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08/17/2005
Life @ TAPMI!!
Reflections always seems to give us a reality check of where we stand in the sands of time and what we’ve made of our lives with the opportunities that have come knocking to our doorsteps. Every moment we get to learn something from life, good or otherwise. Personal competency… it’s whole gamut of what we are and how we adjust ourselves in the present state of affairs so that we are in a better position than in the past.
Self Awareness:In this module I learnt the importance of understanding self, team building & group dynamics and self-assessment and development. One of the instruments which we used during the module was the Johari window. Developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham the Johari(Joe and Harry) window model was a communication and a feedback model to depict how we give and receive information about ourselves and others. Understanding self is the first step towards greater self awareness and by knowing ourselves we can improve our personality and performance.
I never thought that working in a group can be such an enriching experience. Contrary to my skewed notion that working in a motley group of people may suffocate our individuality I was pleasantly surprised to find a completely new facets of my personality. I liked the new experience of working collectively and also towards a common goal. Nowadays, since most of the tasks in the corporate world are group oriented we got a hands-on-training in that aspect. Learning about the various theories related to team building and functioning made me aware of the challenges of working in a group effectively and also about the fringe benefits of working in a group.
I also learnt about the importance of a good self perception and that having a good perception about oneself gets reflected in the work we do both as a team as well as individually.
Unlearn Module:Theme I focused mainly on improving and honing our personal competencies. Everyone of us are unique in the sense that we all have our own idiosyncrasies and way of perceiving things which has been molded in that way partly because of our upbringing and mostly because of our natural preferences. As such we tend to get rigid, inflexible in our approach to change and new ideas. “Out of the box” thinking is the mantra for overcoming our mental blocks. What I learnt from the module was that every problem can have multiple solutions provided we become aware of what the problem really is. By keeping our mental receptors open to new ideas without any prejudices we can actually perceive things from different angles and we are bound to come up with multiple solutions for a problem. I am learning not to take things at face value… because for every question there can be multiple solutions and it all depends on which answer we want to justify. Negative thinking, overtly individualistic approach, rigid mindset etc are some of the points that we need to unlearn in order to realize our potential and THINK BEYOND!
Creativity & innovation:
Life as I dare to say… isn’t only about the binaries… of black and white… where most of the things and beings come in shades of grey, as a matter of fact! All my life I had this notion that being creative means writing poems, stories, composing music, sketching paintings etc and as such they are quite spontaneous and cannot be forced upon. From a personal point of view I thought that an “idea” is like an albatross around our neck. If there’s something that’s bothering one’s mind it will ooze out in the form of something creative. After the Creativity and Innovation workshop although my views haven’t changed much but I am tempted to give it a serious thought. After all, I would appear a fool if I deny the truth. Do we always need some parameters to compare a particular thing against it and see for ourselves who stands at what?! What I failed to recognize before was that there’s more to creativity than just writing verses and prose. We can be creative in everything we do. All it requires is a bit of imagination, enthusiasm and dollops of innovation. When our mind plays a “Cat and mouse game” with our senses then creativity meets innovation and the end result is cascading human development!!
Change, voluntary or otherwise, is perpetually brought about by the unknown dimension of TIME. When we adapt ourselves with the ‘winds of change’ and come up with novel ideas to solve the problems then only we can survive in the ‘rat race’ called the corporate world!
During the workshop we were given ample scopes to display our creativity and enthuse for innovation. Working in a group dramatically increased our knowledge base and we could come up with outstanding ideas although we were made to work with tremendous time constraint.
Coming from a background where there was lesser emphasis on group activity and more stress on individual work at first I was a bit skeptical about the whole exercise. But now I am wiser! Since no man is an island… change which is for the greater common good must be welcomed with open hands. Slowly but surely I am adapting myself to the ‘modern’ truth that most of the tasks are group centric and as such the onus is on my self to improve so that I can measure upto the challenge. I also learnt that passive approach to learning is really out of sync in a B-school like TAPMI where we are groomed to become wealth creators and change merchants.
01:15 Posted in Life @ TAPMI | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Comments
hmm ...
seems like u have learnt a lot from TAPMI ...!!!!
Posted by: Abhishek Singh | 09/06/2005
only one Question ...
Is this your theme paper ???
Posted by: Bhumika | 09/19/2005