December 2014 issue — It's time to step up and take charge. by Complete Wellbeing

End the power struggles p38

Heard of inverted gardens? p58

Sleep like a buddha p64

Winner of the Medscape India award 2012

ISSN 2277 – 5153 VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 ` 100

IT’S TIME TO

STEP UP AND

TAKE CHARGE Claim your power to change things

p24

Editor’s insights

Not a burden

Manoj Khatri manoj.khatri@completewellbeing.com

infinitemanoj ManojKhatri

When even one of us takes responsibility, stepping up to do what we can, everything gets be er 02 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

pen the newspaper and you find it all over. Turn on the 9 o’clock news, and there it is again. Log on to social networking sites and once again you find it in all its pervasive glory. The ‘it’ that I refer to is our collective tendency of blaming and pointing fingers at others. From politicians to journalists, to the common man on the street—we have become experts at complaining about the state of our affairs. All we do is react, blame and wait for someone else to take the initiative. This is not just a social phenomenon—passively blaming others is a disease that afflicts our workplaces, our communities, our homes and our relationships. Wherever two or more people assemble, there is high likelihood that sooner or later, you will also find blame being cast, unless someone takes responsibility. The word ‘responsibility’ seems loaded and for many of us it has a negative connotation, implying burden. Responsibility however, is only a burden for passive people, who have lost their ability to respond to life—which is what the word responsibility literally means: the ability to respond. In his play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw said, “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” Shaw is describing his ability to respond to his circumstances. Like Shaw, we too can take responsibility of our lives and our world, and helping us get started is bestselling author John Izzo in this month’s cover story, Step Up and Take Charge. Izzo tells us that when even one of us takes responsibility, stepping up to do what we can, everything gets be er: our marriages, our careers, our lives, our companies, and our world. Life becomes more fun and more rewarding. “Seeing ourselves as responsible and powerful to change things is a game changer in the deepest sense,” Izzo says. Using examples of real people in real situations, he convinces us of the power of one individual to effect real change. “With great power comes great responsibility,” says Peter Parker in Spiderman. It’s a profound thought. But the reverse is also equally true: with great responsibility comes great power—the power to change our lives and our world and make it a li le bit be er. Let’s begin with the one we see in the mirror.

COMPLETE WELLBEING

www.completewellbeing.com Vol IX Issue 02 DEC 2014

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EDITOR & PUBLISHER | Manoj Khatri CONSULTING EDITOR | Dr Grazilia Almeida-Khatri SR COPY EDITOR & FEATURES WRITER | Wynrica Gonsalves EDITORIAL COORDINATOR | Joycelin Sequeira ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR | Amit Amdekar SR GRAPHIC DESIGNER | Mukesh Patel EDITORIAL OFFICE 502, A wing, Sagar Tech Plaza, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri-Kurla Road, Mumbai 400072. Tel/Fax: 022-6742 0900 E-mail: editorial@completewellbeing.com

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SUMMARY OF CONTENTS TRENDING THIS MONTH >>

Responsibility changes everything By John Izzo

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BULK SUBSCRIPTIONS Call: 022-6742 0900 SMS: ‘CW BULK’ to 7738387787 E-mail: copysales@completewellbeing.com SUBSCRIPTIONS Call: 022-6742 0900 SMS: ‘CW SUB’ to 7738387787 E-mail: subscriptions@completewellbeing.com PRINTED AT | Rajhans Enterprises PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY | Manoj Khatri, on behalf of Complete Wellbeing Publishing Pvt Ltd., at Rajhans Enterprises, No. 134, 4th Main Road, Industrial Town, Rajajinagar, Bangalore - 560044, and published from Complete Wellbeing Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 502, A wing, Sagar Tech Plaza, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri-Kurla Road, Mumbai 400072. Tel/Fax: 022-6742 0900 Editor: Manoj Khatri © Complete Wellbeing Publishing Pvt Ltd., All rights reserved. Reproduction, in part or in whole, in print, electronic or any other form, is strictly prohibited. DISCLAIMER | Complete Wellbeing is dedicated to providing useful, well-researched information on holistic health/wellbeing, but its contents are not intended to provide medical advice/diagnosis for individual problems or circumstances, or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Readers are advised to always consult their physician/healthcare professional/therapist, prior to starting any new remedy, therapy or treatment, or practice, or with any questions they may have regarding a medical/health condition. The views expressed by writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor, publisher, or Complete Wellbeing. Using masculine pronouns ‘he’, ‘him’ or ‘his’ for subjects of unknown gender is considered prejudicial. We respect both genders and hence use feminine and masculine pronouns interchangeably. Complete Wellbeing is not responsible for advertising claims.

COMPLETE WELLBEING

RESOLVE >>

Relationships 38 End the power struggles By Marita Nazareth

MANAGE >>

Mind & emotions 34 Compassion fatigue By Susanne Babbel

Sleep 64 Sleep like Buddha did

Health & vitality 82 Ear pain

Self-help 66 Take that first step

Personal care 84 Care for your skin in winter

By Joseph Emet

By Nicole Paulie

By Ravikiran Vernekar

By Jaishree Sharad

VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 03

DISCOVER >>

Living spaces 58 The magic of inverted gardening

By Shaan Lalwani

Mind & emotions 90 Access Bars

DECIDE >>

Parenting 48 Why you should encourage

your kids to have more friends

By Gaurai Uddanwadikar

By Ashish Narayankar

EXPLORE >>

Food & nutrition 42 Recipes for diabetics By Michael Swamy

UNWIND >>

Humour 74 The end of conversation By Sahil Shah

UNLEARN >>

Money matters 78 How emotions influence our decisions about money

By Kate Levinson

Living Spaces 54 Feng Shui for children’s bedrooms

By Anand Bhardwaj

Perspective 76 Yoga in your work life

By Georg & Brenda Feuerstein

Travel 92 Romancing in Hong Kong By Sathya Saran

TRANSFORM >> Consciousness 88 What is holiness? By Osho

REGULARS >> 10 Talkback 12 Events 16 Write notes 18 Happy happenings 37 Month freshener 46 Culture club 52 CW Select 70 Confession booth 96 New kits on the block 98 Reflections

04 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

COMPLETE WELLBEING

MONTH FRESHENER Infuse life into your days TUE

TUE

Recycle paper or stockings by making flowers out of them.

WED

World Disability Day People with a disability aren’t different; treat them with respect and dignity.

THU

FRI

SAT

Pamper yourself— blend some oil, sugar and rose petals in a blender to create a homemade body scrub.

MON

Make your own music—write a song and give it your own tune.

Use public transport for travelling—just a single day of fewer vehicles on the road can make a difference.

FRI

If you’re bored of the plain walls in your room, channel your inner artist and decorate them with your own paintings.

SAT

MON

Vegetable art is a great way to reuse vegetable scraps. Try it out and see how creative you can get!

SAT FRI

FRI

SAT

20 19

Get your friends and family to come together and create a food bank; share your meals with those that need it.

Christmas Spread the joy of Christmas—visit an orphanage with your family and distribute gifts to the kids.

Commemorate your life’s important occasions–create a zany, colourful scrapbook and fill it with photos and memorabilia.

SUN

THU

SUN

WED

THU

World Soil Day Plant a tree for the sake of your children’s future.

International Anti-corruption Day Raise your voice if you spot anyone giving or accepting a bribe.

Take your kids for mountain climbing and watch the sunset together.

National Energy Conservation Day Switch off any electronic gadgets when they are not in use. TUE

WED

Take a few colourful paperclips and prepare Christmas-themed bookmarks for your friends.

WED

MY NOTE

New Year’s Eve Usher in the New Year with those that mean the most to you. www.completewellbeing.com

MON

December 2014

Decide

parenting

06 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

COMPLETE WELLBEING

THEIR FIRST FRIENDS

Parents are sometimes overprotective of their children and don’t allow them to mingle with other kids. But these early friendships are integral to building relationships that we carry through life

By Gaurai Uddanwadikar

FRIENDSHIP… the very word evokes memories of our best pals, crazy times in school, pranks in college, group study sessions, biĴer fights, breaking and making up and lessons learnt. That is why friendships play such a vital role in a child’s overall development as a happy and healthy individual. COMPLETE WELLBEING

VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 07

Types of play It all begins in early childhood as we sit next to another child in the sand pit or in the park. We play alone, seemingly oblivious to the child next to us, but in reality we mimic the actions of that child. This is parallel play, the first step towards socialisation and friendships. Then comes associative play followed by cooperative play, which slowly and surely pushes us towards more complex interactions with other children and eventually towards building the deep bonds that aﬀect us to the core.

Effective social skill trainers Friendships not only serve to provide children with playmates but also teaches them the larger purpose of social and emotional development. Kids learn how to relate to different people through making friends. Interacting with diverse people allows your child to understand what socially acceptable behaviour is and isn’t. Solving problems, weighing alternative solutions, implementing social plans and making rules are all skills that a child learns as he navigates his way through friendships. He also learns about team spirit, accountability, social reciprocity, responsibility towards self and others and loyalty. It is through friendships and playmates that your child understands that individuals react differently to different situations. He learns that there are diverse perspectives to a situation and that unusual situations call upon singularly distinctive ways of dealing with them. Friendships also encourage healthy competition and foster high achievement goals. Gaurai Uddanwadikar, is a Harvard Medical School certified counsellor. She heads Counselling India and spends the better part of her day in psychotherapy and counselling.

Companionship a survival necessity A child’s self-esteem is inextricably linked to his peer group. His playmates set the standard for age appropriate performance and it is against this standard that the child measures himself. His friends help him cope

08 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

with diﬃcult times like parents’ divorce, illness, academic disappointments as well as supporting him through the transition phases of adolescence. Research shows that children with friends have a healthier sense of self, higher levels of self-confidence and greater feelings of wellbeing. They fare be er academically and have be er social skills when compared to children with few or no friends. Lack of friends or rejection by peers can cause significant amounts of distress and even lead to childhood depression. Friendships are an important factor for the healthy psychological development of a child. Friendships serve a purpose that is diﬀerent and complementary to the one served by family. Family gives one a sense of belonging, satisfies some of our biological needs and gives us a sense of intimacy. On the other hand, friendship is our training ground; it provides us with the luxury of trial and error and the cushion to make mistakes before we venture out into the adult world.

Friendship at diﬀerent life stages Childhood friendships are focussed on rudimentary play behaviours and a preference for certain playmates. Elementary school children tend to focus on kids with similar likes and dislikes and become part of groups with those inherent hallmarks of inclusion/exclusion, fear of rejection, conformity and independence. The focus here is on companionship. But, it is tweens and adolescents that spend almost a third of their day with friends. Friendships now become more intimate and a big part of their identity. Validation, acceptance, care and trust are the other features of friendships at this age. It is at this life stage that peer friendships influence an adolescent at a deeper level. They can either lead him towards delinquent behaviour or foster resilience, higher adaptability, conflict resolution skills and collaborative learning. COMPLETE WELLBEING

The stages of play >>

First is solitary play where the child plays by himself and enjoys discovering new things around him. At this stage however, he does not play with other children.

Then comes parallel play, in which the child plays besides another child, sometimes imitating the other child’s actions, but never interacting with him/her.

This is followed by associative play where the child often imitates another child playing next to him with minimal interaction in the form of borrowing toys.

This is followed by cooperative play which involves interaction, formal organisation and is seen in older children.

I remember seeing two children, Anil and Pritam, both aged 10 years, going through a tough time adjusting to their new school. Both had relocated to India recently. Anil and his parents lived in a retirement-haven neighbourhood, where he had a limited opportunity to meet kids of his age. Pritam on the other hand, stayed in an apartment complex and had a lot of peers in the area. He would meet them every evening to play. At the end of six months, Pritam had adjusted well to his new school and new surroundings as a result of the friends he made, while Anil continued to struggle for a few more months before adapting to his new routine. Pritam’s friends helped him to feel at home in his new surroundings, they had modelled the local lingo and shaped his school behaviour, thus aiding the process of Pritam’s se ling down.

Encouraging your children to build friendships As parents, it is important for us to understand the value of friendships for our kids and work towards providing them the COMPLETE WELLBEING

opportunities to socialise and form bonds with peers. A visit to the neighbourhood park, organised sport activities, play-dates and sleepovers can provide your child with occasions to develop peer a achments. Se ing clear, acceptable rules for social behaviours, teaching the child how to deal with diﬀerent social situations, coaching them to deal with negative emotions and seeking resolution to peer conflicts will encourage your child to seek out friends and the essential support system. Friendships are a handy play resource, an avenue for finding help and trusting care to your child. Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace. —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet To subscribe to Complete Wellbeing, send ‘CW SUB’ to 07738387787

VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 09

Resolve sleep

SLEEP LIKE THE BUDDHA Feel the comfort of your bed. Are you there to enjoy it? Or are you mentally somewhere else, stressing about something that happened during the day, or might happen tomorrow?

By Joseph Emet

WHAT IS THE USUAL WAY you contemplate the future? Is it with some anxiety? As we learn to look at tomorrow with a smile, sleep also smiles at us. We have concerns about our health, relationships, children and work. But as we change our a itudes and relax our need to control everything, those concerns lose their grip on us, and we can sleep be er at night. During the day, your mindfulness practice can bring a sense of contentment, peace and happiness. At night, these feelings translate into a relaxed a itude and be er sleep. As we train that mind to get in touch with focussed breathing and calm down, restful sleep becomes a possibility. Mindfulness practices promote being in our senses over being in our thoughts, being in the ‘here and now’ over being in the past or the future. You may be physically present when you are in bed, but mentally you may be somewhere else. Even if you lay your body down in a dark, quiet and comfortable bed, in your mind you may be going over an acrimonious argument you had with your teenage son earlier in the day. But your body does not know the diﬀer10 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

ence between an imaginary argument and a real one; in both cases, it gets worked up and soon you are more ready for shadow boxing than for sleeping.

Thoughts don’t come with a switch Perhaps you’ve had nights like this, or know somebody who does. It is frustrating, because you want to live an eﬀective life; but here you are, hours are ticking by, and you cannot bill them to anybody! For some of you, sleep might be a waste of time, when you could be doing something more productive. It is in moments like these that we discover what a busy place our mind is. This is also one of the first discoveries that people make when they start to meditate. The heart beats, the lungs breathe and the brain thinks—constantly. Thinking goes on all the time; it does not stop a er we hand in that brilliant research paper, finish tutoring our kids, or mail our income tax. Thinking does not stop when we go to bed. There is no ‘oﬀ ’ bu on. Some first-timers become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of their own thoughts. They find it disagreeable to sit with all that confusion. Yet, there is no way to avoid or ignore that initial confusion. Pushing it away by seeking distractions is self-limiting: the blockbuster movie is soon over, that gripping novel ends and guests eventually leave. Sooner or later we need to face it and find a way to deal with it. COMPLETE WELLBEING

You cannot control sleep Calming the mind is the first step in Vipassana meditation. Mindfulness makes it possible to let go, and to abandon yourself to sleep. This is diﬀerent from trying to control sleep. There are some things you can and do control—like your skeletal muscles, or which way your car is going when you are behind the wheel. There are some other things you cannot control consciously. Sleep is one of them. The conscious mind may be good at creating the conditions for sleep, like turning oﬀ the light, pu ing on some so music and so on, but it has no clue about how to ‘do’ sleep. The ‘doers’ among us may try to control every aspect to a point where the habit backfires. This is where mindfulness helps; it makes us aware of our habits of mind, our a itudes, and our thoughts. And awareness is the first step towards change.

mind something else. This ‘something else’ is what we develop in meditation. It is the ability to come home to our body… to the soothing rhythm of our breath. Because we have been shown the path, we can be certain that the Buddha was peaceful not only during the day, but also at night when he lay down to sleep.

Here are a few suggestions that can help >> A daily period of meditation is important

Train your brain to sleep Change happens slowly, but it does happen. The ability of meditation practice to physically change the brain has been documented by neuroscientists. The brain is like plastic and will change to accommodate the changing demands that we make on it. In mindfulness meditation, we pay a ention intentionally—we do not allow ourselves to give in to automatic thoughts. In the iconic image of the meditating Buddha, he was si ing and watering seeds selectively—he was watering the seeds of positive mental states. With time and practice, weeding our thoughts becomes easier to do, and pays oﬀ. During the day, the people around us, our work, or even leisure activities occupy our minds. At night, when these stop, automatic thinking takes over—unless we oﬀer the

>> >>

for calming the mind. In meditation, we become witnesses of our own thoughts and feelings. This is diﬀerent from ‘drowning’ in them. We stay with the breath, and observe our thoughts. Avoid watching the evening news on TV; it is usually a run-down of what’s wrong with the world. At night-time, you need to contemplate what’s right with the world. You may wish to mentally go over all the good things that happened during the day and give thanks for all the things that you feel grateful for. If you enjoy reading before going to sleep, choose something nourishing, not a mystery novel or a horror story. Emails and text messages are best read in the morning. At bedtime, bad news will get you upset. Good news will get you excited. Both these states of mind are not conducive to sleep.

Joseph Emet is author of several books on meditation including Sleep better with Mindfulness Meditation. He was invited by Thich Nhat Hanh to receive the Lamp Transmission. His Dharma name is Dwelling in Peaceful Concentration, which he has been trying to live up to.

Meditation has many benefits, and be er sleep is one of them. In most pictures of the meditating Buddha, he sits on a seat of lotus flowers. This is a metaphor for his state of mind. Without a peaceful mind, even the so est bed can sometimes feel like a bed of nails!

Take charge of your life with a good night’s sleep on Recron® Certified pillows.

Discover

health & vitality

Ashish Narayankar tells us how he uses the Access Consciousness approach in conjunction with medicine to heal his patients

AS A DOCTOR, I would o en perceive the emotions of my patients and realise that there is much more to healing an individual than just using orthodox medicine. I would wonder why people get depressed or fall sick and what I could do differently to help them. I realised that 99 per cent of all illnesses are just physical manifestations of mental and emotional distress, and that it was more important to work on the individuals’ emotions than treating the symptoms of the disease in order to cure it. This awareness led me to explore numerous healing modalities. One thing led to another and I started working on my clients in a holistic way, treating the aspects of mind, body and spirit.

Accessing your

consciousness

What is Access Consciousness? When I came across Access Consciousness and was introduced to Bars, I resonated with its philosophies. Access Consciousness believes in empowering you with pragmatic tools that enable you to change anything in that area of life you consider dysfunctional or where you have given up. Access uses hands-on body processes, as well as hands-oﬀ [verbal] processes to help you shi your life. It teaches us that we are infinite beings with boundless choices and possibilities. Life can be hard when it seems that we have no choice; but it is even harder when we know we have a choice and yet we are not taking that one step to create something more for ourselves. This is where Access Bars works wonders.

12 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

What can you expect from a session of Access Bars? Our head has 32 energy points called ‘The Bars’, which connect to various aspects of our life. When we touch these points gently, old energies stuck in the brain and body are released, which allows easy and tremendous change. This process is known as ‘running your Bars’.

While running these Bars, all our judgements, points of view, beliefs, a itudes, thoughts, feelings, emotions etc. about that particular area in our life are released. This process helps us to eﬀortlessly erase years of stored blockages and limitations in just a few minutes. There are separate Bars for money, creativity, aging, body, sexuality,

COMPLETE WELLBEING

The 10 commandments of Access Consciousness 1 Would an infinite being truly choose this? 2 Interesting point of view 3 10 second increments power and healing, to name a few. When you touch these Bars, you not only release unwanted thoughts, but also open up opportunities for change in your life. A er running these Bars, some people may experience a certain awareness of the energy being run, but rest assured that this feeling will dissipate of its own accord, over a period of time.

Can you run your own Bars? Yes, we can run our own bars; however, having someone else do it for us would be much more eﬀective. This process can be learnt in a single day’s class. A er you have learned how to run your Bars, you can team up with another person who has learnt it and swap sessions. When you give a Bars session to someone else, every thought you have that is the same as theirs, gets cleared at the same time. So when you give a session, you get a session too! You can never go wrong with the Bars. The only known side eﬀect of Bars is—happiness.

But this sounds similar to EFT Many times I have been asked if Access Bars is similar to Emotional Freedom Technique [EFT] or Kinesiology. Well, EFT is about unlocking emotions and traumas from the body by tapping specific energy points, which is also similar to acupuncture. It is a treatment you can perform on yourself to heal your body. Running your Bars and using access tools will accomplish all that EFT sets out to do, and much more. Access Consciousness has also COMPLETE WELLBEING

taught me an amazing concept of ‘receiving’ and reiterates its importance. Life is not only about giving and doing, it is also about receiving and being. Access helps you to get you out of judgements and gives you a totally diﬀerent perspective on life.

4 Live in the question

My experiences with Access Consciousness

8 No competition

A lot of people complain about the things that others do to them and wonder why they are always being targeted. When we are not empowered, we end up blaming our situation, our family and everything else around us for our present circumstances. This is simply a defensive response, so that we are safe in our mind, creating pseudo notions of ‘it’s not me’, ‘someone else did it’ and ‘I am just a victim of my situations’. When I started implementing Access Bars on my clients, my sessions were faster, more eﬀective and be er, and my clients went back not just aware of the mess they’d created, but believing that they have an option of undoing it. So in turn they believed that they could create a be er reality for themselves. There are no age restrictions and Access Consciousness can also be taught to kids. When I facilitate a Bars Class or any other Access class, I enjoy sowing the seeds of awareness in my participants. Through these sessions I strive to enable them to be be er individuals by helping them release all the limitations and finiteness that they were operating with. To subscribe to Complete Wellbeing, send ‘CW SUB’ to 07738387787

5 No form, no structure, no significance 6 No judgement, no discrimination, no discernment 7 No drugs of any kind

9 Do not listen, tell or buy the story 10 No exclusion.

Ashish Narayankar is a Body process and Talk to The Entities facilitator. He is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and works holistically using medical science and energy medicine. He specialises in cancer healing. Write to him at ashishnarayankar@ gmail.com

VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 13

Trending this month

IT’S TIME TO

STEP UP AND

TAKE CHARGE Claim your power to change things Every problem, from personal diﬃculties and business challenges to social issues, can be solved if all of us look to ourselves to create change rather than by looking to others. By seeing ourselves as agents of change we feel happier, less stressed, and more powerful

14 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

By John Izzo

COMPLETE WELLBEING

RESPONSIBILITY CHANGES EVERYTHING. The moment we decide that we are the ones who are capable of and responsible for changing things, everything shi s. Your marriage, your career, your life, your company, and our world gets be er whenever one of us simply decides to step up and do what we can do in our sphere of influence. Seeing ourselves as responsible and powerful enough to change things is a game changer in the deepest sense. The shi is akin to the childhood game of tag. When I was a child in New York City, we played endless hours of this game. One person was ‘it’ and had to run around trying to tag someone else. The moment you were tagged, the whole game changed. Well, you are ‘it’! You are responsible for your own happiness, for the success of your relationships, for the morale of your workplace, for the success of the company where you work, and for your life. What’s more, you are responsible for poverty, for global warming, for your neighbourhood, for your school, and for homelessness. Be er said, we are all ‘it’. That is, when each of us takes responsibility, stepping up to do what we can, everything gets be er. Not only that, but when we step up and take responsibility, the game of life and work is more fun and more rewarding. We find more success. This is not to say that there aren’t times when our lives, our happiness, and our success are significantly influenced by outside COMPLETE WELLBEING

forces. Sometimes our manager is a tyrant, sometimes parents aren’t able to give us a good foundation, sometimes our spouse is more to blame than we are, and sometimes the problems we face [such as global warming] seem so intractable that it is easy to feel like we can’t make a diﬀerence. But when we choose to focus on what WE can do and how WE can act, we are suddenly powerful. Victims simply don’t create change. I am not talking about “the burden of responsibility.” Many of us already feel too responsible, taking on the blame and feeling a need to fix everything. The responsibility I refer to is freeing. It is about choosing to do what you can in your sphere of influence without worrying about what anyone else is or is not doing.

John Izzo, PhD is a business leadership expert and community leader. He advises some of the top companies and has spoken to more than one million people across the globe. He is the author of six books. His most recent book Stepping Up, shows the power of personal responsibility in life, work and society.

VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 15

The Five Rows of Responsibility One of the simplest yet most profound experiences of my life happened to me on an airplane in January 2002. It was an icy, snowy day in Cleveland, and I arrived just in time to be the last one on the plane before they closed the door. I quickly realised that everyone around me was in a foul mood. No sooner had I sat down than the stranger next to me said, “My boss is such an idiot! He is sending me up here to this godforsaken place. The client never buys anything and never will buy anything. My boss is such an idiot.” Having overheard her diatribe, the man across the aisle chimed in with his own commentary: “Not

only is your boss an idiot, lady, but the people who run this airline are idiots too. We have no leg room, we are late as always and look at the ice on these wings—we’re probably going to die on this thing.” Once we took oﬀ, the mood continued, and the negative virus spread. Soon everyone around me was complaining about the world, their companies, and their spouses, and it just kept ge ing worse. Even I was calling my boss an idiot, and I work for myself! It was a veritable feast of negativity and victim thinking. Like all feasts of junk food, the feast felt good going down but le all of us feeling worse. About five rows in front of me at the bulkhead, a mother sat with her two-year-old son. All through the first half hour of the flight,

We have tremendous power to influence people around us

16 DECEMBER 2014 VOL IX ISSUE 02

COMPLETE WELLBEING

the kid kept trying without success to get his head above the seat to look back. A few times I saw his head, another time his eyebrows, but it was not until about forty minutes into the flight that he finally got his head above the seat and rested his chin and hands on the seat. He looked something like a chipmunk. When he saw all of the passengers behind him, he smiled the biggest, most natural smile you’ve ever seen. Within moments that child transformed the five rows behind him. The boss-is-an-idiot lady started talking to me about her kids. The airline-is-run-by-idiots guy stopped complaining and began making faces as he tried to get the boy to smile again. Someone said, “We should all be a li le more positive like that kid,” and suggested I go borrow him. When I oﬀered to take the child oﬀ the mother’s hands for a li le bit, his mother gladly accepted the break and the boy’s visit to row six changed the mood within minutes. Si ing there at 30,000 feet ra ling across the Midwest, I had an epiphany that I have come to call The Five Rows Principle: most of us have tremendous power to influence about five rows around us, but we spend most of our time thinking and talking about what someone else should do in some other plane or row. What’s more, almost every problem we face—from global warming and terrorism to poor morale in a business and bullying in schools—is a five rows problem. That is, the problem is merely the aggregate of what each of us is doing in our five rows. Let’s take an example of a seemingly intractable problem. Why is global warming and a deteriorating environment such a vexing problem? Because, the environment—like most problems—is a five rows problem. You could say the government needs to step up, but the problem is the aggregate result of decisions each one of us [and our companies] makes in our five rows—the cars we drive, the trips we take or don’t take, the food we eat, the choices we make in terms of what we buy, what we reuse or recycle, and so on. On one hand, our five rows don’t ma er very much at all, but on the other hand the problem will be solved only when each of us does what we can in our five rows. COMPLETE WELLBEING

If you work hard, you will achieve. It is a message of self-responsibility in its purest form. If you are not succeeding, look in the mirror

Take a company where bad service and low morale have become the norm. You could say that the CEO needs to fix it, but soon you would realise that, for the most part, service and morale are both five rows problems. Things will change only when individuals step up in their five rows and treat the customer be er or do their part to improve morale. What’s more, individuals need to focus on what THEY can do in their five rows instead of what someone else should do. The CEO should be worried about what she can do in her sphere, the managers in theirs, and the front-line people in their sphere. The more people focus on taking action themselves, the more likely we are to make progress. If we focus on our five rows, we can create change. We can’t control what anyone else does, only what we do. This conclusion applies as easily to our personal lives as to these larger landscapes. Reeling from a quarrel with my wife that day on my ride to the airport, I was focussed on what my wife needed to do to fix our marriage instead of taking responsibility for my ‘five rows’. The more I focussed on what she should do, the less powerful I felt, and the less impact I could have. Whether it is in our personal or our communal life, we must always begin by asking what we can do, not what others should do. If we all begin in our five rows, every problem we face can be fixed, every challenge we have can be solved. Every time you are tempted to think it does not ma er if you step up, remember the five rows principle: if each of us begins where we are and does what we can, anything is possible. Pointing to someone else is easy and ultimately means no one does anything. VOL IX ISSUE 02 DECEMBER 2014 17

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