Three positives a day

I was recently transferred to the very department I had started my career from – my beloved Risk. After spending initial four and half years in Risk, I have moved across various teams on the business side for the last seven and half years. The first day went in shifting my stuff to the new desk, configuring the system, etc. I was heartily welcomed by all members of the team – some of them with whom I had worked earlier and some new faces.

Finally work started on Monday. In the beginning, I was so lost struggling to gather the information for completing the work. My colleague (who had worked with me in my earlier stint as well) helped me out. It felt so strange learning some MS excel tricks from him (he remembered that one particular excel command was actually taught to him by me around a decade ago). How times change 🙂

So here are my positives for the day:

1. Start of new role, new department
2. The help and support from my new colleagues
3. Had a long discussion about my journey with the bank, career aspirations, etc. with my brother-in-law. He has a very clear thought process, is a keen observer and despite never having worked in corporate banking, could relate to my line of work and provide valuable insights and guidance.

After yesterday’s inspiration to pen down and reflect on positive events, I thought of putting it in some sort of a structure where I remember to do this everyday without fail. It is ironical that for even getting some relaxation and positivity, my mind sought discipline 🙂

So I thought of writing a blog and immediately consulted my friends, philosophers and guides aka Shilpa and Ashvini. Shil is an avid reader, poet and blogger. Ashu is my no nonsense voice of reason. They welcomed the idea of a blog and suggested that I go ahead.

Initially being very shy and apprehensive of revealing my personal thoughts online, I went ahead with it and voila……blog ka shubharambh ho gaya.

Here are my 3, no 4 positives for the day:

1. The birth of this blog with the blessings of Shil and Ashu 🙂
2. I finally updated my LinkedIn profile after months and years of inactivity
3. Hubby came back from our home town. Although he was away for only 2 days, I had missed him dearly
4. Me and Aai saw an excellent film on TV – “Ani…Dr. Kashinath Ghanekar”. The film, based on the life of the legendary Marathi theatre & film personality, recreated many scenes of the various films and characters we had seen on DD in childhood and depicted many popular theatre and TV actors / filmakers / writers of his era including Prabhakar Panshikar, Dr. Shriram Lagoo, Sulochana didi, Sandhya, Vasant Kanetkar, Bhalji Pendharkar, etc. Although I had never seen Dr. Kashinath Ghanekar on stage, it brought back memories of many Marathi plays I had watched along with my parents many years ago.

After spending the last one month feeling sad and demotivated at work, I decided to buck up and stop this nonsense. Started looking online on how to lift myself up and avoid negativity, came across a Tedx talk by Alison Ledgerwood named “Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck)”. In a short span of 10 minutes, Alison highlights how negativity inherently has a significant and more long lasting effect on one’s mood and outlook as compared to positivity. She also suggests methods to overcome this. One of the ways is to reflect on the positives and the upsides in our everyday life.

While I had heard earlier as well that listing down three positives everyday is a great way to feel motivated, somehow this talk was like a wake up call or rather like a ray of light inspiring me to do it.

So finally, at the end of the day, I wrote the following e-mail to myself listing down three good things that happened:

1. Awesome Zumba class this morning – Shalini played some of my favourite songs including boombera, koli dance moves song (ok, I don’t know the exact names of these songs, but this is what I call them to remember)
2. Aai (my mom) came home after almost four five months and will be staying the week.
3. Shamira called, she is in Mumbai this whole month (She is my childhood friend and lives in Europe with her husband). While she had messaged earlier that she is in Mumbai and will call me this week, today she did call – so while it was not a surprise, hearing her voice made me really happy. We will plan to meet sometime this week somewhere near my office.

Awesome!!! Good night!!!