My reflective journal - IDIO

"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world." Ethics has been a grey area in modern times. The problem with ethics is that it keeps evolving with time. In class we talked about the marshmallow experiment where a kid is asked to not eat the marshmallow until the instructor comes back but only a few kids could hold back their desire and they were rewarded with an extra marshmallow at the end. Also, Mam asked us to write a quiz despite there being no quiz in the course outline and she acted as if she was called by the HOD for something important and to no one’s surprise people cheated and this was how the ethics class started. This experiment shows the ethics that the kids showed. This can be related to value trumping as the kids valued the marshmallow more than ethics. This is an important concept as this determines what we value more and what we value less. Prioritization is again something that defines the things we do as we do things that we prioritize....

"You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen." This session was about decision making and the regrets that follows (if any). We were asked to share about the most important decisions that we have taken up until this point. We shared about the decision we felt was most important. Then we were asked if we regretted making that decision and if it was a favorable decision or not. We all shared our experiences and we got a variety of responses which was intriguing. Then we talked about intuition, we were bombarded with the question if making a decision based on intuition is correct or not. Again we were asked if we made our decisions based on intuition or data to which a majority replied intuition. We have to remember “intuition doesn’t mean impulsive”. People in army make decisions based on intuitions on the battleground. Then we were exposed to a simulation were we had to make a decision in a critical situation. A Pharma company was ...

"How much you and the people around you know about you?" This session talks about Johari window, being judged and showing the real you. Johari window is an activity to find the blind spot in our character. The window has two rows known to others and unknown to others. Then there are two columns known to self and unknown to self. We have to fill characteristics that fall under the intersection of these rows and columns. The things that come in the first box are the characters that are open and the ones in the second box are the ones that hidden to others. The characters in the third box are the blind spots, these are the ones that we have to improve on. The fourth box is an interesting one, these characters are unknown to both others and us. This is something we have to discover on our own, to do this we must try new things. We are constantly being judged by others whether we like it or not. No one likes being judged but it is a harsh reality that we are being judged in...

"What do you see in people?" This session was all about perception. Everyone has a different view on everything, so it is only just to expect that people will have different perception about us. Some of it may match your view of yourself and at the same time some will not. Now some people will see a certain traits in us that even we would not have noticed, these traits are the blind spots in our character.  First impression has a great sway in how perceive someone, now we can debate about the fact that if first impression is good or not but the reality is that everyone has a first impression about the people they meet.  The thing to be noticed here is that how away is other’s perception from our perception about our self. This will help us to realize how we must improve so that we can be the best versions of us. This can be done by getting feedback from our peers and friends but the people we sort to should know us quite well in order to give us good feedbac...

“Which is better? To ebb your weaknesses or reinforce your strengths” When I look back at my life, I had always focused on my weaknesses. I had never paid attention to what my strengths are. Alas, I was even unaware of my strengths until recently. To a person like me, who is more worried about the weaknesses and trying to find ways to mitigate them, this session was an eye opener. This session never asked us about our weaknesses. But it had asked more obvious and ground breaking questions like, “What your strengths are?” “How can you use your strengths to achieve your goals?” These questions look simple but the answers to them are not (at least for me). After this class, I had been thinking a lot trying to figure out what my strengths were. Fortunately, our first assignment of this class helped me to find what my real strengths are. In this assignment, I had to prepare a set of questions regarding my strengths and I had to get responses for those questions from my family, fr...

“Do you know yourself?” This was the major theme of this session. According to me, this is one of the simplest yet heaviest questions one can be asked. How truly we know ourselves? The best way to analyze this is to view our life’s decisions that we took, objectively. That is, to watch our life from a third person’s perspective. Our facilitator introduced us to a tool called “Myers Briggs type indicator” which had a series of questions analyzing your decision-making skills, your likes, your preferences etc. and based on our responses it categorized us into 4 factors. My category is INTJ. That is, I am inclined towards Introversion, Intuitive, Thinking and Judgmental. I was able to relate myself ( to some extent ) with the personality description given by that tool. For example, it said that INTJ person prefers lone time rather than socializing. This is true. I love to spend time reading books rather than going out and meeting people. In this session, the facilitator group...

I always had an aversion towards theory classes ( BTW, I still do ). My mind goes blank when I don’t have enough numbers to puzzle over. So, when I first encountered this subject “IDIO”, I thought that this is going to be another typical HR course that is going to bore me to death. But there is a peculiar thing about this subject that made me think, “Wait! This doesn’t look like a normal course”. It is theoretical but this subject is not working in me like the other subjects do. The contents of this subject are making me to think and reflect. This is new to me. I consider myself a thinker who ponders a lot and I feel this course is feeding enough philosophical fodder to my mathematical brain. I learnt about the human behavior and how people react in a particular circumstance in this class. This class also talked a lot about quite heavy terms ( they are heavy to me ) like meaning, purpose, flow, excellence etc. The most appealing thing to me from this class is the Taj case vi...