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Substitute Effort to Ability |
| By:admin on Tue 09 Mar 2010 8:09 PM under Business, Entrepreneurship, Financial Independence, balance |
To build excellence, we have to lead in a way where we encourage effort. Have courage, persistance to outwork your competitor….Have the desire & attitude to excel in your undertakings.
Here is a link to The Talk on Youtube: Top of the Game vTalk by Deepika Bajaj – Substitute Effort to Ability
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International Women’s Day |
| By:deepika bajaj on Sun 07 Mar 2010 8:30 PM under Business, Career and Money, Financial Independence, Personal Success, balance |
INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day is a day of reflection – celebrating the efforts of the brave women who fought for equality, power and freedom of choice.
This day brings a lot of focus on effort of our communities, companies and countries on their efforts to enable and empower women. I was born in a world where modern women had many privileges which many women from the 1970’s had to fight for.
In the 1970’s if you found out you were pregnant, you had to quit your job. There were no maternity leaves. Working women have come a long way. Today not only do we have maternity leaves, we have paternity leaves…
The times have really changed and great improvements have been made – now we have women astronauts, prime ministers, executives, women can work and have a family – women have real choices now. This is a day to celebrate.
Here are some breakthroughs:
1. The study released today by the Pew Research Center shows that in one out of five married couples, the wife earns more than the husband. That’s a huge shift in 40 years, when this was the case in just 4 percent of American marriages.
2. Women now make up almost half of American workers (49.9% in Oct). They run some of the world’s best companies, PepsiCo, Avon and ICICI Bank (India).
3. They earn 60% of university degrees in America and Europe.
Opportunities:
1. Women of color face an enormous wealth gap when compared to the rest of society. Single black and Hispanic women are particularly hard hit, owning only a penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts suggests report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development at a Capitol Hill symposium on the economic security of women.
2. Women MBAs lag behind men in jobs, pay and promotions. There’s a really interesting, albeit not all that surprising, report from Catalyst, the group working to expand opportunities for women in business.
3. The financial demands on the Indian families are becoming fiercer by day. The sky rocketing cost of living, increasing expenses on education of children, increasing cost of housing properties in India force women to go for jobs and take up even careers that were considered only suitable for men such as working in night shifts in call centers or BPOs.
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What do you want?Power,Money,Rosie says Empower self |
| By:deepika bajaj on Mon 01 Mar 2010 9:07 PM under Business, Career and Money, Global Leadership, Personal Success, balance |
Rosie Kuhn, Ph.D. is the creator and director of the Transformational Coaching Training at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. As a Life and Executive Coach, she is focusing on women leaders and entrepreneurs who are committed to generating excellence in themselves, their team and their company.
I met Rosie at the OPEN Women Leadership Forum 2010 and sat down to talk to her about her book “Self Empowerment 101″. This topic is of interest to me since many of us look for empowerment outside and I wanted to find out if we need to begin by looking inside.
DB: Rosie, please tell us more about your book –”Self- Empowerment 101.” 
RK: Self-Empowerment started out as part of a book for coaches. But, as I was writing I realized that what was being said about our relationship to power, to success and to money was relevant to everyone – not just coaches. From there, the book grew itself into this present form. Now, it’s an online course on DailyOm.com called Activating your Personal Power and its moments away from being a workbook too.
DB: Why is this book important than ever before?
RK: As the world is going through its own transformation or paradigm shift, each of us is perhaps confronting feelings of anxiety, worry, powerlessness and perhaps hopelessness. It’s really important to explore the source of our own beliefs and interpretations regarding these anxious times and to reflect that there is incredible evidence that each of us is powerful beyond belief. It takes only a willingness to begin to see where and how we choose to appear powerless and where and how we can choose to be powerful. Self-Empowerment 101 is a great tool to support people in revealing their true essential power and to use it in ways that will significantly shift their lives and the planet.
DB: What’s the biggest challenge for getting women to get what they say they want to achieve in their lives?
RK: As one woman put it “I’m not being allowed to have it the way I want.” When she and I looked closely at what she was saying she could see how she was not being in a state of allowing. When we are not in a state of allowing, how can we have what we want and what we want to achieve?
What is it that doesn’t allow us to be in a state of allowing? Well, most women value being loved by others over their own self-love, self-respect and self-honoring of their own needs and wants; so much so that we as women learn to forget that we have our own needs and wants and our own thoughts and feelings. By forgetting it is easier to then sublimate our desires in service of accommodating others.
Our multicultural world can be confusing too. On the one hand, what is encouraged is self-empowerment, self-fulfillment and generating meaningfulness in ways that may conflict with religious and cultural ways. On the other hand there is a part of us as women and as humans that is fulfilled by caring for others. It can be challenging to know what is true. Sometime there is a practice of balancing both – allowing for both and respecting both.
Allowing ourselves to know what we want – know what we want to achieve is a very important step. Allowing this knowing, acknowledging it for what it is can then allow possibility. The how to’s will reveal themselves effortlessly once we allow ourselves to know!
DB: At Invincibelle, we stand for women to help them in their professional development, how can women be more empowered to act?
RK: As I said above, first, we have to empower ourselves to allow ourselves to know what it is that’s most important.
Second, once we know, we have to empower ourselves to stay present to this knowing and not capitulate or fall back into forgetting.
Third, noticing what we do – how we empower ourselves to not act, or to act in ways that doesn’t serve our knowing, allows us to see that we are choosing to choose based on certain beliefs, expectations and assumptions.
Fourth, we have to be willing to allow the possibility that our beliefs, our expectations and assumptions may not be accurate and true. I saw a bumper sticker that said “Don’t believe everything you think!” When we can allow ourselves to see things in another way, this empowers us to be more at choice in the way we want to move toward or away from what we desire.
Fifth, Invincibelle is an incredible resource for women to find information, resources and support. This is a very important component of self-empowerment – getting connected with people who believe in you and want you to succeed!
DB: What is success?
RK: The most elegant definition of success is Having what you say you want! Now, to me, this success is extremely individualistic. My success may not be your success. However, our successes together may create phenomenal success as a community, culture, country or planet.
DB. How do we discover our power?
RK: As I write in the first chapter of Self-Empowerment 101, power is essential in our being. Without power we would not be a living organism. We are infused with the power of the sun and the elements of the earth. This is just a fact of the matter!
The important aspect of this question is that what is to be discovered is how we are using our power. We are making choices in every moment of the day. Those choices are either moving us toward what we say we want or they are moving us toward, what I call an underlying commitment. For example, in regard to food, I can say I want to stay away from carbohydrates because they make me feel bad in lots of ways. But then I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with cookies on the side. By noticing my choice I can see that I’m using my power to support my underlying commitment, which might be to enjoy the feelings of satisfaction that comes with eating comfort food. This noticing practice is very powerful and points to the evidence that we are always at choice about how we are self-empowering.
DB: How do we tackle our fear of failure or humiliation in starting things with uncertain outcomes?
RK: The Buddhists have a very important principle that they practice: Let go of the attachment to the outcome?
Now, this might seem crazy. Up until now, in this interview I’ve been encouraging us to know what we want, and allow ourselves to have the want and to have the outcome too. Now I’m saying let go of your attachment to the outcome. What’s with that?
The intention of self-empowerment is to be and be with whatever appears on the path of our desire. It may be success and prosperity, it may be failure and humiliation – most likely there will be some of both. But the most important practice is to notice how you are empowering yourself to be with what is.
Choosing to see the present circumstances as failures and as humiliating is just one choice among many to choose from. And, as I share in the book, it is essential to see that we are actually never failing. We use our power to create the illusion of failure. When we look at what we’ve been doing that has led to the perceived failure of a particular project it becomes clear that we’ve most likely sabotaged our success.
So tackling our fears of failure and humiliation means being curious enough to take a step in the direction of what we say we want; being curious enough to explore how we are being and being with the people and events that show up in our lives. Be at choice – whether how you are being is serving you and your desired outcome or serving that underlying commitment. Being curious allows us to discover ourselves beyond the fears we carry. We are not our fears. And the process of self-empowerment allows us to find that this is so.
DB: Why do we need to keep our commitments?
RK: We are always keeping our commitments. It’s important to get this! We have the commitment we speak out loud and then there’s the commitments we don’t talk about or even think about or even know that we have. The more we can distinguish which commitment we are honoring at any given moment the more we can be at choice. This is self-empowerment at work!
The more we can honor our spoken commitments the more we are integrity with ourselves and others. The more we are in alignment with our word and our actions the more empowered we feel. The more we practice living into our commitments the more compassionate we become with ourselves and others. The more compassionate we become the more we are willing to share our prosperity and kindness with others. What a wonderful world we are creating – even in this very moment, as we step ever closer to self-empowerment and global peace.
DB: What motivated you to write this book?
RK: As I mentioned earlier I wanted to write a training manual for my trainees. For the past nine years I’ve been facilitating the Transformational Coaching Training Program. I’m very good at speaking, teaching and facilitating, but I wanted to get it into a book form. Though this book was a offshoot, the book on becoming a transformational coach is a work in progress. One of my many spoken commitments is to have it complete in September 2010.
Click here to buy the book on Amazon: Self-Empowerment 101
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Leadership Lady Gaga way |
| By:deepika bajaj on Fri 26 Feb 2010 12:29 AM under Business, Career and Money, Global Leadership |
I enjoy reading Robin Sharma’s blog and most recently I came across this post. I am a fan of Lady Gaga and have been impressed with her music and style. So, I could not resist sharing this post with you all.
Here is the post that Robin Sharma wrote: In his own words…
In my mind, Lady Gaga is the new Madonna. Love her music or not, part of her genius is pushing the envelope and being so entertaining that everyone around the water cooler the next day is talking about just one thing: Gaga.
1. She’s herself. Leadership means doing your vision (even if you’re title is janitor – be a visionary janitor and create wow in your work). Leadership means staying true to your self. And leadership means, well, not following. Lady Gaga doesn’t behave in a way designed to please the crowd. No, with those wild costumes and stunning theatrics, she sets her own course. And then leads.
2. She knows her customers. The best companies create what I call “Fanatical Followers” – customers who are so in love with who you are and what you do that they have crossed the boundary from loyalty into outright fanaticism. Lady Gaga knows what her fans want – and she delivers it to them. Every time.
3. She puts on a show. When you get to work every day, it’s showtime. No one cares if you have a cold or if you’re feeling off or if you had a fight with your best friend. We are paid to do great work. And the best businesses offer their customers an experience, not just a product or a service. Gaga’s shows are experiences.
4. She Leads Without a Title. Much of my new book, “The Leader Who Had No Title” is all about the opportunity every single one of us has each day to shift from victimhood into leadership. To transcend our current circumstances to play in the rare-air of excellence, mastery and genius. This isn’t hype. There are people who have learned to do this and I share their process in the book. But the key thing to remember is that Lady Gaga was just an ordinary person, chasing a dream in New York City, not so long ago. But through talent, hard work, ingenuity and leadership, she shed the shackles of ordinary and grew into extraordinary. You can do the same, in your work and within your life. Starting today.
P.S. To follow Robin Sharma on Twitter Click Here
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Stanford E-Week is Feb 21-28, 2010 |
| By:Neerja Raman on Fri 19 Feb 2010 2:21 PM under Business, Careers and Job Search, Entrepreneurship, Global Leadership |
The annual Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford, is February 21-28, 2010 and this year we have more events dedicated to celebrating social entrepreneurship and clean-tech than ever before. These are 2 events I am helping organise which are free and open to all:
February 26, Cordura Hall,9-6: Relief 2.0 in Haiti: Enabling Agile Crisis Response with Entrepreneurship In Relief 2.0 we’ll take an inside look at an emergent phenomenon – Agile Crisis Response made possible by social ventures, social media, crowdsourced solutions and other entrepreneurial approaches. We will look at lessons learned and how we might rethink and redesign the way we approach disaster relief and rebuilding, starting with Haiti’s reconstruction effort.
February 28, Wallenberg Hall, 3-5: Structures for Social Enterprise: Panel and Showcase- this lively panel discussion features social entrepreneurs Kjerstin Erickson (FORGEnow.org), Eve Blossom (Lulan.com), and Esther Kim (REDF.org). Moderated by Kriss Deiglmeier, executive director for the Center for Social Innovation, the panel will discuss nonprofit, for-profit and hybrid models for starting and growing a social enterprise. From 4-5 p.m., mingle with entrepreneurs at a fair showcasing their intriguing early-stage social ventures. Social entrepreneurs available for interaction during the showcase are:
Lloyd Nimetz: Blitz Bazaar: Starting and Creating a Movement
Akshay Kothari, Kapeesh Saraf: Design for Extreme Affordability Workshop
Varun Jain: E4SI: Engineers for Social Impact
Anu Mahal: Development Alternatives
Carlos Miranda Levy, Margarita Quihuis: How Social Media Allows Us to Instantly Organize for Crisis Intervention
Viji Dilip: Bookshare International: Reaching Out to the Print Disabled in Developing Nations
DC Jayasundera: Rural Returns: Better Value Chains for the Rural Poor
Rodrigo Santibanez: Puentes Global: Non-Profit International Employment Agency for Low-Income Workers
Additionally the Graduate School of business has a panel discussion on social entrepreneurship on 26th afternoon as part of their annual entrepreneurship day
