Thursday, July 4, 2013

Self Leadership Day 5: Overcoming your fears, School Of Inspired Leadership, Gurgaon

 What a better day to throwing away our fears than 4th of July which eventually is the United States of America's Independence day. Today's Self Leadership class was how to cope up with our fears.
We discovered certain antidotes to fears. Before that the concept that Vision multiplied to efforts will give value enhancement while vision when added with fear will destruct the value we already possess. Hence giving up of fears is essential to move ahead in life.

The first technique was Gestalt which each of us in the class did to overcome the fear of failure. In this technique we folded a paper once in the middle. The front side of the paper was used to pictorially draw an image on how would success look like after a year at School of Inspired Leadership. On the opposite side of the fold we had to draw how would failure look like if everything went wrong. Thereafter we had to draw a picture inside the folds combining both the earlier pictures and showing how will you overcome all the fears of failure and will do what you have dreamt to. It was in my view again a healing exercise.

There is also a theory called as Learning Circle which has the following steps:
   1)      Experience the new paradigm (might come with Vision) 
   2)      Denial of new paradigm 
   3)      Anger with the new paradigm
   4)      Chaos- May be?
   5)      Unlearn the old (Let it go)
   6)      Aha!! (The Eureka Moment)
   7)      Imbibe the new paradigm

In life we always have some resistance whenever we want to do something. One should understand that resistance is the need for electricity generation and similarly it is only through overcoming resistances that we can do great work. All great work in this world is a story of how someone came over resistance. So if one overcomes this resistance then he/she can achieve anything that they want to. There is a study done by few University of Michigan professors on how to overcome resistance and they gave the following formula:
D X V X F > R

Where R: Resistance in life
             D: Dissatisfied with life to achieve more (realise the true potential); like Sachin Tendulkar put 
                 new efforts everyday.
             V: Powerful Vision (Imagine what exactly you want to do)
             F: First steps or rather huge Efforts (to channelize the vision)

Remember that every performance gap that comes in is not because of lack of ability but because of lack of effort.

Anil Sir also told us that there are two types of spirituality 1) Passive Spirituality: (‘Vairagya’ in hindi) This spirituality is practiced by the great masters in caves or secluded places where their only aim is to come out of the cycle of birth & death. 2) Dynamic Spirituality: It is to stay in the world and make efforts by contributing to change the world to a better place.

Another way to overcome the fear is by controlled experimentation on risk taking in a safe environment. Certain workshops like FIRE WALK WORKSHOP help you in this. We might have this workshop this year at SOIL.
                To overcome the fears of criticism hear feedback from your best friend. Take honest review, accept them, evaluate and see if that is true then work on them. A true friend is the one who shows you the mirroe. He will never put you down but tells you how you are not using your capabilities to the full.
                To overcome the allergy to ambiguity one should just accept what new information they get and try to learn them as not all things are present in black and white. People with humanities background can accept ambiguity in a much better way that people who are engineers or are calculative in approach.
                The fear of time and resource scarcity is when people look at scarcity rather than abundance. Few tips are plan your day, honour what you have, multitasking, optimum usage of resources, frugal innovations etc.
                To overcome the fear of nature on should take a nature walk in a garden, do gardening, appreciate nature, hear birds sing and be in the company of people who can bring you closer to nature.
                After the workshop I thought about my own fears and realised that I have only one of them and I have already started working on it. Hopefully I overcome that and then there will be no stopping! J
(Courtesy: Anil Sachdev, Self Leadership class at School of Inspired Leadership, Gurgaon)





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