your time back with the ones you love. I spent more and more time with him. We lost Gaurav after two months but I believe he is always with me. I never accepted that he left. Believing gives us confidence to strike and achieve. It gives us power to change. Beliefs are the compass and maps that guide us toward our goals and give us the surety to know we’ll get there. Without beliefs or the ability to tap into them, people can be totally disempowered, like a motorboat without a motor or rudder. With powerful guiding beliefs, you have the power to take action and create the world you want to live in. Beliefs help you see what you want and energize you to get it. Events, small or large can help foster beliefs. There are certain events in everyone’s life that they one will never forget. Where were you the day Rajiv Gandhi was killed? If you are old enough to remember it, I’m sure you know some are automatically embossed into the mind. For many people, it was a day that forever altered their lives. In the same way, most of us have experiences that we’ll never forget, instances which had such an impact on us that they were installed into our brains forever. These are the kinds of experiences that form the beliefs that can change our lives. I started taking my life very positively after these incidents in my life.
I still have my childhood memories fresh and crisp on my mind. Morning school bell, punishment for late arrivals, tapori chai and samosas. Like any normal middle class girl I have been through the amazing era of radio and black and white TV at our house. I still remember as a kid my parents used to ask me to do my homework first and allow me permission to watch Doordarshan. Friday rituals were Chitrahaar, Ramayan and Mahabharata, which was a treat. Those were the magical times, the ones who had TV where the champions of the Colony.
From Aakashwani to DD to first email on yahoo and today Facebook and WhatsApp, I had seen it all and I so proudly feel that I am lucky indeed. My journey with motivation began here only. I have faced an era where periods and pads where known as (aunty ji aai hai). When becoming a teacher, doctor or an engineer where the only career choices you were allowed to dream about. Dreaming big was considered a taboo. And a girl dreaming anything less then her marriage was considered not acceptable. My mother recalls, when I was just two years old, I myself entered school near our place without admission. The School principal tried hard to convince me to leave but I was furious and stubborn, you know how two-year-old kids are. So I did my admission myself and never left. I even cried for my uniform and my mother got it stitched, I requested for shoes, socks, pony tail and lot of oil in my hair. Normally other kids cry to leave their house but I left and joined my neighborhood school without any entrance exam. The only skill I had was being adamant.
Other parents plan a lot but I gave my parents no time. My mother even shares I never crawled like other kids. I just started running and banging and falling. Most of the times I had bruises because I really used to run a lot. My parents were very scared and worried about me. My mother always used to say, we are very concerned as you never behave like normal kids. You never bothered that your mom is leaving for office and dad is outstation. Other kids demanded candy and chocolates and I just needed a piece of chalk or a box of chalk and I used to write for hours and hours, the right word is goda-gaadi meaning scribbling. Walls, floors, bedsheets, curtains and everywhere, I just kept scribbling and I knew no alphabets. I went to school and felt like a candy store. When I saw books I felt like cakes. My eyes sparkled in bookstores.
I was a passionate learner. But what was making me do all this? Today I ask my self, Why Chalks and board gave me happiness. Why scribbling on walls gave me peace?
The answer is simple – I was simply happy because my happiness rested in words and Thoughts. I believed that words can change lives.
Belief is what humans do. Our personal beliefs define our choices, shape our lives and collectively determine our futures. Nothing is more important than belief. If you want to change the world, if you want to succeed at work, in the marketplace or in any other social endeavor or organization; belief is your Holy Grail. Take a quick mental run through yesterday morning’s decisions. What brand of toothpaste did you use? Did you drink coffee or tea? Which sweetener did you stir into it? Did you eat breakfast? Paratha or sandwich? Whether your decisions were consciously considered or habitual, they were decisions nonetheless. And you made them because you wanted to—perhaps they were quick or easy or they scratched an itch or validated a previous decision. In any case, you believed, for reasons known or unknown.
I studied human Psychology in my graduation. And that somewhere helped me in learning about people. Here’s a thing, I realised we all love stories in our favorite categories. Storytelling is all the rage in business today. But storytelling is far more than an engaging form of information transfer or an addictive form of entertainment. It’s how we make sense of the world.
The job of the conscious mind is to automatically produce a story to make sense out of our perceptions and reflections. Those stories—or schemas, metaphors and mental models— When we enter that hotel bathroom and see the triangle folded in the toilet tissue, we create a cleanliness story. When Mr. Whipple implores us in a TV ad, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin,” it activates a story of softness. Aishwarya Rai's hair and bright red lipstick evoke a Loreal story. Apple’s elegant and thoughtful packaging conjures up a story of quality and craftsmanship. All stories—heard, read or invented—actively engage our inner lives where we form our own, vivid and personally relevant adaptation.
Did you see the movie Cast Away? Tom Hanks’s character is on a plane that crashes on an island in the South Pacific. He lives there alone for several years. He takes volleyball, paints a face on it, and talks to it constantly. It’s Wilson brand volleyball, and Hanks ends up calling his “friend” Wilson. Without real people to interact with, he had to create someone. We are ultimately social animals, and our desire to connect with others is a strong innate drive. We’re not meant to live alone, and we’ll work hard to be socially accepted. We need to feel that we have a place in the world where we belong. Everyone needs to belong. Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the important effects of belonging on behavior (Walton 2012). In one of his experiments, Walton found that when college students believed they shared a birthday with another student, they were more motivated to complete a task with that student and performed better on the task.
I am a firm believer of goodness in mankind, which sometime upsets my loved ones. But for a person who has seen death, these actions of cheating, betrayal and manipulation just becomes mere act of not countable value. When somebody tells me xyz is jealous of your success or happiness and you must stay away, I feel why to stay away. I am no perfect, I have my sectors of miseries and melancholy and it would never match with anybody else.
Everything happens for a reason and for a purpose. Successful people think that everything happens for a reason and it serves them. They believe that every adversity contains the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. I can guarantee you that, the people who produce outstanding results think this way. Think about it in your own life. There are an infinite number of ways to react to any situation. Let’s say your business fails to get a contract you had counted on, one that you were certain you deserved. Some of us would be hurt and frustrated. We might sit home and mope or go out and get drunk. Some of us would be mad. We might blame the company that awarded the contract, figuring they were a bunch of ignorant individuals. Or we might blame our own people for ruining a sure thing.
How a person deals with the negative situation tells a lot about their ability. Some people don’t appear for exam inspire of having no problems or predicaments in their life. Some don’t visit hospital because of blood phobia or needle phobia. I used to be that person who was dead scared of blood test. I use to run away, hide and cry but slowly I started understanding to go and face the fear blocking me out because of my belief. I feared it so much that I used to believe blood test would kill me. But then I changed my believe system. I started thinking about it as its important aspect for my health.
Many of us have some fear some phobia in our lives. Many people tend to focus on the negative more than the positive. The first step toward changing is to recognize it. Belief in limits creates limited people. The key is to let go of those limitations and operate from a higher set of resources. Belief in failure is a way of poisoning the mind. When we store negative emotions, we affect our physiology, our thinking process, and our state. One of the greatest limitations for most people is their fear of failure. Dr. Robert Schuller, who teaches the concept of possibility thinking, asks a great question: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” Think about it.
Nothing stops or ignites a person desire to succeed. It’s how one believes in achieving or escaping in life. You will act according to your belief system. You will be happy or upset because of your beliefs. Today you choose to decide which path you wish to be in. Winning or losing, choice is yours.
DR PRIYANKA KRISHNAN
