Year: 2012

There are various quotations of George Bernard Shaw that I like, however, amongst the ones that I like more than the others is the one below:
‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’

The reason that I really like this quotation is because he describes you and me as a Force of Nature.Potentially, each one of us has the power possessed by tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis or volcanoes, but we so undermine ourselves and behave like clods full of complaints and problems refusing to take accountability. I have a smart, intelligent and a very talented friend who blamed her family for not letting her have a life before her marriage because they were very conservative; and then she blamed her husband for everything that went wrong in her life. As I have mentioned above, she is smart, intelligent and very talented and if she sees herself through my eyes, she will see the potential that she has and how much she is wasting the inborn talent and gifts that she has. However, she insists on being a selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that her world, i.e., her husband and her parents will not devote themselves to making her happy.

The key is to see yourself as a Force of Nature. And once you do this, most of the battle is automatically won. Most people are just not able to see the bigness in themselves and are only seeing the bigness in others. Individually, each one of us can create an impact like that of any other force of nature, and that can happen only when we choose to be used for a purpose recognized by ourselves as a mighty one. There is no right or wrong purpose; it can be anything that lights us up. It has be something that one already doesn’t have, because if one has had it, it does not remain mighty any more. And, for it to also be a mighty purpose, one needn’t know how to achieve the purpose when starting out. Let me quote George Bernard Shaw again here: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

Forces of nature are not reasonable. We know that out of experience.

I have a friend, Jerry Martin, who in a short span of time has become very dear to me – I call him the Force of Nature, only because he truly epitomizes the phrase ‘Force of Nature’. In the midst of some office crises, he once said to me, ‘A force of nature does not play politics – a force of nature is only focused on what it wants to achieve – petty games are played by mediocre people who are consumed by pulling others down.’ Touché!

Every citizen in this country has a view on corruption and wants it to end, but it has taken the force of a 70 year old man to bring the mighty government led by the Congress on its knees; a young friend of mine who had a near fatal accident in November 2011, was celebrating my birthday with my friends and me in March 2012 at my house looking and being perfectly ‘normal’ after 6 or 7 surgeries were performed on her in the preceding months; a cousin, who was brought up only by his mother in a modest way, needed to leave his education and start earning at a young age to provide for his mother and two sisters. Today, 15 years hence, he is a Director of a large multinational IT company and owns 4 houses in prestigious locations. These are real life examples of people one can relate with who have risen above the circumstances and been the force.

You have a choice, either be mediocre or be a force – what would you like to be? If you want to be a force, find your mighty purpose, be unreasonable and remain focused to achieving this purpose. If you already are not seeing yourself as a force of nature, you will start to see the force of nature in you emerge.

Sameer Dua, Founder Director, Institute for Generative Leadership, India

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I felt a great sense of power when I uttered the words, “There will be no deaths in this country for the want of organs”. This is now the vision of the Gift Your Organ Foundation and what we as a Foundation are working towards. Not only the first time, every time I say these words, I still feel the same sense of power that I had felt at the time of first saying this. And this power then urges me to action to achieve what I have just declared. The question that I was left with is how do the words I speak leave me with a sense of power? What can I do to feel this power at all times?

It is the context that I create when I speak that determines what I feel and what action I take. ‘Context’ here means, ‘that which surrounds, and gives meaning to, something else’. I could have stated ‘I hope there will be no deaths in this country for the want of organs’ and the glaring difference between the statements right on the first line and the one above here is the decisiveness of the first statement. In the first statement, there is indisputability, there is definiteness, while in the statement which uses the word ‘hope’ there is an element of uncertainty, a sense of being out of control; a dependence on external factors – external to me and hence there is a loss of power in the second statement.

Context is your answer to the ‘why’. And this applies to everything you want to apply it to. The context you create determines what you do; how you do; and, how you feel when you do. When asked two different doctors why they chose medicine as their profession, one responded by saying to make money and the other responded by saying that he wanted to save lives. Both doctors do the same thing, however, each of them has created a different context for themselves. Nothing wrong with either. One gets empowered by the thought of making money and the other by the thought of saving lives. Both these doctors have chosen to give themselves empowering contexts that which makes them wake up every morning and get to work.

Let us look at this in a slightly differently example – A friend of ours was going through some marital difficulties in her life and one friend stated, ‘I will try to do whatever I can to support her’. Another friend stated, “Who I am is a stand for our friend”. Think of a friend who needs you right now and say these two statements keeping that friend in mind and see the difference you feel when you are saying each of the statements. There is a feeling of power in the second statement; a feeling of being the cause in the matter. Both friends are genuinely concerned about our common friend. One friend will ‘try’ and leave scope for failure and the other is a ‘stand’ – there is no failure is this space.

The good news is that context is created in your language and you have the power to create any context that you want. In a subsequent blog, I will take up creating powerful contexts through language in more detail.

Sameer Dua, Founder Director, Institute for Generative Leadership, India

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I have been intrigued by how different people respond to exactly the same situation in different ways. For example, if a flight is late, you hear one person crib that the flight is delayed due to a technical failure and that the delay totally messed up their schedules; and on the other end you hear another person celebrate and thank God for the airline finding out the technical failure before the flight taking off. Same situation but diametrically opposite perspectives. What causes these perspectives?; Do we have a choice in choosing our perspectives?; How do these perspectives impact people?

To get answers to these questions, I thought the first thing to do was to see what perspective means? One of the dictionary meanings of perspective is ‘the state of existing in space before the eye’. If you look at this definition closely it states that perspective is what exists in space and not in reality. It is not real, it is only exists in space.

To get a better understanding of the above definition, let’s understand what does space in this context mean? The dictionary meaning of space in this context is ‘a blank portion or area’. If space is a blank portion or area then that means there is nothing in that portion or area. If there is indeed nothing in that blank portion or area, that means you can put in there what you would like, see if it works for you and if it doesn’t; take it out and put in something else that does work for you.

No wonder different people have different perspectives to the same exact situation. The state of what exists (in space and not in reality) is different for different people. Different people decide differently what they would like to exist in this blank space or area before their eye.

So the next question is how can I choose what to put in the blank space? How can you ‘put in’, ‘take out’, and ‘put in something else’ in that blank portion called space?

Perspectives lie in your language. Through language you see a particular situation and that gives you your perspective. So, you can crib that your flight is delayed due to a technical failure and that has totally messed up your schedules; or celebrate and ‘thank God for the airline finding out the technical failure before the flight took off’. Same situation, different perspectives that lie in the blank space and we bring this into existence with our language.

Lets take an example of a lady working at a call centre. One perspective is that her job requires her to answer calls from distressed customers of her organisation and all she does is takes calls and responds to them. The other way of looking at this is that she is supporting her customers in solving their problems. She has the power of delighting them, satisfying them or totally putting them off her organization. This can also be recreated by this lady in her language as this is not her job, but her source of making a living for herself and her family. You can choose your perspective and if the existing perspective does not empower you to take action, then bin that perspective and create another perspective that does empower you to take action.

There is no doubt in the fact that your results are a function of the actions that you take. And, if your actions are determined by your perspectives; by changing the perspective, your actions are automatically changed inside of this new perspective that you have chosen to give yourself. And voila, you get brand new results.

Very regularly I see people jailed by their perspectives. It is important to use your perspectives to empower you and not to be used by your perspectives. It is an opportunity to intellectually challenge yourself and try and bring an even a slight shift and see the impact that slight shift may have on your actions. As you regularly start to challenge your perspectives, you realize how deeply you are consumed by these perspectives and give yourself little or no choice to operate outside a pre-defined view.

I suggest you take on this opportunity and see what opens up for you. You never know, your life may just get transformed.

Sameer Dua, Founder Director, Institute for Generative Leadership, India

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