The month of April 2013 epitomized the caption! Yes there were many including myself who were ready for the teacher. It was a great month of personal growth.

The month started with 60 souls from various organizations and walks of life taking part in the Mastery of Self through Neuro Linguistic Programming [NLP] playshop that was conducted in Sri Lanka [see more details in: http://www.ranjandesilva.net/#!mind-power/cpqz ] . This was the first 2 days and all of them left feeling more valuable than ever before, more empowered than ever before and more purposeful than ever before. They come back for the final 2 days on the 6 & 7 of May.

Then I travelled to Vietnam where I conduct the same session for another 60 souls from Fashion Garments a company of the Hirdramani Group in Sri Lanka. The impact created was the same and I go to Vietnam again to do the final 2 days of the training on the 11 & 12 of May 2013.

From Vietnam I travelled to Dubai to conduct a 2 day training on advanced negotiation skills and a 1 day training in work life balance. While the numbers were around 16 participants in each session, as customary in trainings that take place in Dubai, the impact created for them was tremendous.

After having helped unlock potential of so many souls in the first half of the month, the second half was about me going back to school. Yes I was a participant with 15 other senior executives from the health care industry who took part in a 2 week long intensive leadership development session held by the Samson Global Leadership Academy of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Cleveland clinic employees 42000 people and 2700 of them are doctors. All staff medical and non-medical are designated as ‘CARE GIVERS’ with appropriate training irrespective of their specific roles. The clinic that is 92 years old is a leader in health care with strong clinical, academic and research wings. They are the no 4 hospital in the USA and their Heart and Vascular institute has been no 1 in the USA for the last 17 years. They are responsible for many of the innovations in health care including most transplants, dialysis, heart related procedures such as bypass surgery to name just a few. Therefore being with such a life-giving organization for 2 weeks was fortunate.

This was a well designed personalized leadership development process that was one of the most valuable learning experiences I have gone through. I attend this because I wanted to be fully effective in my leadership role at Apollo Hospital Dhaka. After having completed this training I feel much more geared to effectively leave the hospital to greatness.

The course included many self assessments such as the Thomas Killman Index of conflict management, Emotional Intelligence assessment and the leadership virtues test. We were guided to formulate a leadership development plan based on these assessments, other learnings from the course, personal aspirations and our current status in our careers. The plan is inspiring and I have already started implementing it.

We were also assigned mentors who guided us in developing the plan and finding solutions for our leadership challenges and growth needs. While being a leadership coach and mentor myself, and receiving ongoing coaching from my consultancy firm Sensei International, Omar Khan, it was refreshing to see another process and style and to look at me from another pair of eyes. The mentoring sessions were very valuable.

We had many class room learning sessions in various management topics such as marketing, finance, patient experience, Human resources, business intelligence, medical information technology, emotional intelligence, negotiations, conflict resolutions, communications, business building, global partnerships etc. All these were health care related and were very important for my personal purpose in life.

We had many shadow session in the Cleveland clinic such as nursing, pharmacy, cardiovascular, critical care transportation etc. where we got to se the actual operations at work and to interact with caregivers to learn from them directly. We also had round table session in the areas of corporate governance and creating wellness.

I will be writing blog articles about the various learnings during the month of may while having engagement with various teams at Apollo Hospital Dhaka to explore possibilities of adopting some of the world-class practices of Cleveland Clinic to take us towards our mission to be a world-class health care destination, the pride of Bangladesh.

Learning for me is a lifetime pursuit and I am always ready. And amazingly teachers always arrive in various forms and guises.