For my father, K.V. J. Kamath, the epitome of positivity
My mother, Priya, the epitome of strength
My son, Atul, the epitome of kindness

Introduction

ON 31 DECEMBER 2019, I WENT OUT FOR A COFFEE WITH my daughter. I was happy that she was in India and with me for the new year. We clicked selfies, shared them on social media and wished each other a ‘Happy New Year’. We were hopeful and optimistic, looking for a new beginning, a fresh start. Even for the most cynical among us, the start of something is always exciting. It feels like a blank canvas on which we are free to paint as we please.

When we wished each other joy, health, happiness, prosperity for the next year, we sincerely believed it would be better than the last. The year 2020 was special—not only was it a brand new year but also a brand new decade.

Little did we know it would turn out to be one of the worst we’d ever faced.

I had grand plans, like many of us. My thirteenth book was to be launched, and tours had already been planned. The marketing strategy was in place. Months of effort that went into writing would now culminate in a physical book—one of the highlights of a writer’s life.

In March 2020—when the pandemic had only just reared its ugly head and we had no idea what lay in store—I was in Mumbai for the cover launch of my book. There was uncertainty in the air, but the magnitude of what was to come had not sunk in yet. My book event was cancelled, and I barely managed to make it back home to Bengaluru. I did not know it then, but it would be at least five more months before I could step out of my residential complex.

On the personal front, I had planned to be in Singapore in August 2020 to watch my children graduate. As the lockdowns kept getting extended, I began to lose all hope of seeing my children any time soon. After several months of uncertainty, my son and my daughter managed to move countries during the pandemic on special evacuation flights, and successfully completed the mandated quarantine. I think I greyed more in fifteen days than I have done in fifteen years.

Eventually, my book launch was organized online. My children’s graduation ceremony was online. They happened, and we were glad, but they just didn’t feel the same.

A writer’s job is a solitary one. Even before the pandemic struck, my work did not involve going out or meeting other people. I stay at home, and I let my imagination soar. My office is inside my head. And yet, the pandemic affected me badly. One cannot be immune to what is happening around them. For months, I was in such shock that I couldn’t work on any fiction.

The world had turned upside down. As I type this, the dreaded COVID-19 has taken the lives of over 2.78 million people worldwide. It has caused losses amounting to billions of dollars. Today, we are in a strange situation, forced to co-exist with fear, uncertainty and a general bleakness hanging in the air. Though vaccines are now out, there’s not a single person I know who believes this will pass and things will return to ‘normal’. The idea persists that this is the new normal and that we must make peace with it. Many people told me that during the lockdown, they felt claustrophobic, as their apartments had no balconies. They craved fresh air. They wanted to go to the gym. They fell into depression, isolated and cooped up. They felt they had nothing to look forward to in life.

When the first lockdown was announced in India, I started a series of blog posts called ‘21 Days of Positivity’. Every day, I would write a new blog post, which people could read in their inbox, free of cost, if they subscribed. As the lockdowns kept getting extended, I continued posting on my Instagram account simple things that give joy. To my surprise, I began receiving hundreds of messages of gratitude and thanks, telling me that my posts were the only things helping people get through the day, urging me to write more such posts. It was overwhelming to think that whatever I shared was having an impact on people’s lives.

A lot of people also wrote to me asking if it’s truly possible to be happy all the time? They said I made it seem easy. How does one be positive when the reality is harsh? Does one take a Pollyannaish approach, pretending that the situation does not exist? Do we ignore the terrible statistics of deaths and the crippling economic growth that stare at us everywhere we look? How do we manage it?

When I started responding to the queries, the replies became longer and longer. Many asked me to put them up so they could refer to it whenever they felt the need for a ‘pick-me-up’. I began talking to people, asking them what they found most difficult about being hopeful. As they opened up to me, I discovered I had a lot of suggestions and tips to offer. After all, I had some experience in facing grief.

A few years back, I had faced the biggest loss of my life, a tragedy from which I thought I would never recover. But eventually, I did. I also inadvertently discovered a precious skill—that we can indeed change our mindset and cope with anything that life throws at us. I call this the ‘magic mindset’.

The magic mindset consists of a set of principles for every area of life, designed to help us shift our perspective from hopelessness to hope, from despondency to joy, from cynicism to belief—a belief that change is coming, and things are not as bad as they seem. If we view our problems through the lens of the magic mindset, they don’t seem that big or daunting.

While the principles capture the general idea, what is hard is to put those principles to practise. In this book, I have offered practical steps we can take in situations that trouble us, so that we feel more in control. I have also come up with exercises within each chapter, which can help us define the exact problem facing us.

Often when we think of a problem we are facing, our thoughts are jumbled. They go on in a loop, binding us, rendering us helpless as we get caught in a never-ending cycle of stress, stemming from inaction, simply because we feel helpless. We do not think clearly when we are within the situation.

The questions in this book require that we contemplate a bit before answering. There are no right or wrong answers. One person’s reality and journey can be completely different from another’s. I encourage doing every exercise as it comes up, before reading further. At the end of the book, there is a ‘14-Day Magic Mindset Challenge’ to gently nudge us towards the magic mindset journey.

This book does not have to be read in any particular order. For instance, if you feel you are happy about most things but your relationships could do with a little help, turn to that section. But whatever section you choose to read, the book will not help if you read it like a novel and rush through it! It requires active participation, and whatever I outline in these pages should be practised.

I have followed all of it myself and shared everything that helped me. I have also included anecdotes from which we can all be inspired. I have shared personal stories from my life too.

You can keep returning to the exercises whenever you feel the need for it. Your answers might be different based on your changing circumstances and your mindset at that point in your life. Keep practising and be consistent. If you do, I assure you that you’ll begin to see a change in your outlook.

It is my sincere wish that whatever I have shared here helps you on your journey towards the magic mindset and, brings you joy and hope. This mindset has helped me achieve my dreams, and I hope that it helps you achieve all your dreams too.

Thank you very much for picking up this book.

Love, light and healing,

Preeti Shenoy

April 2021

PART 1

Understanding the Magic Mindset

1

The Trouble with Positivity

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

—Dr Seuss

IN 2005, I REMEMBER SITTING IN A MULTIPLEX WITH A group of friends, clutching my tummy and laughing helplessly till tears rolled down my eyes, at one of the silliest Hindi films I’ve watched till date. The movie, No Entry, among the biggest hits of that year, starred Anil Kapoor in a comic role. The character that he plays keeps advising his friend to ‘be positive’, especially when they are both in the kind of trouble from where there seems to be no escape, and they are likely to get thrashed. In exasperation, the friend asks ‘Why do you keep saying this? What is this “be positive”?’

‘Oh, it’s just my blood group,’ he replies. ‘I will need it when we’re beaten up and lying in the hospital.’

Anytime I hear the phrase ‘be positive’, it takes me back to the movie. The phrase, due to its overuse, especially in today’s times, has become hackneyed. When the circumstances are grave, the phrase can almost sound like a joke. We all want to see bad situations in a new, hopeful light. But how do we do that? What if there’s really no solution?

This is where the ‘magic mindset’ helps. While positivity tells us to look at the bright side of things, the magic mindset embraces and accepts that it is not always possible to look at the bright side. Sometimes, things are so bleak that our mind refuses to accept that there can be anything positive about it.

Positivity as People See It

According to the Oxford Dictionary, positivity is a practice of being optimistic in attitude. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, positivity means the quality of having a positive attitude. They state the opposite as ‘negativity’.

Since there is a lot of talk about ‘being positive’, curiosity led me to ask different people what they thought positivity meant. My nineteen-year-old daughter said, ‘Positivity means finding the good even in the worst situations.’

When I posted the question on my social media, I got over a hundred responses in a few hours. The answers offered me glimpses into people’s world views—a cross-section of their minds, their philosophies, their approach to life and what they believed in.

One definition that stood out was that positivity meant keeping our arms open to embrace everyone, especially ourselves; only then would thoughts not linger longer than required and only then can one understand self-love. If we managed to do this, we could also accept diversity and opinions and thoughts different from ours.

Another respondent said that he wakes up and gets out of bed because of positivity. To him, positivity was hope that the day that lay ahead would be better than the one he had yesterday. Yet another defined positivity as ‘Karma’. She believed that whatever we faced daily was because of our Karmas, and she tried to stay calm knowing this too would pass. Another said that positivity is finding an oasis of peace within ourselves, despite all the external circumstances.

Read the definition that you have written. How does it make you feel? Do you think the phrase is overused? Do you think that it is possible to apply the definition you have written to all situations life throws at you?

The Magic Mindset and Reality

For some people, the very word ‘positivity’ is an irritant. They believe that positivity lulls us into a false sense of not seeing reality for what it is. How can we be positive about, say, our finances, when the credit card bills have piled and we are broke? How can we say that the world is beautiful when millions in it are dying? How can we be positive if a loved one has been diagnosed with a terminal illness? What if the person who means the most to us is snatched away suddenly?

That is exactly what happened to me when I lost my father, out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever. He was supposed to visit me a week after the day he died. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and passed away, in the middle of a conversation with my mother. And the surprising part? He was absolutely healthy and had no age-related ailments. He used to walk about ten kilometres every day. He had meetings scheduled the next day. He was sixty-five.

Since I was very close to my father, speaking to him almost every day, you can imagine what a massive shock it was. It felt like my world had ended. For a year, I didn’t smile, socialize or talk to anyone. My father was one of the most cheerful people I knew, and one of the things he would keep emphasizing was that no matter what happened in our lives, we always have choices. We can choose to see things differently. This is the essence of the ‘magic mindset’. It is viewing things differently, looking at them from an angle that we never considered before.

A few years ago, I was studying portraiture in the UK. Our task was to make drawings from real-life models who would pose for a couple of minutes. We would all stand in a semi-circle around the model and draw what we saw. Though we were all looking at the same model, our drawings would all be starkly different. The instructor encouraged us to walk around the model and see how even the slightest movement on our part changed how we viewed them.

Life is like that. Two people faced with the same tragedy will view the event in different ways.

As for me, after my father’s death, I found it very hard to view things ‘differently’. How could anything change the fact that my father had been snatched away from me? It was so unfair. I was plunged into darkness. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning or get out of bed.

To cope with the spiral I was experiencing, I started a blog. I decided that I would focus only on the positive things, no matter how small, that happened to me during that day. There was a lot of sadness in my life, yet I chose to cling on to the tiniest happy thing I could think of. Without knowing or realizing it, I was doing exactly what my father had ingrained in me; I was applying the principles of the magic mindset.

The magic mindset helps us view things in a way that is most advantageous to us at the current stage of our life.

In the initial days, no one read my blog. But I was writing because I didn’t know what else to do. I missed my father terribly. I couldn’t accept that life could change so suddenly. My father believed that we could achieve whatever we set out to, if we were determined enough, and that included happiness. He used to tell me, ‘Nobody can make you unhappy without your permission.’

As I learnt to cope with the shock and the numbing grief of his death, I began focusing on what was going right, something my father had always advocated. I had a goal now, a way to fight the inner darkness—focus and write about one single happy thing that I could think of. Some days, even when I felt that I had nothing to write about, I would think hard and find something. As the months went by, the footfall on my blog grew. Though I was writing primarily for myself, my words soothed many. It has been over fourteen years now, and I continue to blog—not daily any more, but regularly.

Changing How We View Our Reality

The bottom line is that even in our darkest moments, when all we feel is overwhelming sadness, we can find one good thing and focus on that. It can be something as small as finding a footwear that fits well or watching sunlight filter through the trees.

While the standard idea of ‘positivity’ leaves no room for any kind of sad feelings, the magic mindset encompasses all kinds of feelings. It does not require us to suppress our feelings of sadness and allows us the space to be unhappy.

The award winning 1997 Italian movie Life Is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, is a fabulous example of what the magic mindset is all about. The movie depicts the heart-wrenching and inspiring story of Guido, a young man living in Italy in 1939. Cheerful, exuberant, a bit of a prankster, Guido falls in love with Dora, who is engaged to a rich but arrogant man. Guido sets up many ‘coincidences’ to express his interest in Dora, and they eventually elope. They have a son, Joshua, and make their living running a bookstore. During the German invasion, Guido and his family are rounded up by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Guido and Joshua are separated from Dora and sent to a different concentration camp. There, Guido uses his sense of humour and imagination to keep five-year-old Joshua safe from the horrors of the camp.

He tells Joshua that it’s all a game and that he has a chance to win a real army battle tank, which Joshua is excited about. He says he will lose points if he cries, if he asks to see his mother, or if he is hungry and asks for a snack. Though there are terrible, unimaginable atrocities being committed, Guido shields Joshua from all of it with his attitude and spirit. Joshua never comes to know that all around him innocent people are being murdered and that his father and mother are probably next. Guido refuses to be anything but hopeful even though he knows that torture and inevitable death await him. He clings to life, exploring his vast imagination and creativity, coming up with ‘explanations’ to shield his son even in a concentration camp where hopelessness, death and torture are the only certainties. If you haven’t watched this movie, do watch it. It is one of the greatest examples of how we can look at things differently and develop the magic mindset. Of course, we cannot all be Guido, but we can certainly draw inspiration from his attitude.

Magic Mindset and Feelings

A grouse that many people have with positivity is that there is such a lot of emphasis on it that it often feels forced. Many of us have also been bombarded with messages like ‘look on the bright side’ or ‘there are people who have it worse than you’ and so on. The messages invalidate our feelings of sadness or grief, making it seem as though we are not allowed to feel sad about things—because there’s always someone else in the world who has it ‘worse’. But positivity is not a switch that can be flipped on at will. Feelings of grief or sadness are real for the person feeling them and cannot be wished away. It is not possible nor is it healthy to suppress all our feelings of sadness and ignore reality.

The magic mindset means accepting sadness and being aware of adverse situations, while taking small steps to get through them.

Life throws at us different experiences. It might take away loved ones, a job or money. But through it all, if we maintain a sense of hope despite the grief that envelops us and if we believe that things will eventually get better, then we have succeeded in cultivating the magic mindset.

The magic mindset teaches us to be patient, allowing the grief and hopelessness to flow through us till it no longer controls our actions. It is segregating what we feel from what we do. It is knowing with a quiet calmness that ‘this too shall pass’.

No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can train our mind to think this way. There are steps we can take, to change the way we think. Our thoughts determine our actions, and by changing our thoughts, we can change our reality. Creating a magic mindset can help us brave life’s battles, and this book shows you how to do that.

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

Click on the link to buy the complete eBook, www.amazon.in/dp/B09FCD8LND

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Notes

1. Mayo Clinic and Verywell Mind, ‘The Stillness Project’.

2. Dr Rajiv Jhangiani, Dr Hammond Tarry, Psychology Today, ‘Principles of Social Psychology’ (International Edition).

3. The Harvard Gazette.

4. Humans of Bombay (Instagram) and Chirag Chordia (Instagram).

5. Drazen Prelec, Duncan Simester, ‘Psychology of Spending’, MIT.

6. Adaptation theory by Brickman, Coates and Bulman in American Psychology Association.

7. Dutch Postcode Lottery study by Kuhn, Kooreman Soetevent, Kapteyn.

8. Source: https://goqii.com/blog/lifestyle-diseases-an-epidemic-among-young-indians/

Source: https://goqii.com/blog/tag/fitness-and-lifestyle-in-india/

Source: https://www.livemint.com/insurance/news/health-insurance-a-must-to-combat-the-rise-in-lifestyle-diseases-1567068428855.html

9. Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ mental-health-in-india-7-5-of-country-affected-less-than-4000-experts-available/articleshow/71500130.cms

10. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181127111044.htm

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323846

11. The names and other identifying details have been changed.

12. Seven out of ten released inmates commit a crime within three years as they have no job, housing or skills.

13. Melissa Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, Jordyn Young, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

14. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is indeed a book that changed my life.

15. The Hindu, 13 May 2019 and the Cigna Loneliness Index, 2020.

16. National Science Foundation study.

Acknowledgements

To my father, K.V.J. Kamath, for all that he taught me and to my mother, Priya Kamath, for being my strength.

To my wonderful editor, Swati Daftuar, for believing so much in the book, and making it so much better. It’s such a joy to work with someone whose vision syncs with yours. Her ability to completely get what I am trying to communicate astounds me, each time.

To the superb team at Harper Collins—Ananth Padmanabhan, Diya Kar, Shabnam Srivatsava, Rahul Dixit.

To the cover designer, Saurav Das, for a brilliant cover and layout of the book.

To my technical support team Pranav Shah who is super responsive.

To my three—Atul, Purvi and Satish for always being my biggest cheerleaders.

To my closest friends who I am in touch with on a regular basis—you know who you are!

To all my lovely readers who tell me how much my words mean to them, and how it makes their lives better. I am honoured that you choose to share bits of your life with me, it means so much and I am overwhelmed by your support and your trust in me.

About the Book

About the Author

Preeti Shenoy, among the highest selling authors in India, is on the Forbes longlist of the most influential celebrities in India. Her books include When Love Came Calling, Wake Up Life is Calling, Life Is What You Make It, The Rule Breakers, A Hundred Little Flames, It’s All in the Planets, Why We Love the Way We Do, The Secret Wish List, The One You Cannot Have and many others. Her work has been translated into many Indian languages. Preeti is also a motivational speaker, and has given talks at many premier educational institutions and corporate organizations like KPMG, ISRO, Infosys and Accenture, among others. An avid fitness enthusiast, she is also an artist specialising in portraiture and illustrated journalling.

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First published in India by

HarperCollins Publishers 2021

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Copyright © Preeti Shenoy 2021

P-ISBN: 978-93-5422-772-1

Epub Edition © September 2021 ISBN: 978-93-5422-773-8

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

Preeti Shenoy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Cover design: Saurav Das

Cover image: Shutterstock

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