There is no greater a confidence than…

For quite some time now I have been wanting to do a dots-of-gratitude exercise on paper.

The idea is simple.

I take any incident or experience that I am grateful for in my life and start connecting the dots backward in terms of the people who were the cause of that experience in my life and then the people because of whom I met them and so on. And so the dots keep going backward.

Invariably most of the dots have ended up with my father, given some of the decisions he took for and about me.

Nevertheless I want to share here something that I did recently and connect the dots to and with some of the people I am eternally grateful to.

Responsible hospitality is one of my favourite themes and I love studying the hotel and hospitality industry. I have often quoted examples from the Oberoi, Taj, Lemon Tree, Sayaji, Barbeque Nation and the Arya Niwas hotels in my corporate training sessions.

On 26^th February, I was asked to design and conduct a short session on networking skills for 45 managers of one of the best known 5 star hotel chains of India; as part of their management development programme.

I made it a story-based experiential session where, from the very stories I wanted the managers to deduce the operating philosophies, principles and do’s and don’t’s of networking as I saw it.

Of course, given my deep and abiding belief in positive Pygmalion effect, the managers were able to deduce the Go Givers approach of Bob Burg and John David Mann as well as Adam Grant’s Give and Take approach to networking along with the do’s and don’t’s.

They deduced that we all have gifts for the world and that as Bill McCartney put it so succinctly: “We have not come here to compete with one another. We have come here to complete one another”.

The idea was to help them overcome some of the myths and fears around networking and help them accept that networking is as ancient as the human civilization and that it happens effortlessly when we operate from a space of humility, growth mindset and authenticity combined with the five principles of the Go Givers philosophy.

I also touched upon what I call as the strengths-based networking where we are able to operate comfortably from our authentic self than have to worry about copying someone else’s approach that we do not inherently feel comfortable with.

In essence I shared the stories of my well wishers and friends Kiran Gulrajani, Devjit Sarkar, Vinit Taneja Sir, Kaushik Chakravborty, Nithya Shanti, Raj Mali, Dr. Rangana Rupavi Choudhuri, Manpreet Kaur, Mridul Batra, Atul Saraf, Sushil Prasade, Manish Gupta, Neha Shrimali, Nitin Bhaskar, Ashish Choudhary and Navneet Prakash.

Thank you all for all that you all have been to and for me through all these years of networking, knowing, being, doing and having.

Thank you Kiran, Devjit, Dr. Rangana, Manpreet and Neha for reaching out and enriching me with your gifts for the world.

And thank you Vinit Sir, Kaushik, Nithya, Raj, Mridul, Atul and Sushil for blessing me with your gifts and suggestions when I reached out to you.

This reminds me of a wonderful way of looking; something I have picked up from Vinit Taneja Sir: Instead of wondering what can you be the best in the world, ask: what can we be the best for the world?

I concluded the session with proposing a toast for all them to become Go Giver networkers; to develop Dr. Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset for networking and while networking; to experience and practice the African way of Ubuntu in their networking and to live out what Bill McCartney so beautifully articulated.

During the question answer session, one of the participants Ayushi shared a prevalent situation and asked me for help.

In essence, she shared that we are influenced by the outer appearance of people and we may not reach out and network with people whom we perceive to be resource less or less resourcesfull, to put it mildly.

My response was to share with them once again, the approach I had touched upon earlier in the session: to apply the lesson my law batch mate Mukesh Anand shared with me when he shared Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote with me: “Every man I meet is superior to me in some way. In that I learn of him.”

I had carried with me to the session two diaries that I have been maintaining for the last 20 years which has a wealth of wisdom in it based on Emerson’s simple question with which I approached relative strangers: Please share with me the best lesson you’ve learnt in your life.

To illustrate my response to Ayushi, I shared with them all the amazing life shaping experience of my dear young friend Ankit Aggarwal – a story that he shared with me about his life lessons when he was all but 13 years old.

I will one day share in detail, Ankit’s story in one of my posts.

I asked the managers to ponder about this question over the next few days: “So, what’s your gift for the world?”

I also shared with them an open structured mind map for them to map out their networking journey using the 1H-6W formula.

And it was during one of the highs of the session that I found the following words roll out of my mouth in a moment of epiphany – There is No Greater a Confidence than the Confidence that comes from a apace of Humility.

As I conclude, I cannot but acknowledge the great role you all have played as well in my life because of the people and their gifts you introduced into my life even as I could not share your stories in my short session.

Thank you Junie Wadhawan, Jayaraj Sir, Seema Rizvi, Neha Naqvi, Dilip Shankar, Ekta Sharma and Raman Krishnan Anna.

Sohum

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