Personal commitment

During the month of December, I had an opportunity to attend two training sessions, one was about entrepreneurship conducted by Ram Charan and Sadhguru and the second was about Transactional Analysis (TA 1O1) conducted by Saru, an authority on TA.

One common theme of both the programs was about the personal responsibility we have in making things work for ourselves. During one of the discussions, Sadhguru brought out very emphatically the role of "me" as in I, in making things happen. Similarly, basic premise of TA is, if I need to bring change in any situation, I need to change myself to bring that change. A friend of mine says it very well, I take the responsibility for how I feel about every transaction.

I feel this is a very powerful concept and makes me feel being in charge in all the situations as its no more about the others but its about me. If I change myself, I will be able to achieve anything that i desire to. Most of what we do, starts in our brain, most of the times its subconscious, point is making it conscious and equipping ourselves to achieve.

How does this translate to business parlance - I was reading an interview of Larry Page, cofounder of google, he was asked a question about how he views the competition, his response quoted verbatim - "Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there's a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven't thought of yet that you really need. And by definition, if our competitors knew that thing, they wouldn't tell it to us or anybody else. I think just our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities are different than any other company". Very clearly, focussing within and driving excellence is a much better strategy than keep worrying about the competition.

In the same context, sadhguru spoke about the investment we need to do in ourselves to make us equipped. One form of that was keeping our body agile and receptive to stimuli so that we can be perceptive. He emphasized a lot on maintenance of our spine through yoga. He compared the spine to an information highway - receive the stimuli and make it travel to the brain for a suitable response. For a speedy response, the spine needs to be unclogged.

I have made a promise to the self, I want to be conscious of how I am thinking all the time.