Journal
Storytelling
The idea of a leadership “Journal” felt a bit bizarre to me because I had no idea where to
begin or what I would write in such a journal. Inspiration struck after we discussed the idea of
storytelling as a tool for leadership in our classroom. Having an interest in writing and having
always considered myself a raconteur of sorts, this gave me a lot to ponder about. The trail of
thoughts about how powerful leaders utilize stories gave me a lot of new perspectives about
the leadership journey and it all ultimately came back to one of my favorite quotes – “We are
all stories in the end. So just make it a good one, eh?!”.
I realized that the best leaders are people who are etched in books and our memorise through
the stories they told and lived. Whenever we think about great leaders, we always think of
them as these larger-than-life who has lived out extraordinary feats that we think are not
capable of us. But what if they also sat in a room in their young years thinking the same about
the leaders who came before them? This made me think about how all of us are ultimately
just average human beings and what separates them from us is their power of will to achieve
what they wanted in life.
Storytelling as a tool of leadership has 2 dimensions basically; the stories you tell others and
the stories you tell yourself. The latter is of great importance because how can you inspire
others if you can’t inspire yourself. So I guess what I need to do now is consider my own life
as a story where I am the hero who consistently overcomes difficulties and keep drawing
inspiration from these stories to empower myself…
The Happiness Chart
The struggle for finding inspiration to keep up with journalizing was once again broken by
the activity we were made to do in class today where we had to plot a timeline of our lives in
terms of happiness and sadness. As expected, I got a very messy chart which contained a lot
of upward and downward spikes, sometimes at the extremes. Though it sounded easy enough,
this was a very difficult task to carry out as I had to think about a lot of bad memories which I
do not like reliving.
But I guess I did get the lesson at the crux of it all. I had two takeaways from this activity.
The first one was I noticed that, at least of late, all the upward spikes in my emotions seems
to have happened whenever I took a conscious effort to keep myself happy instead of relying
on my environment or other people around me. These were also the times that I learnt how to
be kind to myself. What I saw was that you have to make your own happiness. It is those
people who can make peace with themselves and be content even when adversity is facing
them in the face who can take care of others in such situations by providing them a solid
foundation to rely on.
The other lesson is coming face-to-face with your fears. There were a lot of things in my
mind that I did not want to think about. But then the human mind is a weird thing. It takes
only the slightest little prompt to unlock all these stuff. But it is only after I encountered these
things again that I realized they did not affect me anymore. I was over and above them and in
retrospect, these very same things had made me stronger and kinder. If not for those
experiences, I would be a completely different person today. So good or bad, a good leader is
one who can skim the best out any given situations…
To Share or Not to Share
The absolute worst part about leadership lab, for me, is when I am forced to share my past
experiences with my peers. It was bad enough that I had to think about them but now I had to
share them with others. Being a very private person, this was a very disturbing task for me
and I felt completely uncomfortable with it. I was glad to find a few of my peers felt the same
way.
This is one thing that I could not find the silver-lining in, no matter how much I tried. It may
work for some people to talk about the stuff that they went through to others and get
appreciated for staying strong but not for me. I strongly believe that while some experiences
do mould you into the person you are, it’s better to leave them in the past. You may have
scars in your body but you would never poke it with a stick just to see how deep it runs. I feel
the same way about this.
The Project Experience
Class Activity
So, we had a role play conducted in class. In this each group was given a automobile
company to run and divide various roles amongst ourselves. This though not completely but
gave us some glimpse of the future of how we will work in the corporate. Apart from this we
had do various activities like budgeting and firing of employees which help us understand
how one influences the other based on their roles, responsibilities, capabilities, etc
