1 Day Team Building Workshop at Alankrita

Headed off at an early hour with Rama Raju for the long pending team building workshop for Gap Miners. We picked up Rags at Balanagar and drove off to Alankrita, a fine resort on the Shameerpet Road. The rest of the team had already arrived - Nagesh, Anirudh, Rohet, Sundeep, Aravind, Srikanth, Dayakar and Srikanth Reddy. We wolfed down a standard breakfast of idlis, vadas and omelettes and headed off to the class. The teams were formed and the rules explained and off we went to the cricket ground.
The first game lasted an hour. Team A led by Srikanth, and consisting of Rama Raju, Nagesh, Srikanth Reddy and Aravind batted first and piled on 51 in 9 overs. Team B led by Anirudh, and comprising Rohet, Sundeep, Dayakar and Rags, started well enough and scored 20 in 2 overs. However they started losing wickets regularly and wound up at a net score of 20.
We headed back to the classroom for some paperwork. All members answered questions such as why they were playing, what the team goal was, what their role was and whether their performance could be bettered. They felt they could better it. After some discussion about the team goal, their own roles and their commitment to a common cause, the teams made a strategy to compete harder in the second game.
The second game started off with Team A batting first again and piling on 56 runs. Team B started badly and never recovered; barely managing a positive score.
A tired lot, we headed back to lunch, a nice spread with besibele bath, rice, roti, Andhra chicken, dal, Qubbani ka meetha and ice cream.
Post lunch we compared learnings from the games and how we could have performed better. We wound up the discussion with the characteristics of champion teams, the principles of team building and finally what everyone felt were their takeaways to the workplace. We ended the day at about 430 pm, tired and hopefully with some learning about team dynamics.

The Champion's Mindset - Knowing Your Goals

The champion is clear about what he wants. This clarity itself differentiates him from the others more than any other quality.
So, to inculcate the Champion's Mindset, we must be clear about what we want too. Even things other than those that the world has planted in you of course. What do you really want?
It seems like a difficult question to answer for most. I had a tough time figuring out what I want. Still do sometimes. If we don't know what we want, then even if we have all the tools to get what we want we will not get it! Like having a car at our disposal and having no where to go!
In my workshops also I find that people do not know what they want. A house, a car, success etc are some of the things that come out with some prodding. But again with no clear idea. It is time to sit down with ourselves and get a clear idea. A house by a lake, a home by the sea, an office at Cuffe Parade, a Merc, a position as a Vice President in an MNC, a cricket commentator, a test cricketer, a star actor, a music composer...the clearer one is, the more the chances of it coming true.

How do I get clarity? What do I want?
One way is to go back to our childhood dreams. For example, I knew somehow, vaguely though, that I wanted to be a writer. And there were dreams of playing cricket as well. I see interviews of people in magazines and they say, 'I always wanted to be an actor, or a singer or a whatever...'. This is something that is quite evident in us.

Write, Verbalise
Anyway, it helps to write down the dreams that really drive you, that you would really feel good about. It could be earning pots of money, establishing a great company, being a great scientist and discovering great inventions, creating a great recipe, owning a bakery (mine), but it should make you feel good! It should charge you enough that you feel like working on it 15 hours a day!

Being In That Space
A home by the sea, a ride around India, ideas that make a difference to the world, great health, great relationships, wealth...give it a shape, a number, a color, a smell and visualize the dream. Many champions see themselves breasting the tape, lifting the cup, racing away to glory before they actually do it. It is that clarity, the being-in-that-place that propels them to their dream.

Make That List
So list what you want - the big ones, the small ones, the material ones and the spiritual ones. Make the list of what you really want for yourself. More importantly, get comfortable with the thought and feeling of enjoying that which you have achieved. If your dream is to earn 10 lakhs, get comfortable with handling a cheque for 10 lakhs responsibly instead of shutting the dream off at the starting point. So what would you do with 10 lakhs, what would you buy, where would you invest etc.
The Champion's Mindset is about being clear about the goal. And desiring it badly. And enjoying it when it is achieved!

The Champion's Mindset - Knowing One's Strengths

The first step to developing the champion's mindset is to take an honest appraisal of oneself and one's strengths. Someone mentioned it to me yesterday (and I do believe it myself) that the hardest thing is to know one's strength. One may not recognize one's strengths by introspection, so it may help to get the perspective of your friends and family, of people who know you well. I normally ask participants to find out 5 strengths from 5 known people, including one's parents to get a bunch of strengths. From these strengths, we must identify the stuff that makes us the champion. One can ask for that one quality as well, that is champion material to get an idea of what it is that makes you a champion.

Introspect On Strengths
This is an exercise that needs to be introspected upon. One needs to get comfortable with one's strengths as in being able to say 'I am a balanced individual, who is a good writer, a good communicator, a resilient person, a people-friendly person, a thinker, a cricketer, a dream chaser, a tryer....'. That is what comes to me as I write now about myself. But I am sure I will find someone saying something that will surprise me.

Verbalise It - Get Comfortable Saying It
I also realize that the more I verbalise this statement - I use this method of introducing myself elaborately every time I speak in a lecture or in a workshop - and now I do feel quite comfortable with myself as a person who can speak management, life skills and cricket. Somewhere in the set of strengths lies the strength or the combination of strengths that will bring out the champion in you.

Which One Is It?
It is normally pretty obvious. It is what everyone tells you that you are obsessed with. It is what you are obsessed with. It could be playing cricket (so you think you will be a Tendulkar huh, stop wasting your time), electronics (that guy's crazy, it's like he will win the Nobel Prize or something), dressing up dolls, cooking, acting. miming, singing, dancing, painting, making money...it could be just about anything. People make a career out of anything, it is just that they need to feel that yes, this is what makes me tick, this is what I will do even if the whole world laughs at me, this is what I will do for hours and hours...
I could play cricket for hours one end. When I found someone I played with them, when I did not find someone I'd play with the wall. I'd play imaginary test cricket with my brother and kept detailed records of all the players I played and calculated their averages.
Similarly I could write letters to everyone I loved (it was easy to love everyone sometime ago), long, funny letters to my friends who I'd think needed a laugh. Sometimes I'd write letters to my friends abroad on borrowed money. But I loved writing letters, then articles, then stories and then longer stories.
You know your strengths somehow, you know what you're made for. Ask yourself if the cause is worthy, pick up the relevant strengths, and go for it!

The Champion's Mindset

One of the things about champions is the quiet resilience they show in the face of adversity. The champion always looks at converting the slightest opportunity to his advantage. Maybe the entire game has not gone in his favour, maybe they got off to a bad start, but the champion stays his ground till the end instead of throwing in the towel or getting angry at his teammates. Somehow, in his mind he seems to have the thought that says, okay, we haven't done well so far but give me that one opportunity and we'll come back.
In a team game, the captain needs to understand that he cannot get into a mindset where he thinks that the others are not putting in their best. It has to be always with the thought that everyone is trying their best, everyone is looking for that opportunity and everyone will convert that opportunity. one look at an MS Dhoni or a Shane Warne on the cricket field, gives you an ample example of how champion leaders behave in times of duress.
Given that space, even on a bad day, the players who are not having a good day can pull themselves back which is so important. But if the captain does not have this mindset and gives up on his players with a - I have to do everything, or a they are not trying hard enough - it somehow gets transferred as a vibration and that is when you see that drooping shoulder syndrome (and you can sense it in your bones that the team is going to lose).
It is a thought. But the champion holds on to the thought till the end. Like a weed to a drowning man, it can make all the difference. It is a good quality to practice and add to your repertoire.
The champion never gives up - in his mind, whatever the stakes, whatever the score, he is looking for one opportunity to turn things around!

The Champion's Mindset - Workshop on April 3 and 4, 2010

I am attaching below the content for the workshop on developing the 'The Champion's Mindset' which I propose to do for a small group on April 3,4 2010.

The Champion’s Mindset

“Their discipline, sense of responsibility, total focus on jobs… and the seriousness with which they approached practice was clearly the stuff that separated champions from ordinary mortals.”
- Harimohan Paruvu in ‘The Men Within’

Background
‘The Champion’s Mindset’, is a state of mind. Primarily, it recognizes excellence in oneself and pursues the path of excellence leading to intensely fulfilling lives on all planes, viz. personal, inter-personal, financial, material, moral, spiritual…
Many of us, however, meander hopelessly. We start living a life of compromise, a boring routine, a rat race… however much we earn or are recognized, we are happy only in bits and bytes.

Program Rationale
‘The Champion’s Mindset’ is a 2-day workshop that aims to bring out the best, the potential in each individual. The workshop is a reflective, experiential program that combines cricketing, life and corporate analogy. It works on knowing the self, recognizing one’s strengths, knowing one’s goal, finding the gap, fulfilling the gap and achieving the goal.
It involves taking responsibility for oneself, understanding that excellence is a part of everyone and sustaining that part in whatever one chooses to do – at work, at play and at life. It is about giving the best that one has, the 100% to life.
Learning Objectives
 To bring out the best within each individual
 To kick-start the development of the champion’s mindset and
 To start mapping plans to achieve high results in chosen area of work

Methodology
The workshop employs dialogue, reflection, collective experience sharing and activity to promote development of the mind-set for excellence in performance and work, through rich use of analogy, metaphor, examples and shared experience drawn from life experiences in cricket, writing, career, team building, management, leadership…

Who should attend
All who desire to cultivate a champion’s mindset in life and achieve results they desire… Careerists, practicing Professionals, Entrepreneurs, Sportsmen, Organizational Team members…anyone with a dream and a goal to achieve…

Program Structure
The program will consist of 9 sessions, over two days:

Session 1: Concept of Excellence
Session 2: Identifying Champion Material Within
Session 3: Identifying Goals to Champion
Session 4: Detailing the Planning Process
Session 5: Steps to Reach the Next Level
Session 6: How to Increase Self-Worth
Session 7: My Winning Formula
Session 8: Ways to Sustain the Process
Session 9: Debriefing and feedback:

Key Takeaways
Participants will be prompted and facilitated to:
 articulate their personal and professional aspirations
 become aware of their strengths and how to use them to excel
 develop clarity on their personal and professional goals
 prepare detailed action plans to achieve their personal and professional goals
 understand and use tools to achieve self-developed goals
 understand and use tools to reach and sustain peak performance, repeat patterns of excellence
 develop follow up plan and support system to monitor and stay on course


Program Facilitator
About Harimohan Paruvu
Harimohan Paruvu is a novelist, motivational speaker, workshop facilitator and management consultant based out of Hyderabad. His first novel ‘The Men Within – A Cricketing Tale’, published in 2007, is a bestseller, and the first work of fiction on cricket/sports in Indian Writing in English. It is being made into a movie shortly. The novel has been appreciated for its inspirational content that is relevant not only to cricketers but is applicable to business and life (for reviews please visit www.harimohan.com). As a freelance writer he has published close to 100 articles in various newspapers and publications on subjects as diverse as humor, management, cricket and lifestyle. He is also a motivational speaker and has delivered several lectures on motivation, team building and leadership through cricketing analogies.

Harimohan Paruvu is a Civil Engineer and MBA from Osmania University. After his MBA, he worked in the corporate sector for about 13 years, most of them in an investment bank, the IDBI, dealing with corporate finance. He quit the corporate sector in 2004 to become a fulltime writer, speaker and facilitator. Harimohan is also an accomplished cricketer, having represented Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy in 1985-87, the period when it won the Ranji Trophy. He draws from his experiences on the cricket field and his experiences in the corporate sector dealing with large scale business projects.


For more details write in.

An Interview In The Hindu

Yesterday's Hindu's Metro Plus edition carried an interview of mine with Prabalike Borah.

(http://beta.thehindu.com/life-and-style/metroplus/article263060.ece)


We had met a couple of weeks ago at Minerva Coffee Shop and chatted over coffee. The interview titled 'Cricket, Books and More' turned out well with a nice picture of me posing in front of a stack of 'The Men Within' copies, presumably taken at the Chennai launch of the same.
It is always nice to be acknowledged for a good, hard effort. 'The Men Within' took me about one year to write. I did the plot first, the character sketches and then went about writing chapters, researching for small pieces of information wherever I required them. Reading the Gita, the Art of War, Cricket coaching manuals, Management books, Books on leadership and team play, googling information on several small details that stuck in my head, and then recalling incidents, clearly seeing and reliving what went on in my mind when the incidents happened, it was a highly satisfying experience when I put it all together. I wanted the book to answer as many questions in 'The Art of Winning' or rather 'The Science of Winning' to cricketers, managers, lay persons and give hope to anyone with a dream.
I was vaguely aware of the fact that the book was probably the first novel on cricket in Indian Writing in English but it got confirmed only after a wonderful review of the book by none other than the grandmaster of cricket journalism in India, the late Rajan Bala. A fantastic review that I will cherish forever, in which he mentioned that this was indeed the first work of fiction on cricket in IWE!
The book went into its second print within a fortnight. It hit the bestseller list in the Hindu. Several reviews followed, all of them very positive and more importantly several reader comments cutting across language, age, profession - students, grandmothers, managers, cricketers, coaches etc - who liked the book for its inspirational content. A student wrote in saying that he could use this book's philosophy to plan for his exams and his life, a grandma wrote in saying that her life would have been different if she had read this book when she was twenty, several youngsters wrote in saying that the book has changed their perspective to life and given them hope to dream. One CA picked up 40 copies at one go to distribute to his friends, and I know one eminent management consultant from Hyderabad, who subsequently became my good friend - Amar Chegu - who has gifted even more number of copies as corporate gifts. It is the greatest compliment to a writer I realise, when someone actually gifts your book to another. It is certainly feedback like this that makes the entire effort worthwhile.
A couple of students from Chennai University wrote their doctoral thesis on the book. It made the long list in the 2007 Crossword-Vodafone award. And now it is being made into a movie. With a team like Ram, Mohana Krishna, Sumanth, Swathi, Bharani and Subbaraju, this movie should do extremely well. The book is in its fifth print today. I am doing motivational lectures and workshops based on the content of the book.
I wrote this book to bring out the wonderful parallel between life and cricket. The game taught me much and I wrote it as honestly as I could. I see it touching the 1 million figure at some point or another; there is no way this book will not. It will, sooner than later.

More Praise To The Tortoise

In the Rabbit and Tortoise story, much is made of the rabbit being overconfident - and that it is not the speedy that always win. But to me the biggest lesson from this story is the tortoise's state-of-mind when he/she accepts the challenge. Only a madman would accept a challenge like that and persevere till the end. Imagine taking on a contest when it is loaded completely against you - and winning. I'd say the tortoise won the race for the one act of taking the rabbit on!

Lessons from the story for me:
1) It is never about how good the opposition has been till then, it is what happens that day - everyday is a new one, every race is a new one.
2) Never shirk away from a challenge, the bigger the better. Go, take up all challenges.
3) Focus on your work, and not on what is happening all around (rabbit could have scampered out of sight which does not mean you panic, plod on, old man). Draw your attention to yourself and your strengths.
4) Do what you do best and stick to plan. Give your best, your 100%.
5) Don't imitate the opponent - don't take rest if you notice the opponent taking rest.
6) Don't gloat over the opponent's mistakes - instead carry on with your job.
7) As you get closer to the goal, stop worrying about the other guy and where he is and just focus on your job.

Chances are you may win if you continue to give your best through the race, continue straining against your limits. Stuff that champions are made of!
Go tortoise!