The second
semester for BLP cohort kick started today with Anil Sachdev’s session on
leadership. This class was meant for us to realize the leader inside us and
develop our own potential.
The first
half started off with lessons on emotional intelligence (EI). Basically, EI is something
which is acquired, it’s not inherited. That means our early education and
upbringing have a very profound impact on our EI. One of the ways in which EI
is expressed is by the ability to listen. A lot of people listen to the same
thing and get a different meaning out of it because although the subject and
speaker are the same, the ears that listen are different. A good listener has
the ability to put himself in the shoes of the speaker and appreciate where
that person is coming from. The subject has to be understood both in its
content and from an emotional point-of-view. A simple experiment of getting
into someone’s shoes without removing your own, demonstrated how most of us
while listening to others try to understand them with our own shoes on. This is
called sympathy. Empathy on the other hand is feeling in-to someone, and not
feeling with someone. Empathy is when you can repeat what the other person is
saying by paraphrasing and using synonyms. This is a unique part of EI. Listening
is only the starting point of EI. The ultimate objective is to build trust.
Trust is one word which comes to your mind when you think of a person who is
fantastic at building relationships. One of the most important qualities which
build trust is respect. Respect is accepting the uniqueness of the other
person, respecting the differences.
The session
the moved towards the Appreciative Inquiry approach where students formed pairs
and both individuals of the pair interviewed each other with the enthusiasm of
a child and in the process discovered each other’s positives individually, the
specialties of their individual teams and finally how the outcome is in line
with the higher purpose. The key questions asked in the inquiry were
v
When were you at your best?
v
When was SOIL at its best and when were both
aligned towards a common purpose?
v
What happened?
v
Who were the people involved?
v
What was so special about it which brought out
the best in you?
v
What does this teach you about yourself and the
unique gifts you have within you?
v
What does this teach you about the unique gifts
of SOIL?
This
exercise was aptly named as ‘Mining for gold’.
In the
concluding stage of the session, we talked about happiness. Human nature is to
be happy. But there are many things that come in the way of happiness. There
are 3 principle reasons that Anil Sir discussed with us which he had learnt
through his anecdotal evidence.
1)
Unstated emotional expectations of those whom I
care about.
2)
Regrets about the past.
3)
Guilt that I carry with me.
An interesting outcome of the exercise was the
decision to put up posters in the cafeteria which asked a question to every
SOILite– What is the one thing you want to do before you die?
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