Your Visa To Relevance
Are you still tied up in the shabby knots of your upbringing?
It is terrible to see people stagnate in the wisdom of their formative years. It is sad to see them stuck in the goodness of knowledge and expectations that were applicable in their adolescence, and are obsolete in their prime.
Mothers have learnt that they must wean their infants from the teat, yet few have learnt to wean their daughters and sons from their upbringing.
Our families, in a sense, are our second worst enemies.
Nothing ties us down to mediocrity and purposelessness as much as our ability to fulfill unsaid expectations learnt in our childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.
In a million different intangible ways of tone, body language and choice of words we are instructed (and in likewise manner instruct others) to cling to old learning’s, old ways of doing things, old expectations and old identity.
The nature of the human being is to not only to evolve, but also to continually evolve.
The insidious message most of us receive and transmit is that there is a ceiling to our evolution. A day, when we have finally “grown up” and there is no need, and perhaps, even no scope to evolve further.
When this is the insidious message in your family, you find a million subtle chains that limit you to the identity and place that your family is comfortable with. You keep making noises of wanting to be or do more, or of being unfulfilled etc but remain addicted to the comforts of what is already known, done and possessed.
At the upper levels of our evolved selves we gain the ability to suffer joyfully so that others may benefit. It is a win win.
The way that these “chains of upbringing” work, is that the worst afflicted do not even have the ability to suffer for their own benefit.
The most un-evolved type of person is the one who cannot put in the hard work, commitment and discipline needed for his or her own development and benefit. It is a lose lose.
Not only the individual, but also everyone around the individual loses.
If you see a businessman who started off well with his ability to shoot from the hip and roughly estimate things and has plateaued you will find an example of the un-evolved being. S/he is unable to further struggle and master the tools needed for big business.
Small businessmen often remain in the trader/smart business mindset never evolving to leaders and creators of organisations primed for generational success and sustainability.
Leadership itself has different levels that leaders could consistently evolve and grow into. I’m talking about businessmen (heading under 1,000 crores turnover businesses) who are unable to evolve to the first rung of leadership itself.
This is why also most family businesses fail. The second generations often are inheritors of both the business and the limitations of the un-evolved type of people.
What they inherit addicts them sufficiently to inertia (provides them with everything they need). They are neither taught at home, nor do the realities of life force them, to learn to work at themselves.
The under evolved individual fails not only at building or growing but also maintaining.
Chained thus, they were never really brought UP but tied DOWN to mediocrity and purposelessness.
These are always waiting to fulfill “responsibility ” when the one greatest thing they were responsible for they were unable to fulfill – Being themselves.
My work leads me to brilliant people and it leads me to potentially brilliant people. It leads me to ‘willing to evolve individuals’ and it leads me to people who are obsessed that ‘others with them change’ while they remain the same.
The one has a vertical climb to purpose. The other has a yo-yo existence…stuck in the ‘realities’ of other people’s necessities.
I believe that if being born is the exit from the safety, warmth and love available to us in our mothers’ womb, being alive then is the exit from the safety warmth and love of our upbringing.
Childbirth is a struggle and pain both for the parent and for the infant beginning with loud wailing and tears but ending with joy, peace and bliss.
Too many of us do not allow or embrace the struggle and pain of being born again and coming alive.
Too many of us live still born lives.
Like food stuck in our throats, our lives remain stuck in our fears.
No prison walls ever confined an individual as much as our upbringing can confine us.
Be brave; or remain irrelevant.