Showing posts with label self image. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self image. Show all posts

Saturday 29 July 2023

Charisma Vs. Influence

 Charisma Vs. Influence 

(Execution Excellence -"Ability to get things done" Series)

As we discussed the mindset and practices that highly influencing people demonstrate in the workplace to get things done, one of the queries asked by my friend related to influence.

"Some people are born with inherent charisma, and they influence people easily. Is it possible to develop charisma? 

i have also encountered this question myself at the beginning of my career. This question is relevant to the Influence topic and deserves the answer ... I've included my perspective below. 

First, we need clarity between charisma and charm as we interchangeably use both. My friend means that some people are charming by nature and use their charm to influence; Is it possible to develop charisma?
 
Charm is associated with surface-level traits like friendliness, appearance, and appealing first impressions. In contrast, charisma is related to deeper-level attributes like authenticity, quality to inspire others with conduct, trust, and admiration. It is associated with confidence and passion in what one does.

Generally, people with charm readily connect with people at first instance. They are outgoing, expressive, fun lovers, friendly nature, and attract others easily. (sometimes, too much of it lands them in trouble!
😢). 

Most of us believe that the person with the charm will have all the qualities to influence others and be good at getting things done. However, this belief is not true. It is just perception; anyone can become charismatic with effort and conduct.

For example, You are selling yourself in an interview and influence with your charm; you may be appealing instantly. But there is no guarantee that you will get the offer. However, you can get an offer if you influence with your charisma (as quality).

In a professional context, we must focus more on developing charisma to become influencers. When we concern too much about charm, it will affect our self-esteem.
 
The movie 
"M.S Dhoni's- untold story" beautifully depicts the perception of charm and its impact on others. In the early days of playing in Ranchi tournaments, on the first day of the test match, MSD did well. Then in the evening, MSD & the team met Yuvaraj Singh first time very closely on a basketball ground and internally felt inferior to Yuvaraj's charm or instantly appealing personality.

The next day, the MSD team played against Yuvaraj Singh and badly lost the match. While narrating the game to his friends, MSD said, "We did not get defeated in the cricket ground; we got defeated in the basketball ground itself." That is a very insightful observation by MSD. 

Later on, we all know how things turn around! That is, charisma wins over charm.
 
The key learning is that some people are gifted with charm, which does not mean they are successful influencers. Anyone can develop the skill of charisma with character building and consistent effort in delivering results, through which one can become a charismatic leader.

Charm is a subset of charisma. Natural charm is all about character, and it is all about how confident one is and how others feel good about their presence.

Anyone can develop Charisma regardless of their personality type.

You are highly influential and blessed if you are both charmed and equipped with charisma !!

Have a great week ahead.

Wednesday 28 November 2018

Leading Self (Having Faith)


As we discussed, leading self is all about strengthening your inner world.

The fifth and last factor to improve strengthening inner world is “Faith.”

Faith can be defined as complete confidence or belief or trust or conviction about something. That something can be unknown, no proof or evidence or not seen. However, internally, we feel the presence. The moment you think and feel about it, it would give internal strength. That is FAITH.

The faith can be entrusted on God, Nature, your capabilities, your people or your profession. It can be anything which is held on with strong conviction.

For example,

if you strongly believe and trust in your values and it will drive your life, that is faith
If you strongly believe your favorite Guru or God and it will guide you, that is faith
If you strongly believe yourself and your capabilities without any doubt, that is faith

Why do you need faith in something ?:
 
When you have undoubted faith in something, that gives positive feeling inside you and your mind accepts life challenges or face any consequences with clarity and courage.

Faith makes you stronger internally both during normal and tough times.

If you read any successful people, they have faith either on themselves or on their product/services or in the force beyond their imagination, say divine power.

Just answer yourself on which you have faith? How strong is it? Make it stronger and hold it or surrender yourself to that faith, eventually, you become stronger, and your leadership capability will also become stronger!

Tuesday 27 November 2018

Leading Self (High-Level Discipline)



As we discussed, leading self is all about strengthening your inner world.

The fourth factor to improve strengthening inner world is 
self-discipline”.

When we say self-discipline, most of us, relate it to being punctual or being organized. That is also required, but those are low order discipline. Nevertheless, for some people, still maintaining that discipline is being a challenge.

To strengthen the inner world, what is really required is high order discipline practices. That is under no compulsion from external factors, how you stick on your routines or values for long-term benefits.

For example, you have decided to follow some kind of diet practices in your lifestyle and you committed to that. Even though you are free to give up the diet practices at any point in time, but if you consistently stick to it for your own benefit, that is high order discipline.

The point is that under full freedom, what you are doing consistently without give-up will reinforce your inner strength. Alternatively, when you break frequently your own commitments, you will lose your inner strength.

Personally, I know one CEO of a large organization adheres daily walking practices for more than 25 years irrespective of his busy schedule, travel etc. That is high order discipline. I wonder to correlate his business success with his personal discipline.

 The action is to take one initiative which is good for your forever and stick on this consistently.
 Eventually, that will improve your inner strength and leadership!

Wednesday 7 November 2018

Leading self (Being grateful for everything)



 

As we discussed, leading self is all about strengthening your inner world.

The second factor to improve strengthening inner world is “ being grateful for everything.”

Being grateful means internally feeling gifted or blessed to have this life and being thankful for everything.

Generally, we use to crib about the things which we have not yet attained or achieved or what we missed in the past. In this process, we forget the profound truth that up to this moment, many factors are working in favor of us to exist. As life is so uncertain that, we need to imbibe the feeling of being blessed for every aspect that made us to this moment. Those aspects could be your education, work, family, friends, personality and so on.

When you feel gifted and being in a grateful state, you gain the following benefits

1. Becoming humble which takes you to the next level of your evolution to divine
2. Sincere desire to make an impact by giving and you start attracting the right things
3. Internally feeling secure and confident.

How to be grateful?

1.    Count your blessings, and good things happened in your life
2.    Count your worries or challenges
3.    Compare the blessings vs. challenges, and I am sure everyone will have more blessings than challenges.

Having suggested a rational way of being grateful, you need to be more reflective to feel the gratefulness at emotional way. It is possible through awareness and self-introspection.

Whatever way you develop your inner world with a feeling of gratefulness, that is ok as long as you are in a grateful state as this improves your LEADERSHIP qualities in the external world.

Leading Self (Improving self-image through actions)

Having discussed the two approaches to improve self-confidence, now let us consider the third approach to improve your self-image and confidence.

Through action and small success:




One of the most powerful methods to improve your self-confidence is to take action by yourself and experience the small victory. That achievement experience will inculcate positive reinforcement in your mind and each cell of your body. The positive reinforcement in your mind improves your self-confidence.

For example,

One of the professional challenges for most of us is public speaking or making a presentation to strangers. Even though you are competent enough in your subject, the fear inside you may make you feel low about yourself or you display low confidence. How to overcome low self-image and improve self-confidence on public speaking?

You need to take action of speaking in a small group and experience it. When you achieve the small success through your actions, your mind registers that event and positive experience. When you are doing it again in a relatively larger audience, your mind pushes you with positive reinforcement of earlier success, and again you will do well. When you repeat those positive experiences many times, your self-image and self-confidence will go up on public speaking.

similarly, whenever you feel low about yourself in any aspects of life, you need to take action and experience it.

Hence, you need to take ACTION and achieve small success to improve your confidence which is more effective than any other methods like a self-help book, observation or listening.

Leading self (Improving self-confidence)

Improving self-image by enhancing the perspectives
 


As discussed last week, there are 3 methods by which we can improve our self-image inturn the self-confidence
  1. Self-introspection
  2. Enhancing perspectives
  3. Through self-actions
Enhancing perspectives:

We are forming beliefs about self and the world through our windows and what we are seeing through it. Typically the windows are our family, friends, working environment and the location we live. When we widen our windows and vision, we see a new world of possibilities.
 

Widening windows are possible through observation, reading and listening to others.

For example,

When we see a person with no financial support, only with an engineering background, values, passion creates world-class  IT Institution, it enhances the perspective within us and gives us confidence on new possibilities.

When we see a man/women hailed from the middle-class family is heading the corporate giants at the international level, it enhances our perspective and gives us possibility thinking within us.

When we see a person, with the right strategy, passion and faith achieves world recognition, and become president or first citizien of a nation, it enhances our perspective and gives confidence within us about new possibilities.


Personally, when I met Onlysuccess founder Mr.Vidyashankar in 2008 and came to know about his childhood village background, an introvert type but with a deep hunger in making a difference to establish a world-class training organization.That moment instilled a confidence in me to start my organization in 2012 to make an impact on others.

The point is, irrespective of your background, if you enhance your perspectives, it will give you new possibilities, in turn, increase your self-confidence and in turn self-image.

Hence, look around and enhance your perspectives!

let us discuss the 3rd method to improve your confidence in next week.

Saturday 20 October 2018

Leading self (Improving Self confidence)


As discussed last week, our upbringing and environment plays a significant role in the way we think and feel about ourselves. Despite that fact, if we do not enhance our self-identity or image, it would affect the self-confidence and also the quality of life. Hence it becomes essential to improve our self-image.

How to enhance the self-image & boost self-confidence?

From my personal experience, three approaches  will help to improve confidence  
1.Self-introspection 
2.Widening the perspectives
3.Actions and achieving small successes.

1. Self-introspection:

One of the powerful and hard things to improve your self-image is through self-reflection or self-analysis. It is more about analyzing your inner feeling, thought process and finding the reasons or solutions yourself.

It is more powerful than listening to others, reading self-book.

For example,

Imagine that you attend a seminar, and you have valid questions to ask the speaker, but somehow due to inhibition, you do not speak up, and the event was over. In the end, you felt guilty of not raising, being shy and thought yourself inferior, low confident person. That impacts your self-identity as low.

If you want to overcome low self-identity and be strong personality next time, you need to analyze yourself in solitude by answering the following questions.

Precisely what happened yourself during the moment?
What prevented from asking questions?
What could have happened if you stood up against your inhibition?
How would you have felt if you did as per your inner thought?


The above similar dialogue within you will help you to improve your shortcomings, next time, when similar situations arise, you would become stronger.

Even though this approach is powerful, for some people, it is difficult to ask questions inward. But, from my experience, when you ask yourself and get answer yourself, that is the most impact moment to improve your self-confidence.

If you read some competent people, they use to do the self-introspection of their thought process, behaviors and actions on a DAILY BASIS.

Just it requires practice & time, and let us discuss other approaches in next week. 

Thursday 11 October 2018

Leading self (Impact of self-image)

As discussed last week, One of the factors for strengthening your inner world or “leading self” is self-image.

Self-image or identity is how you feel or think yourself most of the time. That is self-image of yourself.
For example,
if you feel or think like a capable most of the time, then you are identifying yourself as a capable person.
if you think yourself as unlucky most of the time, then you are identifying yourself as an Unlucky person.

How is self-image being formed within you?

The self-image is formed within in the following ways  

1.Your upbringing and background 
2.Your actions
3. The society or network also label you in a particular fashion most of the time, and you will even start believing yourself, then, that will become your self-identity or image.

How will this self-image affect you?

The feeling or thinking you have most of the time will get manifested or demonstrated outside as your personality either as CONFIDENT, ENERGETIC, ACTION-ORIENTED person or Low confident, dull, passive person.

 One of the surveys reveals that 85 % of the world population suffers from low self-image. The consequence of low self-image affects the relationship, communication, performance at work, parenting quality, living up to potential and so on. So the quality of life depends on the quality of self-image.

Let us discuss the method to improve the self-image next week.

Tuesday 2 October 2018

Learn to Lead - Leading Self

As discussed, the first step in personal development process Is leading self or personal leadership.
Personal leadership precedes everything. If we do not learn to lead self, we will be finding difficult to manage others, organizational roles and responsibilities, and even family life.

What does “leading self” mean?

Leading self-means being aware of yourself, your emotions, beliefs, values and how you are effectively managing yourself. It is more of strengthening your inner world. The quality of your inner world would reflect externally as your outlook, appearance, tone, and style of carrying out your activities.

Hence, leading self-means how you are strengthening your quality of inner world.simple.

If your inner world is positive, vibrant, peaceful, then our external personality will also be more positive, energetic and pleasant to you and others.     
    
How to strengthen the inner world?

Irrespective your upbringing and environment, with little awareness and practice, you can strengthen your inner mindset, and thereby you lead yourself. It is all about keeping your mindset in a positive mode.

Given below the factors contributing to strengthening your inner world.
  1. Self-image
  2. Personal responsibility
  3. Self-discipline
  4. Being grateful
  5. Faith
When we enhance our perspectives on the above factors, eventually we can strengthen the inner mindset.

Let us discuss each factors next week. 

Tuesday 29 May 2018

Your self-esteem grows through your actions


Self-esteem is all about how you feel and think about yourself as this determines your quality of life. Even though factors like your childhood, upbringing, environment influence your level of self-esteem, one of the most significant factors drives your self-esteem is your own thoughts and action. When your thought process and action are same, your self-esteem improves. Alternatively, when there is misalignment on your thoughts and actions, it affects your self-esteem.

       For example, you want to inculcate a new habit to improve your effectiveness, and you form a resolution to surf the social media contents only when you are in leisure, not during busy hours. When you are determined by this resolution and make it happen, your self-esteem goes up as your subconscious mind reinforce that you are capable of making anything happen with your persistence.

       In case, if you are not able to follow your own resolution and break the habit formation, your subconscious mind reinforce that you are weak in following up on your own resolution. When this kind of instances happen frequently, you mind convince that you are either strong or weak in following your own commitments and your self-esteem grows or pulls down.
 
      That is, our self-esteem grows or falls on our own thought process and action. This is applicable both in a personal and professional environment too as a leader. Just be aware of your thought and action alignment, raise your standard continuously and stick on it.