Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Wednesday 5 February 2020

How does the environment affect you?

How does the environment affect you?


A few days back, i met a friend after a long time. During the interaction, he was frequently mentioning his colleagues' and subordinate’s toxic behaviors and his frustration to work with them. As I knew him as a highly energetic and positive person, but now he becomes more skeptical about any new initiatives and cynical about everything in his workplace and quality of life. He was much disturbed due to his colleagues/subordinates as they are the people with whom he spends much time.

It is said that you are the AVERAGE of the five people you spend most of the time.  This statement may be true because your environment influences your thought processes, behaviors, and activities. The environment can be family, professional, or friend ‘s circle.

 When you surround yourself with positive and energetic people, you will also start to observe them, reflect their thought process and behavior in you without much conscious effort. Alternatively, if you are surrounded by mostly with toxic people who are always blaming/complaining about everything, you will also start believing in their thought process, and you will also demonstrate the same behavior. That is the power of the environment and its influence in our life.

       As you cannot change the environment completely, be aware of the quality of people you are surrounded by, the news channel you are watching, your Facebook / WhatsApp feeds, and so on. Make a slight shift in the environmental mix by meeting new people, joining educational forums, visiting new places, getting exposed to new challenges, and associating with people beyond your natural circle. This shift will help you to enhance your perspectives.

       Since the environment influences your action, be aware of the quality of your situation, and choose the balanced mix.

P.S: (I suggested my friend look up other functional colleagues, benchmark his boss, and start spending more time with different circles to alter his environment mix. I hope things will become better soon!)

Thursday 27 September 2018

Steps in Leadership Development Process

As discussed, leadership is all about personal development, and it is not given by others.
How to develop your leadership capabilities?

It consists of 4 steps. 

1.Personal leadership or leading yourself
2.Ensuring cordial Relationship with others or leading others
3.Performance  or delivering results
4.Developing others as a leader 




This step is applicable for everyone at ANY stages of the life cycle. 

For example, if you a "business head," you need to develop your leadership qualities by continuously working on those four steps.

If you are entering into the professional ladder as “ Trainee,” you have to develop your leadership capabilities continuously on those steps

On a personal front, if you are entering from "Bachelor to spouse role or spouse to father /mother," you have to develop your family leadership qualities based on those steps only.


It is a continuous improvement journey throughout life. There is no guarantee that as Manager you exhibited good leadership qualities would help you at General Management level. Each level or position calls for the development of different leadership capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, the leadership capabilities could be your thought process, attitude, words, actions and results and how it lifts your surroundings, your organizations, your teams and your personal and family quality of life.

Also, you observe that the development from one step to another step is sequential.but, in reality, it is parallel development only. We can not wait for PERFECT personal development to get into the next step of RELATIONSHIP building.

The point is you need to be conscious enough to develop yourself, your relationship quality, your performance and your effort in developing others on a continuous basis.

Let us discuss each step and its components in next week.

Learn to Lead (Understanding Leadership)

What is leadership?

Leadership is all about greatness in your thinking, your words, your actions and your results which leads to making a positive impact on your surroundings, organization, and family.

Leadership is a quality of the individual on character and competency which positively helps others.

Misconceptions about leadership :

1.    Leadership is given by others
2.    Leadership is related to a title like a manager or CEO
3.    Leadership is directly related to age and experience or educational qualification
4.    Leadership is for the organizational or political environment.
5.    Leadership is more about charisma

All the above are just a misunderstanding about leadership.

If you make a positive impact even a smile in others, that is leadership.

For example, we respect some people irrespective of their age, experience, position but only for the positive impact they made on us through their intention, words or actions. Whereas we may not like some people, even though they are holding reliable power. You can relate this with your network of people.


Leadership is all about 
what you do rather than who you are.

To illustrate this definition of leadership, some year back, Times of India had launched ad campaign " Lead India". The video link is given below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-gvE7MGIBw

Having understood the leadership definition as more about personal development, let us discuss the 
step by step development process next week.

Learn to Lead

If you observe any individual’s phenomenal growth or any organizational growth or any family’s upliftment, the hidden factor among all is“leadership.”

Leadership is not about the resources or positional status; it is more of personal qualities which are uplifting the individual or organization. For example, all organizations are filled with many people with various designations denoting as leaders, even then the organization struggles to make a positive impact or sustained growth. The reason is not due to resources, it is due to a lack of leadership.

As there are misconceptions on leadership and development, a holistic understanding is required on 
Leadership from the inside out perspective and we will discuss  the following  aspects of leadership
1. What is leadership and how it is different from a leader or manager?
2.Steps involved in developing leadership capability irrespective of your age, qualification or position
3.Insights in each of the steps in leadership development


I am firmly believing that “ Personal Leadership precedes any organizational, family leadership.” If the person is molded with the right leadership qualities, the organization he is associating with will also be flourishing. If the person is molded with right personal leadership qualities, his family upliftment also is ensured. The starting point is " personal leadership".

The fundamental is developing personal leadership capability WITHIN, and hence we will discuss more on Personal Leadership and its insights in the following weeks in detail.

Thursday 5 April 2018

Who is a winner when you quarrel?


There were a couple of lions lived in a forest.One day, both felt thirsty and reached the water pond.They immediately began to argue about who should satisfy their thirst first.The argument became quarrel and each took a stand to die in the quarrel rather than give up the privilege of being first to quench the thirst.

       They started attacking each other as their emotions turned into rage. Suddenly they stopped their attack and looked up at the sky as there was a flock of vultures circling the pond. Those vultures were eagerly waiting for the loser to die and it would become a feast for them for a week.

       On realizing the intention of the vultures, both lions stopped their quarrel and shared the water together to quench the thirst and walked away. The vultures disappointed.

Moral of the story:

When you quarrel each other as a couple for a silly reason, the loss would be family harmony only. Similarly even in the organization, when we spent energy on small things and argued for hours, the loser would be the organization, and the winner would be your competition.

Be aware of what for you are fighting and against whom you are fighting! 

Wednesday 21 February 2018

Preserving Relationship



Generally, we get hurt more by close relationships either family members or with people in a professional environment than strangers. When we get hurt, our tendency would be thinking too much about the incident or the person cause it.Eventually, we start recalling all unfavorable moments happened earlier with the person and forming negative emotions about the person. When this occurrence repeats frequently, the gap is also widening over a period.

       When the gap is widening, even the other person does a favor for us, we tend to look at with skepticism.In this process, the quality of the relationship is strained.The one way of approaching this mindset is to value the relationship by recalling one best moment or favor we experienced with that person.Instead of rewinding one bad moment for many times and affecting the relationship, rewind the positive moments for many times and cherish the relationship.No one is perfect in all for every time.

      
   The point is many people are coming across on our life journey and some relationships staying with us for a lifelong for some purpose and let us preserve it with patience and compassion .!!

Tuesday 11 April 2017

What to do when others hurt you?

You might have come across a situation someone had hurt you by their words or action  either by family members or by your colleagues or business partners .As a chain reaction, you would be thinking of the person or event for a longer duration say days, weeks ,even for years !!.Internally you would be feeling of resentment or bitterness about the person or event.

How this feeling of resentment affects you?

It affects your physical health and also your mental strength, in turn affects your quality of your work.

How to handle this feeling of resentment?

Only by way of forgiving. We had learnt the different definition of forgiveness from our education, ancestors, spiritual masters and some of us  think that forgiving mindset is beyond human capacity. Actually, forgiveness is not about forgetting the event or person which is practically difficult, but it is the ability to look at the person or event in a different perspective 

What are the different perspectives?

oThe other person hurt us with his words or action; because the person comes from different background and experience.He behaves with others too. Hence it is not your issue. This will calm you down to some extent
oHow do you behave in such a situation? This will help you to understand others
oLook at event’s or person‘s behavior with reference to a time frame, say after a year or 5 years from now. You may feel not to worth to worry too much.
o Life is too short and it is not worth to trade your peace of mind with that incident and move forward.

The above perspective will give strength to forgive the person or event. Ultimately your quality of life is important and how you choose the response makes a difference!!!!

Saturday 7 January 2017

Regrets of the dying

Bronnie ware is an Australian nurse who spent many years working in palliative care, taking care of patients in the last weeks of their lives. She collected the information from dying people about their regrets, wishes, missed opportunities etc and she found a common pattern surfaced repeatedly .Based on her experience, she had written a book “Regrets of the dying people” which is a best seller.

The top five regrets emerge from the majority of the people are 

1.I wish I had courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
2.I wish I didn’t work so hard
3.I wish I had the courage to express my feelings
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
5.I wish that I had let myself be happier

Those above regrets may not be the expression of entire humanity as it is not statistical proven,yet  the sample may reflect the quality of life .Most of us are living with sub standard life against our inner deep desire .Striving for fulfillment must be a conscious decision and that requires awareness .

Let us be aware of our quality of living!