Why did I go on this insane slimming diet of shakes to lose 7kg over 2 months?
Because someone told me I was too fat to be a bride.
That seemed to cement the idea that I would never be thin enough to be acceptable in society.
It wasn’t until I learned that from questioning what I wanted out of life, and what I needed to do about it, that things started to change for me.
I read more, and I keep an open mind and learned to think critically and ask questions.
Who is right about what?
Why should I listen to them?
What is right for me?
What do I want out of life?
I want to live long and healthy, by intermittent fasting, strength training and long distance running (without messing up my knees or my hips).
Losing the muffin top would be great but I enjoy family meal times which makes up magic moments. The key thing is that I am a lot more deliberate about my actions.
I’m talking about food but this can be applied to any non-foody arena.
I hope to teach my kids about how to be more mindful and selective about what they choose to absorb, which is the best way to be prepared for adult life.
#CriticalThinking.
It’s as rare as #CommonSense.
I’m working on getting the kids a dose of both before they grow up and they stop listening to me. 😬
Transcript
Human beings have a tendency to collect habits and ways of working without being really conscious of why we do the things we do.
Things like how we have our breakfast, how we brush our teeth, in what order do we put clothes on, how we deal with conflict, how we deal with stress. Lots of things, we just kind of accumulate, as we go on. Then sometimes we get to a certain point in our life, where we start questioning, why do I behave that way when relationships starts to get serious.
So introspection. And a lot of the time this introspection results in insight that allows you to make some behavior modification, that then helps you progress towards your goal.
In this way, organizations are very similar.
They start up doing business in whatever they’re really good at, it might be baking, so bakery chain, or mortgage advisor, or any other business you can think of.
As time goes by, they to accumulate habits and behaviors of the people who work there – the ways of dealing with customers, the ways of processing sales orders, the ways of new sales acquisition, lead generation, and so on and so forth. After certain amount of time, they too have a whole collection of behaviors and habits that may not have been mindfully acquired.
And just like us people where we sit down and have a moment of introspection, organisations should do that as well.
In my career, there’s not very many companies that do this on an ongoing basis.
the few that I’ve encountered have a dedicated division or team that does this on an ongoing basis.
They’re generally staffed by business analysts, and project managers whose sole purpose is to look at the business processes that a company has, for every stage of its operation, and look for ways to make it better.
There may be some operations which are manual. And it’s fine, as long as it’s mindfully decided that we’re going to do things this way, we’re going to have a check in desk where people can walk up and make the payment by cheque, or things like that, or we print this document or we take it to the other department, or we’ve got to rekey it in. Whatever there might be – inefficient manual processes as an example, as long as these decisions are mindfully taken, then it’s okay.
What is actually key is the active practice of looking at the things we do and saying, “Is this right? And can we do things better?”
Many organizations aren’t very good at things like this.
And so for us, as consultants as software consultants, CRM consultants for Salesforce or Microsoft, first go in, and to understand client businesses, sometimes, we ought to have the mindset that they’re just not built to be very introspective, and it’s something that we should be helping them to do.
We should be listening for where they mention their pain point, or their pinch points might be and asking great questions as to why are “Why is this process being done this way? What’s the reason for taking this action when this trigger happens?” and helping them be more introspective, so that we can build a future that based on a more solid foundation, as opposed to that’s the way it’s always been done – we just need to do the same thing in the new system.
So it’s just something to think about.
I hope you found today useful. And I hope to see you again tomorrow.
Have a great day.