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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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Does experience kill creativity? Have my experiences started to constrain me in any way? I found myself questioning when a few days back, a colleague gave me an idea which did not go down well with me and I caught myself saying, ‘I have almost 20 years of work experience, this is just not possible’. Almost immediately on saying this, the question arose in my mind – is my experience killing my creativity. Not only mine, is it also killing the creativity of my colleagues who give me good ideas? Just because things have traditionally not been done, it does not mean the new idea is not worth a good try!

History is evidence of the fact that breakthrough ideas in businesses do not come from the same industries. If you continue to do what has always been done, you will continue to get the same result. If you want a breakthrough, you need to come out of your comfort zone, try ideas that have never been tried, follow your instinct, not your experience.

Experience lies in the past and to rely on the past to deliver a result in the future may be a mistake. Experience tells you what is possible. And that I think is the core of what I find constraining! I don’t need experience to tell me what is possible. I want to make possible what I want to make possible. Then have the gumption and the courage to take on everything to make possible what I want to make possible.

Some of my / our success (as an organsiation) has happened when we have gone ahead boldly and have not been constrained by our and others experiences. The one example that comes to mind immediately is that of Gift Your Organ Foundation and its launch. I cannot even begin to tell you the number of people who advised us against getting into this unknown territory. ‘You have no knowledge of this’; ‘There are various people who are already in this and are not getting much success’; ‘What will and can you achieve – you are wasting your time’, etc were the kind of statements that we heard. Some of these statements came from people within the profession.

The Gift Your Organ team saw various patients dying waiting for organs; the team also saw various organs being wasted and not being used to save lives and finally and more importantly, the team saw a future that there were no deaths due to want of organs. We were enlivened by this future. This future was our inspiration and the driving force and not our (and others) experiences of how similar projects have failed in the past. It then did not matter what was required to be done to achieve this future. This future had to be achieved.

Does that mean that experience is worthless? No, I have questioned this to myself and after a little bit of probing, the response that I have got is that there are two ways to use experience (yours and that of others):

a. Use experience to set your goals. You know what is possible based on your experience and use this experience to establish your goals;

b. Or the other way is to boldly declare your result first and then use experience (yours and others) to go about delivering on the actions now required in achieving the declared result.

As stated above, when you use your experience to set goals, you are coming from the past and chances are you are setting very mediocre goals. However, when you declare what you want to achieve first, and then use your experience to achieve these goals, there are very high chances of you reaching your goals, which by your own measure are high goals. Let me sum this up by giving another example of the Gift Your Organ Foundation.

Thursday last week, the Gift Your Organ Foundation team met (minus Reshma who lives in Chennai), and the four of us (Tina, Raj, Priyanka and myself) were wondering how can we make a real big difference, and that too immediately. Considering that the next big day was the World Kidney Day on the 8th of March, we wanted to do something relevant to this day. A lot of ideas were debated and discussed and finally, as a group, we have made a bold declaration that on the 8th of March we will provide 500 economically poor patients an opportunity to free dialysis for 6 months each. The project cost, as a rough calculation, is to the tune of 3.5 crores; and we have less than 3 months to generate this funding / sponsorship.

Our experience says this is not possible; we say it is!
Sameer Dua, Founder Director, Institute For Generative Leadership, India

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