Human Becoming...

HUL put out fabulous results a couple of days ago. Got me thinking about the 10+ years that I worked at the place and all the fabulous journeys that I was a part of. Igniting Growth is one of my favourites because of its honesty and impact it had on the DNA of the organisation. I felt compelled to tell the story so that more organisations can learn from it.

By empowering women in Rural areas and enabling them to earn a livelihood, Project Shakti at Hindustan Unilever is a heart-warming story about doing well by doing good. It is principled, patient and  embeds social goals into an organization’s innovation agenda and processes. I was fortunate to be in the organisation when some of this work was being rolled out.

So much of our lives right now leads us away from each other. With the focus on individualism, the focus on careers, the focus on self-servingness, the inability to simply sit on a porch and watch the falling rain —I’m going to sound real old-fashioned here—but to sit together at the dinner table and be genuinely interested in each other, to notice each other’s wonder, each other’s presence, each other’s human plight— we don’t have time for each other any more. And I believe that it is this focus that we don’t have time, this belief that we don’t have time, this belief that we don’t need each other, this belief that we can make it on our own, that there really is such a thing as an individual: I believe this is what is killing us.

With the arrival of Ethan on the 27^th of January 2012, Raynah and I clearly have our hands full. Fortunately there is inspiration aplenty in Ozone. There’s a family with 5 children, and another with 4. When we see all those families having a blast, cycling, playing ball or then going for a night walk we are encouraged and can see the light at the end of nights spent changing nappies, bed sheets and linen!

But for the moment I’m fascinated with the odds of raising a world-class-whatever having increased substantially with the arrival of our third. The Polgar sisters were a family of three.  Agassi was the 4^th in a family of four children. Sampras was the 3^rd in a family of four. Djokovic is the eldest in a family of three boys. Matthew Syed makes the point nicely in his book – Bounce. Siblings close in age with similar interests make for hours of dedicated competitive practice that moves both participants ever closer to the magical 10,000 hours.

But that isn’t all there is to the story. I have recently devoured a number of autobiographies of great sportspeople and they all have one thing in common. They didn’t wait for any divine intervention or signal. Someone in their lives took a stand for them when they were very young. Someone spotted that special skill and dedication and committed a significant part of their lives to feeding that skill and making it world class.

Gencic saw Djokovic when he was six years old. Toni Nadal introduced Nadal to tennis when he was three! Mike Agassi moved to a house in Vegas where he could afford to build a tennis court in the backyard. Ray and I are taking a stand for the three musketeers and sparing no effort to help them find their ‘remarkable’! The grandparents on both sides are throwing their weight in too.

A question that continues to fascinate me is probably the most fundamental one. How do we as parents, hold the minds of our three boys as the sky holds the birds? How do we teach them to think for themselves, to think with open minds, to think in such a way that they already begin to take responsibility of their own lives? From personal experience I know I love instructing Aidan and Dylan from outside in, assuming that their ignorance can be filled with my expertise in the domain of tennis. I often ignore their own awareness of themselves and the effect of their actions on the world.

Teaching the boys tennis this way is hard work. Throw in the Bangalore sun at 11:00 am and it is enervating. “Bad shot. You hit it too hard! Look at the ball closely. You are holding the racquet too tight. That’s enough for today if you are playing this rubbish” All of this comes naturally to me. But what I’m probably doing is teaching them to doubt themselves, their own capacities and the world. I’m guilty of interfering with my children’s learning in pretty much the same way I interfere with my own learning.

What Ray and I have slowly come around to doing is very different. We try and have conversations that allow them make decision for themselves. As thinking partners to our children we ask them questions that help them think for themselves, questions that increase their awareness of what they are doing, what their motivations are, what effects their actions have on others and the world, and what the consequences and after effects of those actions might be. It is a lot of work especially when the results are probably going to show or not show 20 years later!

Aidan hasn’t been the luckiest person on the block in the last couple of months. He’s been troubled by a mysterious skin condition that results in these huge pus-filled boils erupting on his back on legs. Having seen my sister struggle through similar boils through her growing years I know just how painful they are.

When he first began to get them about a year ago, they were few and far between. In the more recent past he gets one almost every other month. Caring for the wound requires regular cleaning and dressing which causes him considerable pain. When he was smaller, it was possible to restrain him physically for the few minutes that were required to expel the pus. That however is no longer an option, so I set out to see if there might be a more empowering approach that helped him understand how he might be able to cope with it better.

Fresh in my mind, was the last time I had deceived him into believing I was going to give him a bath in the tub, only to press out the seed of the boil when he least expected it. It took me almost a month to earn his trust after that episode. I couldn’t make that mistake again.

When he woke up the other morning, he crawled out of the bedroom awkwardly on one leg, propping up the knee that had the boil. After Ray removed the dressing it became clear that his whole knee was swollen from the accumulation of pus and it had to be fomented to provide him some relief. So I did something that I hadn’t considered before. I gave him a choice.

I told him he could go through the day in pain became the pus would remain inside, or that he could help me foment his knee while playing a drum game on his knee and feel better through the day. After a little hesitation, he chose the latter. Thirty minutes and five mugs of hot water later, the boil burst and the swelling subsided. Aidan walked proudly out of the bathroom to tell his mother of the courage and bravery he had shown and was on top of the world for the rest of the day!

There is a valuable lesson that I learned from my little boy that morning. I learned that the choices I make most often are the ones that require the least time and commitment. I justify them to myself saying they are effective and save time that can be deployed elsewhere. I’m also happy making choices for other people, because I can then force my choice criteria on them and convince them that they made the best choice possible. The tragedy however in that approach is that there is no empowerment and growth available to the person on the receiving end. By allowing Aidan to making his own choices I’m helping him prepare for the time when dad and mom won’t be there to shout out instructions.

In my working years, I worked with many great leaders, but the ones that I remember most fondly are the ones that always let me make my own choices. As leaders, you always have a choice to make. Are you going to choose for the people you lead, or are you going to empower them to make their own choices?

About a month ago, I had both my wisdom teeth on the right side of my jaw extracted. I was barely able to sleep that night and was still bleary eyed and in desperate need of another 5 minutes of sleep when Aidan clambered onto me at 8:00 in the morning claiming he had discovered a ‘NEW’ room in the house!

Before I could even brush my teeth or get out of my night clothes I was being dragged out of the front door, onto the lawn and across the side path to the back of the house where I discovered that the ‘NEW’ room (which had deprived me of some much needed sleep!) was in fact the servant’s toilet at the rear of the house.

Later that day in the evening, Aidan was playing with Valentin, a lovely little German boy with a zest for life like none I have ever seen. Both of them were huddled over some scratching they were making on the road with chalk and having an animated discussion. I went in to fetch a bottle of water and came out to discover that both of them had vanished. After a search and rescue operation that took me all over the sprawling campus that we live on I found both of them sitting in… you guessed it - the ‘NEW’ room!

This little incident is a reminder that we are all born with the intrinsic ability to be truly excited and delirious with joy for the smallest little things. The problem is that somewhere along the way we lose it, rather, we make the choice not to get excited about these things. As you grapple with the chaos that comes your way this week, look for the ‘NEW’ room in your life. Chances are, it has been in your life for a long time and you haven’t truly discovered it!

In the game called ‘YOUR LIFE’ how are you PLAYING?

a. Playing to WIN

b. Playing NOT TO LOSE

c. JUST Playing

d. NOT Playing

In all the choices that you make, you answer the above question in one way or the other! It’s worth asking yourself how YOU are playing this WEEK!

Aidan and Dylan have questions all the time. And they want answers immediately. In the last 6 weeks I haven’t had the crutch called ‘I’m preoccupied with office work’ to lean on. As a result, I have become far more attentive to how I listen. In short, for the first time in my life I have a listening of my listening.

Aidan gets it when he has my complete attention. When he doesn’t he gets very agitated. Initially he will protest saying, ‘Daddy, you are not listening to me’. If that fails to evoke a response he will then repeat his question in a much louder voice. If that fails too, he resorts to throwing a tantrum and sulking with me. On the bright side, I have figured that he’s actually extremely generous. He gives me three strikes before giving up on me!

I have become aware that my listening is uncluttered in the morning, and gets distracted as the days goes by. I have tried to focus on how I breathe to become more present to the moment when I am at the table with Ray and the boys.

I’m taking an examination shortly, to get my ACC credential from the ICF and I’m a little nervous! It has been over 10 years since I last took an examination of any sort so this is almost a new experience. It is like I’m stepping outside my comfort zone. Curiously, the examination is fundamentally a test of how good my listening is. The heart of coaching effectively lies in a total listening of the client and that’s a skill that takes some building.

You don’t have to be a coach or an aspiring coach to work on your listening. It is a basic human skill that we can all work on. The #1 complaint when asking for a divorce outside of adultery is, ‘He/She does not listen to me’. I don’t have a statistic for the workplace but from my experience a lot of ideas don’t see the light of day because someone isn’t listening. I’m working on listening to my listening, so that Ray and the boys keep talking to me. So that they know I’m truly up to sharing their experiences that I’m eager to know about; that I’m listening. Try the same with your colleagues at work and see what that brings up for you this week.

The morning routine since Aidan’s first day at Greenwood High has been very regimented for both the boys. They are up by 7:30; play on the road in front till 8:00. Breakfast is from 8:00 to 8:15. Both then get dressed – Aidan for school and Dylan for the day. They have 15 minutes to play before both of them get onto my sister’s trusty old Kinetic Honda and head off to drop Aidan. On my way back, I stop at my parent’s place and drop Dylan off. He spends an hour there before I pick him up and brig him home.

After the long weekend, I decided to change up the routine just a little bit. Dylan is a getting stronger and he is quite the fidget when he is at the wheel. Riding the scooter with both of them jostling for controls on the handle was getting quite challenging, so being the safety freak that I am (Thank you Unilever!) I decided this was a potential hazard and that I wasn’t going to wait for a near miss to change things.

So this morning, at 8:30 I put Dylan on the cycle and rode to my parent’s place. He thought it was a bonus ride and was extremely happy for the duration of the ride. I stopped to drop him off and he shrugged a little. He refused to get out of the seat! It had begun to occur to him that something might have changed. When I was handing him over to my mom, he clung to me, refusing to let go. My mom had to distract him by pointing out a kitten bounding across the lawn to allow me a chance to do a Houdini and vanish. It took him a few minutes to get ‘Daddy’ out of his mind and was fine for the rest of the morning.

The events of the morning left me considering just how difficult it is to change anything. If my toddler, who still doesn’t have a say in pretty much everything can register an almost automatic resistance to change, even if it is only in the sequencing of events, then imagine the task on hand when you set out to change things in organizations, a country or then the world!

So as you get through this week, consider how many things you are trying to change as ask whether it is worth the effort. Given the automatic resistance you are going to face, are you better served focusing your energy on a few?