“Get Better at Getting Better”

I am a hard core strengths psychology believer and given my Clifton Strengthsfinder top 5 Signature talent themes, there is no way I wouldn’t have fallen in love with this book.

And if I were religious enough then I would have put and worshiped the portrait of Dr. Donald Clifton alongside Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, 2^nd Lt. Arun Khetarpal, PVC, Eric Liddle, Neerja Bhanot and my other role models.

Two of the top five talent themes I have are called Maximiser and Responsibility.

Maximiser is a theme that comes in the realm of influencing and Responsibility comes in that of execution.

Maximiser is to do with excellence – making things better and better; continuous improvement; endless refinement; increased efficiencies and spit and polish till it shines spotlessly outlook.

For us, quality matters over quantity.

Of course it can at times go overboard to the point of paralysis or pointlessness. Like my former boss once told me, ‘Sree, don’t make better, the enemy of good.’

Or as an ex colleague of mine once said about my dish washing – ‘Stop it Sree; the steel will become transparent.’

For maximisers like me, good enough isn’t good enough. We constantly challenge the status quo and keep raising the bar, instinctively and unconsciously.

If there was a favourite sportsperson who would symbolize us, then it would be the great pole vaulter Sergei Bubka who literally kept raising the bar.

Coming to the responsibility theme, the word onus from which emerges the word ownership doesn’t scare us even as the word onus also means weighty. In fact, the opportunity or the call to step in and step up brings out the best and the most natural in us.

We cannot say no easily nor can we give in easily and end up taking psychological ownership of whatever we take on to the point that we even get dreams of what we are about to do the next day regarding what we took ownership for.

And yes, we take it personally.

We just don’t realise it but we do take our job or the task we took responsibility for, personally.

Of course it does at times leave us reeling when we realize that those who exhorted us or triggered us to do so were themselves hollow, shallow or had feet of clay.

Some well meaning people do tell us ‘Dil pe mat le yaar’ but often it doesn’t help.

And then of course, I have the Connectedness and Strategic themes as well in my top 5 talent themes which come in the realm of relationship building and thinking domains, respectively.

I will talk about the Strategic talent theme in detail at another time but suffice it to say that Connectedness is a spiritual theme and those of us who have it in our top order intuitively believe that everything is connected and happens for a reason or to paraphrase the quote of a famous person (no marks for guessing) who memorably said in his 2005 Stanford university graduation speech that we intuitively know that the ‘dots will someday, somehow, beautifully connect well backwards’ and help us make sense of what’s going on here and now.

We look for what is inherently common and similar between people from diverse backgrounds than use diversity to spread us far, apart and adrift.

Connectedness is what leads some people with the motto: ‘Believe it to see it’ unlike those who need to ‘See it to believe it.’

This helps us operate in nebulous zones and in misty areas where the path isn’t clear enough for the pioneers.

As in the systems theory, none of these traits exist in isolation. They influence each other and integrate with each other to create interesting outcomes that are unique to each person.

Hence in my case when my Maximiser, Connectedness, Strategic and Responsibility themes interact, the following outcomes emerge:

·        Conscious of the bigger picture and the broader community, I strive to contribute my best for the greater good

·        When considering future possibilities, I eliminate the bad to find the good and then sort through the good to find the best

·        I feel compelled to honour the commitments I make to others and to meet the standards of excellence I set for myself

Thank you Mr. Chandramouli Venkatesan for the book and its excerpt in the Hindustan Times of 5^th February 2019.

I am certainly going to use the lift operator’s example from your book in my forthcoming workshops.

Dedicated with gratitude to the late Curt Liesveld for the selfless manner in which you left us with the rich Gallup ‘Paired Up’ theme dynamics pairing document which helped me discover the words that articulate what used to come to me quite instinctively and intuitively.

Sohum

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