Part II: Unearthing Your True North

This post is part of the Decoding Rohail series.

1. Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward
2. Part II: Unearthing Your True North
3. Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life

Values exercise

In my last article on the subject, I stressed the importance of having a set of values to inspire you to make the tough decisions. The toughest decisions for me often involved saying no. No to something cool I wanted to do, without first finishing something else I had started. It’s okay to change your mind about what’s important to you, as long as that’s not erratic.

I received a lot of help in getting this clarify from Kris, who supported me in identifying and shortlisting the top most values I held dear. Naturally, this was an iterative process and I believe this is an exercise one can revisit multiple times since your values may slowly shift over time. Heading into this exercise, I had the following goals, in no particular order and non-exhaustive:

• Be super clear on the different roles I “identify” with
• Find ways of making “sustainable” progress on each of the identified roles above
• Cut out procrastination from my life so I can move forward with my identified priorities
• Refine my productivity systems to get the most out of them without overwhelming myself
• Having tools and systems I can fall back on to handle moments of anxiety and uncertainty
• Understand better what makes me tick and refine how I “channel” my attention
• Learning to appreciate the moment as it is instead of trying to control it
• Find ways of channeling my creativity in ways that are healthy and don’t consume me
• Revisit some of the fundamental beliefs I held about myself and the world around me

As can be seen, this wasn’t a short list of goals and I headed into my sessions with Kris with an open mind and heart. My one and only true goal was to come out of these sessions in a place where I was content with where I was.

Your attention as a spider web

Everyone’s likely had that moment when you are suddenly able to separate you, the one who notices, from the voice in your head. Oftentimes, it is a momentary experience and soon enough you’re back to being completely identified with that voice. That voice in your head, if allowed, can completely take over how you perceive reality. Through the process of self-reflection and writing a journal during certain crucial moments, I noticed how fickle your though process can be. Trying reading what you wrote ten days ago and how far removed you may feel from your own thoughts that felt all-encompassing the moment you were experiencing them. This was a revelation to me and to anyone interested in hearing someone describe these concepts can look upon The Artist’s Way and The Untethered Soul.

As mentioned in The Untethered Soul, the voice in your head is like the annoying room mate that you can’t get rid of and you have to learn to live with. This voice has a tendency to create a spider web where the fundamental beliefs you hold about yourself would pull you in and trap you from being to see things for how they truly are.

While this revelation already did wonders in how I began to deal with certain situations in my life, make sure to take the time to respond, rather than reacting. Making sure that my actions were grounded in the values I cherished rather than from a place of fear, insecurity, etc. Nevertheless, I will speak about three ideas in particular which made a huge difference in my life:

• Achieving goals may need you to make sacrifices
• The choosing is losing mindset. Better to keep my options “open”
• “The myth of the ‘perfect time’ for tackling big challenges”

Sacrifices needed to achieve your goals

Most of us desire better than what we have today - but what are you willing to give up to achieve those goals? This one was an eye opener for me when I saw how I could change my “victim” mindset, where I was expecting things to be a certain way without really giving up something in return. I’m normally super vigilant about viewing myself as a “victim” in a given situation. I think it’s very natural for us to fall into that pattern since it’s very convenient to shift responsibility to something external. This self-defense mechanism prevents us to feeling “less than” since the reason we’re not where we want to be is not in our control.

Everytime I’ve noticed this mindset, I’ve immediately resolved it by finding ways that I can either influence the situation using levers that are under my control and if the situation is truly outside my control altogether, to simply find ways to come to terms with the situation. Find a way to accept the situation as it is: stop fighting reality.

In my previous post in the series, I talked about the time I started waking up at 5 am in the morning to get consistent around my drumming. I started doing this because I began noticing the voice in my head making excuses for me about how “busy” I am and how poor old me isn’t able to progress on their goals because there just isn’t enough time to prioritize drumming.

Prioritizing things means making sacrifices and at that point in time, I started to question the number of hours I REALLY needed to be able to function well in a day. I know the conventional wisdom goes something like 8 hours of sleep at night but I thought I’d test that wisdom for myself.

We are often fed ideas along the lines of you can have it all without getting uncomfortable.
However, I have found that the more apt saying would be that you can have whatever you're willing to pay the cost for

Choosing is losing

This was a big one for me. I’ve made a number of decisions in my earlier life based on this mindset. When given the option for breadth vs depth, I’d tend to go for the option where I’d still have the option of pivoting to something else if I’d want. Now it’s a reasonable idea and I’m not at all saying that we need to box ourselves in ahead of time without having space to adapt. No, not at all. However, we must understand that there’s a spectrum here where you have to strike a balance between the two extremes. I’ve found that more often than not, this mindset has prevented me from fully committing to a course of action. I found that this “rational” side of my brain was often coming from a place of fear and a preference for maintaining the “status-quo” that I’d be comfortable with.

Furthermore, I saw that while we may convince ourself that we have perfect knowledge about a given situation when we’re making a decision, it’s often the opposite that’s true. When you may view making a choice as “closing certain options”, often it may be the complete opposite that’s true.

Now relating these ideas back to my drumming journey, I saw that in the initial few months when I first started out, I went into a rabbit hole of all the different things I wanted to learn and there was so much content out there. We live in a fascinating world where there’s so much information on our fingertips. So much so, that we are simply not able to dive deeper into topics and give them the time and attention that they deserve.

I can easily draw a parallel here with the field of data science and machine learning where there’s so many new tools and frameworks coming out consistently. The market would give the impression that people are sponges who immediately soak up the latest frameworks in an infinitesimal amount of time once these tools are released. Of course, This is very far from reality. It’s very well known for professionals, in most fields, not just data science, to feel the imposter syndrome. You come across all the different tools that are on your study list and the years of experience that companies require candidates to possess. I think you see where I’m going with this.

In such a setting, where it’s so easy to feel that you’re not enough, it can be convenient to prefer aiming for a superficial understanding of the content at best. In drumming, that approach just doesn’t work. You have an extremely visible feedback loop where for a given technique, pattern or song that you’re learning to play, you are either able to play it, or you’re not.

See, it’s very easy for our mind to jump between different topics but we can’t fool our bodies as easily. Building the muscle memory necessary for flawless and natural drumming requires you to spend so much time with something that you can move that you’re able to execute without any thought whatsoever.

This kind of approach necessitates that you limit the amount of content you work with and increase the amount of time you spend with a certain concept before moving on to something else. Moving on too early would mean your body hasn’t had enough time to absorb the idea enough.

This mindset has been a revelation for me and I’ve been applying it to my professional life as well. I make conscious decisions when making a choice, being fully aware of the opportunity costs by making this choice. Furthermore, I also recognize the opportunity cost of failing to choose: a lack of clarity on your goals, an inability to make progress, etc.

The myth of the “perfect time”

I’ve never considered myself to be one to procrastinate so much. Ofcourse, that’s not entirely true and while I may tend to avoid procrastination in certain aspects of my life, in other’s I do it far too much. I read a great article on procrastination that you may find interesting.

The biggest fallacy you ask me? The idea that a worthwhile endeavour needs to be done at a time and place some point in the future, when things would somehow be better and you would also be better prepared somehow for this challenge. Whenever I’ve felt this way, I’ve traced the sentiment back somehow to the victim mindset I spoke about earlier. The idea that one is going through an especially difficult time right now and that postponing this idea until later is probably a better idea.

Of course, let’s not get carried away with hurtful labels for ourselves either. There are times when we need to be compassionate with ourselves, when going through a period of change and give our mind and body the time to process the experience in question. Like everything, there’s a spectrum, a very personal one, where there comes a time when you must decide to act on things that continuously rise up within you. Continuing to delay something indefinitely, might ultimately mean that something isn’t as much of a priority to you as you’d like to think it is.

Choosing to act on things that we procrastinate is an amazing way to fill up on your “personal accountability bank” (PAB). This was an idea I first came across reading Stephen Covey’s book “First Things First” where he discusses this amazing idea of how you must show up when you demand something from yourself. Everytime we fail to show up, we make a small withdrawal from our bank account and likewise, showing up is like making a deposit to our account. Having a strong balance in our PAB allows us to ride a spiral where we are iteratively able to set the bar higher for ourselves. Besides, showing up for yourself is a great way to feel good about yourself and also be there for others around you.

At a certain point, delaying things meaningful to you because you can’t see the impact of your decision all the way to the end, or because things are a bit chaotic at the moment, starts to add up to make big withdrawals from your PAB. That’s just the way it happens so it’s best to avoid denying it. Just to change things up a bit, I will give a non-drumming example this time. Around the first half of last year I finally decided that I will become a freelancer. I was quite happy with the time I spent as a data scientist at UCB and I was excited to put myself out there.

Between the point where I made that decision and where things eventually worked out towards my first freelance contract, there was a six month period full of background work, recruiter calls and general soul searching. Embracing freelancing is making a commitment to uncertainty in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with and I constantly questioned the timing of my action.

However, at a certain point, a leap of faith is needed, with self-belief that while things might get tough along the way, you would be able to handle them. Having a strong PAB really helps at such a point.

My values

Not to beat around the bush too much further, the result of my soul searching in the shape and form of a list of values that resonate with me is given below:

1. Acceptance
2. Belonging
3. Creativity
4. Curiosity
5. Commitment
6. Simplicity
7. Faith
8. Exploration
9. Humility
10. Expressiveness
11. Boldness
12. Perseverance

Each of the values above fall in one of two categories:

1. Values I cherish and desire to better embody in my life and,
2. Values I deem a strength of mine and that I naturally gravitate towards.

Coming to this list was a milestone for me because I finally had a reference to help me choose amongst a number of interesting options, the ones that are best aligned to my list of prioritized values. It allowed me to declutter my headspace and allowed me to make choices I could confidently stand behind.

However, arriving at this list is just the beginning. The bigger question is how we can make sure to embed these values in our day to day life. How can we make sure these values are more than words to you, written somewhere and forgotten?

I will be exploring these ideas in more detail in the final blog in the series

This post is part of the Decoding Rohail series.

1. Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward
2. Part II: Unearthing Your True North
3. Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life