Unclutter Your Life: Start With Your Surroundings

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome back, today’s podcast episode is going to be a little different in the sense that this is a topic that I have spoken about multiple times on this podcast. Really January 2022, I talked about this multiple podcast episode that they’re on the directory. So today’s one is not gonna be different. And again, why am I doing this today is because I spoke about this yesterday to someone in a consultation who came up with the idea of too much stuff. What should I do? How do I deal with it? And I was telling them about my personal challenges, some decisions I made early on in 2016 2017. I told them to go back and listen to the podcasts that I did as a part of a report this year. But then, I don’t know if they would go and check it out. So I thought I’m going to record today’s podcast and send it to them. Okay, that is what I’m doing it honestly, I’m just doing it for one individual, but I think I think you’ll find value to even if you listen to other podcasts, and also the earlier podcast episodes I did, even then you’ll find some value in today’s episode, so stay with me. Okay, if you look into your life today, I look into my life.

Okay, there is so much stuff that I don’t need. I don’t need the books that I have, I don’t need the papers I have I don’t need, I don’t need the dresses I have my closet is full of nonsense crap I could get rid of and I should have gotten it off. And I tried getting it off. And I did indeed get rid of only not to do it to a point where it’s enough. So we all have this problem. We are occupying too much space on the earth, which is running out of space. 5 billion people when I was born, 7 billion people now. It’s going up by the minute live in Silicon Valley, real estate is expensive. You get the idea. Everything that you have around you. Probably an overkill. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to look around your house, we started home, let’s start with the home first, look in your house around, go into each room and say, if I take stuff out from here until you put your hand on everything that you have in the house and say do I need this? The answer is maybe yes immediately. But then if you start asking that question multiple times, you’ll start to realize that you probably don’t need it. The second question you ask is, you know, do I use it in the last six months or last year? The answer is no, you probably don’t need it. She’s all about feelings. You attach some feelings to things. They’re dead things around you. You attach some feelings to them. And because you’re attached to some feelings with them, you do not have a meaning you created a meaning within you. And now you’re having trouble disassociating yourself. You need to be relaxed where you are. You need to feel a sense of tranquility within you. Serene. A sense of solitude. That’s your house. Its clutter. Question. I wouldn’t even jump into the whole house, I would take your room and start working on it exactly what I did. I started an amorphous room. I took 76 boxes of paper and trashed them. That’s where I started in 2016. And I kept on trying to get rid of as much as I can. And I try to make progress. I have a specific time in a month.

Usually, the last week of every month is for cleaning. Not the beginning of the month, the beginning of my month is productivity. The last month of the month is cleaning I clean every day anyway, but then here is the problem. The more I cleaned, the more I had, we go out we come back with stuff. We go out we come back with stuff. So stuff is getting added it’s just not about getting rid of stuff. So start with the house easy. Now in the house even I get that question too. I would start with decluttering my closet first. On my car first. Declutter the car. If you can easily take a box, dump everything from the back from the trunk and everything, everything into a box, bring it back home, clean the car, start with an empty car, start there, and then you move. Yeah, I do that, but I also put a lot of junk in the car. So the junk comes and keeps coming in, no matter how much you do, it keeps coming in. Here is the point the point is, I want you to start experiencing at least the idea of opening your mind to the thing called emptiness to open your mind to emptiness By default, all of us, depending upon where you are, in your age and your timeline, all of us have been trained to accumulate and accumulate, I’ll buy one house, I’ll buy a second house and third house in the fourth house.

The question now comes is why I need to make investments, everything that you own, you need to manage. You’re not good at managing things that don’t own them. As simple as that. I was used to working in it back in back in the day. And I used to question why do we have so many applications? Why do we have so many installations? And why do we need to do it, every environment has to production and a development and testing environment, and every, for every product you are up for every installation, you have a, you know, multiple tiers of this infrastructure. And the next thing you know that you really don’t know what you know, but you really don’t know a lot because the Subic said, I’m not going to do this event, if I’m given the role. If I’m going to the position, I will not do this, guess what, I started my own business. And I bought all kinds of software, I will CRM software, you know, I have the next-gen CRM software, I have my certain nice interface-driven CRM software. And then I have a functionality-rich CRM software and the like five different CRM software for which I pay every month. Now, three different email lists that I manage, that are external to the CRM systems are supposed to be internal, but they’re external. And then I have like 375 different websites to manage and run, you see, things you own, you have to manage.

In order to manage you can never lead a contented life. If you are surrounded by clutter. So there are enough people, your clutter is somebody’s blessing. So go donate stuff, give it away, whatever. Whatever you have, give them away and, you know, see if you can empty 10% This month, 20% This next month, and follow a schedule a mathematical formula over the next six months, eight months. Don’t do this just because you heard the podcast today. But this is about a behavior that needs time to develop. This is not, but you need to act. So start acting today, but over a period of time develop that behavior, so that you now have at least a year from now you can look back and say yes, I started and I have accomplished a lot of people don’t agree to have clutter. And I guarantee you if you look into your inbox today, how many emails do you have on how many email emails you have in each of those email inboxes. I guarantee you each of my inboxes has over 100,000 emails that I just don’t delete, and I don’t have to delete them. I don’t know what to do with it. And when I’m done with it, I mean, if I have to search for something in it, it’s a disaster. But interestingly, over a period of time over the last few years, the search has also become very smart. So I have a situation where I have a lot of data. And I also have a lot of good processing and good algorithms. So so far, so good. But imagine a situation where you have lots of emails and you don’t know how to search those emails.

So I want you to imagine a life where you are completely free of stuff, a lot of emptiness in you. And a lot of things you don’t own in your mind. And then you feel I mean, I’ll tell you it’s beautiful to have this emptiness. Unbelievable. Some I’ve seen people achieve the state where they don’t have stuff, they just can they, you know, not only just the physical stuff I’m talking about, but then emotionally also they don’t have stuff in their mind. People load themselves up emotionally with all kinds of feelings and situations and unknowns and all that money for all that. Go do that. Start the process. My phone is ringing now. I gotta go take the phone call. Somebody’s trying to reach me. Hopefully, I think it’s coming. It’s far away. Keep these things forever, but they still come back into the microphone. Maybe you’re able to hear it. Maybe not. I’ll come to know when I listen to the recording here. But yeah, go start. You know what, it’s very funny. As a result of me telling you to declutter your stuff. Guess what happened to me? How can I give advice, which I don’t take myself? So I’m going to go and alter declutter a little bit more today. Okay. You know, there is never a mastery of anything. We are all students.

Okay, that’s all for now. You take care. Bye

Emotional Triggers: What are They and How to Master Them?

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome back to Success with Srini. Today on the podcast, we are talking about emotional triggers, we will try to understand what emotional triggers are, if you’re very new to this concept, I’m sure you’re gonna find value in this. And if you already know what emotional triggers are, then we’ll talk about managing them and how to better manage them. And my intent, my goal is that by the time we are done, you will understand and manage your triggers, you will be in a situation to do that. But then over a period of time, very quickly, very quickly, the next three to six months, you become a master at managing your emotional triggers. Now, what are emotional triggers emotional triggers, by definition is a trigger is an experience that pulls us back to the past and causes the old feelings or old behaviors to come up or rise up or arise.

Okay, so something that takes you behind and timeline makes you feel the same experience of an event that might have happened. And you’ll go to the same feelings one more time. And that means as a result of how you feel, or how you felt back in time, you also start to behave like that. Because that’s those are your emotions trying to express themselves. So that is what a trigger is an event that causes you to go back in time. Now that these events could be external, or they could be internal. So there is could be an external event that could happen, that will take you back in time mentally, or maybe something within you is also causing you to go back in time. So let’s talk about the internal part first, internally, maybe you are carrying a lot of conflicts. And they are in conflict could be for multiple reasons. And because now you have conflicts, you can’t live in the moment. And the present moment, you can’t enjoy the present moment. And you are mentally going backward. I wish my life I was it was great when I was in college, or I was great when I was with my parents and I was in a different country or whatever. And you always go back in time, because you can’t deal with the current conflict. That part of you constantly thinking about your past, now you go back there, then you are literally, there could be something else there. So you people usually go back to the happy state mostly when, when there are too many conflicts going on. there or there could be some external things that could trigger maybe a social situation that you’re a part of, and you go you get into conversation, or you make a point or you get into a debate, whatever it is, that could trigger something, and that will take you back in time. Okay, so quite a number of things.

To this, this, we all have triggers, all of us have triggers. And there are things that can trigger all of us, and they do. But at the core of all this is memory, you retain a lot of memory, a lot of things within you, it’s possible that at some point in time, you will recall those memories and you will process them when you have time. And sometimes you may recall a bad memory, sometimes you recall a good memory. So memory plays a huge role in all this. Somebody who doesn’t have a memory may not recall any of the events that might have happened in the past, they will not go back to the past. That’s a brilliant state to be in Honestly speaking, you get the point. Now, how do you resolve this? How do you make sure that when there is a trigger, it doesn’t push you back in time? It doesn’t bring back an old memory. And even if it does, then how do you resolve it in such a way that it doesn’t impact your current living? That’s the question at the foremost of all this is that. Let’s take people as an example. So you are there because there are people around you. All of us have people around us. Some of these people are core to us. They’re not really they’re not relationships, some are external to us, but we are surrounded by people. And
every individual is unique is different. Everybody’s different. I’m different. You’re different. All of us. We have unique identities. No two people are the same Doesn’t matter, the world keeps on expanding, and more and more people get added to this. But everybody is going to be unique, everybody’s different. So there is no point to expect others to be like you. Because no two people are the same. So if I take that as a premise, if I take that as the foundation, that means as an individual, as a well-rounded, grown-up individual leading my life, I should accept individual differences. Differences exist. So I don’t want a difference. I don’t want an individual’s opinion on something to trigger something within me, I’ll drag myself back in time. And once I go back in time, I experienced all kinds of other stuff.

No point in giving headspace or mind space. To an individual, I know that there is there’s a difference already. It may be true. And oftentimes, it is true that everybody around us is much more talented, talented than us. And they have more gifts, you know, like meet people who are extremely talented, a lot of gifts in them. And I know in which way identical to them or even come any closer to them. I understand that I respect the difference, but I don’t allow them to intimidate me. Talk about your internal triggers for a second, for the most effective way to deal with internal triggers is to keep writing a journal, taking your emotions and resolving them very quickly as they happen on a daily basis. That’s where I would, I would start. A long time ago in multiple seminars, I’ve done this in many seminars, I’ve shown a slide, I put forward a slide where I say, there’s something a concept called perceptional position shift. When I’m facing a challenge in my life, I try to perceptional change my position on the challenge, I say if my father is in the situation, what will he do? If my uncle would have been in the situation, what would they do? So I take different people’s positions in a conflict, too, and then remove myself to see how they will deal with the conflict mentally. So that gives me the strength to deal with the triggers or the stimuli that are coming at me, I also understand my capacity to see if I sit here and process 2000 emotions, I can’t do it impossible. It’s not fun to think about something in the past that has gone wrong, and drive myself crazy or drive myself crazy on a highway or in a high manner or drive myself crazy in a low manner. There’s no point in doing that.

So I understand my capacity. So if you understand your capacity, you can become assertive. See, people don’t become assertive, because they don’t understand the capacity, the thing they can fill more into who they are. And that’s when they lose their standing. Now, there are other concepts in this, you know, if you should take some time to relax and, and, and, you know, look into different alternatives, things like passions and other activities that take you out of situations. So that you don’t need to the trigger effects aren’t there. Right. So if you remove somebody from a conflict zone, they will not see the conflict. So they feel good about themselves. All that is good. And if you take if I take this discussion even further and say yeah, go work out, go exercise, do yoga, do meditation, do hypnosis, all those things, you know all I can add all that stuff to this. And I’ll say go build some relationships outside and strengthen your network. That’s also good advice, I think. But the bottom line is this. The bottom line and the most important part of all this are that you got to be compassionate towards your own self. You need to be compassionate to people around you who have a difference or a different opinion of life and how they process things. You need to show compassion towards them, but more compassion towards yourself. Because understand that people around you are struggling everybody’s struggling at times made the comment yesterday on the podcast. Everybody has struggled with life by default has struggled so there isn’t a situation where somebody’s having an incredible time. And now the only people the only person who’s suffering is you can’t say that. Everybody has some kind of struggle going on. A little bit more patient a little bit more forgiving makes a difference.

Every individual by default has emotions. Every most them. If there isn’t a motion, there’s a possibility for the trigger. So understanding and managing and constructively dealing with them, and you deal with them constructively by fixing issues as they happen so that they stay away from you, but then you also stay away from the path. And then you also move ahead in life in a meaningful way. Okay, that’s all for now. Hopefully, this is helpful. Hopefully, this will hopefully put out what I was thinking. Hopefully, that came outright. That’s all for now, and I will catch up with you tomorrow on tomorrow’s podcast. Stay tuned.

Busyness is a Disease

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome back to Success with Srini. Today on the podcast again, highlighting a conversation with a friend of mine. interesting conversation. And this has happened over a long period of time. So this friend of mine, every time I talk to him, or every time I meet him tells me that he doesn’t call me because I’m busy. And every time he says that I say, I’m not busy. I say You could have called me I’m okay, perfectly fine. No, no, you’re busy. And we want to disturb you. This is the conversation, usually, every time he says that I say this. But I was kind of reflecting on the pattern. And what I found out is he’s understanding of busyness is somebody is doing something, so they might be busy. And my definition of busyness is that if I’m not doing something productive, I’m not busy, even though I’m occupied. So in his mind, he thinks that he’s occupied. So it’s busy. And I’m saying, I’m occupied. Yeah, but I’m not productive. And so I’m not busy, to different ways of thinking here. The reason why I wanted to highlight this today, as a part of this podcast is, that I’m sure you might be going through this. And you probably know by this time, that being busy is not like getting things done, you could be busy doing a lot of things. But that doesn’t mean that you’re productive doesn’t mean that you’re accomplishing anything. So why is it that people get themselves busy L and do not accomplish things? Or do not taste success? That’s the question. That’s the primary question.

So ignore the story. What I said up till now because that’s not the point. But then the question is, why is it that we are taking them all the time that we are given, yet we are not accomplishing them? Well. Every time you have busyness without productivity, the symptoms are obvious. There are obvious symptoms, people who are busy. Without productivity, their symptoms are this. They’re constantly worried about what’s going to happen to them tomorrow. They are constantly annoyed with people around them. Because people around them are not as busy as they are.

These people spend a lot of time thinking of a lot of things, but they don’t do anything. So one of the symptoms, and then they these people do not give attention during conversations, and they will be doing something. And these people will be missing their lunches that dinners and maybe one meal here and there. And they don’t upkeep themselves, mentally or physically or nutritionally, whatever. So these are the definitions of these people. People are busy, but they’re not accomplishing anything. At the core, at the core of all this is that they fail to prioritize. So what is a priority? How do you prioritize? I did numerous podcasts here talking about it. You choose what you want to do. You choose what you want to do. Let the world not decide what you should do. I choose to do this podcast. I’m doing it. I’m recording it now because I choose to do it now. And I dictate the direction I dictate the outcome, not by influences. from outside sources. It’s inside out, not outside in. Now, as I’m doing this, I’m also looking into where am I wasting time? See, my podcasts are one-take recordings. If I do it three, four, or five times I keep on recording myself. I’m wasting time. I’m just wasting time. I really don’t care about you know how great I sound how incredible I sound. Can this be improved? Yes. Can this be done differently? Yes. Can this be given a whole different makeover outlook? All that? Yes, yes. And yes, but that’s not the point. The point is, I need to be precise, I need to be to the point I need to convey whatever is going on in the manner in which you if you are listening in, you can take it you can take in and you can digest and it makes sense to you and it hopefully makes you productive. So I’m passionate about looking for ways not to waste time.

At least I’m trying to now be like do I waste time? Yes. Will I be wasting time? Yes, it happens because it’s very hard to really keep everything in a well-oiled manner. It’s very hard. You need some really In different levels of evolution happening within you to keep up and make up for that kind of a performance, which is very hard. So for example, if you take the best performer, and you make them rehearse for about a month or two, and you put them on a stage, they will do an incredible performance. But you ask them to do the same performance every day live in front of people for over the next 10, 20, 30 days, they become tired, they’ll be exhausted, you will not have the same outcome, and it’s over. So you get to the point. And the step that leads to prioritizing things, there is a pre-step to that, which is you got to have a list of things to do. And I kept on saying this multiple times on the podcast, you need to have a list of things that you should be working off of, at least. And then as you are taking a list and working towards getting those things done in a day. You got to also look into your life in general and say, you know, what are you overspending your time on? What are some things that are optional, and they begin before they can be put on some other timeline? And any nonmeaningful activity in your life that needs to be left out needs to be taken out. Because your job has to be meaningful in everything that you are engaging with. You need to have meaningful engagement with every activity in the time that is given to you today.

So all nonmeaningful things have to be can be deferred or can be removed. And then what I’ve seen and what other experts have seen, and this is a constant observation is when you limit yourself on anything, you make incredible progress. So I only have 10 minutes to do this podcast every day, then those 10 minutes are limited. And I do and I tried to do an incredible job with it. But let’s say that I’m given an hour to do this podcast, I schedule an hour, which is unnecessary for a podcast for 10 minutes, or 15 or 20. And I have the liberty to kind of get back in the get into the mode and get back into the zone and mentally this and that and all that. And then I start recording, press the record button, and I start the recording myself. And then I make a mistake, then I say I didn’t like the way I’m sounding. And then I go back and undo and redo this and then finally listen to the whole recording after 45 minutes, and I don’t like it. Alright, to restart the whole thing again, and now have added one more hour on top of that. So magically, when you limit your time of engagement or time of exposure, you produce better outcomes. And while all this is going on, you’re constantly measuring yourself. How many tasks? How much did I accomplish? What all got deferred? What can I do? And I talked about this also I said I use an app called to do app it’s called to do it’s available on Android available on iPhone. It’s a very simple to-do list amazing app, I use that to program literally my program my whole day I go one by one by one and get things done. And if I have a lot of time in the day, I use it for creative purposes. I use the time to think and try to create something new things which eventually become more tasks later on. But you get the idea.

Okay, life should be full. It shouldn’t be busy. Life should be full. It shouldn’t be busy. I can wait whatever I wanted to kind of if I say anything beyond this, okay, then I think I’m overdoing this. Prioritize your day and your activities to those items. And you’ll enjoy getting more done in less time. Okay, that’s all for now. Talk soon. Bye.