Thursday, 25 October 2012

Akash Kumar_BLP005_Self Leadership_October 2012


October 16th, 2012

The last leg of Self- Leadership sessions started with Anil Sir asking us a question on what takes the responsibility for power of intellect and the brain. How do we take decisions, how do we make choices? Ron Harvard’s work at Stanford research comes up with an interesting framework for the decision making process gives as below.
  1. ·         Frame the most important question.
  2. ·         Collect meaningful and reliable information
  3. ·         Define several creative and doable alternatives
  4. ·         Define logic for evaluation in terms of risk and returns
  5. ·         Values and tradeoffs
  6. ·         Implementation

Later in the session, we were intrigued to think what lied at the heart of creativity. Anil Sir questioned the way people are brought up and how creativity is killed between the ages of 10-15. The education system is more biased towards the right or wrong of the subject rather than knowing the reasoning behind it. God sends us with completely open minds to receive all that we can and be creative in our own ways, but we put layers of fear to condition our minds. Anil Sir talked about the 4 dimensions of creativity, namely:
  1. ·         Ideation fluency
  2. ·         Originality of thinking
  3. ·         Associational fluency (combine images with things)
  4. ·         Learning from analogy (make the strange familiar and the familiar strange)

 The fears which stop us from being creative were unearthed by some questions where we rated ourselves on a scale of 5. The questions were
·         Whenever I try something new, there is a preamble to it. To what extent does the thought of failure strike me?
·         Whenever I do something new, to what extent am I conscious of criticism
·         To what extent does lack of clarity/ambiguity bother me?
·         To what extent does lack of time and resources bother me?
·         How skeptical I am if I am required to do something new which requires me to be outdoors, in the wilderness, exposed to nature where my physical senses get challenged.
The session ended with understanding the ladder of inference where we were explained how our cognition, perceptions, and beliefs determine our actions.

October 22nd, 2012
                
The final session of self-leadership started by honoring the martyrs of India-China War of 1962. A very thought provoking question was put forward for finding out the origin of courage and what was the essence if it. The whole class was then asked to spare a moment and think of situations where they had screwed up their courage. Out of all the aspects discussed on courage, my favorite was- “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear”.
The discussion then moved from courage to happiness. Anil sir shared a video of world’s happiest man Matthieu Ricard which emphasized on the importance of living in present moment. It reflected that happiness is intrinsic can be attained by achieving inner peace, inner fulfillment & self confidence. We can achieve it through regular meditation as it is very powerful technique of watching your breath and attaining peace.

In the end, we learnt the concept of ‘Immunity X-ray’ which is a scientific way of overcoming your fear and bringing change in oneself. We were asked to think and write about things that we want to change in our self but have often found it difficult to change. We have to confront all the grey areas in us, face the truth and overcome the mental blocks which form hindrance in the path of achieving what we aspire.

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