Month: November 2014

You Are a Promise!

You are a Promise!

There is no limit to the scale of the promises you can make if you have the right conversations.

The question is are you having the right conversations?

You are a Promise!

There is no limit to the scale of the promises you can make if you have the right conversations.

The question is are you having the right conversations?

Do you know every morning you wake up as a promise. And guess what? Chances are you have never thought of yourself as a promise.

So today, I am going to make a bold claim here:

Your self-esteem has a great deal to do with the way you have honored the promise that you are to yourself.

If you have made big promises and gone after them with complete intention to achieve the outcomes promised, then notwithstanding whether or not you achieved the result, I suspect you have high self-esteem. And the opposite is true too. There are people in the world (lots and lots of them) who simply show up in their lives and offices and go about doing the routine and mundane tasks that are required of them ignoring the promise they are to themselves.

As humans, we were created to be unstoppable. And, I have evidence of this in my home. My wife and I recently became parents of gorgeous twins who are now 16 weeks old. These twins were born premature, but have been unstoppable from the time of their birth (actually, from the time they were conceived!). I am seeing them grow week after week. First they would not recognize us, now they do; earlier, they could not hold their necks straight, now they do.

As they grow older, they will first learn to turn while lying down. Once they have turned and come on their stomachs, they will not be able to go back to their earlier position of lying on their back. They will yell for help and one of us will have to straighten them. But, they will not learn from this ‘mistake’ (thank God!!!) – they will do the same thing again and again and again, till they learn to turn back on their own.

And then, they will learn to sit up, and then crawl. While crawling, they will fall many number of times, hurt themselves, yet not stop. Eventually, they will master crawling. Again thankfully, that will not be enough for them.

They will want to learn to walk, run, cycle, swim, etc., etc. And each time, they will fall many number of times and hurt themselves. Yet, will not give up.

My kids are a promise – a promise that they will stand up and learn to walk – irrespective of the number of times they fall in the process of this learning.

It is interesting that as we grow older, we think we become smarter and this smartness goes against us. We start to attribute reason and make decisions that don’t help us. If we fall (read fail), we give ourselves such convincing reasons for not attempting again.

In a workshop that I conducted recently for a large multinational organization, there was a practice that I asked the participants to do first thing in the morning of day 3. A senior Manager in this organization could not complete the practice. He ‘decided’ that he was ‘slow’ and hence he could not complete the practice.

To me, he did not seem slow at all – he was active in the conversations during the program. It was clear that the other participants had high regard for him, and his achievements.

However, it was evident that he believed completely that he was ‘slow’, and him being slow was the reason for not completing the practice. My guess is that the practice was not completed because subconsciously he was proving himself to be right – that he was ‘slow’.

And according to him because he “is” slow, he does not make big promises.

I claim that for you to grow, you need to have a promise that is bigger than the last one you made. It is same like it is for children. When my twins learn to crawl, they will be a promise for walking. And irrespective of the number of failures, they will continue to try to walk – till they learn to walk.

You need bigger promises for your own sake; your family needs you to make bigger promises; your organization needs bigger promises and the world needs bigger promises!

Are you ready to do so?

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

Schedule a Conversation

Please help us with your details.

    What Stops You?

    You are either in action or in your conversations – Sameer Dua

    On July 13, 1978, Lee Iacocca, the President of Ford was fired. He was 54. He had joined Ford as an Engineer in 1946 and had risen to the post of the President. The year following his dismissal from Ford, he was offered the position of the CEO of…

    On July 13, 1978, Lee Iacocca, the President of Ford was fired. He was 54. He had joined Ford as an Engineer in 1946 and had risen to the post of the President. The year following his dismissal from Ford, he was offered the position of the CEO of the then severely bankrupt Chrysler. Lee took it up. With the help of financial aid from the federal government Iacocca streamlined the company’s operations, focused on producing more fuel-efficient cars and pursued an aggressive marketing strategy based on his own powerful personality. In a span of 5 years he not only pulled the dying corporate giant out of bankruptcy but also started soaring it up into the profit earning bracket.

    When Lee was fired, he could have easily decided to take his life easy and retired. But when another opportunity knocked at his door, which was seemingly not too appealing at that time, given the fact that Chrysler was not doing too well, he did not stop. He took it up headlong and dived into it with commitment.

    We are all intrinsically driven by the conversations we have with ourselves. When an event occurs, we as humans naturally make up a story about it in our minds and this story then guides us to take actions that we do. Our work, at The Institute for Generative Leadership, involves us meeting many people from various organizations and from various sectors and strata of the society. One question that we frequently ask people and our participants is “What stops you?”. The answers that we commonly receive are “The fear of failure”, “The fear of the unknown”, “society”, “inhibitions”, “uncertainty” and so on.

    If you go deeper within these answers and introspect further, the underlying base will always be “Internal Conversations”.The conversations you have with yourself are the ones that decide your future actions.

    Jay is the General Manager at a multinational organization. He said he had been wanting to bring about a culture change in the organization and had very powerful and detailed plans and ideas that if implemented could bring about significant change in terms of turnover and the environment of the company. He said he had this going within him for 3 years. When asked, what was stopping him from proposing his thoughts to the senior management, the one thing he said was “I have a fear that they may ridicule me. This plan of mine will move the very basis of the organization and I think they may not want to even consider it.

    Jay had a brilliant plan, he was doing very well in his career but was being stifled by the culture he saw around him. Every day on various occasions this thought about his plans and ideas crossed his mind but he always stopped himself. He was indirectly restricting his own growth. And all this because of the ‘internal conversations’ he was having with himself. These internal conversations were stopping him from his own expansion.

    Ravi, is the production manager in his organization. He says ‘If some jobs crop up in the last minute that could hamper our deadlines, I do not ask anyone, I just go ahead, get hands on and do it myself’ When asked ‘What stopped him from asking his juniors to pitch in’ he replied ‘I think, I will be troubling them and overburdening them with extra work’. Ravi here is putting himself in a tight spot and discomfort too because of the internal conversations he is having with himself. These very conversations are stopping him from making effective requests to his subordinates who probably don’t have an inkling about the extra work that comes up in the last minute.

    Amit has written stories but is unsure about publishing them. To see them in print is his dream. His justification is “What will people think if they read them. These are my thoughts, and I will be exposed to the world”. Amit is stopping himself from giving the world an opportunity to read his writings only because of these very internal conversations he has been having with himself for more than 4 years! More importantly, he is stopping himself from an opportunity to grow in the realm of the writing world because of these very thoughts that he has been indulging in and has also being justifying his stance to himself for not taking that one step of publishing his stories.

    If Lee Iacocca’s internal conversations with himself had been thus ‘I have been fired from one job and this new company that has offered me a job is already going down a dwindling spiral, I should not take this risk in this age. I’d rather retire and travel the world now that I have all the time and money anyways’ then he would not have been in a position to credit himself for a future that he created for Chrylser and for himself!

    Take a moment, sit back and think, “Where am I stopping myself?”
    You have a choice, you can either be your biggest barrier or you can be unstoppable!
    What would you rather choose?

    With care,
    Sheeja Shaju, Leadership Coach, Institute for Generative Leadership, India.

    Schedule a Conversation

    Please help us with your details.