Dr. Shailesh Thaker - Best Management Training Blog - Top Management Consultants

Posts Tagged ‘learning’

And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Aristotle Will Durant*, commenting on Aristotle, pointed out that the philosopher had it exactly right 2000 years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do.” By relying on highly specific practices, we’ve seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.

Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work — something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice as the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.

There is something wonderfully empowering about this. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that’s also daunting. One of Ericsson’s central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

I have practiced tennis deliberately over the years, but never for the several hours a day required to achieve a truly high level of excellence. What’s changed is that I don’t berate myself any longer for falling short. I know exactly what it would take to get to that level.

I’ve got too many other higher priorities to give tennis that attention right now. But I find it incredibly exciting to know that I’m still capable of getting far better at tennis — or at anything else — and so are you.

Listen your people immediately (no hearing).We usually says to people, ‘talk to me later’. Even, we hardly look up to them (eye contact) and communicate as we are occupying in technology. I found people are busier in electronic gadgets and missing charm of meeting live people. Most of the time we give importance to technology, instead of live people. Isn’t it? Listen people completely. Do not cut their thoughts before they actually finished. (People do cut the thoughts of the people as if they know it). To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection .Listen intently till the people are exhausted.
Life is “now “or never.  Do it now have impact in the life. Leaders always respect the power of ‘now’ and listen them. This moment is the truth of the life. This truth is very well understood by leader, that’s why leader listen his executives, managers and team members.
Once we listen our people we have the following advantages.
1/ People down the line believe that they have a person to share their emotions.
2/ as a leader we come to know the actual status of the situation.
3/ indirectly, leader give the confidence to the people and power to communicate.
4/ People down the line feel that they have a shoulder to cry or spine support to stand tall.
5/ Leader offer solutions or decisions to the matter.

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. “
Peter F. Drucker

Ani Tenzin Palmo, a 64-year-old Buddhist nun , is traveling the world to raise funds to build a religious community for women in India.

What is the sound of a Buddhist nun sitting alone for 12 years in a Himalayan cave?

“Quiet,” Tenzin Palmo recalled last week.

“Never boring. And very beautiful.”

The phone line from Vancouver fell silent for a moment.

“I wasn’t planning to do 12 years,” she continued. “But it was the ideal place to practice” meditation. “So, I just stayed there.”

“There” was a space both tiny and vast . . .

Tenzin Palmo’s cave near the Tibetan border was so small she slept sitting up, her legs folded beneath her as in meditation.  Beyond lay snowcapped mountains and mist-filled valleys sweeping to infinity.

“It was the perfect environment for carrying on one’s spiritual practices,” said Palmo, 64, who has since become a leading transmitter of Tibetan Buddhism to the West and a star in some eastern Buddhist countries. . .

When she climbed down from her “perfect environment” in 1988, however, she returned not to a welcoming community of nuns, but of monks.  It was no surprise.

Born Diane Perry in London in 1943, Palmo had become a Tibetan Buddhist at age 18 and moved two years later to study in northern India.  She soon discovered how few nuns are in the 1,200-year-old Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

“Everything I read in those days was about monks, monks, monks,” she recalled with a laugh.

Worse, women who did commit to Tibetan religious life typically found themselves kept uneducated and “waiting on the monks” as cooks and housekeepers.

Perry - who had wanted to be a nun since age 10 “even though I didn’t believe in God” - was undeterred.

She shaved her head and took ordination in 1964 - one of the first Western women ever to do so - and later served as assistant to her teacher, before heading to her snow cave in 1976.

But after she returned, she discovered the winds of feminism reaching even the high Himalayas.  Her lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, asked her several years later to create a separate religious community nearby for women. . .

Since then, she has been traveling the world to raise funds for what has become the Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India, which opened the first of its many doors in 2000.

The site, about 40 miles from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama, houses 52 women, she said, but “we are building for 130.”

“She’s important because she’s absorbed the great teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and communicates them through a Western mind,” said Christopher Sohnly, a member of the Shambhala Center’s visit committee, which invited Ani Tenzin Palmo to Philadelphia. Her efforts to promote women’s religious communities have also made her “a pop star in places like Taiwan,” Sohnly said.  She was the subject of 1999 biography, Cave in the Snow, by Vickie MacKenzie, and published Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Lessons in Practical Buddhism, in 1999.

I am reading book “How the mighty fall” written by Jim Collins on the Singapore airport at 4-00 p.m. with my favorite coffee. I am waiting for my Osaka flight .I would love to share the lines of the last page of the book. “Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do yourself than on what the world does to you.”
If we have spelled the word “book”, how we will spell? BE DOUBLE OKAY. A book which can make our mind in okay status, I called it “book”.
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. “Said by Harold Bloom, O Magazine, and April 2003. (US author, critic, educator, & scholar (1930 - )
Some of the books are very elegantly written .The books get attention on outlets are most of the time balance with elegant printing, designing, packing and highlighted content. An average person should read at least 24 books every year. (2 in months).I think I am Fair in selecting this numbers. When we read lovely book we fall in to love automatically.
Last year the number of new books was 288,355, not counting the hundreds of thousands of self-published books that came off presses such as XLibris and iUniverse. And, as long as we’re being numerical, it’s worth noting the mountain of books already in existence, to which publishers are constantly adding— currently, 129,864,880, says a software engineer who just posted a fascinating entry on the Inside Google Book blog, about what Google counts as a book.

Leader can certainly shape great life by reading books.

Happy reading!

Norman Vincent Peale quoted “Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow!”
Thomas Alva Addison said after finding out bulb,” I have invented 1000 ways through bulb cannot be invented in the world.”
Brilliancy is not possible over night. Practice is everything. Everyday practicing. Everyday homework. Everyday investment in efforts leads us to accomplishment.
Very popular cricketer Sachin Tendulkar always goes to Shivaji Park for practice. A melodious singer Lata Mangeskar still today goes for rehearsal before final performance. Amir Khan a bollywood star went for exercise of 4 hours every day for the performance in the film “Gazhani”
Can we get world class success without homework? World class brilliancy can be created by everyday homework, practice and passionate efforts. Major accomplishment is supported by consistent efforts, devoted life and triggering talent.
“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.” Indian freedom fighter said profoundly by Mohandas Gandhi.
Every day, efforts bring some improvement in the performance.
Input of goal achievement case of world class swimmer……………….
Practice as if you of the worst. Perform as if you are of the best.