Skip to main content

Demons and Dungeons : A Framework to Learn In Teams

I have been called many things in my life. Team player is not one of them. It is not as if I have worked in many teams, or many teams have chosen me to work with them. I am the kid who was left out from the group formation as a kid in middle-school standard. Imagine the isolation. Recently, Aparna Piramal Raje, who is also my professor, quoted :

Dare to stand alone, 

Dare to make yourself grow,

Dare to find your purpose,

Dare to make it known. 

Imagine, I have been doing it since I was a kid. The presence of a group can seem less fortunate sometimes than presence of lone Sysiphious warrior. Although now, it is difficult in a hyper-globalized world. I am learning the art of group management and negotiation, treading Moore's law every second. Since years, when I started volunteering. In the past few months I have been found fortunate opportunity with Anant Fellowship. I am a part of team with four more people. We have frequent conversations on Google meet. We have weekly interactions. These are too frequent to recall what mistakes you do on every level. Hundreds of lines and millions of words. What if even a billion alphabets were sent by the behaviors learnt as a reaction to an incident in the school and enhanced over a period of teenage. This thought looms now. It seems there are a lot of stories to unpack in this supposition. 

Recently I sat in review meeting above the people in the panel with team mates in one corner of the computer screen. Everyone spoke, I stayed silent. It was best 7 minutes of my silence. I wanted to contain my impulses of speaking up and speaking out. I wanted to get out of my head. I did until the 8th minute happened. When an open ended question is asked to the non-entity among a box of screens, I find myself scattering rhododendrons of words with metaphors and syllable. You must note I find myself at ease in the abstract. I find myself stick-up when precise notation comes up. You see it makes me remember the examinations in school and anxiety that streams through my navel and exits from the behind. It is a perfection with surreal experiences. So i went in and jumped up, pressed the space bar and activated my mic. There were many Is and so few We-s. You see the point I was making was specific to the work I had done. I see that team reigns supreme. I however, could not escape the child standing alone in the middle-school classroom. How the past rules the primitive senses. Makes current efforts nonsensical. 

I then came up on a framework. 

Step 1 -Calculate the minimum deliverable that you expect from today form yourself. 

Step 2 -Look for tomorrow, and note down what happened today. Tomorrow is only as good as the documented today. 

Step 3 -Seek feedback from the panelists and peers on one-to-one basis. Avoid self-deprecating ideas, especially un-empathetic biases which enrich the forms of self-judgement. They are self defeating prophecies. 

Step 4 -Note, that anxiety will be a part of the equation where historically you see spaces for improvements. You never arrive, you step and jump over to the next platform. Just like a hoopla in Takeshi's castle on Pogo. 

PS: People are generally kind. Primitive brain isn't. You see ? Who needs to be controlled ?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Phone Call

Tring ! Tring ! After 2 seconds ... Tring ! Tring ! Tring ! The phone rang loudly but nobody picked it up. It had been lying like it had been last night. Alone, cold on the floor above the mattresses spread for a man to sleep. The man was the father. A father of two people both in adulthood, with a son and a daughter. The children and their mother and father all lived in a two bed room apartment. The apartment also has a kitchen, two balconies a staircase to lead any visitor up on to the terrace and down towards the ground floor. The phone in its standby mode lay peacefully in bliss on the third and top most floor of an establishment which is over 20 years old. It was bought after a lot of hard work and planning by the father to give a home to his two adolescents and more space to grow up. This home was not just a home. Although it was small but it saw a lot of developments in peoples lives. With people living in it and outside and using it to their fullest extent with cre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Latest Read : Upside of Irrationality

Our brain has wonderful way by which it constantly evolves along the way devising ways to leave us astray. At times it tries teaching something to us. We all usually busy in our world, decide against its meaningful advices and encroach upon 'decisions' we deem fit. What we never discover is the source of errors in judgement. Subconscious knows all and decides to inform at appropriate timing what we seek to accomplish. But gut and intuition (which at time prove to be wrong) come in between claiming everything. If we win, we call it glory, if not,  it is termed as a mistake. But  fellows. It is not our decisions over which we so easily lay claim upon that make us win. On the other hand it is the subconscious. While executing pre -ecided actions we choose to listen (best thing to do!)  all that our subconscious has clammed up in the past. That usually makes us execute our plans with a promise of success or at least save as from a nasty debacle. Everyday while we are b...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Shit Hits The Fan

  2021 December Shit hit the fan and I was left to clean it up. I failed in writing my response papers at my fellowship. I failed to respect the idea of novelty in the subject. I failed to create the make sense of the time that was given to me. I narrated the story that I had come with. That I knew what I wanted, that what I wanted was exactly same as what I needed. It is the novelty of the newness. Most thing get ignored when only some needs to be focused. Please get out of my head, the irritation persisted. I am not in a frame of mind, I would say, like I would say to my mother, who would barge into my room to ask something. The thought that I had not failed loomed constantly, I would reassure myself again and again, that I was okay. Nothing was.   15 people in my family had passed through covid-19. More than 6 were in hospital during the festival of Diwali. I had visited none, not even once did I visit them to ask. That was not the worst part. I couldn’t accept, I...
Post a Comment
Read more