A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were leaving for an evening walk. She was listening to Ilayaraja’s playlist. The song that was playing was “வெற்றி நிச்சயம் இது வேதசத்தியம்”. [Vetri nichayam idhu veda sathiyam - Translated: Victory is sure, it's Vedic truth]
Pausing the song, she looked straight at me. I sensed an impending event. Unaware of the headphones on, she yelled. “If success is assured, why have I not felt success?” The time bomb was ticking. I countered, “Who told you that you have failed?”. This works with my wife always. A return question as an answer. “Let me rephrase the question back to you. How long do we wait before giving up hope for success?” The bomb had gone off. I hinted we leave for a walk. Without a word uttered, we traveled half a kilometer. She looked at me and gestured with her hands. “Your answer, please” I knew my time was up. Her wait was for one of my motivational stories. But I had none in my kitty. Wanting to surprise her, I choose a non-mythological one this time.
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"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that is enough" - Robert Heller
Let us say that you arrive at a splendid idea for the next path breaking app in ecommerce. You immediately show it to your friends. They dissect it to the core and tell you it will not work. Hmmmm Now you face a tough decision. Do you go with your guts or your friends’ scientific reasoning? Do you want to go with your gut? Why not? When you look at your statistics, they split the data exactly in the middle. Your gut has worked 50% of the time while the other 50% times it has got it wrong. So what should you do? This analysis, which is based on the past events, certainly seems to be sound and justified. Just wait ... Your gut has only helped you in making many of those dicey decisions which, at some times, looked unsound. When you look at the history, many of the unsound things have only become disruptive hits. Sound ones never do disruption. Dhoni going to Joginder for the last over, Netflix and the other OTT options, Ola taking on the unorganized taxi market, to name a few. So what am I finally saying? The challenge is not in trying to convince those who are in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to only ask them to do a complete gut check to decide whether they should defend their instincts and then do it. Agree with me, what’s your gut feeling? It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change -- Charles Darwin, Scientist We live in an era of constant change. Take, for example, even the virus CORONA has changed itself so many times in the last 18 months. Business, economy and materialism are always on the change. As they change, expectations are that the actors in the system also change seamlessly. How is that possible? Yes, if you don’t, you perish. Thus everyone tries to change. Is that change easy? My straight answer is No, it’s tough. Why? What they are demanding is a change which is very personal. Competencies that are all quiet, innate to oneself. We refer to it as “Soft Skills”. What are they? Soft skills include your ability.
The list is endless. I know most of you would have heard all these comments at least once in a financial year. Yes, during your appraisal feedback. The underlying problem is that everyone understands that importance but does nothing about it. Neither the education system nor the society framework nor parental guidance act. They do nothing to inculcate these skills during the formative years of the person. I am tempted to blame the education system at large for this mess. They take pains to make me understand Newtonian physics. Also, Einstein’s relativity, the structure of Streptococcus. In fact, who killed Aurangzeb and when did the battle of Plassey take place. Yet do nothing to improve my soft skills. They need to invest in improving one’s soft skills at school or college level. It’s left to the student’s responsibility. In the rat race of marks, these obviously take the back seat. OK, I got the problem, but how do we solve it? I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is in not trying. - Jeff Bezos As the financial year comes to a close, we all start to evaluate what you have achieved during the last year. You assess your achievements, KPI, career and the teams who worked for you and very soon you come to the conclusion: IT SUCKS. At the start of the year it was full of promise and now at the fag end of it all looks wasted and fatigue. You start to hate your job. Does this sound very much like you? As an executive and career coach, I have listened to hundreds of such stories over a 100 times. Passionate hard-working folks who mostly are thwarted by the management when they come to me, I give them the universal solution - "Be your own boss" The moment when they hear this advice, the backtracking starts. When I say to them, why not put the money in your idea, work it out for some time and then test the results. The backtracking excuses starts to flow:
So what does entrepreneur mean? It means choosing one solution which you think works, you start to work much harder than when you were as an employee, get paid very less initially and have exponential stress levels with unforeseen uncertainties and very less family time. Trust me, it’s very scary and if you think not - then you are really stupid. The next logical question is - if it’s so scary why do it? The main reason is that it earns something which even money can't buy - FREEDOM. Freedom to have no one to blame, freedom to choose your time, freedom to plot your own course, freedom to change the world for the better. But there is something that comes along with FREEDOM as a free package. The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt Any Rand Guilt has a very bad characteristics - it has an incredible way of popping up whenever we are barely doing anything. Most of us have learnt guilt throughout normal childhood development. Guilt clues us in when we’ve stepped outside the boundaries of our core values. It makes us take responsibility when we’ve done something wrong and helps us to develop a greater sense of self-awareness. The feeling of guilt forces us to examine how our behavior affects others and make changes so that we don’t make the same mistake again. That is the bright side of guilt, when we look into the other side it weight a very heavy burden on us even when we have not crossed over the Lakshman Rekha within us. It is like a negative energy that diminishes our life. So the main problem with guilt is that it can easily go out of our hands. In any feelings which we experience, we need to quantify it to know the effect of that on our minds and hearts. It is really difficult to measure any of the human feelings. With this constraint, I have come out with a mathematical formula to calculate the amount of guilt. It goes like this - "The quantity of a man's guilt is directly proportional to the feelings experienced by the party he injured." It's logical and hence cannot be mine, I wish to give the credit to its owner - Mr.Ryszard Kapuscinski (a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author). Now I have no guilt feeling. Many researchers and life coaches believe that If we’ve had a strict upbringing, as an adult, we may set our standards too high and judge ourselves too harshly. And that’s where the problems arise. This is what I generally refers to as the dark side of guilt. Excessive guilt diminishes our ability to enjoy many aspects of life. It can cast a gloomy shadow on our relationships with others. So how does guilt creep into us? Since guilt is a heavy feeling that too from your heart, it sometime defeats logic. We can get guilt in many ways. Maybe it is because we have performed well below our expectation, or we failed to live up to the expectation of someone whom we regarded as our idol. Or we did something which caused hurt to someone in some way or a mix of all of these or finally it's all about the self. You are feeling guilty because you didn’t keep a promise you made to yourself. |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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