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What Motivates You?

Whoever you are or wherever your road has taken you, your personal story is your companion on this journey. Have you thought of sharing it with the world – stark and unobscured? Yes, it is scary to break down that wall and bare your soul. There are for sure certain parts of your soul that exist only for you – your thoughts, your secrets.
However, what inspires you constantly, should be shared – find the tools to express what lies inside of you and dare to share that which motivates you – pushes you beyond ‘comfort’. Share your experiences and motivations as an anecdote or in any other compelling manner, such that not only would you help others but also would rid yourself of exhaustion. When you have nothing that motivates you, there is a real danger of building and concealing self-loathing.

You would find it hard to do anything of consequence, feel constantly drained, overthink everything, and worst of all doubt yourself whether you can do or have done anything worthwhile. When you share and feel motivated, you would discover synchronicities in every part of your life. And while, you might believe that motivating yourself is the best form, reflecting on and soaking up the learnings from the lives of others, can be truly stirring and stimulating.

You might say that everyone needs their time and space, to travel their journey. And you are right. However, this journey must brim with productive thoughts and a grounded approach that takes you one firm step at a time. It is futile to waste your energy fighting against where you are currently. Move on to invest that energy to reach where you want to be, while sensibly shedding all that which pulls you down and does not serve your ‘motivation’. It would help to remain circumspect of habits that potentially annihilate you, such that you can defeat the old patterns that seemed ‘comfortable and easily ‘accessible’. Indeed, you cannot hold yourself responsible for what someone else does, nor should you hold on to what happened ‘yesterday’. Blaming the ‘past’ quickly turns into a mindset that is limited and constrained. The only thing that should motivate you is being in control of what can make the life you want. It is all about altering the response.

Looking back should be reserved only to see the strength you displayed in the face of challenges and the hardiness you gained from whatever ‘thrashed’ you. You will (I assure you) feel motivated to see how much you have grown and you will learn to give yourself credit for being tenacious and resilient, and moving ahead with grace even when it may have been the hardest thing to do.

The mistake we often make is to wait for what we deem as the ‘ideal’ path – when we know that a path is created by walking. Rather than waiting to build confidence and motivation to start a journey, take that step and build courage and motivation as you move along. Most often, life never turns out the way we deem it to be. Start by finding that one tiny scintilla that serves as motivation, and you will soon smile and be at peace with even that one baby step that you take as you build a new path.

Keep Motivating!

Dealing with Feelings of Failure

This is not one of those expositions that offer solutions or ‘miraculous escapes’, but is written with the sole purpose of being able to identify the feeling of failure. It should make you go “Yeah, I know the feeling”.

Life is unceasing in its ability to test us and will do so till we are around in its domain. There will be a day when you feel elated and the next one makes you want to run away, hide, quit – because you feel like a ‘failure’. The truth is – no one is spared and this is perhaps one of the great balancing acts of nature – of life.

I have discovered that it is important to accept failure – in fact stare it in the face and tell it “I am not afraid”. In reality, I am. Very scared, very hope less. But when you are afraid, you are driven to act – to counter that which scares you. I won’t deny that failure has ‘paralyzed’ me several times – enough to contemplate some very cowardly ideas. But then I tell myself that I have not worked so hard to let one instance label me a failure for good. What about my daughter? My husband? I want them to be proud of me – I want to be proud of me! Giving in to failure is certainly not the way to go.

Look closely – failure has ‘lure’ hidden within it – yes it lures you into taking the easy path – of giving up. I was a massively obese person – illness, emotional eating, feeling sorry for myself – everything ‘contributed’ to the generous layers of fat. I accepted defeat, and continued to wallow in self-pity and as a result kept piling on the kilos. Embarrassed by how I looked, I stayed indoors and even refused to go anywhere with my family or do any of the fun stuff with my daughter. It became overwhelming – that was when I stopped and kicked myself hard and worked at getting rid of this ‘failure’.

Failure is an option, a mind-set, which therefore means that we choose it and worse still let is remain with us. I had chosen failure too but soon decided that failure and I were not compatible. I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to achieve those dreams that I would oft see even as a child. I may still not be close to achieving all of them, but at least I know I am trying – everyday. The example of being obese is just one of the myriad failures that have had me in their vice grip. But again – this is not a story but rather a ‘place’ where you can feel comfortable, be at ease and relax in the knowledge that failure is not ‘picking on you’ and if you look around you will see many familiar faces working through their own ‘failures’.

Ease up – take a deep breath and then kick failure as hard as you can. Everyone can do it and you don’t need a ‘guru’ or specialist or an expert to show you how. It’s there – inside of you!

Content Strategy and its need in digital age

For the last few weeks rather months I have been directly or indirectly been forced to find out more about content strategy. Just thinking of the word strategy, makes one feel like smart and experienced enough to talk about the topic.

However simple it may be, it is still difficult -at-least for me, to understand the wikipedia definition of content strategy, “…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance AND a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process…”. For me, content strategy is the way in which a business/organization defines & develops the culture, the content structure and the information which may be aligned with the product/service. It is important that the structure meets a user’s need at any particular time during information search.

In this digital age, users are always “ON” whether it is web, social, mobile or even offline (QR codes/website links etc.), and is always looking for and consuming information in seamless and integrated manner. So content strategy presents us with an opportunity to connect with user, and to become the source of information without becoming a news company or a commercial content platform.

Content strategy helps you to strengthen your web marketing of converting a new visitor or known visitor to a potential prospect to a customer. Even if that does not happen it still helps you to build trust and confidence with your customer by meeting his information needs. So, a business has nothing to lose if they think about content strategy as a business executable and start building relationships with online users.