Hello friends and a very warm welcome to Transforming Stress with Dr. Ash. Are you ready to turn stress into your comfort? For over 30 years now, Dr. Ash has worked and gained education across three continents: India, United Kingdom, and the United States in healthcare. He's witnessed firsthand how stress can impact our health and cause our happiness. But here's the exciting part. He's here to help you transform your stress into a powerful tool for growth and resilience. Each week he'll share practical tools and life-changing insights from his books, including The Boiling Frog, to help you manage your stress, find balance, and live a life of purpose. Please join us every Friday at 5 pm and let's start turning stress into strength together. Now let's dive into today's episode.
SPEAKER_02Fonela, welcome back. In the first section, we talk about self-management. And there are five uh pillars of self-management: self-awareness, self-reflection, self-care, self-discipline, and self-accountability. So let's start speaking to self-awareness. Self-awareness, Fonella, is being aware of our own strengths, our weaknesses, our emotions, our blind spots, how we are affecting the environment, how the environment is affecting us. And this is a f this is a foundation for the other skills we'll be talking in section two and later in the book, managing the environment, our emotional intelligence, our social intelligence, it all links from self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01How aware are we of ourselves? Okay, so this is crucial. This is a bedrock. Now I think one of the strengths of the book is we can dip in and out of it, but it would be really good to start here. Absolutely. Yeah. And the structure of the book, which I absolutely love, by the way, is you you have a quotation, you have a photo uh not a photograph, a picture that you have commissioned, and you have some information and then reflective awareness and reflective leaps to action.
SPEAKER_02So uh Funela, as a physician, as a consultant in internal medicine, my brain works in a kind of a binary way. Okay. So I make diagnosis and I manage the patient. Okay. So I collect all the information, symptoms, patient's history, all the medical records, all the data gathering, and then make a diagnosis. Yeah. And then how to manage this particular patient. Now, in the structure of the book, in every chapter, what I have done is how do you understand whether you have that skill well developed or not? Because if and that is awareness. That comes with awareness. Yeah. So every chapter has a section of reflective awareness. And then the management plan is the leap to action. Because unless and until you take action and execution, you're not going to go far. So that is that is a very, very important part. Because in today's world, then formation is so rampant. Absolutely. But does that that does that mean that people are transformed?
SPEAKER_01Sometimes it means people are just overwhelmed, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_02Overwhelmed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because there is because there is no execution.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. And we all think, maybe think we know what's meant by self-awareness, self-reflection, but actually sitting down and understanding, well, how does that impact my life? How do I engage with that? How do I go beyond just thinking I know what that might be? And it seems as though there are some powerful steps here that you can take.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Yeah. Again, as I mentioned earlier, Funella, that it is a framework. Yeah. I re I am I remember a quotation by Einstein who mentioned that if you start judging the ability of a fish by how the fish climbs the tree, you know where I'm going. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In the context of human beings, we should know our strengths. If we play to our strengths, we can be as successful as we can go. If we put ourselves in a situation where we are continuously forced or continuously we are put in a situation that we are not playing to our strengths, then that will result in energy drainers, energy getting more and more, let us say, going on a downward spiral. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I'm thinking of a mechanical analogy as well. You know, the wrong part going to an engine or a mechanism. That part it might work a little bit, but it will get worn down, and eventually the whole engine's going to go. It's not going to work. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So awareness of our strengths, weaknesses, what emotions we are feeling on a day-to-day basis, hour-to-hour basis, minute-to-minute basis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And it sounds, given the model you were explaining to me earlier, obviously from your backdown background as a doctor, it's not like you're going to go in and diagnose people with their life, but you're giving them this framework. Yes. And you're almost you're letting them be their own kind of self-physician. Not in terms of they're going to prescribe for themselves or but in a way they are going to prescribe for themselves because they're going to look at what is it I need to engage with, what do I need to stop and do? How can I look at myself? How can I introspect? How can I plan? How can I connect to who I am on a daily basis? This is what the book's going to facilitate. And that's really going to help people build that resilience. They know and understand themselves. They're not that part that's just been eroded in the engine. That they're not boiling themselves alive. They're doing something else. And that's a very exciting path because along the way we've got some amazing things in there. We've got creative innovation. And we've just got all the human potential, all the things that people can do and be.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, you're spot on, Funella. I'll add one more thing to it that none of us can have strengths in all areas of our life. Of course. I might have great strengths being a f being a doctor, and I might not have that great strengths in fitness or exercising or running. Yeah. If something is important to me and is not my strength, then I have to put structures around it. Sure. Like external structures of having some kind of accountability buddy or coaches or mentors.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And that is also being aware of your strengths also makes you aware of your not so good strengths or your weaknesses, which are lower down. So I've recommended Clifton strengths analysis. Yeah. And for values, I've suggested the D Martini value determination process. So if you do that, I'm sure there will be others out there in the market as well.
SPEAKER_01Find what suits you.
SPEAKER_02So whatever suits the person, but the key is knowing yourself. Absolutely. So this is really foundational. Yeah. Because if you know that you are not in the right environment, no amount of skill is going to help in the long run, at least to kind of thrive in an environment. For sure.
SPEAKER_01For sure. And I know also in there you have a self-care section which is helping us to look at, well, how can we just support ourselves daily? We're embodied beings. It's not all about what goes on in our head and those two things, the what goes on in the head, what's happening in the rest of the body, it's so interconnected. Can you tell me a little bit about the self?
SPEAKER_02We'll come back to the self-care when we discuss in the self-care section. And you are also right in saying that all these things are quite interwoven. We'll talk about self-reflection. Yeah. But self-reflection is being aware of self-awareness, being aware. Yes. Here it is very important to also know what our limitations are. Yeah. And what is the role of having external support or a coach or a mentor to provide that extra support.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes, because I know mentorship and coaching is mentioned throughout the book. And if we look at the picture there, you have a person standing in the background.
SPEAKER_02That happens to be me. That's a one of the cameo appearances I've given in the book. So as you can see, that I'm looking into the mirror and I'm seeing what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses, what are the emotions I'm feeling on a day-to-day basis? What is my energy levels? What are my blind spots? Yeah, yeah. We have the coach. You have been one of the coaches. And what I know sometimes people don't want to hear about their blind spots, but I tell my coach or coaches in the past that I want to hear the reality. Yeah, yeah. So that I can bring those changes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yes, because otherwise what's the point? You can move forward if you don't have the whole picture. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and it's really interesting. It reminds me of being at the hairdressers, that part at the end where they show you what's going on at the back. Do you like it? Do you need it to change? What do you need to do?
SPEAKER_02Sometimes you might not like it. It's ugly. Yeah. But you gotta you got to accept all parts of yourself. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We'll we will talk about how self-awareness links into the other things. We'll talk about how it links to emotional intelligence, to social intelligence. It will link to into the other areas, how it helps you to manage the environment when the environment is becoming challenging in terms of conflict management, conflict resolution, in terms of uh being aware of your own values, whether the environment is serving you in your values. So we will take a step-by-step approach there, Fudela. But for now, thank you very much for going through this section with me. We I think we have laid a good foundation. We will now go to self-reflection and look forward to seeing you there.
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