A picture from the interfaith conference in Sri Lanka a few years ago. The respect for each other and their views points gives hope to make this world a better place. Please reflect on a baby step you can take to create interfaith harmony in your own community, be it the neighbourhood, workplace, school, social organisation or any other organisation you are associated with.
NAFLIA 2019 Presentation (Click here to Download Powerpoint)
NAFLIA 2019 Presentation (Click here to download PDF)
Click on the above link for the presentation related to the keynote speech to be given by me at NAFLIA 2019. Conference participants are invited to download the presentation and use it to follow the keynote speech.
This blog is written in service of life-Insurance Advisors in Sri Lanka, specifically the members attending NAFLIA 2019, the National Forum for Life Insurance Advisors scheduled for the 2ndof September. My attempt is to articulate the key messages of the keynote speech that will be delivered by me.
As I was reflecting on the topic for the annual conference, ‘Assuring Tomorrow Dream Today’. The questions that come up are, what is the action we need to take today to assure our dream of tomorrow? How do we know the action we choose to take today will assure our dream tomorrow? I realised this is a very complex question and that there is no standard answer to this as the action to be taken depends of the world each person lives in. What I mean by the ‘world’ is the immediate world of each person starting with him/herself, family, friends, organisations they belong to, organisations and people they interact with etc. The answer is personal.
Continue reading “Living our Dream Purposefully – Purpose of Living – Part 30”
Organisations consist of people who are varied. People come from varied cultures, mindsets, beliefs, philosophies, and background. This diversity creates varied dynamics of interactions. Therefore it is unlikely that there are two similar organisations on this planet. Therefore there is no standard formula or right answer or wrong answers. Therefore the best I can do is to provide the clay for you to create a pot that can hold the value you can add to organisations that suits your reality and your aspirations using your creativity and your knowledge.
Why do you need to add value to organisations? I had learnt somewhere in my journey of life that the more you give the more you get. This concept became true to me as I tested it. The more I gave to others the more I received. The more time and I focus I gave my studies the better results I received. The more value I gave my existing clients the more new clients I received. The more knowledge I gave , especially free of any fees, the more knowledge I gained.
Continue reading “How Marketers can Add Value to the Organisation”
How many times a week do we look at our smart phone? Do we look at it first thing in the morning? Do we look at it before 7.30 a.m.? Do we look at it during meetings? Do we feel lost without our devices? I am sure the answers to these questions might not only be interesting but it will start us thinking.
Study UK’s Daily mail (www.dailymail.com) surveyed 2,000 smartphone owners about their tech habits. They found the average user now picks up their device 1,500+ times a week, reaches for their phone at 7:31am in the morning, checks personal emails and Facebook before they get out of bed, use their phone for three hours and sixteen minutes a day and almost four in ten users admitted to feeling lost without their device. (see the 4 mts video below about these dangers)
Technology has given us so many options of interest that our mind keeps wondering from one to another at an alarming rate. We may be at a meeting and our smart phone alerts that it’s a friends’ birthday and we pick the phone to wish her. When we open Facebook to do it, we see a friend request from an old friend. As we start accepting it, we see a photo posted by another friend. Then we remember there is a customer meeting and we may be late to get home and we start messaging someone at home to pick up a child from school, and then she tells you to bring some extra cash as the plumber was coming to fix a leak the next day. All this happens in about one and half minutes. Therefore we live in a world where our mind gets more and more fickle.
Some feel this is beneficial as it helps us to do many things rapidly, become knowledgeable in many fields, be able to handle more things than ever before, be able to respond fast, be connected with more friends more often, find new opportunities be more efficient, smarter, successful etc.
Do you generally find that your email inbox clogged with unattended mail?
Do you find that there are many important things to attended to?
Do you find that some important projects don’t get your required attention?
Do you find that some important task are neglected or delayed?
Do you feel that there are some task that you need to attend but you get drained trying to do them?
Do you find you just don’t have enough time to do tasks you enjoy doing that energizes you?
Well, if the answer to one or many of these questions are yes, then many of the answers are with David Allen, the author of many books including, ‘Getting Things Done’ and inspirational speaker.
I was fortunate to be at David’s session today, organized by Right Selection, the company who also represents me in the Middle East. While I generally have an empty email inbox, have things quite well organized with most things done by the end of each week with, and adequate time to do things I am passionate about, I found David helps put things in perspective and provides concepts and a process that helps get things done.
Here is a summary of the learnings for you.
Compare the intent of your communication with the impact of your communication. If there is mismatch then surely there is conflict. Great communicators know how to
synchronize the two and this requires us putting our heart and soul into communications. This is the powerful message delivered by Omar Khan at his learning event : ‘Heart & Soul of Real Communications’ on the 21st of January 2014.
So how do we start achieving this magical balance?
This requires us to be a students of impact of our own communication on other people and our intent of that communication. We need to use our ears to listen to the emotional impact created on the other person. We need to be empathetic. We need to see it from our soul, that is to know the positive energy it creates in the other person. Understanding of spiritual intelligence is key here.
Top Performance requires us to ensure that top teams are set up, developed, nurtured and rewarded appropriately. Most companies miss this important point. Here is a summary of the insights from the ‘Top Performance through Top Teams’ session by Omar Khan held on the 21st of January 2014.
Inappropriate strategy deployed by the organisations to measure/improve business performance is one of the key reasons that teams remain average teams delivering average performance.
Therefore following are the appropriate strategy for the organisations to measure/improve business performance.
Continue reading “Great Teams Build Great Organisations and Great Organisations Build Great Teams!”
‘Mastery of Self’, first introduced by Omar Khan in Sri Lanka in the mid-nineties has inspired thousands of Sri Lankans to make ‘Lemonade’ out of the ‘Lemon’ in them. They are known as NLPers rather than HELPers as they HELP the world with the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming [NLP] they mastered during this 4-day experience. Continue reading “THE HEART AND SOUL OF REAL COMMUNICATION”
Ever had a situation where you had top talent in your team perhaps a great track record of performance supported by great processes and a super brand, but with no results to justify these inputs.
In our leadership consulting work we have found one of the key reasons for this. This happens when top leadership does not recognize the fact that the fastest way to improve organizational results is through the key teams that are accountable for delivering that performance.
Organizations need to be strengthened horizontally not vertically, and by ratcheting up the capabilities of top teams, we can increase the value of our organizational assets ten-fold, and every penny invested, will give a hard dramatic ROI as each of these teams are in charge of strategic business results!!
Driving up business performance through our key teams require; growing our leadership throughout the team as way to driving key results, aligning teams so they can execute and get past blocks and plateaus, having an expanded concept of individual and team accountability, improving the quality of decision-making in ways that shows up on our bottom-lines and tangibly improving ‘conversational capacity’ through the ability to have radical action conversations.
Continue reading “Does Top Talent always become a Top Team that delivers Top Performance?”
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.
Continue reading “The teacher will arrive when the student is ready”
Ranjan De Silva 