Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 32

How vivid is your ability to visualise?

Pseudo-hallucinations: why some people see more vivid mental images than others – test yourself here The brain can see a lot of things that aren’t there. agsandrew/Shuttestock Reshanne Reeder, Edge Hill University

Consider the statements below. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream?

I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place.

Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen b...

Being a Leader is Like Being an Improv Actor

One of the skills that all of us need to develop as we want to be and behave like a leader is to develop the skills of an improv actor. The foundational aspect of any improv actor is the ability to be fully present in the moment and respond to their stimuli. As leaders, we need to be able to do that as well.

So, if our stimuli requires us to be a coach, we need to be able to channel our inner coach. If our stimuli needs us to be a manager and give clear instruction to someone on our team, w...

11 Timeless Peak Performance Reminders for Leaders

This post is inspired by another post by one of the titans of the advertising industry – Kevin Roberts. You can read the original post here.

Here are my peak performance reminders for leaders:

Start your day with intent. Be humble. Remember that as a leader you are here to serve the cause and the people you lead. Your number one responsibility is to create more leaders worth following. Stay inspired. You can’t inspire others if you are not inspired. Listen with intent. This can be on...

Lessons for Leaders from the Movie – “The Fundamentals of Caring”

Premise:

This past weekend, I ended up doing what I really love doing – watch movies. One of the movies that I watched was the 2016 movie “The Fundamentals of Caring” featuring the unassuming . The movie was based on a book.

As the movie title says, the movie is about someone who takes on ...

The Power of Noticing

Premise:

One of the key skills that we need to develop if we want to be leaders, in general, is our ability to notice things. This is a meta skill, that once we learn, can be extremely useful in many spheres of our lives (work, home, community, etc).

What can we do about this:

The key to increasing our ability to notice is, to slow down. I am guilty of not doing this often. A lot of people that I know are guilty of the same as well. We are all so busy doing stuff (emails, meeting...

Leading Large Scale Cultural Transformation

I wanted to share this short video, in which Simon Sinek, in his usual style, shares the way he sees cultural transformation work.

Here is the video:

Here are some of the important concepts that he shares:

What doesn’t work:

Launching a formal company-wide transformation effort, with clearly laid out plans, executive presentations explaining the rationale for the change does not work. Typically, these are met with cynical, wait and watch responses from the employees. Th...

Less is more: Why our brains struggle to subtract

Premise:

It seems that our brains are naturally wired to think in an additive way when we are trying to solve problems. It is one of those brain hacks that we picked up from our ancestors but is no longer as useful to us as it was to them. So, if we can learn to think in the opposite direction, i.e, in a subtractive way, we might surprise ourselves with the solutions that we might arrive at.

The Research and its Findings:

Here is a research paper published by Nature which looks a...

6 Levels of Commitment to Change

Premise:

Every change or a transformation effort needs the support and commitment of people who will either be affected by the change or who lead the change or who could influence the success of the change effort. Hence, it is important for those who want to drive or lead the change effort learn how committed they are to the change.

The commitment can vary from people wanting to outright sabotage the change on one extreme to co-creating or co-owning the change on the other end of the...

Becoming Change Agents..

Whether we like or not, we are all involved in some form of transformation at any given time. Some of these transformations are self initiated, at times they are forced upon us, on our companies, industries or even economies. It is in our own interest to learn how to navigate these changes. The best way to do that is to learn to become a change agent and lead the change instead of allowing the change to lead us.

Being or becoming a change agent is not simple. We need to learn specific sk...

The Finest Example of Storytelling using Data

I have seen a lot of presenters who use data to influence or persuade their audience. In most cases, they end up overwhelming their audience. If you were to ask the audience a couple of days later about what they remember from the presentation, usually, people do not remember much.

So, it was with utmost excitement and reverence, I would like to share the best presentation that i have ever seen that uses data to persuade the audience.

This is a TED talk delivered by Hans Rosling (almost ...