Convincing Ourselves

Introduction The tragic and unforgivable killing of Shinzo Abe put a spotlight back on the defining characteristic of his time as Prime Minister i.e. Abenomics. The success of his economic policies is still debated due to mixed results over a number of years. Personally, I don't think judging an economic policy is that simple. A country like Japan does not operate in a vacuum and is affected by unforeseen events around the world. However, I still believe there is a lot we can learn from the shortcomings of his economic policy   Abenomics and why it couldn't fulfill the promise: The 1990s and the 2000s were a two-decade period of Japan essentially stalling. Its industry, once the envy of the world, stopped innovating, and its trade surpluses, once the biggest in the world, stopped being so big. On top of that Japan, started suffering from degrading living standards and demographic problems.  Abenomics was an attempt to use, easy monetary policy, loose fiscal policy, and structu...

Just watched a video on BBC reel, talking about yogic breathing and the many related health benefits it brings. There were people in the video learning the art in India and claiming that it had helped them change their life forever.   Whenever I look at such videos or articles about breathwork and its benefits, my mind simply goes back to the classic book 'Relaxation Response' by Dr Herbert Benson . This book, I believe was a seminal work in western literature and brought the idea of breath and relaxation to the general scientific-minded audience. In fact, it helped to ‘rationalize’ these spiritual and esoteric practices to a large extent. When discussing the introduction of breathwork and other spiritual practices to the west, one cant go without talking about Jon Kabat-Zinn who essentially made meditation secular, and accessible in the west. These two authors and researchers have done the most to introduce, clarify, and explain the benefits of breathwork in the mod...

Below is an abstract of the paper I wrote for " Telling the story of business: story-driven research in entrepreneurship, business, and marketing",  held at the University of South Wales in January 2020.  ================================================================= A Narrative Inquiry into the role of psychological factors in helping a Pakistani Family Business owner-manager, navigate turbulent market conditions   By Umair Usman, Usman Carpet House, Lahore, Pakistan Abstract This is an ethnographic narrative inquiry to identify the psychological factors that helped my father, a Pakistan family business owner-manager, through the great recession of 2006/2007. The study is retrospective in nature where I discuss my time, as a part of the family business during this period we experienced. I recall what I observed, and experienced, were psychological and mental factors that were inherent in my father and supported him through this...

The Article reviews the paper "Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: A systematic review" published in the Journal "Eating Behaviours" in 2014 by Katterman et al. The paper itself takes a meta-study approach and examines 14 different studies where Mindfulness Meditation has been used as the primary method to influence emotional eating, binge eating as well as weight. One of the reasons why the authors may have looked at mindfulness meditation as the primary, rather than the only intervention, is probably because in real-life clinical settings, it is difficult to find practitioners using only one method alone. At the very least interventions are accompanied by some form of counseling or psychoeducation. It must be kept in mind that traditionally, it would be common to find practitioners using such mind-body approaches adjunct to another mainstream approach such as CBT. The authors looked at emotional...

Business travel brings with it many instances where one has to be out of their comfort zone. Being away from home, one is at the mercy of their surroundings, which at times can be very limiting. As someone who takes a lot of care in eating right and eating well, it often becomes difficult for me to find a balanced meal. This is an issue not only while in the plane or in an airport or train station, but also during business meetings and dinners. Unlike at home, or in one's daily routine, there is little control over the situation. During my previous trip I Took inspiration from Self Hypnosis and related CBT techniques to self regulate what I eat and how much I eat, while keeping my energy levels relatively high. This included several sessions of self hypnosis before I left for the trip which seemingly had little result. However, one on the trip, some positive statements stuck with me in my mind which kept me in check. The results were actually very good. Much better ...

A study by Pates et al  (2001) looks at the “The Effects of Hypnosis on the Flow States and Golf-Putting performance” looks at the impact of a hypnotic intervention on flow experience and golf. Although the study is small, It utilizes a relatively simple hypnotic process to instill a trigger that helps these golf players enter a state of flow and improve their golf puts. The study was only conducted on 5 people and was not a double-blind study, however, the results were interesting. All the participants in the study showed improvement in performance as well as entering flow states. Even though the study has its faults, even the indication that a simple hypnotic intervention might help improve golf performance is intriguing. Visualization and relaxation as well as alerting/acclimatizing exercises are common in sports psychology already. However, one can wonder about the possible impact of similar hypnotic interventions in various other settings. A good example...

Failure is inevitable. I have seen many wonderful and talented people be surprised by failure. No matter how good of a student you are, or how good of a sportsperson you are, you will face failure. You will have a bad day. That is the nature of life. Those who do not accept it, are ignoring reality. This can have a disastrous effect on people’s stress levels as well as self-worth. High performing individuals equate their self-worth, their purpose, from doing well. The day they fail, and sometimes they go through a prolonged period of failure, they lose self-esteem, confidence and sometimes even the will to continue. But when we realize that failure is as much a part of life as a success, we can carry on working towards our goals. It is easy to see that even the highest performing athletes, businesspeople, etc have gone through failure. It is they who everyone remembers. In any scenario, we can only control our actions, not the outcome. Therefore we can only try our best...

There are few things that are as important to health, as what you eat and drink. It directly affects your weight, mood, blood sugar and so much more. Yet, most people look for quick fixes. They want to lose weight do so by going to extremes diets that are unhealthy and unsustainable. Unless one is being offered millions of dollars for a photoshoot, why would someone use unhealthy methods to lose as much as weight possible as quickly as possible? The reason is that they ‘hate the way they look’. It's not health or fitness but their ‘looks’ that are the motivation.   Being motivated to be fit in order to  look good is fine, but being motivated to ‘not to look bad’ is something entirely different . Its the route to being  unhappy, to take risks with one’s life  and end up on unhealthy quick fixes . We cannot forget that the most important opinion of themselves comes from themselves and not other s . Only when we accept ourselves wholly as we are. Onl...

To change and improve, it is necessary to identify the problem. If a problem is left unidentified or unacknowledged, there is little one can do about improving a situation. There maybe a lingering feeling of 'incompleteness' or 'urgency' but no direction to work on and no plan to implement. Clarity: Clarity of purpose by identifying a problem is therefore necessary. This is not something that is workable only for helping one improve oneself, or in any therapeutic setting, it is, in fact, the very essence of life itself. Identifying issues is necessary to improve everything from problems with ones exercise regimen or one's beliefs, to asserting quality governance in an organization to cutting costs in a company. Without clarity of the problem and issues at hand, one may simply take a haphazard effort of correcting whatever 'seems' to be the issue. More often than not this may make one attempt what is already being done, or what is easy, rather than wha...

Mantras, incantations, prayer or affirmations, repeated over and over again have been used in the east since eternity and are still in practice today. Having seen them being used first hand, I wondered if they were really useful or not. Mantras and Psychological interventions: Before we talk about Mantras in a negative manner it is important to note their similarity to other interventions in psychology, the most obvious of which are affirmations and therapeutic statements. Affirmations are a common self help technique taught to clients undergoing not only therapy but also life coaching. Affirmations aim to disrupt habitual thinking and instill a new, more productive thought. Although affirmations can be more tailored to a particular need, than an affirmation, the principles of repetition are fairly consistent. There is also another difference as a Mantra may not be legible even to the person saying it as it may be in another language, while affirmations are generally in the p...

I have written about failure before but it is not something discussed so often these days. Literature and gurus are out there to preach the path to success and how it is inevitable, when in reality the fact of the matter is that every now and then failure will come looking for you. Successful people are not those that never fail, they are the ones who keep going despite failing. When one fails, it is hard to get an objective look at the situation however one of the best ways that I have found of being able to convince myself that failure is only a part of life is by looking at other successful people are recognizing how many failure they have been through themselves. Keep in mind who failed Steve Jobs : The greatest example in modern times may very well be Steve Jobs. The once upon a time young heartthrob of silicon valley who was thrown out of his company. More than a decade later he came back and implemented the biggest corporate turnaround in history. His story, if anyone has...