Life Audit

I'm not a big believer of Monday Morning Motivation. It is my (very) strong belief that if you need explicit motivation to get up on a Monday morning, there is something fundamentally wrong and one has to quickly act on it. I thought it might be a good idea instead to start some tough questions that'd help get focus. For starters, I've listed a set of questions what my mentor (who gave it to me) calls life audit. I religiously go thru them in Jun and Dec which has helped me dream more, keep me grounded and get my focus  back. Happy to share it here. 

1. How is my life working out?

2. How’s my daily attitude; how happy am I?

3. How are my relationships with my family, friends, co-workers, coaches and mentors?

4. How’s my health (weight, overall wellness, self-esteem, stress levels, etc.)?

5. How effectively am I feeding my mind? (How many books have I read in the last six months? What do I wish to become? Am I studying productively?)

6. How do I rate my lifestyle (my satisfaction with activities such as travel, exploring, attending fun events, etc.)?

7. Where is my income in comparison to where I want it to be?

8. How often do I give back to others?

9. How is my goal-setting? How satisfied am I with how my goals have manifested in my life?

You could rate each of this from 1-10 (1 being lowest) and start taking actions for those that have low scores.

Do you have a set of questions that you refer regularly to keep you focussed? Would love to hear them.

12 habits of confident people

There is an aura around confident people. They seem to get what they want, everyone seem to agree with them, one feels good if they are around and there is a sense of relief when the confident person says they will take care of something. Personally, I feel drawn into people that are confident and have always wondered what makes them so confident. Ofcourse they'd be extremely good in their craft, I was looking at other personality traits too. 

Dr. Travis Bradberry, author of interesting books like Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and Leadership 2.0 lists the 12 habits of confident people. 

1. They get their happiness from within

2. They don't pass judgement

3. They don't say yes unless they really want to

4. They listen more than they speak

5. They speak with certainty

6. They seek out small victories

7. They exercise

8. They don't seek attention

9. They aren't afraid to be wrong

10. They stick their necks out

11. They celebrate other people

12. They aren't afraid to ask for help

Did anything surprise you? Does something sound counter intuitive? Or just plain interested to know more? Here's the link to the full article (also added an attachment as some times the links get reorganized)

Quotable Quotes

Some more interesting quotes, this time from stoicism:

• "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be One.” – Marcus Aurelius
• "We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” – Seneca
• "If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it.” – Marcus Aurelius
• "We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” – Marcus Aurelius
• "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus
• "You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all." - Marcus Aurelius. 
• "Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions." - Marcus Aurelius
• "The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive." - Seneca

Resilience and the 3Ps

As I'm trying hard to maintain general sanity and quickly bounce back from yet another personal crisis, I've started to like the word Resilience more than ever. Resilience is defined as the capacity to quickly recover from difficulties. Different people have different ways to cope with difficulty. But Martin Seligman's in his beautiful book "Learned Optimism: How to change your mind and life" describes that there are 3 Ps that  comes in the way of recovery:

1. Personalization - The victim mindset to attribute whatever is happening to oneself  "it happened only because of me" OR "I caused this misfortune".
2. Pervasiveness - The misplaced assumption that a setback in one area is going to affect all the areas of life and therefore the life is going to be turned completely upside down.
3. Permanence - the belief that the bad effects of the event will last forever

When faced with a crisis the following plays out in an infinite loop "I created this hopeless situation, my whole life has now become hopeless and I'll continue to remain hopeless for rest of my life"

We all know that this is not true. Dr. Seligman argues, therefore, that recognizing the 3Ps helps one to rebound from a tragedy or a crisis lot more quickly as you can put things in perspective.

I wish you don't get into tragedies, but if you do get into, as life has the habit of throwing them once in a while, do remember the 3Ps. I'm also curious to know coping mechanisms you have to come out of a personal crisis.

Remember what Seneca said "We suffer more in imagination than in reality".

When Ego overtakes team's cause

My boss of almost 5 years now, Joel Sumner introduced me, a few months ago, to the idea of looking for leadership and team building lessons from the area of sports. I've, since then, been sensitive for any lessons we can learn from Cricket (the only sport I follow). 

I found one yesterday in the 3rd Test match between West Indies and Pakistan. The series was tied at 1-1 and West Indies were fighting to save the 3rd test with a draw, so that the honours would be even at the end of 3-match series. With just 7 more balls to survive, and with all the 9 fielders around the bat, ego took over ST Gabriel. Instead of defending just one ball and leaving the strike for next 6 balls to RL Chase who was batting with a century and had gotten WI so near for a fighting draw, Gabriel thought he'd go for the glory and hit a maximum (you can hear the commentator screaming in disbelief "why did he do that!!!!". He did got an inside edge, got bowled and Pakistan won the test match and the series. Classic case of ego taking over the needs of the team.

It also brings me to the false meaning that some people tend to attribute for "aggression". Often times the aggressive behaviour is coming from the ego and might not be helping the team's cause. Rahul Dravid, Bangalore's own legend, talks about how aggression is not about chest thumping or over the top celebrations, but is about being completely focused on the task at hand, taking pride in the output day-in and day-out, and about being intense, in this article. Notice that he also talks about how when ego takes over, people would lose the big picture and tend to do the opposite of what team wants, in search of personal glory. "I measure aggression by how people perform" says Dravid and I could not agree more. 

Next time when you think you are acting aggressive step back and reflect whether it is the ego and whether or not it is helping the team. When a colleague or team member is acting from ego, gently suggest them to calm down and think from whats important for the team.

Want to conquer ego or atleast want to keep it in check? Then I strongly recommend reading this book titled Ego Is The Enemy.

What lessons have you learnt from watching sports?

Resilience vs Being Virtuos

Chanced upon a great commencement speech (video, transcript) by Wharton Professor, Adam Grant who has written landmark books - Give and Take, Originals and Option B). He talks about the importance of resilience over popular virtues like Generosity, Authenticity and Grit. He argues that you'd need Resilience to be able to hold on to your virtues, especially when you are down and out. He argues that everyone should follow the airplane rule - you mask yourself first, before helping others to put it on.

On generosity, his advice is to help others, but not at the cost of burning out yourself. You might feel less altruistic, but you'd have helped far more people. Giving has to be energising than exhausting. 

Adam argues that clinging on to being authentic all the time could stunt your own development. To be authentic, you need to be crystal clear about your identity and values. You need to know exactly who you are. And that can tether you to a fixed anchor, closing the door to growth. So, be true to yourself, but not so much that your true self never evolves.

Adam Grant feels "never give up" is a bad virtue. Sometimes quitting is a virtue. Grit doesn’t mean “keep doing the thing that’s failing.” It means “define your dreams broadly enough that you can find new ways to pursue them when your first and second plans fail.”

Found it interesting? You can read the full transcript of the speech here and/or watch the video below:

Patience helps

My elder son is studying at UC Irvine as a freshman and has been declared captain of their cricket team from next academic year (starting Sep'17) as the current captain is graduating this year. Yesterday, he was tasked with making a presentation to the school's board for sports on the plans of the cricket team etc., and also to get the budget approved. Cricket not being one of the primary sport in the US, predictably has not been getting importance (in terms of getting the (football) ground for practice, funds for participating in tournaments, getting kits etc.,). My son made an angry presentation to the board and obviously it didn't go well with them. He was elated with the opportunity he got, but was disappointed with himself. As any dad would do, I tried cheering him up and sent out an email on how he should approach going forward as he is likely to captain the UCI cricket team for 3 more years (subject to his own performance). I sent out the mail and thought it has the lessons I learnt in influencing people and is therefore generic and might be of use. Here it is:

I'm so happy that you're getting so many opportunities and getting to know how the world works at a very young age. Pl. keep in mind the following (based on what I've learnt in the last 25years dealing with a lot of people)

1. Demanding something from authorities never work (unless you are indispensable). Relationships help. Over the next year you should try to build relationship with these authorities - meet them informally (deliberately arrange to "run into" them), talk about your progress and challenges (see next points).

2. People don't like whiners, especially if they are leaders (think Kejriwal). Instead of putting the same thing as a problem or an issue, put it as a "challenge" and tell what you are doing to address it and then explicitly seek "help" to overcome the challenges you are facing, but unable to solve yourself.

3. Passion helps. People get moved by folks that are passionate to a cause. You can't do it in one meeting, therefore #1 is very important.

4. Surprises are not appreciated, lobbying helps. You should keep talking to them thru the year and when they come to the decision making meeting they are already aware and hopefully sympathetic to your cause.

5. Appeal to their emotion. When you present, do not present it from your perspective. Present it from the perspective of what is important to them (in your case it might be pride of UCI, showcasing the diversity at the campus, showing that UCI cares for students from all parts of the world etc.,). Note they too are operating under constraints and will not have infinite monies and are looking to optimise whatever they have. 

6. Likability helps (various studies have shown it). #2 and 4 makes you unlikeable and 1, 3 and 5 makes you likeable. When people prima facie "like" you, they are most likely to consider your requests in a favourable way.

7. Patience helps. You might follow all of my advice above and still may not be in a position to influence the board the first time, may be 2nd time too. So, you need to be patient and keep doing all these and trust me eventually you'd be able to influence. (Pl. re-read the first habit Be Proactive in Stephan Covey's 7 Habits of Highly effective people and specifically the section on "increasing the circle of  influence").

I'm proud of what you've done and I'm sure you'd do a lot more.

What is your DQ - Dependability Quotient?

If we judge anyone by their "intentions", most people would think themselves to be dependable. However, we all are judged by the actual behaviour and that might actually be projecting a different story. 

Ask any manager, she'd put "dependability" very high on the their list of things they judge people on. Being seen as "dependable" is a great trait to possess that'd help retain/increase the trust, be seen as a go-to person and increase influence. Carefully notice the top performers around you, you can see for yourselves that they are dependable - they seem to be around for their team, for their managers, for their customers. All the time. Most importantly they'd never, I repeat NEVER break a promise they've made. 

This trait becomes super important around major releases, major trade events like NI-Week, IMS etc, or when there are escalations that need some ultra quick responses. From a manager's perspective, here's what one can do increase one's DQ:

• Honour the promise. If you've told you'd work on some thing over the weekend or come to office on a weekend, for heavens sake walk the talk and seize the moment. You miss only one day as promised, all the great work you might have done in the past will not count much (for that one day may be too critical for your manager, her manager's manager and so on).

• Make solid contributions to trust account - deposits build trust, withdrawals lessen trust. When you walk the talk, you make a deposit, and when you break a promise you withdraw. Note even breaking a seemingly small promise (from your view) could result in a huge withdrawal from your manager's perspective.

• During crunch moments, do not call in sick or call in and report a change in plan - unless it is really very very important. When you call in, managers usually will approve given our culture, but that doesn't mean there was no withdrawal. There indeed would be, and that'd be a BIG withdrawal and you'd never come to know. Higher the stress levels, higher would be the amount of withdrawal. (OK OK, I hear you arguing that if the manager had NOT approved, I'd have still come. That is not the point - see the pic at the end of this post)

• Avoid planning long vacations around major releases. If you still *have to* (due to constraints coming from other family members or friends, visiting places that are open only during specific months, planning around school vacations etc.,) make sure it is discussed with your manager sufficiently well in advance and approved. And as you approach the vacation, over communicate that you are not going to be around to ALL the stakeholders and do everything you can to easy their anxiety. Finally, pl. consider leaving your contact details during vacation. Highly unlikely someone would try bothering you, but such a gesture would be a deposit. And after coming back, please thank your co-workers for holding fort.

I feel sad that I see many people miss this simple point, rationalize their actions and resent when they realise that there is a gap between where they are vs where their manager think they are. Gaps can come from many things, but having a high DQ is easiest to achieve, and is in our own control and also is the one that has a (very) high RoI. 

Edit: Vijaya Raghava pointed out the prime reasons why 4 raters are who they are is largely because of their Dependability Quotient. Further, he also rightly reasons that DQ seems to be directly linked is sense of ownership(and pride). Pl. consider.

What RamP's Reading? May'17