Reflection on Amal Totkay
By: Atta Ul Mustafa
Tags: Growth Mindset, Amal Academy, Amal Totkay

A mindset is basically a person’s way of thinking and their opinions. It is a set of assumptions or notions held by an individual or a group of people.

Mindset helps in perceiving the life, positive mindset enables you to be an upgraded version of yourselves, it helps in accomplishing those difficult targets which one thinks of like it is impossible or I can’t do this, on the other hand the negative mindset is horrible, in this situation we try to find the inferior part in everything and like sort of reduce our expectations by thinking of worst possible scenarios. So to have a life which is well balanced and full of ambitions, we should have a positive mindset. The significance of positive mindset is described in the figure below:

Importance of positive mindset

Considering in broader terms, we have another another interesting set of mindsets, namely fixed and growth mindset. A growth mindset is like I can always improve upon my traits and abilities, furthermore one can also achieve any goal or skill by sheer determination, persistence and hard work, even though that person is not naturally talented in that particular skill. Fixed mindset is like we cannot refine our skills. Furthermore it indicates that talent alone is necessary to achieve success and efforts are not really required, which is absolutely wrong, having a fixed mindset is a vital element which plays a significant role in restricting the personal development of an individual. The importance of hard work is elaborated in the quote below:

“Hard work beats talent when that talent does not work hard”

Coming towards reflection upon Amal Totkay, I think they are the guidelines towards a successful life. They are explained as follows:

Self talk

This is the best practice for analyzing ourselves, highly related to the concept “Visit the balcony of your life”. It is like mirror which shows us the true picture of ourselves. This is where we can reflect upon our daily routine activities and can judge that whether we are proceeding in the right direction or not. Furthermore whenever we do good things and then reflect it back later before going to sleep, it gives us a sense of accomplishment which like motivates us in achieving our goals. Hence, it is really important to appreciate ourselves because this gives like positive signals to our mind which results in effective action as well.

Self reflection

2. Get out of the comfort zone

Comfort zone is when an individual is fully satisfied with the achievements in his life and is no longer interested in the improvement. I really love this totka, obviously it is difficult but this is from where the real life starts. The simple point is that you won’t grow until you challenge yourselves, so we should keep motivating ourselves in pursuit of something which is better and hard to come because this is how we become a lifelong learner and we have a life full of purposes.

Comfort zone perfectly explained

3. Create new habits

Developing new and productive habits is the key to success. They assist in upgrading from fixed to growth mindset. We should adopt new habits in consideration with our goals, like if I play cricket and I want to improve my game, so I would spare an hour or two for sake of exercise, just to ensure that my fitness level remains high. Secondly I should focus on learning new skills, like I would learn that how to swing the ball or how can I play all over the ground instead of just being one dimensional. Creating new habits is like value addition to one’s existing ability, which can definitely plays a vital role in its growth. So to do this we should always remember 3R’S which are reminder, routine and reward. Reminder is like we inform ourselves that what we need to do, routine is like implementing those pre-established activities and most importantly reward which means that we should keep pushing ourselves no matter how intense or difficult the goal is.

3R’S of creating new habits

4. Ask people help

Asking help from others is another beautiful aspect of Amal Totkay. Most of people hesitate to do this, this concept is similar to “Ek aur Ek Gyara”. We should have a courage to ask help from our peers or experts because this in turn leads to our own benefit. Similarly we should have a passion to serve others as well because this is what makes a healthy community. For this step we need to ensure that we are picking the right persons, I mean we should approach those who really want to see us prosper in our lives, because they are the ones who will motivate us throughout our lives and will be with us through thick and thin.

5. Fake it till you make it

This is another interesting part of fabulous five Amal Totkays. It means that even in the worst possible situations, we should pretend that we have the required skills or abilities to achieve that particular task. The most important thing is that how we see or rate ourselves, studies prove that our skill set and confidence level is highly enhanced whenever we use this wonderful technique, but this requires a lot of practice to be really professional at it.