Inspired Leadership and the five pillars of SOIL….Mindfulness, Ethics, Compassion, Diversity, and Sustainability. Prior to my advent at SOIL, I was aware of meaning of these simple looking words, but was quite away from the real sense behind these words.
My journey at SOIL started with Self Leadership class by Anil sir. This class was a short journey to learn observing our own feelings, thoughts, and actions. It taught me the power of mindfulness, and its effect on Ethics. If one is mindful, has control of its actions, and knows the difference between right & wrong, then one could understand Ethics. In current scenario, we see that the business world is not free of corruption. Every second day we find some scam in newspaper. All this happens just because we have lost control on our action and it is now a part of our culture. We concluded that it is not an easy task to eradicate this virus from our system, but the time has come to build a brigade that will curb this virus from spreading. So, we have to bring these two words “Mindfulness” and “Ethics” out of our dictionary and start practising this in our daily life.
Third word “Compassion”, which I rarely understood in my life, was taught to us in a very interesting way. I could have never appreciated Compassion the way I did by seeing an exercise of a person stepping into other’s shoe.
We were then taught Appreciative Inquiry by doing a simple exercise of listening to each other’s story and then appreciating each one of us for their strength. This exercise taught us recognize the power of diversity in building a motivated team that could further help in building a great Organization.
Then the word “Sustainability” was discussed. Sustainability means optimum utilization of resources today, so that it could be saved for future. We must practise this in order to save our planet Earth and human society from extinction. This has to start from very basic activities that are in our control such as, closing tap properly after its use, not wasting water during shaving or taking bath etc.
The crux of this whole exercise was to learn controlling our action and our behaviour. If we succeed in practising these five pillars, then it means that we have started building an army of Inspired Leaders who will take charge of tomorrow’s world and will be responsible for making this world a better place to live.
Next Leadership session happened on 8th Sep 2011.This was again an eye opening session and great self-learning. There is a big ‘S’, source, to which a True Leader is always connected and knows the true purpose of his life. If one wants to feel content, then one needs to give unconditional love and for that s/he should get rid of ego, because ego is friend of fear, which is opposite of Unconditional love.
The most interesting learning from this session was “Immunity to Change”. Every person has hidden competing commitment and assumptions that prevent them from becoming a better person. I learnt that if I want to improve myself then I should know these assumptions and try to overcome my competing commitments.
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