The Blog of Nishant Garg

Courage to Quit and Courage to Show up

“I’ve quit more times than I can count, sometimes too soon, sometimes for the wrong reasons, but more and more often without drama and with a calm feeling in my stomach. Safe in the knowing that a no to what I don’t want is a yes to something more important. My health, my love, my heart’s work.

My very own life.”

—Anna Lovind

“The ego’s core feeling of “not enough” causes it to react to someone else’s success as if that success had taken something away from “me”. It doesn’t know that your resentment of another person’s success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it.” —Eckhart Tolle

Dr. Cortney Warren — Letting Go of Your Ex: CBT Skills to Heal the Pain of a Breakup and Overcome Love Addiction

This is a guest post from Dr. Cortney Warren. Her new book Letting Go of Your Ex: CBT Skills to Heal the Pain of a Breakup and Overcome
Love Addiction released in Feb 2023. I am grateful to share an excerpt from her new book on this post. You can also check out my interview with her in 2022 on Choose Honesty, Honest Liars, The Psychology of Self-Deception

Dr. Cortney S. Warren is a Board Certified Clinical Psychologist and Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Having won numerous professional awards for her research, Cortney is an expert on addictions, self-deception, romantic relationships, eating pathology, and the practice of psychotherapy from a cross-cultural perspective. Her newest work is a self-help book that explores breakups through an addictive framework called Letting Go of Your Ex: CBT Skills to Heal the Pain of a Breakup and Overcome Love Addiction (2023)

Excerpt and overview of the blog

Are you struggling to get over a former lover? Do thoughts and memories of your ex occupy your mind day and night? Do you wish you could talk to them, touch them, see them—anything to make you feel close again? Are you consumed by anger, sadness, frustration, or unbearable pain that your relationship is over? If so, you’re not alone—and you may be going through a love-addicted breakup. For people who struggle with love addiction, breakups can be downright devastating. Yet, there are tools you can use to start healing.

Making Art and Long Term Thinking — Without ‘Hustling’

When the results of our “art” don’t arrive in the immediate term — what do we do? Give up our art because…

No one is reading it? no one is watching it? no one is seeing it? no one is buying it? All these questions and reasons may be valid — but the question is — What do we do now?

Keep creating and keep getting better and know that it will generate fruits in the long term. That’s the courage to keep creating because you’re an artist in the first place.

An art to writing a blog, creating a video, creating a podcast, to help someone in need.

Entrepreneurship is not about grinding and hustling and wracking your health. It’s about making your life and other lives better. It’s a myth that you’ve to grind all the time to become an entrepreneur and fulfill your desires. You can work all day, all week juggling many things and not get anything done.

How do you make better decisions? You have all the valid data points, you have done the impact analysis of each options and you have run through the data many time and still unsure about it? That means your intuition is saying something — listen to it.

If you work in any way in the online business industry(startup founders/entrepreneurs/coaches/therapists/etc), and don’t know “WHO” is your specific audience — what I have learned is that “speaking to everyone is speaking to no one”. You just have to find a few believers and when you do — the 99% of the non-believers won’t matter.

Warren Buffett wrote in one of his letters to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders: “We can ask our CEOs to manage for maximum long-term value, rather than next quarter earnings. We certainly don’t ignore the current result of our businesses – in most cases, they are of great importance – but never want to be achieved at the expense of our building ever-greater competitive strengths. “

Here is my take: It’s not complacency, it’s long-term thinking over short-term scarcity thinking. This same rule applies in goal setting. Let’s say you set up a goal to achieve something in 3 months, but sacrifice sleep, relationships, and friendships. But, if achieving the same goal takes 3.5-4 months without sacrificing anything — I’d choose the longer period.

I know how hard it can be for Introverts to question and challenge other’s ideas and beliefs. I often see introverts accept their boss’s instructions without questioning them. Do you ever felt helpless after that?

I used to be like that.

If you want to grow and own your voice, you get to question things from curiosity. Best teams are only created when the best ideas win and introverts speak for themselves. It’s possible.

The Nishant Garg Show:

This show and blog is about helping Entrepreneurs, Tech Founders, Startup Enthusiasts develop Emotional and Mental health and be more human in their work and personal lives. I interview entrepreneurs, authors, mental health professionals, leadership executive coaches, psychologists, and many more For any questions, please contact me. If you have enjoyed listening to my podcasts, please subscribe to the new podcast updates on Itunes please provide your reviews on Itunes which will really help me.

My Thoughts on Entrepreneurship and Building Connections

Playing a long game: It’s a belief that building a Tech startup is always hard. It’s true. And, it’s an eliminating belief too. Life works in duality. On the other hand, it’s easy if we take our time to build something without grinding and hustling mentality. Working long hours isn’t the solution. Founders and team who understand the philosophy of ‘slowing down’ succeed in the long game because they have high degree of emotional and mental endurance over the long haul.

Courage and Confidence: Working on a Tech startup is damn hard. Isn’t starting something new is hard? It’s hard! The confidence level is low and we require courage to keep showing up. I started podcast in 2020 knowing nothing — it was hard, and now I’ve 200+ episodes and it’s less hard.

On creativity: People force themselves for creative solutions when they feel tired and hence push more and more, and eventually nothing happens. Why not take a break and replenish yourself to fill your energy tank?

Founders with diverse experience: You can build a company at any age. Startup founders with diverse prior experience in different industries, even as an employee, who have built different kinds of designs and products are more likely to succeed in their startup venture. They already have gained many skills along their career such as how to build teams, how to leverage existing network, etc etc.

What You Want Wants You and Accessing the Internal Feelings

Hey Friends, I hope you’re well. I wrote these musings while getting high on coffee in the morning and thinking life. These cover anger, letting go, being okay with whatever arises, and communicating your needs.

Let’s begin:

“Anger is a powerful emotion. It’s human to feel anger and rage and our responsibility is to express it in a healthy way. If you heard that “good people” or “spiritually good people” don’t get angry, that’s called ‘bypassing’. If we ‘disown’ that part of our psyche that gets angry, that ‘part’ will ‘act-out’ in different weird ways. It’s human to feel anger and rage.”

“I don’t know who needs to hear this. If you are having a bad day or a bad week, everything will be alright soon. Light always follows darkness. If your week is not so productive, it’s completely ok because you will be back with much clarity and grit.

If you feel slow in achieving your desires, remember the story of tortoise and hare. You may be slow today, but you might run tomorrow, and then you may get slow again. This is life and life has its own rhythm.”

“When you don’t hold your fist too tight and try letting go, you will realize that things that really belong to you will show up at the right time. No amount of pushing will matter for things that don’t belong to us. How do we know what’s for us? Tough one. Just keep doing your best and putting one step at a time and practice a little bit of letting go and surrender.”

Light Always Follows Darkness

Hey Friends, I am excited to share some of my favorite contemplations from my favorite teachers.

Abraham Hicks: “If something you want is slow to come to you, it can only be for one reason: You are spending more time focused upon its absence than you are about its presence.”

Yung Pueblo: “You can not build a deep connection with someone who’s disconnected from themselves.”

From article: You Don’t Deserve Better – “So no, you don’t deserve better, and you don’t get a pony. Get a coach. A therapist. Find a support group. Read a book. Something! The harsh truth is that your relationships are not going to improve until you do something about it. Cancel the self-pity party and the I-Deserve-Betterpalooza. Shut down the excuse factory and put down the blame-thrower. It’s time to heal!”

Victim Mindset is Not Fixed and Keystone of Resilience

Your heart can be absolutely shattered and in sorrow, and you can continue on, you can grow, you can learn, you can find love in life. It’s a beautiful paradox of resilience of being both broken and whole at the same time, sad and hopeful, and devastated and generous. We are astonishing in our ability as human beings to hold profound experience that are seeming opposites at the same time.
Maria Sirois

This post is a selected excerpt from my interview with Maria Sirois. You can check the full interview at Dr. Maria Sirois — Overcoming Victim Mentality, Happiness in the Darkest Times, Finding Meaning in the Suffering, Lessons Learned from the Hospice Facility, and More (#129)

[Maria explaining about one of her victim experiences and how it felt to her, how she overcame it, and practical practices]

Maria: I felt powerless. I felt small. I felt like I could at any moment be tossed another terrible thing that might bring me to my knees.

Holding a victim mentality is a very disempowering feeling. And I have great compassion for those of us who, like me, are kind of wired that way.

The opposite is also beautifully true, which is that letting go of the victim mentality and really taking ownership of one’s self and one’s choices. There’s tremendous goodness that grows from that. So. I think what I most want people to know is that the victim’s stance or mindset is not fixed.

It’s not true. It’s simply one quality or one perception of experience that can be changed and can be changed at any age. I had an awakening at the age of 29 when a trusted mentor of mine had a number of conversations with me about it.

The choices I was making were to always focus on the negative, to lead from painful thoughts, to be captivated by worry, and to notice the bad in a moment or the bad in another person. And I was quite capable of noticing the good, but I tended to lead from the bad. When he reflected that back to me, I felt like I had been presented with a very painful, but clear mirror of who I was.

That was the moment I was 29 years old — I decided I didn’t want to be that woman and so I spent quite a bit of time with him and with other mentors, and a therapist, and really discussing how you change your mindset from a predominantly negative pessimistic.

The Full Body Yes(with an example)

In my interview with Scott Shute, I asked about the concept of Full Body Yes and how he beautifully explained the 4 stage process in it with an example. Scott Shute sits at the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions and the business world. He currently leads Mindfulness and Compassion programs at LinkedIn. After twenty five years of customer-oriented leadership roles, he found his dream job, where he gets to utilize his entire skill set and embrace his passions. In this work he explores the possibility of human potential, helping employees become the very best version of themselves.

Here it begins:

There is a four-part teaching arc that we go through.

1) The first stage is to really Know Yourself. You need to understand your own story, like understanding your body, why do I get upset, what do I act like when I get upset or happy or whatever it is, and understanding the external systems — who am I trained to please? When I make these decisions, who am I making these decisions for? And having a deep appreciation for your own story.

2) The second part is to Love Yourself, to see yourself as more than this body and this emotion, but to start to recognize that deepest part of yourself. And it’s that voice, that voice from that deepest part of you that we’re trying to listen to. This is where the message of the Full Body Yes comes from. But it’s that part of ourselves that we don’t access all that often.