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?
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The greatest wealth is to live content with little. -- Plato Every one who has passed 40 would be able to tell you that all of them have only one aim in life from now on - to have a simple and happy life. All of them would be frustrated with this current dog raced complex and fast paced world. There are many blogs that tell us how to be happy but not many are there when it comes to simplifying your life. First let us see why do we need to simplify our life? Just for a moment, try and think what would be the most happiest place for you to be and it would never turn out to be our metros or cities. It is always a far away hill station, a clam and quiet remote place or your ancestral village home. What do these place have that the ultra modern cities do not have? Simplicity. The modern day life has turned itself into a complex machine where each day there is an ounce of complexity being added into it and we only try to adjust with that. We have never resorted to see how to reduce this complexity and make things simpler. Making things simpler is not a simple task - but certainly we should start somewhere. Extravagance is often a picture of an unsatisfied life. It is often in the most simple things that we actually find true happiness. As a young boy (back in the 80s) it would have just been that small cricket bat or the colorful top - பம்பரம் or the free flying kite which we used to chase and get hold of it. When we look back at it, we find that it bought more happiness than the crazy 128GB iPADs and Bose stereo headphones. Why? The answer is still the same - it was uncomplicated and simple then than now. If we already knew the answer then where is the toughness in it? It takes courage to admit there is the need to simplify our lives. It cannot be achieved by all and very easily. There are efforts which needs to be put to get it but let me assure you that once you get there, you will never want to return back to the current complexities. Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do -- Potter Stewart (Associate Judge of the Supreme Court of US) Everyone has a different view of Ethics but all of those views finally merge into one pattern: Right or Wrong. I also had the same issue when I decided to start full-fledged research on this topic. What suddenly prompted me to go into this topic - well it was the last blog of mine. What can you learn as a leader from the movie Drishyam-2. What's the connection you may ask? It was the last paragraph that got me to this topic. I wanted to know if what Georgekutty did was ethical or not. Let's begin that journey and see where we end. Are you ready folks? Let us start with what is ethics anyway? At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy. The term is actually derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character, or disposition. Most of the concept of ethics in any country is basically derived from the religions, philosophies, and cultures of that land. Philosophers have divided Ethics broadly into 3 buckets: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics
Now you may ask if there is any use of Ethics, especially in today's environment. Since the environment is fully infected with Greed and partially hypocritical disease. I feel that Ethics is the only available tablet for these diseases. There is a band of people who believe that Ethics affects the way people or community behaves and there is another group that says that it's only fit for literature study - since most of the people these days are irrational. Ethics works only when you become rational. When I listen to both sides of the story, for me both of them look correct from their perspective. That brings me back to the basic question - which is right? One thing which we must clearly understand is that Ethics will never give you the right answers. Then what does it give? Ethics doesn't always show us the right answer to a moral problem. Indeed more and more people think that for any ethical issue there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to that case to give those involved some clarity in the choices. I feel that all Ethics does it that it can really clear the confusion and disturbing noise from the issue. After that, it's basically upto the individual to see and make the choice on their own will and judgement. Now - where do Drishyam-2 and Georgekutty come into the frame? 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. Personality is only ripe when a man has made truth his own - Soren Kierkegaard (Dannish Philosophor) Before I start I wanted to check what is personality according to the Webster's dictionary. It states - "the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character". Then using logic I wanted to check if an individual's distinctive character can change? I looked all around me and found that it cannot change. (Yes, I looked at my wife - I rest my case) Can Tendulkar behave like Afridi or Michael Jordan playing defense or Arnab Ghoswamy doing a soft debate? I think you get my point. Of course some of them are constant and they do not change but then I looked at their personality and also found that they did not change. Tendulkar's personality was the same at 16, at 18 or at 40. So I decided to challenge this and see if I can prove otherwise. When I looked into research papers I got only this fact - It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. I decided to get a little more deeper to see what makes up ones personality? Since traits and patterns of thought plus emotion play important roles which makes it easy for us to bucket them into 4 main categories:
With frustration of not able to prove what I initially assumed, I started to think that we are who we are - it must be constant and there is nothing that I can do about it. Then suddenly something hit me - S-L-A-P.(My wife woke me up) I remembered the fact is that we choose our personality and who we are. Hence it must be changeable. I got my energy back - our personality is shaped by the choices we make over time. If there was a choice available, then there is a possibility for change. (Thanks to my course on Statistical Methods which I never understood but is helping me now). Although we are to an extent hardwired in the brain, there is some amount of change possible. It is this change that I wish to elaborate today incidentally breaking certain myths on the way. Are you ready? |
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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