Understanding Human Psychology

I recently came across an article about AI "reading the room." The idea was fascinating. Imagine you're facilitating a workshop or leading a meeting, and AI is continuously analyzing the room. It tells you whether people are engaged, whether they are distracted, whether your energy has dropped, or whether you need to change your approach. As someone who has facilitated learning sessions for many years, I had mixed feelings. Facilitation has never been just about knowing the content. It is about being present. It is about noticing the person who suddenly sits back in their chair, the participant who leans forward because something sparked curiosity, the one who hesitates before speaking, or the smile that tells you an example has landed well. It is about sensing the energy in the room and adapting in real time. Can AI do that? Maybe, to some extent. It can probably detect facial expressions, body posture, eye contact, speaking patterns, or periods of silence. It may even t...

  Take your work seriously. Don't take yourself too seriously." I recently heard this thought in a podcast featuring Kunal Shah, and it stayed with me long after the podcast ended. He spoke about how there have been brilliant thinkers, inventors, and leaders who have done extraordinary work, and yet, over time, many of them have faded into history. He even mentioned how people working at the Bombay Stock Exchange didn't know who its founder was. It made me pause. We spend so much of our lives worrying about what people think of us, whether we are successful enough, whether this one meeting went well, whether someone appreciated our work, whether this week has been good or bad. We carry the weight of every little event as though it defines our entire life. But does it really? I don't think the message is to become careless. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite. Take your work seriously. Do it honestly. Do it sincerely. Give it your best. Learn from it. But don...

  Ive forever been pro learning from the times of my college days. Untill school I felt I did not have a choice of what I wanted to study about. But then in college, I had almost all the subjects of my choice. I loved to study for the fondness of knowing more about the topic, especially when the subject was psychology. I also noticed that the teachers one encounters are also responsible to bring out the interest of the student in that subject. And touchwood all my psychology teachers were those kind of teachers who developed our interests and engagement. After that time, I learnt and loved to study. I completed my graduation in entire psychology and then masters. While I was at work, there was a time when I was dealing with labour and thats when learning about labour laws was what I invested my time in, my second masters was the reason behind it. But curiosity kills the cat! So I went on to invest my everything to my PhD studies, it took years, money, effort and a lot lot of brain ...

 I was recently attending a training session where the facilitator made an interesting point about feedback. He said that feedback is not something you collect for the sake of collecting it. It is not a box to tick. The purpose of feedback is improvement. It is about understanding what is working, what is not, and what can be done differently. That reminded me of a story I had read some time ago. There was once a lion whose lioness told him that he had bad breath. The lion didn't like hearing this and decided to verify it with his trusted counsellors. The first to arrive was the sheep. The sheep bowed respectfully and said, "Your Majesty, I am sorry to say this, but your breath smells awful." The lion was furious. He immediately pounced on the sheep and killed him. Next came the wolf. Having witnessed what happened to the sheep, he decided to play safe. "My Lord," said the wolf, "your breath smells as fresh as the spring breeze." The lion knew the wolf...

We live in a world that seems to reward speed. The faster you respond to an email, the better. The faster you finish a report, the more productive you are considered. The faster you solve a problem, make a decision, submit a form, prepare a household budget, complete school homework, or crack an interview, the smarter you appear. We learn speed in school may be, where solving your exam paper in a given time before others are done with it, it's considered smart, winning a race is amazing- it becomes more about speed than fitness.  Somewhere along the way, we have started believing that speed and smartness aka intelligence are the same thing. But are they? Back in 2009-10, I used to teach the Introduction of a Learning Organisation to MBAs, that's when I read the concept of Systems Thinking. And I was fascinated that although everything in the world is dependent on each other, yet I never had seen the world this way before. Then I kept deducting how actions take shape and snowbal...