Bamboo In The Wind

Of course, the game does not start until you kick the ball. You clearly have to take the lead. You can do it all by yourself. But you know you cannot go long enough on your own. You will tire and stop playing. The trick is to move to play out in the open. You still go first; come running at an angle and kick the ball! A bit of tactful juggling is bound to get you a fellow player! The fellow player learns to juggle and swing a kick just as you do! You start sharing more tricks with him as an equal, and he does not mind doing as he is told. After all, he is just trying to have a good time! A couple more bystanders join the game. And a few more follow them. They are focused on replicating what your fellow player is busy doing! The ball is now a lot more mobile. It moves across the ground. The field is getting a bit noisy and energetic. Now more bystanders barge into the field to have a go at the ball! The team begins to go beyond learning the tricks, and a match begins. There are teams fo...

We routinely find ourselves at crossroads. We struggle with it and wonder why we are there in the first place. Everyone has access to information, opportunity, and resources, yet some breeze through. But not us. The choice to go someplace, the application of self, the process of sequential decision-making, and using resources create the run to the finish line with varying degrees of satisfaction. Crossroads are erected with reluctant starting choices. Application of self is half-hearted, and the decision-making process is superficial and risk-averse.  With no skin in the game, you tend to draw resources without considering the ramifications. Resources quickly affect the next set of choices. It culminates in confusion, fear, and uncertainty about the direction to take. Chaos is all internal. Yet, we rarely internalize the reasons for it! No one else can help make your share of choices without knowing how to clearly arrive at those. Internalizing internal chaos is the best start to g...

Working on unnoticeable advantages is rarely in fashion. You need everything to happen prominently. You want one large blast and the whole world to get lit.  There are so many things you are good at. Choosing, Persisting, Follow-ups, Timeliness, Committing, Attending, Caring, Timeliness, Patience and Ownership. What if you thought of these traits as advantages? It might not make much difference in the short run. In the long run, they are all significant differentiators. In a world of instant gratification, behavioral traits that bring focus and consistency to thinking, working, and interacting can get better results. Adjust the frame of mind to see the advantages you already possess!  And seeing that is tremendous progress!

We can easily get carried away with what we see through our lens. Our biases influence how we see things. Or even if we see anything! It does not matter whether or not we see anything. When we are in an ecosystem, we certainly will experience things. Whether we agree with what we see or not, we certainly will impact due to what is experienced. It is mind-boggling to witness something that we cannot see. What if we understand that biases brought us this blinder, made a relatively simple thing, and turned it unexpected. It shatters us when we encounter it. The only way out is to get the blinders off. That requires finding a new lens to see clearly. What we witness is rarely unique. If we care to look at what happened elsewhere in the past, we build balanced perspectives. Historical perspectives are an excellent way to begin to see through what we witness!

Sometimes we must change the way we do things. Routine can be during and monotonous. At work, conduct group meetings on a hilltop, take teams on a  hike, conduct focused 1-1s while taking strolls in a park, take time off from sessions and meet team members to know what's on their minds. And how about taking your parents for a drive in the mountains, taking your family on a refreshing cruise, or camping in the woods and discovering yourself? Change is an intrinsic desire. One that reconstitutes internal order by altering the frame of mind. Change is the aftermath of taking action. Positive change is a result of taking action that works for us.

Self-discovery at work is usually unheard of. That is because work presents a square peg in a round hole. What we enjoy doing rarely matches the work we are assigned. And that is fair from the organization's point of view. The workplace needs helping hands to pursue its own enjoyable journey. Usually, the story of the starting member resonates with a few others, and work takes off. But as more and more people join hands, it tends to be half-hearted participation. People choose organizations for economic reasons, progress reasons, or social reasons. But it is rarely the case that the growing organization gets people based on the core philosophy. No matter how much we talk about the culture and proliferating it organization-wide, that depends on how well they connect at various organizational layers. And when that alignment is at stake, people focus on compliance rather than fulfillment of what they like. It's a complex and delicate balance that every organization struggles with....

In industrial org structures, growth has been permission driven. It tended to be a function of how your bosses saw you and judged your potential. Of course, selfless superiors could hop over their insecurities, spot you, and give you a real chance. And getting an opportunity to present your work was an achievement in itself. If you ran into superiors who were entangled in their own insecurities... then well, good luck...! You can be sure that they will shred your work into pieces, look for signs in you that please them. Your opportunities depended on how they saw you given their own insecurities. You rarely had the skill to understand the psyche of your superiors lest know they had any misgivings. But they always did. And you. You were stumped by their decision to use you or not. Thankfully in the new age economy, that is not true anymore. You are attractive to everyone if you are interested. Interested and experienced in something you can catch others' attention on. If you have do...

Giving your best requires, among other things, being at your best. But the more interesting question is whether "being" comes first or "giving"? It is a tricky question that requires inspecting what each term means to us. On the one hand, the state of  Being represents acting in concert with concurrence with the self. With minimal resistance and maximal acceptance of who we are and what we are about to involve ourselves in.  We are perfectly ok with what we might do and how we do it and agree with the ramifications of how we might come across. Thus it represents an inside-and-out approach to everything we do. On the other hand, Giving is a state of acting proactively and deliberately. Working with awareness, care and attention needed; creating circumstances that allow positioning ourselves, minimizing blind spots, and increasing the odds of favorable outcomes.  It's thus outside and in approach to doing things. You may not always have the desired experience, bu...

There are little things that we turn into nagging issues. In hindsight, they look so trivial, yet we treat them as anything but trivial.  We make a big hue and cry. We begin to find the world around us is unfair to us. Most dissatisfaction stems from unreasonable thought-process. The resistance to making an effort to understand is at the root of it.  The question then is how do we know what we face... First, get out of the hideout! Shed the fear of storms.  It is just a storm in a teacup!

We think we have an idea of how to get work done. While it may be enough in some cases, in most other cases, it requires spelling out more. Instinctual decisions are significant for situations that warrant spontaneity, where a sense of urgency is paramount. We need more than one option to get work done for most other things. We need to identify places we might need to rethink if things don't go as planned. A plan is a mind map of what we need to do when things go right and how we need to respond if they don't. There is rarely room for surprise when we have mindmap in our back pockets. All we are doing is navigating the situation with a reasonable response. And that is usually enough to get past almost anything!