Convincing Ourselves

Resilience is a concept almost synonymous with positive psychology and I feel it is important to discuss resilience, given the Covid-19 environment we are in right now. Resilience is of course the ability to bounce back from adversity. Putting yourself together and rising up, after one has fallen down. Resilience is considered an essential quality for soldiers on the battlefield, sports teams, individuals as well as businesses. The reason for this is simple, adversity is inevitable. It is inevitable that a business, organization, individual entrepreneur, or even a non-profit, will through a period of adversity. This adversity can take many forms. It could be due to legislation that changes the industry completely, it could be due to intense competition, a natural disaster perhaps or a macroeconomic situation. It can also be internal, eg a PR error by the CEO, an accounting scandal, and on. Whatever industry one is in, no matter how big or small the business, adversity and h...

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. His work in the investment arena has changed the landscape of the industry. He is so confident in his firm's ability to generate returns that he now gives life lessons and principles on how to manage a fund, investments, and life. He is so confident that no one can replicate his success that he has made the basic principles of his flagship fund public. Ray Dalio is now a sort of grandfatherly figure, considering he has been in the investment industry for over 30 years now. His advice, his comments, about macroeconomics (his forte), and various asset classes in a particular, matter. Basically, when he speaks, the press listens. Therefore it was quite peculiar when a few years ago he revealed that he has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for decades! When, Why, How? Apparently, Ray Dalio picked up this habit when Transcendental Meditation became quite the rage in the US a ...

Self-efficacy, confidence in one's own ability to create change, undertake behaviors, is essential for optimum mental health. So much so that it is a major marker for depression. In fact, while doing through the literature on psychological fir aid for disaster and trauma survivors, I came across building self-efficacy, of a community or an individual, as an important part of the rehabilitation process. So how does one go about building self-efficacy, especially after one has gone through immense failure and loss? Staying the realm of psychology only, one can go down the route of regular counseling, and even hypnotherapy or EDMR, which has shown great success for trauma victims. However psychological first aid adopts a more behavioral approach. Building self-efficacy in such a case is best developed through a series of practice situations, given to a survivor (or even a community). It could be as simple as collecting water or cooking food. However, these practice sit...

The skepticism to the phenomenon of hypnosis is quite prevalent and for good reason. Hypnosis has the same reputation that perhaps politicians do. Ridiculed by the public imagination and my media in general, you can't deny there are those who have good intentions, but then again there are those who tend to over-promise. There is, of course, significant literature on the uses of hypnosis in therapy and it is, in fact, a common tool. In fact, it is essentially a recognize mind-body therapy and has the same recognition in medical circles that meditation or yoga has. To put it in the bluntest terms, it is considered viable integrative medicine. Apart from my own personal experience, one can go through academic journals and case reports of hypnotherapy patients. Apart from the usual reduction in anxiety or depression, there are numerous cases of people who have been able to quit smoking, give up drinking, resolve irritable bowel syndrome, skin problems and in one case even s...

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...

Introduction Influencing the general public is a hotly debated topic in the policy. In any form of government reforms and agendas have to be 'sold' to the public. The government has traditionally been done through information dissemination through the media and done so quite effectively. An example can be of course selling wars or military interventions to the public. When the intent, however, is misinformation on a large scale, it becomes 'propaganda'. Despite its negative connotations, it is surely been present in democracies, as much as in dictatorships. A few years ago we have seen a move towards 'Nudging' individuals also called the Nudge Theory. This was popularized by Book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book ' Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness '. An example of this could be the wording on a referendum to discourage a certain outcome or perhaps limiting choices for the consumers on the type o...

It seems that popular topics find their way into academic circles more often these days. I came across a great example of Harvard Business Review by Reiken et al called “ How Mindfulness Can Help Engineers Solve Problems”. The article has been re-posted several times across a variety of academic sites and it is surely worth a review. To begin with, mindfulness is essentially about living in the moment and paying attention to simply what is. The authors compare linear, or convergent thinking with divergent thinking, where several options are explored on top of the starting point, to generate a number of ideas and hence favours creativity and innovation. The article makes the claim that most engineers are trained to be liner, convergent thinkers and even though it's important, for the best solutions one requires both convergent and divergent thinking. The authors performed two studies to look at the impact of mindfulness meditation, which is an exercise known to...

Is there such a thing as too little food? Well, there is surely is. Eating too little, going on a crash diet or leaving out a food group for no obvious reason are all examples of a haphazard, rash approach to managing health and weight. The main reason why we tend to go for these crash diets are  1. Impatience. 2. We want to look good rather than be healthy. The above two points usually manifests themselves in a ‘deadline’ usually around a wedding, a holiday or some other social event. As important as it might be for our egos to look for other people, the reality is that that we only look as good as we feel, and nothing good comes quick. One of the most extreme ways in which such black and white thinking becomes reality is anorexia and bulimia. Anorexia is, of course, something I myself have struggled with. I have had loved ones who have struggled with Bulimia. Anorexia is essentially a killer, as it has the highest mortality rate of any mental heal...

Back in Pakistan now. As you know, one of the hazards of business travel is delicious food. Warm coffee shops, exotic treats, late-night dinners. How can you say no....however I meditated with a positive statement that I kept on using days before my travel ...... and kept it going as much as I can during my travel. Helping me balance healthy foods with indulgences, important dinners with some time for my self. It was not always easy, but it was not excruciating either. It has taken me a lot of time to reach this spot but I do not believe THIS IS WHERE I SHOULD BE. I believe there is no point we should EVER BE, just a journey to improve ourselves, our habits, our lives... May you all live the best life possible, may your journey to the top never stop Umair Usman is a Rapid Transformational Therapy practitioner, a businessperson, and a blogger. You can know more about him at https://buff.ly/2zmc9rj . To book a free consultancy session, please f...