Shhh! Secret Life of a Princess

Random, provoking thoughts from a self-confessed princess :: with focus on motivational learnings from the media. I hope to inspire everyone to be the best they can be

Friday, April 22, 2005

Jacket of Accolades for 'The Jacket'

"Sometimes, you only make sense of your life after you see your own death" - this quote blew me away.

Have you ever had the chance to view your life only after you died? Who would have the chance to do that? That was what exactly happened to Adrien Brody in his character in The Jacket. Accolades to Adrien Brody too for such a convincing protrayal of this tormented character who had to go through life as someone who could not remember anything that happened to him after his first near-death encounter. How did that happened, one would ask. Did someone totally wipe out his entire collection of mind just for that period using that device used in Men-In-Black?

Anyway, his amnesia served the story well as that was exactly the reason he had to be tied in a Jacket, pushed into a compartment just fitting for a corpse and left there with no oxygen, no food and no toilet (for heavens sake! How can one live like that?!!!) for hours even days just to get the memory out of him. The amazing part was this compartment turned out to be a Time Travelling Machine and he travelled back in time to meet the girl of his dreams and find that he was already dead in the future. Hahaha! I just spoiled the movie for half the population in Malaysia. The part that puzzled me was how he could actually have the time to make love knowing that he will be dead in 4 hours. Well, let's just say he made the best of everything esp when he knows he will be dead.

What initially meant to be a movie about a race in time to figure out the cause of death and to avoid death (But from all the movies I watched, noone can ever do that, thanks to fate) turned out to a movie about how life should never be taken for granted. If you do know that you will be dead due to some certain reasons, will you be doing what you are doing now that contributes to that reason? Most likely not. But will this ever happens? Well, now I am waiting for someone from the future to tell me who I will marry, how rich will I get and when will I die so that I can plan towards it all. Yeah, right! :P

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Think Positive and Half of the Battle is Won

mrgreenI just returned from a very motivational and fun team-building activity yesterday. It was fantastic as I learnt a lot esp from the core message they were trying to communicate to the members. They started the course by promoting positive thinking like:
When someone asks "How Are You?", it makes a big difference the way you answer the question. If you say "Not so bad." you will have a lower energy level compared to saying "Good" and your mental will tell you that you do not feel so great after all. If you say "Good", mentally you feel better but not as energetic as saying "Great" or "MARVELLOUS" and by merely saying those words, you have created a sense of greatness that would make you feel better for the whole day while influencing your other party to feel the same.

mrgreenSame goes to being in a team whereby if you use positive words, you will encourage the team to try harder and perform better but once negative words are spoken, your team will believe it and will not expect to win. That is why thinking and saying positive from the start helps you win half the battle already. Usually I realise how people who thinks that they can win from the start, they either get close to winning or they try harder and feel like they have achieved more even though the did not win.

mrgreenFor example, The Harvard graduate contestant in The Apprentice 2, kept using the words "We will win" regardless of how loss of hope their team is in. And by merely communicating those words to himself and the whole group, he had creating a winning spirit and that helped the group closed the gap between themselves and the winning team. It also allowed him to last so long in the competition despite being the youngest and most inexperienced. I personally would like to see him last longer but well, he made a major mistake in the episode in which he got fired.

mrgreenThe second part of the evening was used to instill the opposite effect in the teams. The task was to find the missing lines in a maze by going out of the room and memorizing the lines and the objective was to solve the maze to move from Pt a to Pt B. We were told that there will be sabotuers(numbers ot disclosed) in our group who will sabotag the tasks that we are doing and we can eliminate the sabotuer as long as we get consensus from the majority of the group. After all teams have completed and selected their sabotuer to be eliminated, the facilitator asked each team what made them selected the saboteurs and reasons like "He made silly mistakes.", "He talked too much and did not contribute to the goal" and etc was heard. Next the facilitator asked the saboteurs how they felt and what they think they did to deserve to be labeled a saboteur (kind of like being selected into the boradroom in The Apprentice). There was a huge conflict whereby the sabotuers questioned the team members on their incomptetency and that perhaps they forgot and made a mistake? Perhaps they were being put there because of some of the team members just wanted to take revenge and bring them down. Accusations ensued and finally it was revealed that there were in fact no sabotuers among any of them. This had led to the talk that in this tasks, the teams were given negative thoughts and by concentrating on those thoughts, they ended up finding faults with each other and blaming each other for small mistakes. In order to eliminate these, everybody should work towards the goal which was to solve the maze in the first place despite having negative feedback or destructive actions.

ideaWhen a company concentrate on negativity, it will never achieve its objectives as they are concentrating on the irresponsibilities and negativities that block them from completing their tasks. Thus, all of them should concentrate on their objectives and strive towards resullts. Do not point fingers and blame all problems on others. Things can always work even with mistakes as long as the majority concentrate on the goals and objectives.

ideaThus, eliminate negativity and instill positivity in all that you do. By thinking positive, you are training your mind to see the end result that is to get the trophy or win the race and by doing that you are also programming your mind to work towards the end result you visualized. This has been quoted by so many great writers like Napolean Hill in "Think Rich, Grow Rich". A lot of things we do are in the mind and that is why Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is so successful. As I said, by being positive, half the battle is won. The next half is just to make the things happen and strive towards your goals.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Quote of the Working Morning

Pssttt...just want to take a bit of time out from work to give you guys one quote: "Forget about winning if you can't ever imagine yourself winning." Really like this.

KLSE Life

Life presents itself with many challenges. And that is what makes life exciting. Can you ever imagine ever having just a straight line? I pity those who do cos they will never have the emotions like those I can feel. Life will be like eating plain bread everyday. The fire that burns when I am excited about something, the passion that zeals my spirit and the misery that creates melancholic mood in me. For me, life is like eating ice-cream one day and curry mee the next. Well, life has its ups and downs but what fun is the up without the down?

Like the stock market, I am on a down-trend now. But my hopes are high that it will go on the uptrend. And even if it does not, I will lift my spirits up and do whatever it takes to make life better. Never give up on yourself. Who else can help you but you?

Monday, April 04, 2005

The Life of Death

Flipped through the newspaper today and read an article about the highly successful but morbid tv show called "Six Feet Under" about a dysfunctional family who takes care of a business related to human's death. Read a book entitled "The Lovely Bones" about a raped and murdered girl watching how her family deals with her death from heaven. Heard about another interesting book called "The curious incident of the dog in the nigh-time" relating the story of a dead dog and how an autistic boy traced the story leading to its death. On Monday, watched a tv programme called "Summerland" about how a fun-loving, single aunt copes with taking care of 3 kids after the death of their parents, even though now the series is getting more soapy than ever(yucks!), nevertheless still entertaining to watch.

Funny how the story of death has now been the central topic in many art forms. But I am not at all suprised that these are the types of stories that attract high viewership and readership. I would be interested to know how people deals with the grief and torment that comes together with the death of loved ones.

In life, there are only twp things that are imminent: tax and death. Dealing with tax calls for only one form of reaction: sighs of exasperation. Dealing with death however creates different types of reaction to those affected, some in forms of denial, some in lighter actions. It is nice to see how the son of the parents in Summerland reacted to his parents death by trying to find out the meaning of 'heaven' and tried his best to go there despite putting his life in immense trouble. The daughter meanwhile stresses herself by taking over the responsibilities of her mother and father and as a result was penting up all her frustration and anger in the form of fulfilled responsibilities.

Who could say how heaven or hell looks like? Well, the image of hell in movies like Constantine is enough to instill fear in human to not create and perform sins or else they might be punished incessantly in hell. Who is to say whether any of this is right or wrong. All that matters is to take those scenes as learning points so that we appreciate the short life that we have to spread love all around and to give more. At the end of our life, it is the quality of life that matters. Thus, create a life that lead to numerous respect and honour from all those you care about. Just like Pope John Paul II. :)