5 advice to grow in life and career from my?mentor

Once you get clear on what you really want to do, all kinds of doors will open for you. from:One Minute Mentoring

Rightly said, at times in our lives, we get stuck; and all we need is a hand that holds and pulls us to show the way ahead; to find the clarity about our goals.

Who better to hold our hands other than someone we look up to, who has faced similar situations like these themselves, who helped many people find the right way in their lives.

It is not easy to find someone who matches your value and personality. I was lucky to find a right person, at the right place, at the right time. I am talking about my mentor Jagriti Pande.

I was facing a similar situation. I had to move out, and I didn’t have a clear understanding of how I am going to approach those things that I have set as a mission.

So, we arranged a lunch session to chat about the happening in our lives. We discussed several things from personal to our professional lives.

Meanwhile, she gave me some life-changing advice to grow and as I think about them; can be used by everyone.

Nothing ever happens exactly as you think.

Never say “that won’t happen to me.” Life has a funny way of proving us wrong.

Life is full of uncertainties, and that’s what gives meaning to our lives. Life is very less about what happens to you and very much about how you react to it.

If you start focusing on the negative side of the uncertainty; your thoughts will start turning negative due to the stress of uncertainty. The decision-making process becomes difficult for us in such circumstances.

Either the situations could be better than best or worse to worst. You may never know.

Be prepared for everything.

Don’t be attached to the outcomes.

Keep the expectations high, and work hard to match them. Do the process well; Put in efforts, time and hard work in process.

Put best of your efforts in your work, life but don’t be attached to the outcomes. You will learn faster, be more successful, and be happier with the outcome when you are process driven.

Focusing on the process makes more room for experimentation, control over yourself. You are more willing to take risks when you are less concerned about the results.

Not every time you will hold a pair of aces. The situation won’t be as you want it to be every time.

You can be hard on yourself at times, and sometimes it’s okay to be but learn to cut yourself some slack. As you will to a person, you care.

Did you tried enough?

When we fail to get the desired outcome; which isn’t perfectly in our control. We feel bad for ourselves.

We ask ourselves “why this happened to me?”. Which is a general human tendency.

Instead, we need to ask ourselves “Did you tried enough?”

If the answer is yes, then it wasn’t in our control. You couldn’t have possibly changed anything.

If no, we know that we need to work harder, put in more efforts. So it doesn’t happen to us the next time.

If you want to make a dent in the world don’t let the temporary failures bring you down. No matter how many times it happens.

Take action for what you don’t like.

Complaining is not a strategy ~by Jeff Bezos

We sulk over numerous things every day. If you do not like where you are if you think you can do better things. Don’t just sit and sulk over it.

Wounding about your problems won’t cut it.

Think of what you need to do, and then do it without any hesitation. Action leads to progress. 

Get up do something about it. Do something, change your situation.

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” — Maya Angelou

Don’t take things personally.

Many a time in our lives we don’t like others comments, criticism, feedback on something we have done. And it’s okay to feel bad about it after all we have done so much efforts to create that. But things get tensed when we take it on ourselves instead of our work.

We generally do one of the two self-talks:

Self-talk undermining others: We start thinking that this is my job I know this better, sometimes that might be the case. But not always. We start behaving that we are the expert; we know more than others.

Self-talk defeating our self-confidence: We start feeling like we don’t know anything, we tend to undermine our own decisions. We get into a self-doubt state.

Both of the mentioned self-talks temporarily paralyzes our thinking power.

What should we do instead?

We should keep our minds open for whatever the next person is saying, his situation, his justification. We should approach situations like these with a growth mindset to understand other’s point of view.

The secret is to take feedback seriously, not personally. Learn to take lessons from these situations as you take from an experienced teacher.

If you still think you are right. Think of what you can do about it without offending the person.

Here is a method I evaluate myself:

I have started using these advice in my life and these are helping me to make think straight, take effective steps, evaluate myself better.

Thank you for making it till the end.

Knowing these things could be easy but learning these things could be really tough, I am still working on these. But learning these simple advice will lead to compound results in the personal and professional life down the road.

I get asked a lot "How to approach a mentor the right way?"

This Book could be a great starting point: One Minute Mentoring: How to find and work with a mentor - and why you’ll benefit from being one