Live a Great Life

Thanks for your motivation & inspiration on my last post “How to live in present Moment”.

The post was viewed around the world & I received emails from everywhere. Lots of my friends contacted me with whom I had lost contact & a lot of others who wanted to connect me for questions & guidance.

Regret, Its has been quiet a while I have not written a blog, I have been passionately working in one of my SAP Projects, which has gone live very recently with a stupendous success & Customer Satisfaction.

This topic of “Live a Great Life” has been on my mind for a long time. However in order for me to write on this topic, I had to experience & feel living great. Very recently, I have experienced living few days in that energy of being able to lead, motivate & inspire a large number of individuals to achieve a greater purpose, or rather in other words I have really felt what is generally called as “Being in the zone”.

The feeling “Being in the Zone” (BZ) can be best described as a feeling of being at your own best, Being Hyper-focused, feeling of living a life of greater purpose or state of mind where anything is possible.

For close to 2 years, I lived a life of huge commitment, Discipline & passion towards the Project. This experience has embraced me with the feeling of contentment & fulfillment. Thanks to some of my great colleagues Abhinav, Vivek, Neelesh, Prasun, Murali Sharma, Venkata, Atul, Kesav, Krishna, Sudhakar, Chandra, Sanjyot, Nirav, Virginia & Peter who inspired me & contributed to my experience. The objective to write this blog is to share this experience & inspire you to take tangible actions & work towards achieving great things in life.

I did a detailed analysis of my thoughts, experiences, actions, attitudes, communications & behavior to really understand what made me to experience “BZ”. Thus I could arrive at 3 Key behaviors or Attitudes which I have used & can enable any individual to achieve a greater purpose, Live a great life or feel “Being in the zone”

Key behaviors or Attitudes :

1. Gratitude –

Gratitude in my understanding is to feel thankful for everything going around you, every small action from every person & everything around you matters for the goal to be successful.

Appreciate everyone’s action, respect everyone. Stay & be thankful to the universe for giving you the amazing opportunity to create a new future everyday.

It took a long time for me to learn this behavior, probably about 3 months, I read the book “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne many times & started practicing the morning gratitude steps. Each morning as you get up start with being thankful, as you keep your first steps out of your bed be thankful for the new day, Appreciate the things that you already have & be thankful to the universe, Appreciate the things that is already achieved & really be enthusiastic about what you are gonna achieve today. For next 30 mins as you are getting ready to go to work, be thankful & appreciate everything around you.

This exercise enables you to manage stress better, you tend to listen to people, appreciate their work & your communication lands to other as full of commitment. It enables you stay charged every day, you become appreciative rather than a complainer, in difficult circumstances you are able to find a way out & your focus improves.

2. Overcome fear –

Everyone has fear & each one of us want to overcome them, go beyond them & see the light on the other side to a bright future, full of freedom & joy.

Overcoming fear requires you to stand for your own self, stand for what you believe in, stand for your commitments, stand for what in right & lastly be truthful to own self.

3 year back, I lost someone whom I loved the most, I blamed others for my loss, all my relationship with friends & family members were in turmoil. I was carrying the fear of loosing relationships & the feeling of self doubt always existed with me.

In last two year, I began from first focusing on giving my best in the work I do, started reading more books, I began to realize that past is just what has happened & what will happen in future is entirely dependent on my actions in the present. In those days I wrote those previous blogs such as Stop being stuck in past & live in present for the future ahead!! & How to live in present moment!!

One key book which really inspired me to overcome fear & get up from difficult situations is “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“. 

One of key Habits to be focused on “Be Proactive”, get an understanding of Circle of Control, Circle of Influence & Circle of concern. Practice being proactive by writing down each task you want to accomplish, give it a deadlines, this includes those in your personal life as small as getting a hair cut. Every day morning first one hour focus on reading something, especially something which motivates you or read something that will help to gain edge in your profession. If you have difficulty managing your time, read something on managing your time.

Being proactive gives you the power to be ahead of time, allows you to live in the present moment, enables you to fulfill your commitments & thus enables you to overcome fear. There are other habits in the book, which are equally important, please read through the entire book, for me it is a like a bible which I keep reading whenever I get time.

Practice the steps as per this video on 1000% formula, this will give you a new perspective towards your life.

3. Live your passion –

SAP is my passion, read my previous blog SAP – My Passion

Living your passion is like… loving to work on it, living to work on it, always thinking about it, advancing in it, happiness comes from it, success in it makes you feel contented, world recognized you with it…………….etc.

I created a dream of being a SAP Solution Architect, an opportunity to design an end to end customer solution for whole of an enterprise implementing SAP. In my recent project I got the opportunity to do this role.

While working through this role, i came across a number of challenges such as harmonizing the requirements, arriving at a single solution to multiple requirements,  standardization of solution & simplifying customer experience across many business needs.

In order to overcome these challenges, I committed to do the SAP Architect Certification, I prepared for the certification, however my confidence has not been up to the mark, each time I booked my certification exam, I couldn’t hit the date as my preparation was not giving me confidence to make it successful. However my passion has me kept going, I kept preparing for it.

In my 4th attempt of preparation, I build the confidence by using the approach of just sitting down & working through it. for continuous 3 days & 2 nights… I went on to prepare rigorously with out taking many breaks. I completed the certification last year sometime in mid June 2017, Still I was probably the first in APJ to be Certified as S/4HANA 1610 Solution Architect.

This experience gave me a very insightful learning “To be persistent”, keep working on it until you achieve it. Its okay to fail, but by being persistent you keep your dreams alive & there is great chance to be successful in the next attempt.

Living your passion, very much depends on how you are feeling about yourself & your passion. Feeling is a very important check mechanism, that I use more often now. If I’m feeling good about something, then things are aligned with my expectations & results are certain. If feelings are mixed, that means something is missing & you need to find out that part & work on it.

Think on what actions if you take, can get that feeling of being confident & certain about your success. Then take those actions & as always plan the action & focus on them in the present moment & appreciate own self & others in the Journey.

Living a Great life, can become reality the more we feel “Being in the Zone”, In order for you to feel in “BZ”, keep reading & implementing new ideas in life, step up your game. Human Beings are designed to feel contented, fulfilled & inspired by learning & experiencing new things in life.

Thanks for reading this long blog, Stay Inspired, Live Inspired & Keep Learning!! 🙂

Please leave a comment for any questions.