Birthday Message #2 - The Power of Understanding

-- By Arulnambi K.

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I have lost count of the number of times my father had me and other members of our family do a self-assessment by writing down each of our strengths and weaknesses (or areas for improvement). He would also ask us to assess each other, or rate ourselves in different areas. He strongly felt that such exercises would help us understand ourselves and understand others. This understanding would help develop our personalities and make progress in our careers, our relationships, and our life.

He always stressed the importance of understanding oneself. Awareness of one's own strengths and weaknesses illuminates one's path in life, opens doors, presents opportunities that one can recognize, and helps build self-esteem and self-confidence. 

There is a quote attributed to Swami Vivekananda, the philosopher who was a favorite of my father's. In an email titled 'Words of Wisdom', on January 12, 2007, my father writes:

Today is the birthday of Swami Vivekananda. He was the embodiment of courage, confidence and youth power. “Stand and die in your own strength, if there is any sin, it is weakness; avoid all weaknesses, for weakness is sin, weakness is death”. 

In another email titled 'Practices for Happiness', this one from March 31, 2005, he includes the same quote: 

Do practice: Cultivate logical thinking and develop self-esteem. Stand and die in your own strength. If there is any sin in the world, it is weakness; avoid all weaknesses, for weakness is sin, weakness is death.

"Stand and die in your own strength" - how is this possible without realizing what that strength is? Making people gain that understanding of their own selves was a life mission for my father. 

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Understanding oneself is an age-old concept and has strong roots in psychology, my father's chosen field, but he developed the message of understanding others from his own life experiences. Some of these experiences were very painful to him, but ever the optimist and learner, he thought of that pain as a valuable lesson in itself. To him, understanding others, be it your friend, your colleague, your business associate, your child, your parent or your spouse, was the key to avoiding stress, building meaningful relationships, and ultimately being happy and spreading that happiness.

In an email titled 'Clarity of our condition', dated October 28, 2006, he writes:

Life is for better learning. Self-experiences, particularly bitter experiences, teach us better lessons. Avoid close interaction with narcissistic personalities. They will never have any true concern for you or your family. The personality deficiency will stay throughout their life. We will be free from stress and be happy if we understand them fully and be away from them.

He writes in an email dated July 22, 2013:

Patanjali, the greatest Personality Psychologist of the world, insists on understanding others as the first step in development.

My father, by his own admission, was wrong about some people in his life. His first instinct was to help anyone and everyone, sometimes without a full understanding of the person he was helping and without considering whether that person deserved his help. This caused him much pain and anguish, but he could not help himself and he would say that his core personality could not be changed. He reveals some of this in an email he sent on July 21, 2011, while thanking someone for the gratitude he had shown to him:

As a service-oriented personality, I have helped thousands and thousands of individuals, but only one in a thousand  is grateful to me. As an applied psychologist, I understand it as human nature. Some have even stabbed me in my back, but I cannot change my personality and its core value system. 

My father believed strongly in this message of understanding oneself and understanding others. But he also believed in the essential goodness of human beings, and reached out to help people, sometimes against his better judgment, and sometimes misunderstanding the true nature of those people. He would seem like a sheep among wolves, caught in his own idealistic world. He tried to learn from it, but did not always succeed. From those darker chapters of my father's life, from those times he was "stabbed in the back", his message of understanding resonates even stronger.