Kaleidoscope Thinking

“A kaleidoscope is a device for seeing patterns. They’re made up of a set of fragments, but it’s a flexible set of fragments, so that if you twist it or look at it from a different angle you can see a different pattern. So, in fact, it’s not reality that it is fixed, it’s often our view of reality.
Leaders have to shake people out of their orthodoxy and get them to see that a new pattern is possible. So it’s all about seeing new possibilities.” - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Call to Action
What new possibility do you see for yourself and your team today, that you would like to see realized?

Doing What's Right For You

Liz Wessel is a former Googler, and at 26, already the CEO of her own startup. She attributes her success to two pieces of advice she received. The first was to say yes to taking risks and trying new things, and the second;  to not chase money but happiness.

INSIGHT
Eminently good piece of advice no doubt, but not everything that works for others, may work for you. So, before accepting the thoughts of others, ask yourself:
Are they
- resonating with me?
- in alignment with my values?
- applicable to me this stage of my life?
If yes, then embrace and practice the thoughts.

What Is A True Success Metric?

“For me, a peaceful night's sleep means true success.” - Actor Jimmy Shergill

INSIGHT
Good things and bad things keep happening to us, but it's not what happens that affects us, it's how we react to it, that does. So there cannot be a better criteria of success than a good night's sleep. It proves that we have managed to win the daily wars raging inside us.

Life Transitions

“To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don't isolate.” Michael Jordan, billionaire basketball star

INSIGHT
The journey from acquiring to contributing, from taking to giving, from looking without to looking within,  is the journey from doing to being. Each of us makes the transition in different ways, at different stages in our lives.

Raise The Bar

After his first audition, a casting director told actor Sidney Poitier, “Why don’t you stop wasting people’s time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?” It was at that moment, recalls Poitier, that he decided to devote his life to acting. He wasn’t going to let someone else decide his life path. - John Mason, Expect to Win

INSIGHT
Words dig deep. Deep enough to hurt and scar, or deep enough to raise the bar on the determination to succeed.

Stories Worth Telling

“Australian Aborigines say that the big stories—the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life—are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.”  — Robert Moss, DreamGates

Let Leadership Coach Uday help you
to SCOUT, SPOT and CAPTURE the
meaningful stories STALKING you,
and make them your OWN

Contact
uday@arurbizcoach.com

What Is Your Definition?

Using the census definition, India is 31% urban. But if we apply Ghana’s definition of urban, India is 47% urban, and if we apply Mexico’s definition, India is 65% urban.

INSIGHT
Clearly, everything in life and matters is a product of definition, whether it is our country's population, or the GDP number.
Or for that matter your definition of; happiness or failure, wealthy or poor.
So whose definition do you wish to apply - someone else's, or your own?

When Was The Last Time You Checked Your Beliefs?

Belief is like a personal guidebook to reality: it tells us not just what is factually correct but also right and good. It fundamentally informs our behaviour. It would be nice to think these guidebooks are reliable and dispassionate, but it has become clear that they are not. Beliefs are largely a product of our fallible psychology, gut feeling, the company we keep and biological differences such as how easily we scare. -  Graham Lowton,  New Scientist,

My Learning
Beliefs are born of our experiences, context and time. It is worthwhile to  evaluate the validity of our beliefs periodically.

The Digital Nomads

“The Millennials view of success isn't necessarily a house, a well paying job and a (white) picket fence. There's a huge shift towards defining success as working in terms of things that one truly believes in, and appreciating experiences over material possessions.” - Karoli Hindriks, owner Jobbatical, a site for digital job hunters on a global scale.

INSIGHT
In the 60’s and 70’s too, Western youth were looking for what they believed in. They were the drug-induced  peace-seeking nomads. In the present globally connected times the Millennial digital nomads earn their way through experiences.

It Is All About Perspective

A college freshman wrote a letter to her parents. In the beginning, she told her parents that her skull fracture was healing, the fire wasn't so bad after the janitor offered to let her stay with him, and, oh, by the way, they were expecting a baby together. Her last paragraph revealed that she had no skull fracture, no fire, no janitor, & pregnancy, but she did get a “D” in chemistry & just wanted to put the bad grades into the proper perspective. - From Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini,

INSIGHT
Success or Failure, Happy or Sad, everything is relative - a matter of perspective.

Building A 21st Century Career

According to academic and career theorist Prof. Michael Arthur, there are three types of career based investments that people can make:
1. Knowing why: Deals with how and why people derive meaning out of their work and learning.
2. Knowing how: Covers skills and expertise that will be in demand for a particular industry.
3. Knowing whom: Involves building and managing one's social network of peers.

INSIGHT
Managing a 21st century career requires being entrepreneurial - continuously seeking out opportunities to develop, renew and enhance your skills and abilities.
A coach helps to accelerate the process of discovery and growth.

Living By The Pareto Principle

"I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community….And I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” - Mark Zuckerberg on why he wears a grey t-shirt all the time.

INSIGHT
Zuckerberg is very clear about the vital few in his life.
He believes in serving his FB community to the bare inclusion of everything else in his life. But on becoming a father in November last year, he took two months off to help his wife take care of the baby. Being a competitive person, he even invested time and effort in trying to bring his baby’s diaper changing time down to 20 seconds. He succeeded!

The Irrational Mind

In the United States, net immigration from Mexico has been at zero since 2010, but Republican primary voters still cheered Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southern border as though it would solve whatever was worrying them. - A New York Times report

INSIGHT
Human beings are predictably irrational, says author and professor of psychology Dan Ariely. A wise leader is one who can channel his people's irrational emotions into productive action, by focusing not on emotions, but on behaviour. 

Power of The Story

“Retelling a story about the habits, mannerisms daily goals of successful people puts you one step closer to learning (& teaching others) how to recreate their results. Find people who have the skills you want. Study their stories, & tell their stories. We tend to teach what we need to learn, & I can't think of a better way to do it” - Annette Simmons in Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins

INSIGHT
Learning from the stories of others is the simplest way to learn. My personal collection of over 700 stories is my treasure of learning into which I dip to revive and refresh myself.

Being Authentic is a Choice

Lionel Messi announced his retirement from international football yesterday after Argentina lost again in the Copa America final. Often the lightning rod for criticism. He has been questioned about not singing his country's national anthem. “I get annoyed by the people who attack you without thinking“ he said, “I won't sing the anthem on purpose. I don't need to sing it to feel it. It reaches me. Every person feels it in their own way.”

INSIGHT
Is it brave, or is it foolish, to choose be authentic to yourself when emotionally charged situations demand a certain form of expression of behaviour?

Fostering Innovation

Leaders can foster creativity by setting goals with clear boundaries but at the same time breaking all the rules, often unspoken. Our creativity and innovation is often capped by these unspoken rules, which condition our thinking process. - Franklin Tang, CEO Philip Tang and Sons

INSIGHT
An organization's spoken rules define the ’musts’, while the unspoken ones define the ’shoulds’. Articulating the unspoken, transforms them into ’coulds’.

Why We Seek Meaning in Life

“...the human need for meaning reaches into the far recesses of our life and ensures that eventually nothing is left blank. We adorn, embellish, categorise, make ladders of hierarchy out of everything.” - Santosh Desai on LinkedIn

INSIGHT
Why is the human need for meaning so compulsive? After his experiences in a Nazi death camp, Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl realised it was essential for our spiritual survival. Frankl's theory holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

Transitions

“There's no one fish saying, “Hey, I want everyone to be about five inches away from someone else, and we're going to have this shape”. That is physicist Dr Neil Johnson, describing transitions in nature such as in a flock of birds or a school of fish.

INSIGHT
Could the bunch of variables in our lives such as relationships, resources and contexts have a similar mysterious trigger in shaping human transitions?

Life is Lived in the Hours

“A life is lived in hours. What we do with our lives will be a function of how we spend those hours, and we only have so many … Life is full and life has space.” - Laura Vanderkam in the Busy Person’s Lies.

INSIGHT
Life is full and life has space, both statements are true. Evaluate your own time and discover how you can repurpose it to do things you find fulfilling.

The Secret of Good Relationships

The China Disneyland was inaugurated recently. One of the actions CEO Robert Iger took to push the deal, was to seek a personal relationship with China’s paramount leader, President Xi Jinping. On learning that Xi’s father, a revolutionary leader, had visited Disneyland in 1980, he pressed his staff to find a photograph. They found one which showed the President’s father, wearing a Mao suit, shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. Iger presented the photo to the leader as gift and a symbol of the partnership.

INSIGHT
Poor, peasant, privileged or president we all love to be made to feel special.