Last Year was perhaps the worst year of my life. I went through a dark long patch of depression, followed by misunderstandings that strained relations with a loved one.
I felt betrayed and disillusioned. Whatever I was doing suddenly seemed so meaningless! I thought I was finished.
Thankfully things got better by the end of the year but I knew I had to do something to keep things on the path of recovery. We ourselves are responsible to a great extent for many problems in our life. Therefore, I had to mend my ways to make things alright and prepare for future.
After some reflection about what I was doing wrongly, I concluded that:
1. I was not being true with anyone. Not even with my own self!
2. I was negative and missing the “moments”.
3. I felt like a failure in life, no confidence left to reach for any new goals.
But what could I do? I had got stuck in a loop of guilt, doubts and fears. To make it worse, there was a pressure which made it even more difficult to get out of this trap – “What example am I setting for my children?“
How would I tell them to perform well at school and in life when I myself was feeling weak in my knees.
That’s when Dinky, my wife told me about THE SECRET.
“Think of WHAT you want to achieve, without worrying about the HOW. Invisible forces would make you achieve your desires.”
What did I want to achieve, I thought. Following popped-up in my head:
1. Resolve my fight with myself about who I am, who I pose to be and who others think I am. This is what Robin Sharma calls “The Integrity Gap“. Kill my Integrity Gap. Make it Zero (0)!
2. Stop running the rat race and savor the present, “the now“.
3. Have a higher self esteem and be in control. I was running negative on that, and it was just crushing me. I had to fall in love with myself, again.
Now that I knew I had to do these, would it work on its own? No! I had to remember these goals for them to settle in my head. And how would I do that?
I was looking blankly at my laptop screen, while thinking what do I do to achieve these little roadblocks just big enough to create a mess in my life. Suddenly the following dialog box popped up:
This pop-up gave birth to an idea in my mind. I changed my password to IntegrityGap@0.
From then onward, every time I unlocked my computer (which is dozens of times daily) using my new password, it was like a subliminal brainwash. Next 90 days allowed me to remove a lot of unspoken baggage I was carrying since many years! It made me a better person, one who was more at peace with himself. True to himself!
I couldn’t wait to change my next password. Changing passwords for security used to be mundane and irritating affair but now it had become a life changing ritual.
My next password was CelebrateLife@100%. 90 days focused on celebrating and being grateful for the moments God was blessing me with. Not thinking too much about the past and neither the present, just living in the moment. 90 days is good enough time to etch these ideas in ones brain.
Some say it takes 66, others say 21 days to form a new habit. Be on the safe side and go for 90 days which is the limit most organizations have before you must change your password.
While this helped, my low self esteem was still coming in my way to live life fully. That feeling that I was not good enough and the fear that someone would soon find out, was killing me.
My next password is, therefore, IAmTheBest#1 .
Like Magic, a few testimonials followed within the next few months. I became a certified interviewer at work, cleared a work interview to move into what I always wanted to do: Program Management et al.
Oops! Did I just share my current password with you?
Never mind, because 90 days come to an end today and it’s time for the quarterly ceremony to change my password again. You too are invited!
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