Srinivas Venkataramanan_BLP022_Self Leadership_Oct 2012

15th October 2012

The class today started with an introduction of Upanishad which means student and teacher learning in the form of a dialog. We also discussed about an interesting program which comes on DD national, Upanishad Ganga. All though, I have not seen this program , after attending this class I am pretty keen on watching it

We were given a framework which involved a set of questions to determine our career path,

·         Define the frame by asking what the most important question to you is.

·         Collect meaningful and reliable information

·         Define several creative and doable alternatives

·         Define logic for evaluation which includes your risk and returns

·         Values and tradeoffs

·         Implementation

Then the entire class was involved in a few creative exercises. For eg, we were writing down various ways a pen and a holder can be used. This exercise really showed us ideas are born from out of the box thinking. After going through this 4 dimensions of creativity were explained which were

·         Ideation Fluency

·         Originality of thinking

·         Association thinking

·         Concord design

Then we were introduced to a new concept, Ladder of Influence. It explained to us how perceptions are created and also what is the real way of reaching at conclusions.

On the whole , this class had a huge impact on my thinking process and certainly I am hoping to use whatever I have learnt today in various decisions I am going to make in the future.

22nd October 2012

With the day being the 50^th anniversary of Sino – Indian war, it was apt that the class started with a discussion about the great sacrifices of Indian warriors to this country. An interesting quote which defined courage beautifully was shared,

“Courage is not the absence of fear , but to realize something else is more important than fear.”

We also did a group exercise, in each table we discussed a couple courageous acts which each one has done in his life. Discussion in our table was pretty interesting with diversity ranging from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.

Then we were introduced to a pretty interesting framework, Immunity framework. A framework which we can use to find out a few important habits which we want to change in ourselves and the ways to do the same.

This framework is the biggest take away for me from this class , and I really want to use this to change a few habits of mine which have been a hindrance to my growth .