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)
