Chapter 4 - Methods of Developing Leadership Skills
Day 4
A leader thinks of himself as a perpetual student, and he learns from everybody, even a child. Celebration, relaxation, a sense of belonging, and the need to regularly upgrade our skills and acquire new one.
These are priorities that we should never neglect. Everyone is a student throughout their life. This is another quality of leadership.
A leader never stops learning. He thinks of himself as a perpetual student, and he learns from everybody, even from a child.
1. Creating Trust - If you look at the people around you and tell them that you do not trust them, then how will you feel? How would you like to live in a world where you do not trust anybody and nobody trusts you?
You would feel lonely, sad, insecure, helpless, miserable, depressed, or angry, all the time. Just imagine living in a world where everyone is like that.
Would you be able to make any progress? First, you need to create trust. That is the secret of management. And if you cannot trust others, the same thing applies to you.
Nobody likes being doubted. So why do we keep doubting everyone around us? Let me give you an everyday example.
In Europe or America, you find a caution notice, a label, pasted
inside cars, basically cautioning you to drive carefully, warning you that rash driving can be fatal.
If you look around carefully, you realise that you are cautioned about every other thing in the world. This has made us lose our innate trust in goodness.
You will notice that our doubts are always about something that is positive. If somebody tells you, "I love you very much," you ask, "Really?" But if somebody says, hate you", you do not question it.
Because hate, you think, is natural. So the next time you doubt, examine your thought. In all probability, it must be something good that you are skeptical about.
That is why we doubt God. We doubt in the goodness of people, in compassion, in love, in anything that is sweet. When we taught our courses free of cost, people would doubt.
"They must be getting something. Why are they teaching for free?" It sounds too good to be true. This sort of paranoia has been prevalent in society for long.
And it is only spirituality that can take us away from these false alarms and fears, and take us towards trusting ourselves and the people around us.
There is goodness to be found in every field. Not all corporate bigwigs are corrupted. Not all politicians are hopeless and not all spiritual and religious leaders are bad.
All that we need is to be able to see the goodness within ourselves and to trust that the Divine will bring all that we need into our lives. Banks give credit. I just take credit.
I go to the bank knowing that they always give credit. Take a burning lamp for instance. It is not just the lamp that burns. The wick and the oil burn too, but the lamp takes the credit.
Any achievement is a collective effort of so many. Spirituality is the connecting link, the one inspiration, the one wave, the one energy, the one divinity that helps us progress.
That component of life is called the spiritual component. And it is the lack of a spiritual component that throws us either into violence on one side or into depression and suicidal tendencies on the other side.
2. Developing Sense Of Belonging - You need to see your life in context of time and space - how vast creation is, how big the universe is and how small your life is, relative to the cosmos.
Billions of years have passed and billions more are to come. You are one among six billion people on this planet right now. Do you feel you belong to them all? Do you feel at home with everyone?
You can. Then, the moment you have a sense of belonging (starting with the feeling), just know that you have won customers everywhere. In fact, they become your family, an extended family.
A sense of belonging is very necessary in any set-up, whether it is a corporation, an NGO, a social or religious organisation. A good leader must create this sense of
belonging, a sense of
responsibility.
3. Communicating Through Presence - We convey more through our presence than through our words. A baby looking at you does not have to
say, I love you'.
The baby does not have to verbalise things. As adults, we talk and talk away, arguing for an hour, and yet we see that the person with whom we are arguing is not convinced.
Or even if we feel we have convinced them, they are in the same place as before. All our logic and our convictions, all our power has failed and we feel frustrated in life.
But this happens because we have not used the dimension that lies within us, i.e. non verbal communication. You should know this - you convey so much through your presence, your feelings.
When you get out of an aeroplane, the air hostesses tell you to have a nice day. They do not mean it personally, but when the same words come to you from your mother or grandmother, something touches you deeply.
You feel their words carry some emotion, some feelings. So your words must carry them too. If your presence is all mumbo jumbo, jammed with anger, pent-up and negative emotions, you cannot communicate properly, effectively and freely with people.
