That Courage to Act

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve during the financial meltdown years, has written his memoirs. The New York Times in its review of the book says, “Bernanke’s memoir is called The Courage to Act - a title that may be ironic because, although he generally chose to act in most of the crisis he faced, it would have required an equal amount of courage, or even more, not to.”

#MyLearning
Actions carry relevance and pertinence when done at the right time & at the right place. May I have the courage to be proactive in the deserving moments of life situations.

Pic: biz shift-trends.com

Commit to the Process

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna advises to not let the fruit of action be our motive. Cartoonist Scott Adams, puts it as committing to a process, and not a goal.

Karl - John Persson,  CEO of H&M, may have that thought in mind when asked about his brand's targets for India. He said, "We never say, 'Let's reach amounts of stores or this sales target.' We want to deliver something fantastic for the customer. If we do that well,  the selling will come."

Leander Paes too must have thought along similar lines when he shared that all he does with doubles partner Martina Hingis is to keep her happy and relaxed. The tennis takes care of itself to produce wins such as the Wimbledon doubles championship.

Daily Fundamentals

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” - Zen Saying

The message, according to college lacrosse coach John Brubaker is that consistent execution of fundamentals over time is the key to success. In ancient times you chopped wood to make fire and carried water for drinking; and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t survive, never mind thrive. What are the high-value fundamentals you yourself must execute daily to ensure prosperity? Possible examples are:
^ Responding to all emails the same day they come in.
^ Returning all phone calls by the close of business that day
^ Waking up and going to bed at the same time
^ Exercising daily during lunch hour

So what are your preferred 'chop and carry' fundamentals?

The Path of Four-Way Wins

Stewart Friedman, founding director of Wharton's Leadership Program and the Work/Life Integration Project,  recommends pursuing the path of four-way wins. The path comprises practical steps to making things demonstrably better in four domains of of our life,  at work,  at home, in our community and our private life. To begin, do a quick  review to explore: what's important to you,  where you focus your attention and how things are going in each of the four domains. Use some of the the thoughts and experiences of the people given below, help to generate ideas for experiments to better align what matters to you to what you actually do. Design experiments in which you are deliberately aiming to improve your performance and results in each of the four domains.

    1.   Expand your Knowledge

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert cartoons, believes, every adult must have working knowledge of; Public speaking, Psychology, Business writing, Accountancy, Design (the basics), Conversation, Overcoming shyness, Second language, Proper grammar, Persuasion, Technology (hobby level) and Proper voice technique.

       2.   Declutter you Mind

"To compose, I need to be happy and to have free mind space, " says A.R. Rahman the Oscar winning music composer, and Leander Paes, winner of the US Open Mixed Doubles title along with Martina Hingis says, "if I can keep Martina happy,  if I can keep her relaxed,  the tennis I don't even have to worry about. "

Focusing our motivation results in our single-minded immersion and harnessing of our emotions into performing and learning. The emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

     3.     Dance with your Emotions
"A relationship is like a dance,  says Indian classical dancer Anita Ratnam, "sometimes you are close, sometimes you pull away;  there is passion, anger and forgiveness;  and much like a dance,  the relationship will end one day." 

Every relationship has its share of a range of emotions - most, if not all are impermanent, changing with time, context and our personal and mental growth. Let us make the best of our relationships in our time in the world.

     4.    Accept the Past

"Not surprisingly,  I find myself thinking about that slippery substance - the past - and the infinite variety of human attempts to make peace with it.  The impulse to freeze it into tradition,  to tame into verity,  these are common options.  But just as readily available is that other inconvenient choice,  so seldom exercised - the choice to wonder at it,  too accept it's essential non- graspability." Arundhati Subramaniam in book review of Keki N Daruwala's book Fire Altar in HT

      5.   Accept your Ignorance

"Belief means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. says Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.  "That means you are concretising your ignorance.  There is no need to know everything.  What I know, I know. What I do not know I do not know."

       6.    Establish a Routine

For geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury - it was essential for their work…Charles Dickens took three hours walks every afternoon - and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing. Tchaikovsky made do with two hour walks, but wouldn’t return a moment early, convinced that cheating himself of the full 120 minutes would make him ill. Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a paper and pencil with him in case inspiration struck. Ernest Hemingway tracked his daily word output on a chart “so as not to kid myself”. Arthur Miller said, “I don't believe in draining the reservoir you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it,  while I have still things to say.” 

        7.    Measure What You Can Control

Film director Ashutosh Gowarikar's advice to  actor Abhishek Bacchan - do not measure your success by how your film fares at the box office - because that is not within your control.  Measure your success by how you fared with the goals you set yourself for the film. Their success is within your control.

         8.     Be Resilient
"The hardest time to Captain the team is when your are not scoring runs and that's when your character and of leader you are outweighs your own form. The team needs the Captain to be a strong person who enjoys other people's success and sees the bigger picture. " Brendon McCullum, New Zealand skipper.

         9.      Create Lasting Emotional Bonds 

"In every situation, says Deepak Chopra, make it a habit to ask the key questions of emotional intelligence: How do I feel? How do they feel? What are the hidden stumbling blocks? A leader who can answer these questions will be in a position to create lasting emotional bonds.” 

Call to Action

The result of undertaking the practice of the four-way win is a greater sense of control and freedom living in ways that are consistent with what you're passionate about, what you really care about. When people take even a small step that's under their control, that's intentional and that's in a direction that they choose, they feel better about their lives and about the people they're affecting with their actions on a daily basis.

Evolution of a Leader

Acording to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a CEOs skills and responsibilities need to evolve according to the size and needs of the company:
Small company
(1 to 50 or100 people, depending on industry)
# build a strong team
# work on a few clearly defined problems
# focus on establishing company's identity

Medium company
(50 or 100 to 500 or 1000)
# focus on process and organization
# setting new set of priorities
# training employees on how to meet new goals

Large company
(500 or 1000+)
# focus on leading company strategy
# developing and maintaining corporate culture
# creating  appropriate structure for company
# ensuring right people in essential  roles
# making the most important hires
# empowering employees to meet their goals

Living our values

A 22 year old heir to a large infrastructure company believes luxury lies in work and relationships, not materialism. "Unity of family, companionship of friends, and faith in God..."  are the luxuries, he believes one should truly strive for. "More than anything," he continues, "I like to meet new people and learn about their viewpoints. That's like a luxury to me."

The three luxuries the young man talks of, reflect his personal core values. Values are the practices we use (or should be using) every day in everything we do.

They form the foundation on which we perform work and conduct ourselves. In an ever-changing world, core values are constant.  Core values are not descriptions of the work we do or the strategies we employ to accomplish our life purpose, our Dharma.  They  underlie our work, how interact with each other, and which strategies we employ to fulfill it.

Reference: ET Panache

Picture source: everyoneagreeswithtom.com

Making life changes

'Amazing transformation' of Rahul Gandhi, says Omar Abdullah,  referring to the change in Rahul after his 56 day sabbatical. He doesn't know where Rahul went, what he did, or what this transformation is down to.  But, says Omar, he would try to learn, because there were lessons to be learnt for himself as well.
He also hopes that it doesn't mean he has  to disappear for 56 days.

Life Lesson
The first step in our learning,  development and growth is to know what it is we want to learn. Though the last of Omar's comment may have been half in jest, it is a useful pointer to an understanding that in our desire to learn and grow, we may not necessarily follow the exact steps and process our inspiration may have followed. 

A useful process for change is to develop a foundational theme around which we want to grow our competence.  The foundational theme serves as a core around which we can weave our everyday experiences of listening, understanding, talking, writing and reading. The themes make learning holistic, and help to tailor the lessons to suit our needs and personality.

Some of the themes  could be;

Courage/Fear
When you have unrealized dreams, but hesitate to go after them in the fear of disrupting what you already have.

Habits
This one can be used when you are disorganized and seriously wishesto put your life in order and want to get rid of dis-empowering habits.

Personal Excellence
This one helps when you wish to improve the overall quality of your life and not just in a few specific areas.

What do you think Omar Abdullah foundational theme could be?

What's yours?

Life is About The Choices We Make

Mohan was a charming fellow, every time I ran into him on the street, he would flash his good-natured smile and wave at me. Then one day, he happily told me that he had started a catering business, and pressed his newly printed visiting card into my hand. i told him I certainly would recommend his services to people and keep him in mind when the occasion arose. And I did hire his catering services for a few family functions. At these times, i noticed, it was his wife who was running the show. A grim-faced woman, who unlike Mohan, never smiled, she would be busily looking after the details of the service, keeping a close watch on every aspect of the service. Mohan was employed in a pharma company, but when his catering business started flourishing, he quit his job, and he became the smiling front for his catering service, winning over people with his charm and good nature. Soon, I lost touch with Mohan, and my running into him became less and less frequent, and soon, he just slipped from my mind. Then one day, after years, I ran into him again. He wasn't his usual decently dressed self - his clothes seemed slightly disheveled, and so was his hair. Moreover, he passed me on the street without looking at me! I was surprised, this wasn't the Mohan, I knew, but I just dismissed at it being one of his bad hair days. This happened on a couple of more occasions - his appearance was disheveled and he did not acknowledge my greeting. Finally, one day when i met him again, i stopped him and asked him whether he had forgotten who i was and why he was behaving in this strange manner. He was silent for a while and then in a sad voice he told me, "My wife is no more." He did not say anything more, and neither did I pursue the matter further. I later learnt from people that he had given up his catering business and had devoted himself to looking after the house and his only son.

Dealing with life situations and events

Tragedies are a part of our life - we lose people and things we hold dear, jobs are lost and relationships broken, which are actually a test of our Response-ability - the ability to cope with life's situations and events in the most appropriate manner.While we may not be responsible for most of what happens, we are completely responsible for our reaction to what is happening. Rather than placing blame, this way of thinking acknowledges personal power. Response-ability is the capacity to choose. Out of many possible responses, I can always choose the one I make. Response-ability is remembering to be in charge and make careful, thought-out choices.When we respond with the best of our ability, and accept and handle whatever consequences we have helped to create, we not only benefit from your choices, but our life and relationships will improve immensely. 

Analyse Your Business

Raghoo Potini shared some key insights from the Book "Flash Foresight" By Danil Burrus, which I thought was a great framework for analyzing one's business. 

"A flash foresight is a classic eureka! moment, like Newton's discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree . Actually the Flash Foresight triggered by the application of one or more of seven simple principles covered in the book .Let me cover two big ones.

TRIGGER #1: START WITH CERTAINTY: There are two distinct kinds of change that we can use to find certainty:1. Cyclic change2. Linear change
Cyclic change: provides us with all sorts of certainty .When it is autumn, you can predict that, within six months, it will be spring. Humanity has identified more than 300 distinct cycles that allow us to predict the future accurately. 
Linear change: A simple example of linear change is your age. Your life progresses in one direction. No matter how well you take care of your health, you are not going to start aging backward. Linear change is where the real action is, precisely because it is not a repeating pattern and therefore creates entirely new circumstances and opportunities. 

Hard trends and soft trends: A hard trend is something that will happen; it is a future fact. A soft trend is something that might happen; it is a future maybe. Here's an example about Hard trend and soft trend. The 78 million Baby Boomers are now flooding health care system in the US. Again, notice where the hard trend is, and where it isn't. The increasing numbers of Boomers who will need medical care as they get older is a hard trend, because those numbers are fixed and cannot be changed. But the projected shortage of doctors and nurses to provide that care is a soft trend, because it is something we can change if we see it and decide to act on it.Action:  

Make a list of all the cyclic changes that are affecting your business. Make a list of the linear changes that will have an impact on your life. Make a list of all the hard trends that are taking place in your industry, so you know what you can be certain about. Make a list of all the soft trends that are taking place in your industry, so you can see what you can change or influence. Ask yourself, "What do I know will happen in the next few weeks, months, and years? And how can I innovate to take advantage of what I now know for certain about the future?"

To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .

Dematerialization. As technology improves, we are reducing the amount of material it takes to build the tools we use. For example, laptops are getting smaller, lighter, and more portable, even as they become more powerful.   Virtualization. This means taking things we currently do physically and shifting the medium so that we can now do them purely in a virtual world. Using software, we can now test airplanes, spaceships, and nuclear bombs without actually building them. Virtualization has transformed the world of business. Amazon is a virtual bookstore, and eBay is a virtual yard sale.   Mobility. With the advance of wireless technology, we are rapidly becoming untethered from everything. Our mainframe computers became desktops, then laptops, then palmtops, then cell phones.   Product intelligence: Imagine you're driving down the road, and a light blinks on your dashboard: One of your tires is about to go flat. Your GPS speaks up: "Service station with an air hose in three miles; take the next exit." How does your car know this? It's intelligent. It has smart tires, and it's networked.   Convergence. Filling stations and convenience stores converged in the 1980s; in the '90s, so did coffee shops and bookstores. Today, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and information technology are all converging. Products are converging, too. The modern smartphone is an e-mail device, a camera, a video camera, a music player, a GPS device, and more. Action: Ask yourself, What problems will my company be facing in the next few weeks, months, and years? What problems will our customers be facing?" Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.

TRIGGER #2: ANTICIPATE: When a competitor offers lower prices, you are forced to change how you do business. Being preactive means putting yourself into opportunity mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from happening in the first place. It means, instead of reacting to change that happens from the outside in, creating change from the inside out.

These five technology trends all the result of three interlocking hard trends. The first digital accelerator is processing power. The second digital accelerator is the growth of bandwidth, the third digital accelerator, storage."

10 Reasons Why I Am Passionate about Coaching

I subscribe to an interesting newsletter by E.R. Haas, whose outfit provides virtual training products for personal and professional excellence. His recent newsletter had the subject line; The Power of Why will change the way you look at business success. Intrigued, I opened the newsletter, because I must tell you, I have been struggling with this 'why' business for a long time now! Long have been the hours I have spent thinking of why I am so passionate about coaching. Unfortunately, every statement I had thought of had sounded like a motherhood rather than  a statement which captured the key drivers of my passion. Things had come to such a pass where doubts had started to creep into my mind of the sincerity of my passion! And now this newsletter had come along to rub salt into my wounds! Or so I thought, as I decided to see what this guy Haas had to say. And I must say what  he had to say, pushed me finally into getting down (once again) to find answers to the question which had haunted me all this time about why I coach. And this time I finally managed to crack it!! Here is how my moment of epiphany happened. 

The Eureka Hour!

The trigger of stimulation in Haas's newsletter was a video of a TED presentation called 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders inspire Action' by Simon Sinek. Sinek spoke of what he called the Golden Circle, which looked like this.

According to Sinek, everybody knows “what” they do 100%. Some know how they do it. But very very few people or organizations know WHY they do it. (he was telling me!) The answer, Sinek said, wasn't about making a profit, that was the result. It was the “why”, why do you do it, why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should people care. Simple yet profound, and it immediately got me researching (aka google) my unanswered question of 'why I coach' with renewed vigour. My search led me to a presentation by the Master Motivator Tony Robbins called Why we do what we do, in which he talked of the "invisible forces" that motivated everyone's actions. I spent the entire evening mulling about what Robbins had to say. I slept over it, and the first thing the next morning, as soon as I woke up, was this sudden blinding clarity! A clarity about all the reasons why I was so passionate about coaching! All of them seemed to want to burst forth like a dam burst! The best thing was, I could relate every one of the reasons to something that had actually occurred sometime in my coaching situations! I immediately put pen to paper and started jotting down my thoughts. And here is what I wrote: 

I coach because it enables me to make a difference to people’s lives. I do this by helping them:

1. Discover things about themselves they weren’t aware of

2. Feel they are worth it

3. Convert inertia in their efforts at success into impatience to get going

4. Add new meaning and depth to their relationships

5. Make their life and work feel more fulfilling

6. See  their life and work situations and events in new ways

7. Create their own processes to learn, grow and evolve

8. Create relationships between what they are aware of about their life and work, and what they were not aware of in those contexts

9. Get new insights in the patterns of their behaviour 

10. Put things into context by connecting past life and work events with present actions, behaviours and attitudes

Most importantly, the nature of the challenges my clients face, give me insights into those of my own.Their efforts and commitment to overcome their challenges give me the motivation and the learning to act on those of my own. 

And the bottom line - my clients’ every ‘ah aah’ moments give me SATISFACTION, their successful outcomes FULFILLMENT and the learning, ENRICHES  my life.

Thank you Haas, Simon and Tony!

Coaching Using Principles of Behavioral Economics

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, explain, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The goal of Nudge is to demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. The person who creates that environment is, in the authors terminology, a choice architect. 

Reading more on Nudge in the various web references gave me more and more the feeling of just how remarkably similar the role of a choice architect is to that of a coach. Here's why: 

• Anyone  who indirectly influences the choices people make, the authors say, can be called "choice architect". A coach does exactly that, hence he is a  "choice architect" too.
• Choice architecture, can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone. This is one of the basic tenets of coaching. 
• The tools described by the authors (though differing in nature and application) sound very similar to the ones a coach would use. For instance, the tools highlighted are: 
• Expecting error (the coach tool: empathy) 
• Understanding mappings (the coach uses assessments to map client needs) 
• Giving feedback (a primary coaching tool)
• Structuring complex choices (the coach is a clarifier)
• Creating incentives. (the coach uses small wins as incentives so client is motivated for the big wins)

The remarkable similarities set me thinking. How could one incorporate the discipline of behavioral economics on which the book is based, with the practice, and business, of coaching?

This article is my attempt to do just that.

Applying Principles of Behavioral Economics to Coaching

The use of behavioral principles is fundamental to any coaching practice. Behavioral economics can help coaches understand better what every coach always understood, albeit unwittingly: That people are not rational.  Any new understanding of people's behaviour can only give coaches a better understanding of how exactly coaching works. Or how they can make it work better. 

Stephen Covey the personal development guru applied his mind to why humans behave the way they do and what they could do to avoid human susceptibilities that lead to wrong decisions. The result was his book The 7 Habits of Effective People, and the first of the seven habits is Be Proactive. Proactive people, says Covey, are those who are in control of themselves and do not surrender to a stimulus in the external environment but use their personal power to deal with the stimulus, whether people or situation. How are they able to do this?

Stephen Covey's Proactive Model

Proactive people know that there is a gap between a Stimuli and Response and within that gap is their freedom to choose the right response to maintain control over their self and be above circumstances.

What about people who are not proactive? Often, resistance to change is the result of lack of clarity because of a conflict between the rational and the emotional mind which comes in the way of allowing any change to stick. Ideas, and in turn change, is effective when it stays with you over time and changes the way you think.

Weaving the two models together- Thaler and Sunstein's derived from behavioral economics and Covey's based on new age theories of personal development, could, I realized, help create a useful model for coaching: Nudge Coaching

In his Proactive model, Covey talks of the four tools humans have at their command to effectively exercise their freedom to choose. The four 'hot buttons of pro-activity' being:

1. Self-awareness
2. Imagination
3. Conscience
4. Independent Will

Through the process of Nudge Coaching applied to each of the four 'hot buttons of proactivity', the coach would be able to resolve the conflict between the rational and emotional mind, and makes change happen.

The Nudge Process of Coaching 

Choice architects, according to Thaler and Sunstein, can have considerable power to influence choices. Or to use our the authors preferred language, they can nudge. The authors explain this term as "...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." Most important from a coaching point of view - nudges are not mandates.  

Coaching clients are busy people who are trying to cope in a complex world and cannot think deeply about every choice they make. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes leads them astray. The Nudge Coach brings organization and structure to the contexts in which people take decisions. Choice architecture does not seek to reduce choices - just influence them in order to improve the client's lives, as judged by themselves. Humans are susceptibile to various biases and hence the way an issue is framed makes a huge difference to the success of a coaching engagement. In other words, people are nudgable. In the Nudge coaching process, a coach helps clients to structure their choices and create strategies that makes it easier for them to do things that improve their lives. He uses four types of nudges to achieve these coaching goals:

1. Nudging Client Self-awareness: Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and complete self-control. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes lead them astray. The explanation, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is rooted in some well-documented human behavioral quirks that are amplified by information overload and trying to cope in a complex world. All this leaves people with little time to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The Nudge Coach helps create awareness of their cognitive abilities and the resources available to them for better self-control.
2. Nudging Client Imagination: Sunstein and Thaler have spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be encouraged to make better decisions, and they offer some intriguing ideas. Their central thesis: People will make better choices if they are given a clear and well-designed set of options that acknowledge and offset human idiosyncrasies. For helping client's design and structure the options available to them,  the coach has to take into account his knowledge of behavioral science. By helping to rightly structure the choices available to the client, a coach helps to nudge clients to do the 'right' thing.
3. Nudging Client Conscience: Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains that the ideas of right or wrong, good or bad exist only among humans. No animal is good or bad - only humans would pity the antelope being being made meal of by a predator such as a a cheetah in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are greedy, unlike animals, who stop eating once their stomachs are full. Thus says Pattanaik, humans have the capacity to be worse than animals (greedy) and better than animals (generous). And it is in these subjective choices - greed vs generosity, right vs wrong and good vs bad that the coach, by structuring choices available to the clients, helps them to to improve decisions about their health, wealth and happiness.
4. Nudging Client Will: One of the basic tenets of behavioural economics is that people do not always take rational decisions. They have  status quo bias and change doesn't come easily. For reasons of laziness, fear, and distraction, many people will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance. All these forces imply that if, for a given choice, there is a default option—an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing. The solution - helping coaching clients first make their choices, and then hold them accountable to their choice. Holding them accountable can at times  make the client feel challenged. A useful approach to overcome this is the one akin to the program in gmail. Every time a user mentions the word attachment but does not include one, prompts a pop-up, “Did you forget your attachment?” Similarly, by reminding the client of his commitment to the choice he has made, the coach can nudge the client will in non-threatening manner.

The Nudge Coach

By keeping an eye on the four nudges, a coach aka a choice architect can improve the outcomes for clients on their journey of the head and heart to fulfill their potential.