Be Happy – Develop Your Personality (Part - 2)

Good personality charms everyone - your friends, your girl/boy friends, your employer, your colleagues and all those who come in contact with you. You may take a little period to convince everyone if you have good personality. Since it plays a vital role in improvement of our health, incomes, job-elevation, social status, our educational levels etc., we need to attach due importance to this virtue and continue to develop and improve it.

It is the personality that matters. What we want is to see the man, harmoniously developed, great in heart and mind, having intense feelings about his own interests and other’s interests as well. He must mean the feelings, work out the solution, organize the infrastructure to implement and act upon them at the first opportunity. He must command self determination and express self confidence in resolutions. What is happening around us in the world? We are working according to the influence being exerted upon us. Part of our energy is being wasted in the preservation of our illusion. Acts of our bodies, our virtues, our intelligence and our spirituality are continuously influencing others and so conversely we are also being influenced by others. For example, one celebrity is known to you as a very learned personality. You are under the impression that his language is very beautiful. He comes to you and speaks on some subject for an hour. But he could not influence you in spite of your earlier impressions. After that meeting, you come to meet some other person who speaks a few words, of your interest. Though his speech was not perfect, containing a number of grammatical mistakes, he makes a good impression upon you and you still remember him. Why? It was due to the magnetic personality of the second person. He attracted you by talking over the subject of your interest.

In our family or surroundings, we find a number of heads of their respective families. Some of them are very much successful and others are not. Why? We usually quote other’s failures. When I say that I could not succeed, I would immediately make another statement that due to such and such reason, I could not do the job properly. We do not confess our own faults – somewhere we lacked. Generally, we find ourselves faultless and other one is wrong. Why are there one head leading his family very successfully and other one, miserable? If you study personalities of the both, you would be able to find out the reason. Education and inheritance do not matter each time, as much their personal efforts do.

If we go through the words of the great leaders of our past – the words contained in their speeches, in their books, in their quotes, we would find that most of them are common and handful. But their impressions were different; their method of delivery or presentation might be different. If we compare their thought with the new ones, we may perhaps conclude that the old ones are now not valid but at their time, they were very much relevant and influenced the people of that time, the people worked on them, that is why they are now part of our history – we still remember them. Perhaps, it was the impression of their personalities. The personality comes to dent upon our brains.

The idea of all education, all training, exposures and experiences should be man-making. But we try to polish our outward appearances which we know are not permanent. In course of time, our appearances will fade out; perhaps the impressions created by our personality may not get the same fate. The ultimate aim of such training should be to make our progeny grow all-round. The Science of Yoga claims that it has been able to define a perfect system of developing personality, without any discrimination of caste, color or creed. Each one can grow and strengthen his personality many times if he adds up sense of spirituality to his working while pursuing yoga. It ensures speedy development and in fact, there are no realities except a physical world, a mental world and a spiritual world around you. There is a tapering slot. As deeper you will go the system, you will get fine and finer exposure – the finest one is to your ultimate reality – you came in this world, naked and you will go naked. Nothing will accompany you. This world will snatch every thing from your body - every possession you loved in your life, you fought for terribly, you deceived your near ones or the strangers as well and you stored for your use in near future but before that use, you breathed your last. After your death, your good works will become part of history to remember about you that there was a towering personality naming you.

This you know, the greatest power is lodged in the fine, not the coarse. Whenever we see a man taking up a heavy weight, we see his muscles swelling with signs of exertion on his body allover. We feel how strong his muscles are. No, they are just appearances. The real work is being done by the thin thread type nerve system which brings power to the muscles. If you just cut off any thread, you will find that powerful man would come to ground immediately. The nerve system brings the fine and finer vigor to the muscles through the digestion of our intakes in shape of our food, drinks, nutrients, exercises and our thoughts – we must ensure their purity first. A single foreign particle in the engine or fuel of your vehicle can cause break down anytime. We generally see the gross things like our bodies – we can identify their movements. They are so intense that generally, we do not find ourselves able to see beyond that. But the fine things like our thoughts do matter a lot. We must process them to make fine and finer.

If you are near some lake or river, you will find that the bubbles bursting out from time to time. The bubbles come usually through the bottom of the water – we are not able to see their journey from bottom to top. We notice it when they come on the top level. Likewise, we can perceive our thoughts after a lot of processing. If we can control over the fine movements or get hold of the roots before they take final shape – we can have control. The man who can control his mind through purity and morality of his thoughts, would be able to control other minds also. A good many failures can be averted. You can reduce the mental stress and all financial, social worries just by introducing purity, morality and transparency in your thoughts and working. Perhaps, this is the reason that all religions advocate these virtues to the maximum possible.
Personality development implies progressive identification of our weaknesses and taking corrective action instantly. Very frankly, the person having good physical dimensions but without higher mental faculties and etiquettes can not be far better than an animal whose pleasures and pains are restricted to the sensory system only.

Personality development involves struggle within your own lower mind having worldly desires, old habits, and self centric wrong tendencies. Lesser we concentrate over such habits; the better would be our approach towards the process of development of our personality. This is the great struggle when you try to give up your old habits and make room for the new ones towards becoming more civilized and ready to feel the pains of others, if any created by our own interests.

For developing our personality, we may take the following steps:

1. Have Self confidence:

To achieve your biggest dreams in life, whatever they may be, you need to be supported by yourselves only, to achieve a specific outcome… you know what your purpose is… you know what your reasons are for wanting to achieve your goal… or maybe you just don’t want the punishment or the negative outcome that would happen if you don’t achieve this goal. Either way, you have a purpose and you know what it is… And if the goal is big and challenging, that probably is not to be enough… …especially if you don’t picture yourselves as successful in this area of life (where your goal is), or if you aren’t loaded with confidence in your ability to get it done or if you don’t enjoy doing the things required to reach your goal… …because when you don’t like doing something, you won’t do it for very long (or very well) before it feels like absolute torture. You need to develop your self confidence first. It is an essentiality of your good personality.

2. Make Positive Thoughts only:

Positivism in your thinking process is equally important. Suppose, you are going to take up an ambitious plan of designing your career, income, investment, family or even your own aim of life. You need to be positive and endeavor to achieve it. If you are thinking that you may not be able to achieve the targets, your success will disappear on the first stroke of any failure if unluckily you come across even by chance. Positive thinking instills confidence in you for winning the battle.

3. Develop Attitude towards Failures and Mistake:

If you keep yourself active in spite of your continuance to commit the mistakes thousand times, you will win if you are trying to learn from each mistake and taking note thereof while designing your new efforts. Otherwise, they will become an inert existence to stumble like a wall.

4. You must have self reliance:

Man is the maker of his own destiny. We must accept responsibility of our own acts. If we do it, it will instill confidence in our companions, our followers and they will have blind confidence in our capacity to protect them if they too may have to suffer due to your acts in future.

5. You must prefer for renunciation and service:

Selfless service is a paramount quality towards character development. If you enunciate your desire of giving up your own interests in any particular project, chances of success and involvement of the people to make that successful would go up tremendously. It is of course certain that ultimate credit will go to your leadership.

Since personality development is crucial for our success and our happiness, we may discuss further in depth in the next post. For the time being, we may concentrate on the above details in this process.

Be Happy - Develop Your Personality Further.