“Milind, It’s a VERY DEPRESSING ENVIRONMENT here. It’s minus 14 degrees, everything’s covered with snow and there’s not a human being in sight on the roads.”

This 28 year old Ivy League MBA student I’m coaching lives on the US East Coast and she was feeling really low when I started my weekly coaching call yesterday.

ME: “Send me a picture. I want to see what something depressing looks like.”
She sent me the picture (the one in the post).

ME: “Smriti (name changed), yes I can see a lot of snow. But I don’t see a signboard which says ‘DEPRESSING ENVIRONMENT HERE’. That signboard isn’t OUT THERE. It’s IN YOUR MIND. You see what I mean?”
What was true for her is true for all of us. We say things like ‘stressful job’, ‘depressing family situation’, ‘difficult life conditions’ etc. The reality is that there is A job, A family situation, A set of life conditions. The labels we give are NOT REAL, they are simply a reflection of what’s going on IN OUR MINDS.

The moment we realize that, we move from feeling helpless to feeling ‘If I work on my mind, my world can change. How ‘snowy’ or ‘stormy’ my environment is, won’t matter then.”