Anurag Dubey_MLP008_Self Leadership_Sep’11

It was the 3^rd class of self leadership, almost after a break of 3 months. We all were there on 4^th floor, at 9.15am, with Snehal and Susie ma’am. Snehal ma’am started with giving a recent example from her life about what an inspired leader actually is; she said that while a airplane starts to take off, it is like all of us-moving steadily towards the track, but an inspired leader is one who takes with him everyone else into the sky. Then we all discussed about stress, what causes it and is it good or totally bad. She explained through a graph that upto a certain level of stress, our performance level increases, but beyond a limit, it gets deteriorated. We then made a stress map and studied the different effects of stress in our lives, in terms of cognitive, physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms. Though there were few students who had never experienced atleast one of these symptoms, I realized that I tend to suffer from each of them. Then, Susie ma’am took over and we tried to work on some stress busters through yoga and laughter therapy. We all enjoyed that session a lot.

Post lunch, Anil sir joined the class and we started to learn a new aspect in self-leadership: immunity to change; that the biggest barrier towards self-leadership lies within us; that we tend to resist to face our weaknesses; that we need to identify them and uproot them from our lives. We worked on the directions of Robert Kegan’s Immunity to change. We tried to create a robust x-ray map of our immune system by the use of 4 column entries. In the first column, I needed to put across a commitment, an improvement goal, which I felt that its one of the weakness which is coming into the way of my success. It was important to fill up this first column carefully as it shouldn’t be something not so important in life to work on, it needed to be something sufficiently important, and more to the point, something that aims at a personal adaptive change, otherwise I would be wasting time over it further. In the 2^nd column, I had to put up an 180⁰ behavior corresponding to the commitment in the 1^st column- to describe specific, concrete behaviors, to better see why I do that thing and what I am doing instead. The 3^rd column required me to put across the hidden competing commitments which helped me to go into deep understanding of my commitment and made me look beyond the horizon. Finally, the 4^th column is about digging out the mental assumptions that I have made in my mind which actually is making me immune to the change- it reveals territory that I have previously been subject to, and that my immune system has acted as guardians of.

I also went through the two documents that Anil sir mailed to us and that helped me increase my understanding further into this topic. The summary by Jonathan Reams about Robert Kegan’s work led to some interesting conclusions as per the author, some of them being- that mental growth continues after adolescence, that there is a distinction between technical and adaptive learning, that people have an intrinsic motivation to grow, that these kind of mindset changes take time, and that they involve both thinking and feeling, that reflection and action are interdependent and enable each other, and that there needs to be sufficient safety and support for facing the risks in this depth of change of mindset.

So, the outcome from this session for me was the realization that no change remains immuned if we actually walk deep into it and uproot it completely; all it requires is a deeper understanding about our individual behaviors. Overall it was a great day and a great learning experience and I look forward for the further classes on this same subject where we would move deeper into overcoming the immunity to change.