Shortcoming

During our childhood days, some of our qualities are not developed properly due to various reasons. As we grow up, many times those qualities hinder our personal, social and corporate life. We should try to develop those qualities so that we can be better persons.

I had many qualities that needed improvement and I tried hard to develop them, employing various methods. After experimentation with some of the methods, I concluded that the following techniques worked for me to defeat my shortcomings:

• Mentally imagine yourself having the quantity and successfully using it. It's called Guided Imagination or Guided imagery (sometimes called guided meditation, visualization, mental rehearsal and guided self-hypnosis). There are a lot of material on it in internet (e.g. https://www.headspace.com/meditation/guided-imagery)
• Next step is to practice it in real world.

I have used this technique to overcome some of my shortcomings, as mentioned below:

I had stage fright and problem speaking in public. In my school and college days, I always avoided speaking in public. But when I started working, these qualities became very much essential. I used guided imagination technique to overcome this issue. I started to imagine public speaking as a very simple and enjoyable work. I started imagining a successful public speaking situation of mine - entering the stage with ease and confidence, started delivering speech in a pleasant manner, audience liking my speech very much, clapping, cheering, congratulating me ... I started visualizing each and every detail of the process in my favour and continued this for some days, until the imagination became permanent in my mind.
Then I invited a very small group of my project for a presentation. It's very important to start from a very small task, if we want to become successful here. I prepared well for the presentation (preparing for presentation is another topic, which involves skills. I had to master it too) and it was successful. This way I started inviting more and more number of people for various presentations and I started gaining confidence and my problem of speaking in public got cured.
I would like to mention here that not all my presentations were great, some of them were bad. But I continued to present to people without bothering about the outcome. The organisation where I worked, had indirectly helped me by giving me opportunity to present / train people; most people don't take part on such activities as it's extra work and no monetary benefit is involved.

Another problem that I suffered from was that I had difficulty talking to girls. This also started causing difficulty for me in the workplace, during the beginning of my career, as many of my team members were girls. Here too, I applied the same guided imagination technique. I visualized talking to girls with ease, looking at the eyes. Then I started talking to the most approachable girl. Once I was comfortable, I started talking to others as well. This way I started developing friendship with a lot of girls. I started participating in office ramp walks, with girl partner. At some point of time, it so happened that most of the guys were envious of me because any girl that came near my area in office, used to come to me, say hi and talk; other guys used to just stare. Some guys even started asking me how many girl friends I used to have in school and college days. I used to just smile, as the reality was different.

All of these kinds of shortcomings are just some blocks in our mind. We can easily overcome them with practice and lead a better life.

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The views posted here are entirely mine and they are not necessarily correct. You are most welcome to differ to them. Please post your views as comment.