“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right”. A famous Henry Ford quote reflecting on the power of belief and mindset in achieving success.
It’s a quote that three-time Amazon bestseller and psychologist Anurag Rai says is “one of his favourites”.
The executive coach has had a unique life since moving to Aberdeen in 2005 and by his own account, self-belief has helped him navigate some trick waters.
Admittedly, he didn’t even know coaching was a profession he could move into.
He moved to Scotland at a young age with the ambition of opening a restaurant, and he achieved it.
But the happy times didn’t last long.
“I lost everything,” he told me. He spent four nights sleeping in a dark, cold storeroom is his restaurant in an effort to cut costs on electricity.
He asked himself: “Why did this happen to me? Why me?”
He continued: “I kept asking that question and obviously it took me into a very bad place.
“On the fifth night, a new thought came into my head. Why not me?
“If bad things can happen to small kids in warzone countries, surely bad things can happen to me?
“I then thought, it’s not about what happens to me, it’s what I do about it.
“I got some courage, asked for help, got the restaurant back up and running and in 2014 when my son was born I decided to change career.
“I became an accountant, started working for a big four accountancy firm and it was during lockdown when I wrote my first book.”
Anurag’s first book, The Power Within, birthed his current career.
“On the back of that book, people started approaching me for advice.
“That’s when I realised this is something I can do, I can share and that’s when I got into coaching.”
Anurag’s offerings vary from helping people achieve long-term goals to teaching people how to become better leaders.
He teachers a number of methods to help a person reach their full potential but, arguably, none are more important than self-belief.
“When are you more likely to jump a rope [a metre] high? When you think it’s hard or when you think it’s easy?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter is something is hard or easy, I’m going to think that it’s easy because that makes it easier.
“Our brain will always prove our self-image right.
“There are psychological principals which support that fact which we call cognitive dissonance.
“This is a reason why most people struggle to change their behaviour. They want to go from their current behaviour to their desired behaviour but their identity is still stuck to their current behaviour.
“If I think I’m a procrastinator, that’s what I’m reaffirming in my head. Our brain will always choose familiar pain over unfamiliar possibility.”
It was fairly evident that self-belief isn’t something Anurag lacks. After all, taking the jump from a secure job at a big four accountancy firm into self-employment, alongside fathering a young child, isn’t an easy decision.
And it’s not something Anurag would have done had he not been in control of his life, nor came to terms with challenges the past.
“First thing is to accept and realise that we don’t have control and it’s okay. When we are trying to control things that we don’t have control of, we miss the opportunity to control the things we can control,” he said.
“If I ask, what’s the one thing you can control? It’s your thoughts and your actions in this moment. You cannot control what you did two minutes ago, you cannot control what you will do two minutes later until later becomes now.
“Life is only happening now. Anything outside now is either a memory or an imagination.”
Staying in the moment and not dwelling on the past is a central theme of Anurag’s teaching and it ties in with his second book, Mind 2.0, which is based around understanding your mind and reaching your full potential.
“When people get caught up in the past, what they are getting caught up with is their memory.”
“I do an experiment in my workshops which shows how the brain does not understand the difference between thinking and reality.
“If we are caught up in the past, for our brain it’s real.
“It’s like being chased by a tiger every day, that’s the stress-response you get.”
One method Anurag teaches that helps take back control is meditation.
“Meditation is often misunderstood. Whenever we talk about meditation we think about the monk’s way to meditate,” he said.
“We think that we are going to have a mat and we ask the brain to shut down, to stop thinking, and it will listen to us.
“Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It works for the monks because they live in mountains, they don’t have deadlines to meet, they don’t have kids running around them.”
Anurag shares 21 different ways to meditate in The Power Within.
“It’s not a lot of time that you need. You only need five to 10 minutes. I say do it for 21 days before you start seeing the benefits of it.
“The most important benefit if you get betting control over you emotions and your thoughts.
“You cannot make better decisions, you cannot be a better person for your family, your kids, you can not be a better employee or a leader, if your neurochemistry is hijacked.
“Meditation helps you see yourself as separate from your thoughts. It helps you slow down so that you can think clearly and make better decisions.”
The leadership coach has since written a third book, Leading With Human Quotient: A Comprehensive Guide to Human Leadership.
In it, he talks about the demands of being a good leader and how they extend beyond technical skills and industry knowledge.
“It’s how we deal with humans, that’s what leadership is all about”.
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