Why should you travel?

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

This is one such touching topic during this pandemic, which can break the hearts of most of us who love to travel for a holiday or professional purposes. But believe me, it is a temporary suspension. Things will be fine soon and it would be the right time to plan your trip once things get normal.

Travelling is important as it transforms us. By taking a break from daily routine and regular lifestyle, we should travel by staying away from technology and getting engaged in new activities.

Here are my top reasons why travel is important:

1. We get to learn and educate ourselves about new places, their culture and history. It helps us to pick new words in a different language. We might run into a difficult or tough situation where we need to be smart and think differently. It helps you to become much smarter in a demanding situation. It helps us to Connect to other cultures and people. It helps to expand our awareness and knowledge.

2. We all are human beings, not robots. We work like donkeys and lead a fast-paced life to compete with others to sustain in the market. Our body needs a break. We should take a break from our fast lives, recharge ourselves by travelling. It helps, try it.

3. Most importantly travel helps us to break various myths about new places, their culture, food and habits.  We get various “first-time” experiences during the trip which definitely make us stronger; mentally, physically, and emotionally. Travel helps us to give some time to heal which in turn reduces stress and helps us regain enthusiasm for life.

4. We get a chance to meet strangers which may lead to interacting with them. It helps us to understand a distinct set of people with different mindset and approach. It also helps us to improve our psychology. It helps us to get to know ourselves better. Something like “Rediscovering our selves”. Believe it or not, social networks are real things – in real life. Damn, I know. Establishing new connections and building a network with new people is one of the smartest things you can do in today’s world.

5. Every trip will make you a better storyteller. You have lots of stories to share. Whom do you think people want to listen to? someone who spent his vacations at home doing cooking or watching soccer, or the one who spent a week in Goa, driving a scooty with his friends or sky diving at St. Kilda beach at Melbourne or trying some deliciously spicy food in Hyderabad? Think about it because I know which kind of a story I would like to hear. It creates a lifetime memory for your grandchildren. Believe me, you will be a best grandparent for your grand kids.

“The most magical thing about home is that it feels good to leave, and it feels even better to come back”. Today, plan your new year trip for 2021. Go somewhere new where you have never been before. Try something adventurous! Love yourself, love your life and love to spend time with yourself and family.

 “Travel opens up your mind, relaxes your soul and rejuvenates your lifestyle”. 

Cheers!

Subrat

Silence is the most dominant shout

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

I am not a great listener and probably, that is the reason I am the best person to write about the power of silence. Silence can sometimes be considered as an inability to speak, a sign of weakness. However, silence doesn’t have to mean that effective communication is not taking place. In fact, silence can be a powerful negotiation tool. Knowing when to stop talking and listen is just as important as knowing what to say. This comes more naturally to some of us than to others but it’s a skill that can be worked upon and sharpened.

While in conversation allowing your counterpart to do the active talking and listening, you will end up gaining their trust and confidence in you. Your silence may even encourage the other side to reveal more than they intended. The value of quietness is significantly belittled in current society. In addition to the fact that we can’t really cherish silence, we likewise give our absolute best to keep away from it.

  • The extraordinary instructor inside.

Silence is not our enemy. It helps us to become more relaxed as you don’t have to filter and process unlimited information. The ground-breaking impact of quietness can assist us with better understanding what the instructor inside us needs to say. The only thing that is in any way important is that quietness gets us closer with a critical wellspring of clearness and peacefulness.

  • Better Concentration.

Silence can assist us with calming down and to enter a condition of mental clearness. An impressive reaction to this expanded clearness lies in huge enhancements of your concentration. In turn, your capacity to concentrate on a given assignment will increase massively. Because of expanded concentration levels, you will end up being significantly progressively beneficial at all that you do.

  • Least bothered about insignificant things in life.

Most of us are surrounded by ‘n’ number of unimportant engagements in our life. These unimportant things are insignificant.However, many of us place great emphasis upon them. We are not clear with our priorities, so we fall prey to worrying about things that are least important. Instead of being irritated or offended by minor occurrences, silence can give you the necessary mental strength to treat these things as they are.

  • Silence allows better delivery and understanding.

Silence in the form of appropriate pauses, allows your audience to absorb information. An audience responds in real time and hence, you should give a pause whenever you say something important in your conversation. It helps them to absorb and retain. A concise silence enables your audience to ponder over your basic message in their brains and thus helps to connect better.

  • Unpredictable when you speak less.

The more you talk, the more your words and information can be utilised against you later on. Talking less will influence other individuals to

reveal increasingly about themselves. When you listen, you find out more and you can utilize that information later. The less you say, more significant and baffling you show up. By saying less and to the point you create an impression of meaning and power.

Leaders are often judged by what they say or do but sometimes silence is their most effective leadership tool.

Silence can enrich communications, if used positively. It can even misfire sometimes if inappropriately pitched in. Silent spaces should be used to support communication and not undermine it.

Cheers!

Subrat Saurabh

Why is a journey more important than destination?

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

The journey to any destination starts with a small step. It is always important to take the right steps and learn from the wrong steps. You should always enjoy the journey and keep learning from the process which you undergo during the journey.

You learn a lot of lessons about life from your success as well as from your failures. It helps you to understand what didn’t work well, and what went well. Failure gives you the strength to fight with the problems and Success helps you to be more confident and prepared. We all lose something during our journey, it makes us realize what matters the most in our life and what never did. A journey towards achieving success may not be a bed of roses but believe me it’s worth all the pain.

Most of us want to get success through a short cut but as they say, “There is no short cut to success”. But is it possible? Answer is NO. We cannot achieve anything in life without proper preparation. Short cuts may lead to instant gratification but it’s always short-lived.  Have we ever observed that when we think that we are prepared to live our dream, we end up realizing that somewhat more planning is required and that readiness occurs over the span of the journey?

We often need time for preparation as that is the most important aspect. It is not a great idea to wait for long to execute the tasks. We should always have a set target time to do the right thing at the right time. You can strategize well, make an appropriate plan, review, revise and execute at the right time. During the journey when it gets tougher, it makes you work harder to reach your destination.

A journey is nothing but a set of processes and you need to follow it to reach the destination. You should be sensible enough to respect and understand this process. It is always easy to reach your destination if you make all necessary moves and execute all the processes as per the expectation. However, the kind of decision you take during your journey, will decide the fate of your success and pave the path to your destination.

Journey makes you stronger. You are more wiser and experienced at the end and ready to face another challenge in your life. At the end, when you arrive at your destination, you are a whole new person, more experienced, more mature and wiser. You understand the value of achieving that goal and simply don’t let go so easily.

Cheers!

Subrat Saurabh

How to be a good storyteller

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

Words are a powerful medium to express. Though written words are a beauty in itself but when given a voice they become more powerful. The emotions and characters come to life when stories get a voice.

Have you ever tried to be a storyteller in a get together with your family or friends or while travelling in a train with strangers?  Being able to tell an entertaining story is a terrific way to utilise time and to create a powerful impact on your audience. Even if you have attempted to be a storyteller, it is not necessary that you end up telling an impressive story. You may have a fantastic story to tell but it seems that for most of us, the art of telling a story seems to be just beyond our capacity.

Storytelling associates us and gets us in contact with our audience which may be more profound than ourselves. It’s nothing unexpected that new talents are utilising narrating, to convey their very own vision for quite a long time and also to build a brand image out of it.

However, one of the important questions is what makes a delightful story? And how can we become good storytellers? And if we are not a good story teller then how can we become one.

Storytelling is not only about creating images for a new talent or branding of a new product in the market so that it should reach the target audience. Storytelling is also important to writers and content creators of all kinds, communicating fiction and nonfiction stories.

However, storytelling is something which we are altogether inclined towards to some extent. Everybody has a fantasy of publishing their own book, and everybody has stories which are fantastic and unique in their own way, that characterizes their lives. Believe it or not but it’s true, everyone has a story.

One must consider the following points while venturing into the art of storytelling:

·         Identify your audience:

We must identify the appropriate audience for whom we have created the story. This is important in light of the fact that it will decide the impact of your story. It’s no point providing water to the person who is not thirsty as he won’t realise it’s worth. In the same way, if you identify the wrong audience your storytelling would be a futile effort. If you identify your audience well, then it will be much easier to reach out to them with your stories and messages.

·         Identify the context and elaborate:

Being a storyteller, we are aware about the story, we know where our story is heading towards and how it’s going to end. It’s very important for us to set the context and elaborate more about the characters, its physical appearance, habits etc. Strong characterisation always helps to attract the interest of the audience.

·         Don’t lose the grip:

If you are not good at editing and filtering your thoughts real time, in your mind then it’s obvious that you will get into unwanted details which are not relevant to the story. Such mistakes will distract your audience and you will end up losing the grip of your audience.

·         Avoid adding unnecessary details while narrating real incidents:

The more frequently we narrate the same story, the little addition we will in general include. If we add unnecessary add up, those accounts float further and further far from the events that really occurred. Inevitably, you may finish up depicting something that never happened by any means.

·         Notice your audience:

Make sure to monitor your audience (by making eye contacts, if they are in front of you) and stay connected with them (by seeking feedback, if they are away). Keep the session interactive, if you are in front of an audience. If you have a sad story to narrate, be sure that you don’t go for so long that you’re putting stress on the audience. Take your audience on an emotional journey. Make them feel your story.

·         Story should have unpredictable ending:

If you want your readers or listener to spend some quality time on your story then you better come up with a most unpredictable ending, does not matter if it’s a little weird. A Story is good because it has a great ending not because it has an unexpected beginning. Give enough space to your audience to build an ending in their minds but make sure that your ending is different than what they can think of.

Cheers!

Subrat Saurabh

5 Ways to deal with failure

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

If Thomas Edison would have stopped after failing for 10th attempts, then he would have never invented an electric bulb in his 10,000th attempt.

Sometimes things go as per the plan or even better than the expected but on some days, they don’t.  You commit an error, have difficulty or you essentially fall flat. It’s unpleasant but you cannot avoid it unless you avoid doing anything at all.

Don’t worry. It happens to all of us. We experience disappointment to different degrees. Some of us manage it well and some just give up.  Things can turn around quickly. Things will improve however before they do, you should figure out how to manage disappointment. Here are a few tips.

  1. Just accept the failure.

When you’ve quite recently fizzled, it will undoubtedly sting at times, a bit. In some cases, a great deal. That is OK.

Try not to attempt to push it away, by diverting yourself or by endeavoring to push the duty onto whatever is left of the world.

You must acknowledge that disappointments happen to everybody. Think about this experience as something, where you can gain from it. The initial step on managing disappointment is accepting that it occurred. Acceptance of failure is the best way to deal with it.

2. Stop thinking about the failure

Never let the rejection engulf you. If you allow failure to overpower you, you will always think that you can never make it next time. Stop thinking about failure and don’t let this stop you from succeeding in your next endeavor. Remember, you are not a failure just because you had a setback.

Keep reminding yourself, “Just because you failed today, does not mean that you will fail again”. Keep yourself engaged in your hobbies to refresh yourself and bounce back.

3. Give your disappointment a chance to get out. 

It’s obvious to get disappointed over something you buckled down for, yet could not accomplish it.

So proceed, let it out. Communicate with your friends about it. Take the necessary steps to dispose of the disappointment that keeps bubbling up in your mind.

Give your exhausted brain a break and engage in something that can pep-up your mind. Watch a favorite comedy show or go out with friends or well-wishers. You need to loosen up your mind to cope up with the pressure and try to be happy.

4. Give yourself 24 hours to overcome

It’s alright to feel tragic or grieve about the failure. However, just allow yourself 24 hours to adjust, accommodate and accept it. 24 hours ought to be sufficient time to ponder over the mistakes and move ahead from that point onward. Push ahead, begin anticipating what to do straightaway, what your next activities ought to be and what you should deal with to make progress.

5. Plan your next moves

Try not to get stuck and get neck deep into stagnancy rather endeavor to make your next steps effective.

You’ve already learnt from your failure. It’s high time to buckle up and work smart to make the progress. Write down your next goals and go for it to achieve.

No Failure is strong enough to pin you down to the floor unless you refuse to get up. So accept it as a part of life, deal with it, learn from it, make efforts to overcome and success would be knocking at your door.

“Stay Focussed and Be Successful”

10 productive things to do during this pandemic.

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

Believe it or not but we, the people across the world have been forced to maintain social distancing and most of us are staying home without much choice. Although we always enjoy the company of family and long to get enough time with them, we never imagined to get into such a situation, where too much availability for each other in the family can get stressful sometimes. Maybe, we are missing to get missed, we are probably missing that personal space? Someone has rightly said, “We always want to work from home but never asked for so much work from home”.

Being a social creature and then getting confined to the four walls, sometimes get to the nerves. However, when we do not have a choice to change the situation around, the question arises how to adapt? I would say create a change, a positive change in you and your surroundings.

We can utilise our pandemic time productively in the following ways, without stepping out of our homes:

1. Learn one new technical skill – You don’t need to be a perfectionist or a subject matter expert but learning a new skill will keep your mind fresh and keep you motivated. This is the best way to manage this stressful time.

2. Join a reading challenge on Goodreads. Set reading goals , it does not matter how small this goal is. Go for it! You can track a reading target on Goodreads and connect to many like minded readers. You can read a book of a genre of your taste. 

3. Get into someone else’s shoe. Try to understand what your spouse or parents do during the day. What is their skill set? Learn and spend some time with them to understand their pain area and success story. This will help you to understand someone else’s perspective.

4. Make a note and organise your work. Prepare a to-do list for the next day. Keep a track of all those minor activities like insurance premium payment, electricity bill payment, Internet payment etc so that you don’t miss anything important. Cultivate this habit which is extremely important to lead a disciplined life.

5. Workout at home – Even if you hate doing work out, it’s important to do some light exercise or yoga during this time. You can refer to any yoga tutorials or exercise on YouTube. It’s the best way to get relief from stress and it keeps your nerves calm. It will also build your immunity. 

6. Learn cooking – You know the best part to learn cooking is that you are always more independent than most of those who hate even preparing tea or cooking Maggi noodles. Believe me if you love food you will love cooking and pampering your taste buds.

7. Help the needy – Extend your support to those who are struggling during this pandemic time. You can support them financially and emotionally. 

8. Be active socially – Be in touch with your loved ones through frequent calls, messages and video chat. Stay connected. Share your thoughts with them and speak out. 

9. Keep your surroundings clean – This could be a most boring suggestion but it’s very important to keep ourselves and surroundings clean and stay away from getting infected. This is the utmost need of the hour. If you still feel uninterested repeat the mantra, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”.

10. Make a plan for the future. Discuss and make a plan to travel or a plan for your professional growth or something like that which you can do as soon as things get normal.

Remember, we have to maintain social-distancing and fight COVID-19 with best of our capacity.

Cheers!

Subrat Saurabh

Be a positive guiding light, to relish illuminating reflections

Posted on by chickenbiryanii

“I am elated to see the posts of so many parents whose kids have done well in their board exams. Let us acknowledge that it’s not only the effort of kids but also their parents & teachers. Kudos to them for their support and guidance during this tough time.  

Most of us are locked within our premises for the last few months with limited supply of resources and going through a stressful time. We were never prepared for this and hence, never did a drill to handle a pandemic situation. Teachers and parents were going an extra mile to guide and support their kids throughout. Let the kids also understand and appreciate the pain and effort that you have put in and it definitely calls for a celebration. 

I request all the parents to allow their kids to do whatever they want to do in their life. Don’t force them to opt a career of your choice. Let them choose what they want to do. There are numerous options available and they can tap the appropriate opportunity to explore and flourish anywhere. Each kid is a fighter and has a special talent. Let them decide their future and follow their dreams and passions. Let them become an engineer, singer, doctor, artist, comedian, entrepreneur or whatever they want to be. Encourage your kids to channelize their positive energies to achieve their dreams, in what that is for the greater cause. Please don’t let them become too self-absorbed and self-obsessed in their own dreams, work on their character building, vision creation and help them to guide their positive energies in the right direction. Encourage them to root in what’s good and right, and their dreams will surely get wings.

Encourage them to pursue dreams that sharpen and accentuate their natural gifts and talents. Be the guiding light that illuminates their path to self-belief and success. Trust me they will do much better than your expectations. Please get to know your kids and encourage them to follow their dreams with a focused eye. Don’t let the world miss out on all they have to offer.”

“Be a positive guiding light, to relish illuminating reflections”

Cheers!

Subrat Saurabh