survival8: February 2024

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Candid Medicated Soap

Product highlights

# Inhibits the growth of fungi

# Helps relieve skin itching

# Aids in healing cracking skin

Candid Medicated Soap is an effective soap for managing skin irritation and itching. It may also help with skin conditions like jock itch, ringworm, and athlete's foot. It contains clotrimazole, which aids in the killing of fungi that cause skin irritation.

Key Ingredients

# Clotrimazole 1% W/W

Key Benefits

# Candid Medicated Soap is a beneficial soap for relieving skin issues such as irritation and itching

# It may also prove beneficial in managing skin disorders such as jock itch, ringworm and athlete’s foot

# It contains clotrimazole which aids in killing fungi

Directions For Use

Use as directed on the label or as advised by your physician.

Safety Information

# Read the label carefully before use

# Do not exceed the recommended dosage

# Store in a cool and dry place away from direct sunlight

# Keep out of reach of children

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Summary of Emotional intelligence 2.0 (2009, Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves)

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WHAT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE LOOKS LIKE: UNDERSTANDING THE FOUR SKILLS

To truly improve your ability in the four emotional intelligence skills, you need to better understand each skill and what it looks like in action. The four emotional intelligence skills pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence. Personal competence is made up of your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies. Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships.

The four skills that together make up emotional intelligence. The top two skills, self-awareness and self-management, are more about you. The bottom two skills, social awareness and relationship management, are more about how you are with other people.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and understand your tendencies across situations. Self-awareness includes staying on top of your typical reactions to specific events, challenges, and people. A keen understanding of your tendencies is important; it helps you quickly make sense of your emotions. A high degree of self-awareness requires a willingness to tolerate the discomfort of focusing on feelings that may be negative.
The only way to genuinely understand your emotions is to spend enough time thinking through them to figure out where they come from and why they are there. Emotions always serve a purpose. Because they are your reactions to the world around you, emotions always come from somewhere. Many times emotions seem to arise out of thin air, and it's important to understand why something gets a reaction out of you. People who do this can cut to the core of a feeling quickly. Situations that create strong emotions will always require more thought, and these prolonged periods of self-reflection often keep you from doing something that you'll regret.
Self-awareness is not about discovering deep, dark secrets or unconscious motivations, but, rather, it comes from developing a straightforward and honest understanding of what makes you tick. People high in self-awareness are remarkably clear in their understanding of what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons.
The surprising thing about self-awareness is that just thinking about it helps you improve the skill, even though much of your focus initially tends to be on what you do “wrong.” Having self-awareness means you aren't afraid of your emotional “mistakes.” They tell you what you should be doing differently and provide the steady stream of information you need to understand as your life unfolds.
Self-awareness is a foundational skill; when you have it, self-awareness makes the other emotional intelligence skills much easier to use. As self-awareness increases, people's satisfaction with life—defined as their ability to reach their goals at work and at home—skyrockets. Self-awareness is so important for job performance that 83 percent of people high in self-awareness are top performers, and just 2 percent of bottom performers are high in self-awareness. Why is this so? When you are self-aware you are far more likely to pursue the right opportunities, put your strengths to work and—perhaps most importantly—keep your emotions from holding you back.
The need for self-awareness has never been greater.
Guided by the mistaken notion that psychology deals exclusively with pathology, we assume that the only time to learn about ourselves is in the face of crisis. We tend to embrace those things with which we're comfortable, and put the blinders on the moment something makes us uncomfortable. But it's really the whole picture that serves us.
The more we understand the beauty and the blemishes, the better we are able to achieve our full potential.

Self-Management

Self-management is what happens when you act—or do not act. It is dependent on your self-awareness and is the second major part of personal competence. Self-management is your ability to use your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively. This means managing your emotional reactions to situations and people. Some emotions create a paralyzing fear that makes your thinking so cloudy that the best course of action is nowhere to be found—assuming that there is something you should be doing. In these cases, self-management is revealed by your ability to tolerate the uncertainty as you explore your emotions and options. Once you understand and build comfort with what you are feeling, the best course of action will show itself.
Self-management is more than resisting explosive or problematic behavior. The biggest challenge that people face is managing their tendencies over time and applying their skills in a variety of situations. Obvious and momentary opportunities for self-control (i.e., “I'm so mad at that darn dog!”) are the easiest to spot and manage. Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals. The realization of such goals is often delayed, meaning that your commitment to self-management will be tested over and over again. Those who manage themselves the best are able to see things through without cracking. Success comes to those who can put their needs on hold and continually manage their tendencies.

Social Awareness

As the first component of social competence, social awareness is a foundational skill. Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them. This often means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling even if you do not feel the same way. It's easy to get caught up in your own emotions and forget to consider the perspective of the other party. Social awareness ensures you stay focused and absorb critical information.
Listening and observing are the most important elements of social awareness. To listen well and observe what's going on around us, we have to stop doing many things we like to do. We have to stop talking, stop the monologue that may be running through our minds, stop anticipating the point the other person is about to make, and stop thinking ahead to what we are going to say next. It takes practice to really watch people as you interact with them and get a good sense of what they are thinking and feeling. At times, you'll feel like an anthropologist. Anthropologists make their living watching others in their natural state without letting their own thoughts and feelings disturb the observation. This is social awareness in its purest form. The difference is you won't be 100 yards away watching events unfold through a pair of binoculars. To be socially aware, you have to spot and understand people's emotions while you're right there in the middle of it—a contributing, yet astutely aware, member of the interaction.

Relationship Management

Though relationship management is the second component of social competence, this skill often taps into your abilities in the first three emotional intelligence skills: self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. Relationship management is your ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully. This ensures clear communication and effective handling of conflict. Relationship management is also the bond you build with others over time.
People who manage relationships well are able to see the benefit of connecting with many different people, even those they are not fond of. Solid relationships are something that should be sought and cherished. They are the result of how you understand people, how you treat them, and the history you share.
The weaker the connection you have with someone, the harder it is to get your point across. If you want people to listen, you have to practice relationship management and seek benefits from every relationship, especially the challenging ones. The difference between an interaction and a relationship is a matter of frequency. It's a product of the quality, depth, and time you spend interacting with another person.
Relationship management poses the greatest challenge for most people during times of stress. When you consider that more than 70 percent of the people we've tested have difficulty handling stress, it's easy to see why building quality relationships poses a challenge. Some of the most challenging and stressful situations people face are at work.
Conflicts at work tend to fester when people passively avoid problems, because people lack the skills needed to initiate a direct, yet constructive conversation. Conflicts at work tend to explode when people don't manage their anger or frustration, and choose to take it out on other people. Relationship management gives you the skills you need to avoid both scenarios, and make the most out of every interaction you have with another person.

SELF-AWARENESS STRATEGIES

Simply put, to be self-aware is to know yourself as you really are. Initially, self-awareness can come across as a somewhat ambiguous concept. There is no finish line where someone is going to slap a medal on you and deem you “self-aware.” Awareness of yourself is not just knowing that you are a morning person instead of a night owl.
It's deeper than that. Getting to know yourself inside and out is a continuous journey of peeling back the layers of the onion and becoming more and more comfortable with what is in the middle—the true essence of you.
Your hard-wired emotional reactions to anything come before you even have a chance to respond. Since it isn't possible to leave your emotions out of the equation, managing yourself and your relationships means you first need to be aware of the full range of your feelings, both positive and negative.
When you don't take time out to notice and understand your emotions, they have a strange way of resurfacing when you least expect or want them to. It's their way of trying to bring something important to your attention. They will persist, and the damage will mount, until you take notice.
Facing the truth about who you are can at times be unsettling. Getting in touch with your emotions and tendencies takes honesty and courage. Be patient and give yourself credit for even the smallest bits of forward momentum. As you start noticing things about yourself that you weren't previously aware of (things you aren't always going to like), you are progressing.
The remainder of this chapter introduces you to 15 original strategies, which were designed to help you maximize your self-awareness to create positive changes in your life. The strategies are straightforward and packed full of insights and examples that will help your self-awareness grow.

1. Quit Treating Your Feelings as Good or Bad

2. Observe the Ripple Effect from Your Emotions

3. Lean into Your Discomfort

4. Feel Your Emotions Physically

5. Know Who and What Pushes Your Buttons

6. Watch Yourself Like a Hawk . . .

7. Keep a Journal about Your Emotions

8. Don't Be Fooled by a Bad Mood

9. Don't Be Fooled by a Good Mood, Either

10. Stop and Ask Yourself Why You Do the Things You Do

11. Visit Your Values

12. Check Yourself

13. Spot Your Emotions in Books, Movies, and Music

14. Seek Feedback

15. Get to Know Yourself under Stress

SELF-MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Self-management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to actively choose what you say and do.
On the surface, it may seem that self-management is simply a matter of taking a deep breath and keeping yourself in check when emotions come on strong, and while it's true that self-control in these situations is a sizeable piece of the pie, there's far more to self-management than putting a cork in it when you're about to blow up. Your eruptions are no different from a volcano—there is all sorts of rumbling happening beneath the surface before the lava starts flowing.
Unlike a volcano, there are subtle things you can do each and every day to influence what is happening beneath the surface. You just need to learn how to pick up on the rumbling and respond to it. Self-management builds upon a foundational skill—self-awareness. Ample self-awareness is necessary for effective self-management because you can only choose how to respond to an emotion actively when you're aware of it. Since we're hard-wired to experience emotions before we can respond to them, it's the one-two punch of reading emotions effectively and then reacting to them that sets the best self-managers apart. A high level of self-management ensures you aren't getting in your own way and doing things that limit your success. It also ensures you aren't frustrating other people to the point that they resent or dislike you. When you understand your own emotions and can respond the way you choose to them, you have the power to take control of difficult situations, react nimbly to change, and take the initiative needed to achieve your goals.
When you develop the ability to size yourself up quickly and grab the reins before you head in the wrong direction, it keeps you flexible and allows you to choose positively and productively how to react to different situations. When you don't stop to think about your feelings—including how they are influencing your behavior now, and will continue to do so in the future—you set yourself up to be a frequent victim of emotional hijackings. Whether you're aware of it or not, your emotions will control you, and you'll move through your day reacting to your feelings with little choice in what you say and do.
The remainder of this chapter presents 17 specific strategies—things you can start doing today—that will help you manage your emotions to your benefit. Each simple strategy is targeted to an important element of the selfmanagement skill. This carefully crafted set has been honed through many years of testing with people just like you, and are proven methods for increasing your self-management skill.
As you master each of the strategies and incorporate them into your daily routine, you will develop an increased capacity to respond effectively to your emotions. Of course no matter how skilled you become in managing your emotions there are always going to be situations that push your buttons. Your life won't morph into a fairy tale devoid of obstacles, but you will equip yourself with everything you need to take the wheel and drive.

1. Breathe Right

2. Create an Emotion vs. Reason List

3. Make Your Goals Public

4. Count to Ten

5. Sleep On It

6. Talk To a Skilled Self-Manager

7. Smile and Laugh More

8. Set Aside Some Time in Your Day for Problem Solving

9. Take Control of Your Self-Talk

10. Visualize Yourself Succeeding

11. Clean Up Your Sleep Hygiene

12. Focus Your Attention on Your Freedoms, Rather than Your Limitations

13. Stay Synchronized

14. Speak to Someone Who is Not Emotionally Invested in Your Problem

15. Learn a Valuable Lesson from Everyone You Encounter

16. Put a Mental Recharge into Your Schedule

17. Accept That Change is Just around the Corner

SOCIAL AWARENESS STRATEGIES

Have you ever had a coworker approach you, and without you saying anything, he understood what kind of day you were having and where your mind was wandering? He knew you must have come from a meeting with so-and-so because he could “see it” all over your face. He knew it was probably time to let you vent, instead of asking for that favor he had in mind. He must have picked up on something.
Or how about that waitress who seems to “just know” what each of her customers need: one couple is in their own world and prefers to be alone; another couple welcomes some fresh conversation from a new person, while another table wants professional and polite service, minus the small talk. Everyone's sitting at a table to eat and drink and be served, and yet there's so much below the surface that makes each table unique. How does she quickly size up these tables and know their needs?

Both this perceptive coworker and the waitress have a high level of social awareness, a skill they use to recognize and understand the moods of other individuals and entire groups of people. Though these two may be seasoned veterans at this, it is a skill that they most likely learned and practiced over time.
Instead of looking inward to learn about and understand yourself, social awareness is looking outward to learn about and appreciate others. Social awareness is centered on your ability to recognize and understand the emotions of others. Tuning into others' emotions as you interact with them will help you get a more accurate view of your surroundings, which affects everything from relationships to the bottom line.
To build your social awareness skills, you will find yourself observing people in all kinds of situations. You may be observing someone from afar while you're in a checkout line, or you may be right in the middle of a conversation observing the person to whom you are speaking. You will learn to pick up on body language, facial expressions, postures, tone of voice, and even what is hidden beneath the surface, like deeper emotions and thoughts.
One of the intriguing things about building an acute

sense of social awareness is that emotions, facial expressions, and body language have been shown to translate across many different cultures. You can use these skills wherever you are.
The lens you look through must be clear. Making sure you are present and able to give others your full attention is the first step to becoming more socially aware. Looking outward isn't just about using your eyes: it means tapping into your senses. Not only can you fully utilize your basic five senses, but you can also include the vast amount of information coming into your brain through your sixth sense, your emotions. Your emotions can help you notice and interpret cues other people send you. These cues will give you some help in putting yourself in the other person's shoes.
The 17 strategies in this section will help you tackle the obstacles that get in your way and provide you with a helping hand when the going gets tough. You can only attend to so much, so it's critical to pick up on the right signals.
These proven social awareness strategies will help you do just that.

1. Greet People by Name

2. Watch Body Language

3. Make Timing Everything

4. Develop a Back-pocket Question

5. Don't Take Notes at Meetings

6. Plan Ahead for Social Gatherings

7. Clear Away the Clutter

8. Live in the Moment

9. Go on a 15-minute Tour

10. Watch EQ at the Movies

11. Practice the Art of Listening

12. Go People Watching

13. Understand the Rules of the Culture Game

14. Test for Accuracy

15. Step into Their Shoes

16. Seek the Whole Picture

17. Catch the Mood of the Room

RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Most people have a spring in their step and put their best foot forward when they are in a new relationship (work or otherwise), but they stumble and lose their footing trying to maintain relationships over the long term.
Reality soon sets in that the honeymoon phase is officially over.
The truth is, all relationships take work, even the great ones that seem effortless. We've all heard this, but do we really get it? Working on a relationship takes time, effort, and know-how. The know-how is emotional intelligence. If you want a relationship that has staying power and grows over time, and in which your needs and the other person's needs are satisfied, the final EQ skill—relationship management—is just what the doctor ordered.
Thankfully, these relationship management skills can

be learned, and they tap into the three other EQ skills that you're familiar with—self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. You use your self-awareness skills to notice your feelings and judge if your needs are being satisfied.
You use your self-management skills to express your feelings and act accordingly to benefit the connection. Finally, you use your social awareness skills to better understand the other person's needs and feelings.
In the end, no man is an island; relationships are an essential and fulfilling part of life. Since you are half of any relationship, you have half of the responsibility of deepening these connections. The following 17 strategies will help you work on what's critical to making relationships work.

1. Be Open and Be Curious

2. Enhance Your Natural Communication Style

3. Avoid Giving Mixed Signals

4. Remember the Little Things That Pack a Punch

5. Take Feedback Well

6. Build Trust

7. Have an “Open-door” Policy

8. Only Get Mad on Purpose

9. Don't Avoid the Inevitable

10. Acknowledge the Other Person's Feelings

11. Complement the Person's Emotions or Situation

12. When You Care, Show It

13. Explain Your Decisions, Don't Just Make Them

14. Make Your Feedback Direct and Constructive

15. Align Your Intention with Your Impact

16. Offer a “Fix-it” Statement during a Broken Conversation

17. Tackle a Tough Conversation

Monday, February 19, 2024

Belly Breathing (Ch 3 from the book 'Why we meditate')

TRY THIS FOR A FEW MOMENTS

Close your eyes and drop your awareness into the body. Be present with whatever is happening. Merely feel how it is. Are you feeling stressed or relaxed? How does that feel? Can you distinguish physical sensations of the body—warm, cool, pain, pleasure, tightness—from more subtle or energetic feelings, such as buzzy, speedy, anxious, excited, calm, and so on? Whatever is happening, dont resist it or worry about it, just feel it.

The Three Speed Limits – Tsoknyi Rinpoche

When I challenged myself that morning in Kathmandu to slow down, the experience of moving at my bodys natural speed helped me understand an important distinction between my body, my thinking mind, and my energy. To my surprise, when I looked for the root of the problem—the stress—I couldnt find it in my body or mind. I realized there are three kinds of speed: the physical, the cognitive, and the feeling or energetic. I could walk and move quickly without stress and tension. My body could move however fast it needed to; the problem wasnt there. My mind could think fast and creatively; that was also fine. It was my feeling world that was off-balance, distorted. So I realized stress accumulates in the energetic world, the feeling world. The more I understood what was happening inside me, the more I saw it outside as well, all over the world. Whatever we call it—speediness, anxiety, restlessness, stress—I think almost all of us can relate.

I call this understanding the three speed limits: the physical speed limit, the mental speed limit, and the feeling or energetic speed limit. The body has its own healthy speed, but the feeling world can be rushed in a distorted way. That feeling—of restless, anxious energy—is not healthy. Its distorted because its not rational; its out of touch with reality. Speedy energy tells us to get there now, even when we cant. Anxiety tells us were going to die when we arent.

To help distinguish the bodys speed limit from the feeling worlds speed limit, imagine you have to clean a large room. You walk in and see what needs to be done. Moving furniture, dusting, wiping, and vacuuming—it will take about an hour. This is the physical speed limit. The feeling world, however, can be either relaxed or banging on us the whole time: Go faster! Finish as soon as possible! I want this to be over! If we do it like this, well feel stressed the whole time and burned-out in twenty minutes. If our energy is relaxed, on the other hand, we can respect our natural speed limit and clean the room the same, without feeling rushed or restless. We might even feel fresh when its done.

If we dont distinguish between these speed limits, its as if we havent diagnosed the problem correctly, and so we cant apply the right remedy. A major misunderstanding is thinking that speedy energy and fast movement are almost the same. Then we either keep trying to slow down our bodies, or slow down our thinking minds. Neither of these works, because the physical and cognitive are not where the problem is, and not where the solution is found either. Not only that but these strategies cause other problems too. If we slow down our bodies and minds, we can start to worry about functioning well in the world. We can also start to be afraid and pull back from the world, as if it were an enemy. But we need to function; life is fast, and we cant slow it down. We have to run in the world. We need to move our bodies, and we need to use our minds.

Thinking fast is fine; its useful! So what is this third part of our being, this murky area of the feeling world? I think its the key to understanding and working with stress.

The Practice

There are four gentle breathing techniques that are especially useful for handling this upward-moving energy. These methods retrain the energy to come down below the navel—its natural home—and rest there. They stand alone as beneficial practices and can also be practiced together as a more comprehensive training. They are:

1. Deep belly-breathing, or “baby-breathing.”

2. Scanning the body and feeling our speedy energy.

3. Connecting speedy energy and awareness with the breath and bringing them all down below the navel.

4. An extrasubtle method that mainly uses intention with minimal muscle control.

Method #1: Deep Belly-Breathing, or Baby-Breathing

Usually when were startled, emotionally activated, or just stressed, we breath more quickly, shallowly, and more in our chests. This happens subconsciously but over time can become a habit, and our bodies forget our natural, relaxed way of breathing. In my tradition, we believe the natural way is deep.

Find a relaxed position to work with your breath. This can be sitting or lying down. If youre sitting, whether on the floor or in a chair, try to find a posture where your back is straight but not tight, upright but relaxed. The position of your hands and feet is not so important; all our bodies are different. Try postures and see which allows you to feel straight but relaxed. Whichever position you take, the most essential point is to be relaxed.

TIP: If you are sitting in a chair, try either crossing your legs in the chair or sitting in a way that your feet are flat on the floor. If you cant do this, dont worry. If you are lying down, try on your back with a straight spine and, if you can, your legs bent, with your feet flat on the floor.

Next, put your hands on your lower belly. Your thumbs should be roughly at the level of your navel. Relax your shoulders and arms. Start breathing gently from your abdomen, allowing your belly and hands to rise and fall with each breath. You can rest awareness with the rise and fall of your belly and hands. Try to completely relax your neck, shoulders, and chest so they have no tension. Allow the upper body to fully rest, and let the lower abdomen do most of the movement.

TIP: If you have trouble finding the breath in your abdomen or relaxing with it, try lying down on your back with your legs bent and feet flat on the floor. Put a medium-size heavy object like a big book on your belly. Feel it gently rise and fall as you practice belly-breathing. This can help settle your body and awareness in this practice.

When you feel relaxed and are breathing in a regular rhythm, breathe more deeply, letting the belly and hands rise and fall with each breath. Then introduce short pauses when the breath is fully inside and the breath is fully outside. In other words, after exhaling, pause a few seconds before beginning the next inhalation. At the end of the inhalation, hold the breath in for a few seconds before beginning the exhalation.

These pauses, just holding for a few seconds, should be relaxed and comfortable. Dont hold until you feel short of breath or strained. This is not a competition, and more is not necessarily better. This is a gradual training, and we are just exploring a new way of breathing.

TIP: One day you can feel which pause is more helpful, the holding in or holding out. Whichever is for you, do that. Progress comes over time as we feel more and more comfortable holding our breath, and the retention lengthens naturally.

Finally, just keep relaxing and continuing this belly-breathing. Allow your body to enjoy the deep rhythmic abdominal breathing. Allow your whole system to calm down and let go, like a baby resting without a care in the world. Continue for as long as you are comfortable. This method of deep abdominal breathing has many benefits even without the subsequent techniques.
Method #2: Body-Scanning

The aim of body-scanning is to find and connect with our speedy energy, with our feelings of anxiety or restlessness. Its important to bring an attitude of gentleness and curiosity here. Otherwise we can start thinking of our speediness as an enemy or a negative disease that needs to be eliminated. Instead we treat it with tenderness, like an overexcited child. This method is a little different from other traditional body-scanning techniques—for example, those that focus on choiceless awareness—because here we are choosing to pay attention to speedy energy. As with the first technique, this body-scanning technique has many benefits on its own but also serves as an important preparation for the third practice, khumbak, or gentle vase breathing.

Begin by finding a comfortable posture, where your spine is straight but your whole body is relaxed. This can be sitting or lying down. Start with a dropping practice for a few breaths, and if you have time, maybe a few minutes of deep breathing.
Then bring awareness to your energetic feeling body and explore to find the speedy energy. There are two ways to scan; by moving awareness through the body or by directly bringing awareness to where its needed. If you already know where the speedy energy is, you can just go directly there. If not, you can move awareness relaxedly through your head, face, neck, shoulders, upper back, and chest. Remember to be curious and gentle. The main focus is just connecting directly to sensations and feelings; there is no other agenda to this step. We are not looking for particular sensations or feelings, or trying to change our experience at this point. We are just exploring the of speediness and restlessness.

The sensations and feelings associated with speedy energy can be quite subtle.
As you explore more you may notice coarser physical sensations like tightness, pain, heat, and dryness, as well as more subtle sensations of tingling, vibrating, and buzzing. Continue this practice, scanning again and again, just being curious and open to whatever you feel.

Method #3: Gentle Vase Breathing with Retention

This method is a gentler version of a classic technique called vase breathing.
Although this modified version is suitable for unsupervised practice, please follow the instructions carefully and listen to your body.
Gentle vase breathing is where everything comes together. We build on our skills of belly-breathing and body-scanning, and learn to bring breath, speedy energy, and awareness together and hold them under the navel. This practice needs to be repeated over and over again, because we are retraining an energetichabit. Its very important that the body remain relaxed and the pressure be very gentle; if we tense up and push too hard, the practice can backfire and make our energy more unbalanced. If were too tight, especially in the upper-stomach area around the solar plexus and sternum, the energy can feel like its blocked,
“bouncing” back up into our chest and head. This can actually make us feel temporarily worse.
This is a subtle practice; youll have to play with it to find the right balance.
We can use two main metaphors to help visualize and understand this practice: the French press and the balloon. These two techniques may yield different experiences, so play with them and see which feels more natural and beneficial for you.

Begin by taking a posture with the spine straight but the whole body relaxed, either sitting or lying down. Start by doing a few minutes of breathing to prepare the body.
Then scan for the speedy energy—signs of restlessness, anxiety, or buzz. When you feel you have connected to the energy, move on to the next step.

THE FRENCH PRESS: Remaining relaxed and grounded, breathe out completely.
While breathing in through your nostrils, imagine the breath is mingling with the speedy, restless energy and gently pressing it down, like a French press gently pushing the coffee grounds down to the bottom of the vessel. The speedy energy is being urged from the upper body down through the stomach, to its natural home below the navel. Then hold the breath down there for a few seconds. The energy needs to be held in the “vase,” so we press very gently downward with the muscles we use to poop, to hold it all down there. You dont need to push hard. Exhale completely, then inhale and repeat over and over again.

THE BALLOON: This is essentially the same practice physically, but some people find the French press image too forceful and they push too hard. So instead of a French press, imagine there is a balloon in your lower belly, under your navel. In this version, we dont imagine pushing anything down from above. Each breath in fills the balloon, and each breath out empties the balloon.

Remaining relaxed and grounded, breathe out completely, emptying the balloon. As you breathe in, imagine the empty balloon sucking down the breath and speedy energy and filling up below the navel. When its full, gently “pinch” the top of the balloon to prevent the energy from escaping, by pressing down very gently the muscles we use to poop. Hold the breath for a few seconds. Exhale fully and repeat, over and over.

When holding your breath in like this, its important not to hold it until you feel strain and gasp for breath. Just start with a few seconds, and gradually build up the duration over days and weeks. If you keep practicing regularly, your capacity will naturally increase, without forcing it. If you start with two to three seconds, for example, you can build it up to ten seconds, and then fifteen to twenty seconds over time.
This is very beneficial, because the increased retention is often a sign of more relaxation in the subtle body, and of more control of the energies.
If you feel tightness in your head or chest, light-headed, or dizzy, you may be tensing up, pushing too hard, or holding the breath too long. Stop the practice and relax for a while. Try practicing gentle belly-breathing and body-scanning to see where the tension is building up. Try to relax that.

Method #4: The Extra-Gentle Way

This final method is for when we have gained some proficiency in the other techniques. When we have become comfortable with belly-breathing, can connect to our speedy energy with awareness, and can regularly bring our speedy energy down to rest in its natural home below the navel, we can try this fourth technique. We have created a link between energy and awareness, and can now use that link to bring speedy energy down with almost no effort. We may notice that the previous techniques are really helpful, but when we get up and have to do other things, our speedy energy pops back up and becomes activated. After all, we cant talk and engage normally if were holding our breath! This technique helps to bridge these practices with daily life. It allows us to maintain some benefits while talking, moving around, working, and engaging in our lives.
Start by just mentally connecting to the energy in the body and exhaling. While inhaling, imagine bringing breath, energy, and awareness down under the navel. Once you have applied a slight amount of muscular engagement, almost a reminder to the body, keep about 10 percent of your energy and breath down in the “vase,” and breathe naturally in and out on top, keeping the chest and shoulders relaxed and natural. Just be as natural and normal as possible. This practice is so subtle no one needs to know youre doing it.
At first, we will be constantly distracted by life and lose this subtle practice. So whenever we lose it, we just need one breath to connect again. Just repeat over and over. Gradually we are forming a new habit, and it becomes easier and easier. We will feel more grounded throughout the day. We will notice many situations that were stressful before become easier to manage. This is really helpful for long meetings!

DANIEL GOLEMAN: THE SCIENCE

My wife and I were in a taxi with Tsoknyi Rinpoche on the way to the Delhi train station. It was March 2000, and we had reservations on a train that would take us up toward Dharamshala, where I would moderate a meeting with the Dalai Lama and a handful of psychologists on the topic of “Destructive Emotions.”
We had left with plenty of time to spare, but gridlocked traffic was eating away at the time buffer. I was, frankly, getting uptight, increasingly worried about missing the train—a destructive emotion had taken control.
My anxiety boiled over when our taxi stopped for a red light at the intersection of two huge avenues, which looked less like streets and more like parking lots packed with cars (and the occasional oxcart, bicycle rickshaw, and cow). The red light stopped us for what seemed like an endless amount of minutes.
A silver-colored word in the middle of that red light—relax—made no difference in my state. I could not relax, but got more and more tense. My head spun with the swarming colors, sounds, and smells whirling around us like a hurricane. Though our lanes werent moving anywhere, drivers all around us were showing their impatience in a rising cacophony of honking. I felt a mounting sense of urgency at the traffic jam, an impossible pretzel that had no rhyme nor reason and seemed would never untangle.
“Oh man!” I said to Rinpoche. “This traffic is really snarled. Im starting to worry about getting to the train.”
Rinpoche said, in a soft, calm voice, “Can you feel the speediness? Can you find where it is?”
I closed my eyes and scanned my body, noticing a buzz of sensations and a growing tightness in my belly. I nodded.
Rinpoche continued, “Find it. Feel it. Its not you. Its not your mind, not your body. Its your energy.”

Rinpoche added, “First just sense that you are speedy—what that feels like in your body. Then understand that you are tuning into the feeling world. Find where in your body you feel your energys speediness. Then breathe in and hold the breath down under your navel for as long as is comfortable for you. Exhale slowly, holding back about ten percent of the air.”

Getting what he was saying, I took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. Rinpoche led me through several breaths this way. And, almost miraculously, my tension eased. The light changed, traffic moved again, and I felt more relaxed. Right on the spot, Rinpoche was guiding me to use the body scan and the gentle vase breathing method. As weve just learned, that gentle vase breathing is one of several ways to work with our breath to calm our nervous energy. These breath-control practices are ancient in India, and made their way from there, along with Buddhism, to Tibet in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Several such breath-control practices have been preserved and are still taught in various corners of Tibetan Buddhism to this day.

Their purpose: calming the mind for meditation. Science agrees.
It turns out there is sound research showing the power of these breath methods. In recent decades scientists have turned their attention to such breath-control methods, realizing that using them has powerful impacts on our mental state. In short, managing our breath helps us manage our mind.

Key parts of the brains emotional circuitry get triggered by the amygdala, our neural radar for threat. In todays stressful life our amygdala fires far more often than needed, and the speediness we are caught up in adds to our stress.
That pitches us into “sympathetic nervous system” activity, where our body prepares for an emergency: our heart rate jumps, as does blood pressure; our bronchial passages enlarge, and we breathe faster; our digestion shuts down; blood shifts from our organs to our arms and legs (the better to fight or run); and we sweat.
Such emergency responses are triggered by hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which mobilize all these systems to prepare for emergency. This biological reaction gets set off all too often these days (That irksome too-slow driver! That scary fast driver! Difficulty with the kids! That horrible boss!).
Once stress hormones surge through us, were more readily triggered for a further stress reaction. And, as weve discussed, these days this threat reaction triggers in response to symbolic threats too—like the feeling that someone is treating us unfairly—not just the physical survival emergency the reaction was designed for. Being treated unfairly feels bad, of course. But its not the threat to our very life that our fight-or-flight response was designed to handle. Even so, that biological machinery for physical survival also takes over when we undergo a psychological threat like unfair treatment.
We can undergo this fight-or-flight response many times in a single day, all too often without having time to end it. And such a prolonged, ongoing fight- or-flight reaction overtaxes our biology with long-term costs, such as heightened inflammation, lowered immune system defenses, and becoming more susceptible to a range of stress-worsened illnesses.
During the emergency mode our attention shifts to focus on the presumed threat—even when were trying to get something else more important done, we stay preoccupied by what upsets us. The response is so strong that we might find ourselves thinking about that threat and how to handle it even when we at two a.m. As we read in chapter 2 this kind of anxious worry serves no useful purpose.

Some of us might get sad or angry, while others panic. Theres no set response, but none of the likely reactions help us.

Contrast that with a “parasympathetic response,” the physiological state where the body rests and recovers from such stress. Our heart rate and blood pressure subside and our breath slows, as do the other biological upshifts of the emergency reaction. Our digestion resumes its usual workings. This is the biological state where the body rests, restores itself, and relaxes. We can eat, have sex, sleep.
The bodys emergency response has a beginning—when were triggered—a peak in the middle, and an end, if we have the chance to calm down again.
Thats what the controlled breathing method Rinpoche offers here does for us: it ends the stress cycle were caught up by.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Index of Management Lessons

Toggle All Sections

1: Identifying Personalities in Different Domains

2: Negotiation

3: Behavioral Science

4: Layoffs

5: Elon Musk

6: Xerox (A Case Study)

7: Misc

Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Tech Layoffs Are Happening (Feb 2024)

Its been barely 50 days since new year 2024 began, and the tech industry has already suffered more than 30,000 layoffs. And with layoffs showing no signs of slowdown, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come forward with a theory to explain why tech layoffs are happening.

The billionaire says that companies are realizing that, while (layoffs are) painful, there are benefits to being "leaner." In an interview recently, the Meta CEO said companies are still adjusting to the post-pandemic era, as per Business Insider report.

E-commerce sales skyrocketed during the pandemic, leading to significant increases in online advertising revenue. However, sales growth slowed and ad rates returned to normal as consumers went back to the stores and the economy stabilized. Numerous businesses realized they had overhired and needed to make significant cuts, including Meta. That was the first wave of layoffs.

"In terms of the layoffs and stuff like that, I actually think that was more due to companies trying to navigate Covid," Zuckerberg said when asked if tech layoffs had to do with the AI boom.

What He Said About Meta's Layoffs

"It was obviously really tough, we parted with a lot of talented people we cared about," Zuckerberg said in the interview, speaking specifically about Meta's past layoffs. "But in some ways actually becoming leaner kind of makes the company more effective."

Following Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency," when Meta laid off tens of thousands of employees, the company has been steadily recovering.

As per Zuckerberg, businesses are still considering efficiency in their operations today. Many are thinking about changing the company's structure, reducing the number of management positions, and adopting a leaner business model.

More Than 30,000 Layoffs Have Happened In 2024

From Google, Amazon, to Microsoft, a lot of big companies have already announced the beginning of layoffs in 2024. Here's a list of companies that have laid off employees till date this year:

Instacart
Mozilla
Grammarly
Getaround
Amazon
DocuSign
Snap
Polygon Labs
Okta
Thinx
Proofpoint
Wattpad
Block
PayPal
Salesforce
Flexport
Microsoft
Swiggy
Aurora
eBay
SAP
Brex
TikTok
Vroom
Wayfair
YouTube
Pixar
Audible
Discord
Google
Amazon
Twitch
Treasure Financial
Duolingo
Rent the Runway
Unity
Pitch
BenchSci
Flexe
NuScale
Trigo
InVision
VideoAmp
Orca Security
Frontdesk

How Apple Has So Far Avoided Mass Job Cuts Despite The Tech Layoff Wave (Feb 2024)

Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Meta, HP and Google are some of the big names among the long-expanding list of companies that have announced mass layoffs.

No Mass Layoffs At Apple Yet

One tech giant that has been an exception to date is Apple. Apple employees have so far been able to avoid mass layoffs at the world's first company to hit the $3 trillion market value.

It's not that the economic slowdown and rising recession fearless haven't impacted Apple. While Apple shares are currently up 16% this year till date, the tech giant did see its shares bleed last year, just like other tech giants. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected next month to report its first quarterly sales decline in over three years.

So how has Apple not announced mass layoffs till now? Well, there are three key reasons that can be attributed to Apple being an exception amid the mass layoffs at tech giants.

First, Apple not aggressively hiring during the pandemic.

The second reason is that Apple doesn't offer perks such as free lunches to its staff at the campus.

And third, its CEO Tim Cook himself took a voluntary pay cut of 50% for this year 2023, which can possibly help in trimming costs amid uncertain economic headwinds.

Tim Cook's Voluntary Pay Cut

Apple will be cutting its CEO Tim Cook's compensation by 50% to $49 million in 2023, citing investor guidance and a request from Cook himself to adjust his pay.

Tim Cook yielded to resistance over his lush compensation package, as advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services expressed to Apple shareholders “significant concerns regarding the design and magnitude,” Reuters reported. Despite the fact that stockholders ended up approving his pay package—64.4% voting in support—the billionaire CEO agreed that it should be scaled back, as per Forbes.

In comparison to Cook, although Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did take public accountability for their purported missteps that led to their respective layoffs, neither volunteered to slash their compensation to correct their wrongs. Instead, their employees bore the brunt of job losses when they aren't responsible for the executive decisions of the company.

Apple's Judicious Approach When Hiring

Compared to the other big tech companies, Apple scaled its workforce at a relatively slow pace and has generally followed the same hiring rate since 2016, as per the Forbes report.

While there was a hiring surge in Silicon Valley during the pandemic, Apple added less than 7,000 jobs in 2020. In September 2022, it was reported that the company employed 164,000 full-time workers, in both its corporate and retail divisions.

Rampant Hiring By Other Big Techs

Mostly, the tech companies undergoing mass layoffs currently are the ones who in all likelihood hired fervently during their pandemic—and even before.

Alphabet has consecutively expanded its workforce by at least 10% annually since 2013, according to CNBC. The company grew its headcount by over 20% in 2018 and 2019. The growth continued, adding over 16,000 new hires in 2020 and 21,000 employees in 2021, the report mentioned.

Since 2012, Meta has expanded its workforce by thousands each year. In 2020, Zuckerberg increased headcount by 30%—13,000 workers. The following year, the social media platform added another 13,000 employees to its payroll. Those two years marked the biggest growth in the company's history.

Amazon has already initiated its plan to lay off 18,000 employees in the process which is expected to continue in 2023 after being announced in late 2022.

In 2021, Amazon had reportedly hired an estimated 500,000 employees, according to GeekWire, becoming the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart. A year later, the company expanded its workforce by 310,000. Prior to its layoff announcement, it was reported that Amazon employed 1.5 million workers, including corporate and warehouse staff.

Overall, it does seem that it has been so far so good for Apple employees, with no mass layoffs announced yet amid the job cut wave weeping over the tech sector. But it remains to be seen whether the Tim Cook-led tech giant is able to sustain this and totally avoid mass layoffs despite rising global recession fears, inflationary concerns and rising interest rates.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Progress Report (Hindi to English Learning)

Date	Total	Right	Wrong

Monday, February 12, 2024

Ex 1.12 - Pattern Recognition and ML by Christopher Bishop

Pre-read

Question

Solution from Book

Solution Using ChatGPT

Are you aware of the result E[xn, xm] = mu^2 + I . sigma ^ 2

I assume you meant $E[X_n \cdot X_m] = \mu^2 + I \cdot \sigma^2$ , where $I$ is the Kronecker delta, which is 1 when $n = m$ and 0 otherwise.

In that case, $E[X_n \cdot X_m]$ simplifies to:

$E[X_n \cdot X_m] = \begin{cases} \mu^2 + \sigma^2 & \text{if } n = m \\ \mu^2 & \text{if } n \neq m \end{cases}$

This is because when $n = m$ , you have the product of a variable with itself, and the additional $\sigma^2$ term comes from the covariance term. When $n \neq m$ , the covariance term is zero, and you are left with the square of the mean.

If you have further questions or if there's anything specific you'd like to clarify, feel free to ask!

Can you derive this expression?

Certainly! Let's derive the expression for $E[X_n \cdot X_m]$ for two continuous random variables $X_n$ and $X_m$ from the same Gaussian distribution $N(\mu, \sigma^2)$ with mean $\mu$ and variance $\sigma^2$ .

The expectation of the product is given by:

$E[X_n \cdot X_m] = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} x_n \cdot x_m \cdot f(x_n) \cdot f(x_m) \,dx_n \,dx_m$

Since $X_n$ and $X_m$ are from the same distribution, let's denote $f(x)$ as the probability density function (PDF) of $X$ . The expression becomes:

$E[X_n \cdot X_m] = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} x_n \cdot x_m \cdot f(x) \cdot f(x) \,dx_n \,dx_m$

Now, split the integral into two cases: $n = m$ and $n \neq m$ .

Case 1: $n = m$

$E[X_n \cdot X_m] = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} x_n^2 \cdot f(x) \cdot f(x) \,dx_n \,dx_m$

$= \left(\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} x_n^2 \cdot f(x) \,dx_n\right) \cdot \left(\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x) \,dx_m\right)$

$= \mu^2 + \sigma^2$

This result comes from the fact that the integral of $x^2$ over the entire range for a Gaussian distribution with mean $\mu$ is $\mu^2 + \sigma^2$ .

Case 2: $n \neq m$