Losing weight & what I learnt - Intro

After a couple of half hearted attempts at losing weight, I finally decided to embark on a long journey to lose weight about 3 years back. This time I was very serious, since my extra kilos were causing some health issues.

The first year was not so great as I lost only 2 kgs. Over the next 2 years I managed to lose about 18 kgs. Over a 3 year period I came down from an overweight 86 kgs to a correct 66 kgs. This helped me a lot to reduce or resolve my health issues. It also made me feel light.

Sometime back, as I sat on the beachfront in Besant Nagar, I started to go over this journey. To my surprise I found a lot of things I learnt as person. My next question was could I translate or relate these to leadership lessons. The next hour at the beach was spent wondering how I could do it, if I could do it, and will it be useful to people.

Over the next few weeks, I am planning to write about my learnings. How a journey to lose weight can contribute to learnings for a leader… 

During the course of these posts, I will try to relate to some of the incidents, mishaps as well as positive stuff that changed me. I will try my best to explain some of the jargons (which I was always afraid) or present my understanding of them.

So, looking forward to you joining me as i revisit my journey.

Next week is the first step - " Visualizing the end state or the goal => which can be translated to Vision "

Until then...

Comments

  1. VenkatMarch 1, 2014 at 10:28 PM

    Looking forward to learn Raghu....BTW I lost 3 lbs in 14 days (30 mins running)....and now itself I started feeling very light...Hope my triglycerides level will be lowered in the coming months...Thanks for your inspirational advice on the other day!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Treat people as adults

Following up on trust, it took me a while to realize the next step on the trust ladder. I was given more responsibilities, I pushed myself and my teams to deliver them. While I trusted them to deliver, I always had this habit to keep checking up with people if they were going in the right direction and kept providing suggestions on how to go about. While as a manager this was possibly the right behaviour with respect to Project control, as a leader was it? I did not realize it was not until several months later. There were a couple of times when people would assign a task to me and kept checking on the progress. During one such time, when work was a bit stressful, I felt why someone was doing this. Here I was a responsible adult who knew what to do and how to do, and if at all I had a doubt would approach them to get it clarified. Why did people not trust me??? Around the same time, since some of my teams' deliverables were getting delayed I was exhibiting the same behavi...
Read more

Pass on the baton

This is the concluding post on my series On Mentoring. In my last post, I talked about growing wings for people to fly. But despite my attempts, some of them did not make an attempt to fly. That was when I realized that as mentor it is not enough to grow wings, but also be the safety net for the people. They need to see and understand that there was a safety net below, when they try to fly and in case they fail, the net would protect them from crash landing. I started talking to people to make them feel comfortable, to give them the required support to grow. Then came the next question - Am I doing the right things for people to grow? That was when I reflected back on the incident that my mentor told me about the need for me to grow, to help my team to grow. This changed my outlook of being a mentor from being a ladder (to what my tamil teacher said years back) to being an escalator. In the corporate world, the mentors need to be like escalators, taking people up and at the sa...
Read more

Are you listening ???

All of us who are blessed, can hear. It is something involuntary. We wake up to birds chirping or to the persistent alarm and end the day with either ilayaraja melodies or the breaking news. But do we listen. As a leader, it took me sometime to go through this journey of listening. The reason I call it a journey is because, it took me through several stages. At each stage, I learnt something new, and the need to leave behind a few other things. The first stage is obviously hearing and not much to write about it. The second stage is selective listening . During the initial stage, as I had said earlier, it was a learning process for me to lead a team. So I kept my ears open, and listened to everyone and everything said. But unfortunately, it was in the interest to learn things. So, what I listened and processed was the information that I needed in my journey as a lead. I was very particular in listening to feedback about me from everyone. While this helped in...
Read more