Ability to Bounce Back!!

Get ready Magnus Carlsen, Vishy Anand-2.0 is coming to challenge you!!

Anand showed great character, preparation and temperament to win the candidates championship; which is a double round robin tournament where the winner will take a chance to challenge Magnus for world champion title. Vishy Anand was accurate in his calculations and throughout the tournament he showed that hunger and passion towards chess.

It is not a simple yet another tournament win for him. After his loss to Magnus last year in world championship and his bad show in many tournaments thereafter, many believed that his career is over. He was fighting against his age where his opponent in last world championship was 19 years younger to him. Even Vishy showed that demotivation and appeared as rusted.

This win make totally different sense if we look at his character and his determination.

After his loss to Magnus, someone asked him, what you think. Anand said, “In the 9^th game of World Cup in Chennai, I realized I am going to lose my world title. Life is a bitch, sometimes what all you have to do is put a ctrl-x on life and start all over again”.

And he has exactly done that.

It is termed as a greatest comeback ever. But talk about that character, that faith, that confidence, that brave front, that ability to bounce back, that belief that I can do it, that positive approach. Let’s talk about how he went about it. Let’s talk about that sheer determination to do it one-more-time all over again.

Anand went ahead with this very meticulously. He took a break, did lots of soul searching, confidence building and did a wonderful preparation with his team. These were evident in his games of Candidates Tournament. He was bang-on and was never was in a bad position in the tournament. He built a great defense in the final game just that even computers couldn’t suggest a break-through.

This is a true champion, a great determination, fantastic practice and then great execution. Irrespective of what happens in the re-match of world cup with Magnus, a true champion is already been made. This story will be a great deal of inspiration to younger sports stars, to corporate life, or common people like you and me.

What I learnt? In our life, almost on every day we encounter situations like this, where we need to put a ctrl-x and start all over again. But, do we do that? Sometimes we feel at the bottom of the confidence level, can we step back and start all over again? Can we have that great determination and temperament to do-it-all-over-again? One-more-time?

Thanks Vishy, for inspiring many lives by your character.

Technical Tracking and Story of a Looser

Since some months, some unknown person started posting some negative comments on my blog.

I was wondering about the identity about that person.

With help of our IT team I tracked down that person and I was shocked to know that he was part of my management team.

I really feel sorry about that person, who un-successfully tried to disturb me and feel proud about the fact that I never trusted what that person said.

Anyway, this is life!

The Marathon Mindset

This is an attempt to find similarities between Marathon and our corporate life!

The first lesson we learn is that anyone who wants to run a marathon must re-programme his or her thought processes and attitude. Believe it or not, a marathon mindset is a sporting, yet intense mindset that allows us to focus on finishing well rather than ‘winning’ the race. That is not as preposterous a concept as our conditioning might lead us to believe, for being a winner is about much more than just coming first. Ask any marathoner, and you will be told that the key is to relax your body, put your mind at ease, and keep running. But most important of all, it is enjoying what you do. Likewise, the key to success both in the corporate world and in life is to do well by staying united with the others around you in a spirit of comradeship and enjoying the run.

A marathon mindset will not only make you successful but also bring meaning, joy and contentment by defining many aspects of your life. You do not look at everything from the perspective of whether you’re winning or losing, but imagine that you are running alongside others in the larger race of life. Only in a marathon does a fellow runner egg you to keep going.

In a world that places utmost emphasis on winning, even if it is by trampling over others, can running the race really be as important as winning, if not more so? And will such a ‘paced’ approach – that is, a long-term view of your work – help you achieve your goals at all?

Look at it this way. Such a shift in your perspective would radically reposition you for long-term success without your ending up all frazzled and burnt-out in a hyper-competitive environment. Can’t imagine how that is possible? Well, believe me, it is!

Few points we can learn are;

1)     As you focus on finishing the race rather than winning. Why can’t we apply this to our lives? Just enjoy what we are doing?

2)     Look at a large picture; don’t look at sprinting the way out, perhaps focus on finishing. So, a bad boss, one bad appraisal, one bad project should not affect you in the larger interest of life.

3)     Define the goals of your life. Life is more than just win-lose battle.

4)     It’s all about measurement

Alone on the road

Life is like a bicycle race, whose aim is to fulfill our personal legend, which, according to our scripters is our true mission on this earth.

We all set off together, sharing friendship and enthusiasm; but as the race progresses, that initial happiness gives way to the real challenges, tiredness, boredom, and doubts about our own abilities. We notice that a few friends have, in their hearts, already given up. They are still cycling, but only because they cannot stop in the middle of the road. There are more and more of them, pedaling along beside the support vehicle-also known as routine-talking amongst themselves, full filling their obligations, following the dreams which are not up to their potential, circling in the same known small pond, but unaware to the beauties and challenges of the road.

We eventually leave them behind us and then we come face to face with loneness, with unfamiliar bends in the roads and mechanical problems with our bicycle. So, that feeling of coming ahead of the race, that pride of achievement has evaporated. At a certain stage, after suffering a few falls with no one near at hand to help, we began to ask ourselves, if it’s really worth all the effort.

Yes, it is. It’s just a question of not giving up. It’s question of being focused. It’s all about having that attitude to go ahead. It’s about our ability to focus at the time of confusion. It’s about putting all the broken pieces together and setting off for that march, yet another time. It’s all about that discipline with which we need to face the life.

Scripters says; we need to understand the life through four invisible forces; Love, Death, Power and Time.

We must love because we ourselves are loved by god.

We must have an awareness of death to fully understand the life. As such, as per scripters, the life doesn’t end at death. That is just a momentary stop.

We must struggle in order to grow, but without getting affected by the power we gained through this struggle. As there is a super power above all, and the life goes as per that power. The moment we understand how insignificance our power is when compared to that super power; that sense of achievement becomes humble.

Finally, we must accept that our soul is caught in the web of time, with all its opportunities and limitations.

Therefore, on our solitary bicycle rice, we must value time and do all possible thing to value each second. Play to our potential, and don’t get distracted by the road blocks. We can rest as and when necessary, but we must follow that dream.

Live that dream every day, every second, in whatever we do. That is what is called passion…

On a business trip

What I liked about my business trips is that it allows me to follow what I really like, walking. I just love catching up with different cultures and love exploring cities through walking. All packed and adequately dressed, its great fun to visit cities, understand the history and meet/observe people. There is tremendous amount of fun in uncertainty, and exploring the city as tourist (Without following the tourist guides) helps me to understand more.

A map, a water bottle and two bananas and few eatables will be in my backpack.

Recently I explored Helsinki in this way. Thrilled at its history, and its closeness to Russia. Visited an ancient church and got confused there what to do! Walked across sea shore and ended up getting confused about direction (That is also fun!)

I just lived my life on that day!!

Tour de France:

I got a chance to watch a documentary about this great cycle event. It’s amazingly great. It tests the endurance of a human being and it needs great amount of team work, calculation, meticulous planning and great execution.

I was just thrilled to see this documentary.

360 Degree Feedback

Feedback plays very important role in our professional career and we all grow if we get constructive feedback and work on that. But the feedback we get has to be very well articulated and constructive; it should be well connected to the growth/career development. But in reality the feedback session just becomes an hour spent to list out all the faults. And many a times its completely biased.

360-degree feedback is an evaluation method that incorporates feedback from the worker, his/her peers, superiors, subordinates, and customers. Results of these confidential surveys are tabulated and shared with the worker, usually by a manager. Interpretation of the results, trends and themes are discussed as part of the feedback. The primary reason to use this full circle of confidential reviews is to provide the worker with information about his/her performance from multiple perspectives. From this feedback, the worker is able to set goals for self-development which will advance their career and benefit the organization. With 360-degree feedback, the worker is central to the evaluation process and the ultimate goal is to improve individual performance within the organization. Under ideal circumstances, 360-degree feedback is used as an assessment for personal development rather than evaluation.

Recently I got an opportunity to get this feedback and I must say, the process and the result were learning experience. I found out what people perceive me as and it helped me to understand my strengths and areas of improvement. And honestly it also confused me a bit as well.

Offcourse there is a risk of not implementing this correctly and in that case it fail to give a correct feedback and it might derail the entire process. However it’s always nice to get the feedback and work upon the deficiencies.

Learning…

Philosophy, Psychology, Positive Thinking and Ageing

Contrasting topics!

This week has been strange for me. Generally I like reading business and management; this week I didn’t even touch my favorite Economictimes in the morning. I was completely shut down from business news all the week.

I started thinking about this, about my psychology, and why I am feeling so. There were many thoughts came in; maybe I was tired, maybe I had too much of business reading last week, maybe I was thinking negative, maybe I was philosophical where I started feeling there is no truth in material world? (I know it’s true early for me to feel thatJ) And found out that there is a connection between all the reasons I thought about.

Though the above topics look contrast to each other in the first place; in Indian context there is a perfect connection and they are very tightly integrated.

Indian philosophy is nothing but psychology. In the olden India there was no subject called psychology. Indian philosophy itself was psychology. The steps we see in our rituals, the scriptures, the essence of Vedas everything revolves around mental elevation of human beings. Just think about some of our morning rituals; be it getting up early in the morning, be it doing morning prayers, be it listening to light music or be it respecting elders and getting blessings; it all has a connection to psychology, pure psychology.

Our ancient Indian scriptures give lot of assurance about life, about wellbeing, about ‘God’ taking care of all the things. This is nothing but pumping energy and thereby making us to think positive. Indian philosophy never says to leave your normal duties to attain self-knowledge. It says one must mentally purify oneself by positive thinking and having a stronger mind.

There is much detail knowledge in our scriptures as how we can train our mind to elevate ourselves. It is said that our mind is our stronger friend when you train it and otherwise it can become a great enemy.

Lastly ageing, it is now proven that having a balanced life and positive thinking increases your immunity and one can live longer!! Our ancestors thought about all this and put these rituals in place which elevated us psychologically, trained us in positive thinking there by living longer/happier.

Such great is the knowledge of our ancient culture is that it draws a parallel between how we live and what we think. It is amazing knowledge but it’s so sad that we are not aware of what we have.