Overview

Even though Kaizen (continuous improvement) is primarily associated with business and engineering these days, I like to apply this philosophy to my life. By extending the meaning of this word from continuous improvement to lifelong learner I apply this philosophy to every aspect of my life. I first picked up on this idea of constant striving in my boarding school at 16 years old, where I had innumerable opportunities to explore my interests. Even though I was actively involved in more things than I had time for, in order to be consistent with my belief in kaizen I decided to give an assembly talk to improve my non existent public speaking skills. The motivation for this assembly talk was not only growing out of my public speaking fear but also to share some of the new ideas I had learnt to improve upon myself. The exact content of the assembly talk I gave in 2017 is what follows.

Assembly talk on perspective shifts, 2017

What if I tell you that this talk could potentially change your life? Neither expect to find the holy grail in this talk nor to be enlightened immediately after the talk. But it will get you thinking. This talk is about change in perspectives, which have greatly helped many others and me. There are two perspectives that I will talk about.

For the first, let me start with an example. Last year, during this inter house match our team wasn’t really doing good. Since I was the junior most in the team, my captain found it very convenient to blame me. As a result, I decided to just give up because I didn’t really feel like playing with a captain like him. The key point here is not the reason or the challenging situation, but the fact that I gave up. This kept happening a couple of times and I hated it when this would happen. I didn’t like the way I reacted to challenges. I wanted to change but I kept telling myself that there are two types of people, one who thrive under pressure and others who don’t and I belong to the latter. Even though I wanted to change this, my mentality never let me. This year when I was going to be leading my house team in hockey, I was really worried about this part of me. I would constantly worry about what if we go down by 3 goals and I give up. I couldn’t live with the fact that I would let my team down this way.

Now, there have been matches in which we were down by 6 goals and I still didn’t give up, I kept fighting till the end.

What changed?

I took a different approach;~~.~~ A perspective change. Instead of telling myself that this is who I am I told myself I can take a different approach. After carefully examining my thoughts and feelings what I realized was that I wasn’t actually scared of losing the game. What I feared was that my reaction to failure won’t be good. Similarly, every single time I felt like dropping the idea of this assembly talk because I was too scared, I would remind myself of what I was really scared of. You see, it is never the stimulus we fear it is always our reaction to it that we fear. Now if one can take charge of oneself and be assured of own actions, one won’t feel scared of these situations anymore. I was ready for whatever came my way. This applies to everything in your life. This technique is also used by some of the professional sportsmen. They would picture situations they don’t perform well in, and then try to examine their feelings as closely as possible. Now they decide on how they are going to react to it when this situation arises. What this does is that when you are put in the same position again, you feel familiar to the feelings and this time you decide on doing what you intend to do rather than just reacting to it the way you normally do.  This approach can be applied to every aspect in your life. There is always a stimulus and you react to each stimulus in a specific manner. Now between the stimulus and your reaction lies the choice. The choice to decide what you want to do.

Once you start controlling your actions you change into a proactive person compared to the reactive one before. First step to being proactive is that we need to stop using phrases like I have to or this is the way I am. We should be saying I choose to or I can take a different approach. Since, the thing all of us fear is our reaction~~s~~ then just by remembering that you can choose your actions, you will be freed of the fear and with this you gain the power of self-control, the power of making your own choices.

Now, moving onto to the second skill or perspective.

The most common phrase we hear in this school is, “I don’t have enough time”. The school is such a demanding place that we often encounter situations in which we have to choose something over the other. Your timetable gets so overfilled that your life gets driven by these activities and not by you. There might come a time when you feel helpless because you can’t get all the work done. We can divide our daily activities into four sections:

1.      Urgent and important

2.      urgent but not important

3.      not urgent but important and

4.      not urgent and not important.

On careful examination you will realize most of the things you do in your day are either urgent and important or urgent and not important. If you are a procrastinator then you will find your timetable filled with not important and not urgent things. We are so occupied with the urgent things that they take away all of our time and we lose out on the things we really want to pursue. These things are in the category: important but not urgent and this category according to me is the most important one.

Think of something that you will start doing today and which will have a positive impact on your life. Think of such an activity in both your professional and personal life. These are the activities which get pushed back every time something urgent comes up. But it is important to take time out for these activities. For example, this assembly talk: I realized that I had turned out to be proficient in many areas except in the field of public speaking. It is a skill that I think I lack and I believe it is an important skill too. So I decided to give an assembly talk. Like each one of you I had my activities which would consume my time and push this back in my timetable. It kept getting delayed for four months and then I realized that it will keep on happening forever unless I do something about it. So, I let go of some of the urgent and not important activities and give this some time. It is activities like these that really help you develop as a person. So, it is important that you take out some time for the activities, which are important but not urgent.

Just knowing all of this is never enough. I have known this for almost a year now and I am starting to learn how to implement it now. It is important that we must keep these things in our minds every time we make a decision. Both the skills point towards one key. Being in control of yourself. If today I can say that I am who I am because of the decisions that I made yesterday, then I am truly in charge of myself.