I remember a conversation I had once,

“How are you”

Me: “I don’t know who I am, how am I supposed to figure How I am?”

These types of conversations and thoughts are the usual truth of my life. As you might imagine, I face many challenges with the usual social conduct norms. More and more I have found that most social behaviour is based on people’s fears, ignorance and incompleteness.

Take for example, a common greeting that starts with ‘How are you?’ is fairly bizarre because ‘Who am I’ is a very fundamental question from where we can say all spirituality begins. So a ‘How are you’ greeting, flippantly asked, not only completely ignores this fundamental aspirational question, but it actually implies that people not only know ‘Who’ they are but they can actually surmise about ‘How’ they are.

A lot of people may say that what I am saying is too deep and everyone doesn’t think so much. This is not about thinking. This is about our day to day conduct being truer to the nature of life. In more intelligent and evolved civilizations we find the common greetings to be much more deeper and truer to life. The greeting of Namaste or Pranam is a reverential bowing down to the other person. “I see the divine in you”. What a fundamental truth is being inculcated into our day to day life by this simple action!

Not that I have adopted the practice of greeting people with Namaste. I stick to a ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey’. I find it most important to have a little joy come into my heart and mind when I see someone and I greet them. Then whether I say a Hi, Hey or even the dastardly How are You. It’s ok. Though at some point I want to adopt the Namaste.

There is another reason why people continue with the ‘How are you’ greeting. It is because they DON’T have a clue about how they really are. Because where have we been taught or shown or directed towards creating any kind of self evaluation framework for ourselves? We get years and years of training in physical laws of nature, social behaviour, academics and even job related works. But nothing to be able to simply and intelligently evaluate how we are doing at life. 

As I wrote in the previous post, ascertaining How I am doing is something I have spent quite some time on. It requires thoughtful objective consideration of many aspects of my life and then an overall subjective summary about How I am doing.

Here’s my framework in brief. You can use this or adapt this into something that works for you. 🙂

My Self Evaluation Framework

So here is how I do my ‘How am I’ thinking….

Basically I have identified 4 different facets of our life. Each of these facets have specific activities & indications associated with them for us to evaluate. These help me to overall get an idea of my life at that point of time. I have also thought through some activities that are needed towards better well being of that facet of our life.

Zone: Physical

This is mainly the physical fitness. Towards this well being is your usual walks, swimming and other forms of fitness.

Metrics: The overall metrics to measure how well I am doing in this zone is – level of activity (should be high) & frequency of falling sick (should be low). Not gotten into actual fitness metrics as of now, but that can be a part of this.

Zone: Psychological

This is about the mind – whether it is fine.

Mood: Am I calm, collected, cool and brimming with vitality. Or am I lethargic, bored or depressed.

Creativity: On different spheres of life – personal/work/day-to-day

Social Interactions: Quality of interactions (should be high)- includes activities with friends, client relations, balance

Metrics: Social interactions & overall comfort and ease of mind.

This also includes activities like writing this blog – because research and expressing really suit my scientific bent of mind.

Maybe I should add hobbies here?

Zone: Emotional

This aspect I understood and put into my assessment a little later than the other facets. I realized that I need to do something to work towards my emotional well-being as well and it is a different zone from psychological. For a while I was clueless about how to take care of my emotional health!

And honestly I feel so sad about this because the reason I was totally clueless about how to care about my emotional health is because people don’t bother with it. No one has ever explained this to me, not taught me in school nor nurtured it at home – because they just don’t know. Even adults we see around us don’t know how to take care of their emotional well-being. So it is hardly surprising that we also grow into such adults. Recently I saw this TED video on emotional hygiene and I so agree that people need to take their emotional health seriously.

Finally I figured out the way through this. A little help from Indian culture and little help from a client of mine – Lumens School, they have 4 pillars in their education system including Emotional. Basically Emotional is tied with Creative energies. So one of the ways to emotional health is via Art & other creative tasks.

Metric: Painting & other purely creative art & craft

In fact, I noticed that if I was to celebrate every Indian festival traditionally then my emotional health would be taken care of! Cooking delicacies, making rangolis, lighting lamps, decorating the house …. all these creative and artistic tasks really help maintain emotional balance. Sadly, the urban lifestyles have drastically cut down on how much we celebrate our festivals. So even more important for us urban folks to care about our emotional health.

I implemented this understanding one Diwali with good results. 

Zone: Spiritual

Spirituality again is something that is abundant in Hindu land, but it is a task to pick it out from all the religious stigma and exotic fancies. This is a whole topic on which I can write on because I have many thoughts on it… not because I have figured it out 😉

Also, the metric for this would be very subjective.

Metric: Yoga practices (from jnana, bhakti, kriya paths), improved perception and understanding of how the world works, discipline, being able to do our best at all times…..

I need to update this assessment quite significantly when I get the time, as I have developed a more robust system over these years (since I wrote this post). However, this will still help you get started. Or fine tune your self evaluation if you have one.

And if you have actually read this whole post… do comment with your thoughts… 🙂