AGILITY IN LEADERS: SWAMI VIVEKANANDA — II | Agile Story 27
This is in continuation of my earlier story on Swamiji on the aspects of AGILITY in his leadership style. (AGILITY IN LEADERS : SWAMI VIVEKANANDA — I)
While going through the Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master certification we became aware of Daniel Goleman’s 5 main components emotional intelligence. Briefly they can be summarized as follows:
In this context let’s recall Swamiji’s views on the self-awareness and empathy. “Do you feel for others? If you do, you are growing in oneness. If you do not feel for others, you may be the most intellect giant ever born, but you will be nothing; you are but dry intellect and you will remain so”. “Many feel but only a few can explain. It is the power of expressing one’s love and appreciation and sympathy for the others that enables one person to succeed better in spreading the idea than others.”
Both the above quotes clearly explain the importance of empathy and social skills. According to Swami Vivekananda, when we let loose our feelings, we waste our energy, disturb our inner peace, and accomplish minimal work. The energy which ought to have gone out as work is spent as mere feeling, which counts for nothing. It is only when the mind is very calm and collected that the whole of its energy is spent in doing good work. The one who gives way to his feelings and lack SELF-AWARENESS or SELF-CONTROL, cannot work; she or he only breaks into pieces, and does nothing practical. It is the calm, forgiving, well-balanced mind that does the greatest amount of work.
The finest words from Swamiji which I can recall in this aspect is indeed “When a man is under the control of senses. He is of the world. When he has controlled the senses, the world is of him.” He propagated the idea that ‘SELF-AWARENESS’ is the best way to control one’s mind. Will power and determination can also stop mind from wandering. However, there is one more very important point attached to this: To keep the mind under control one has to practice and repeat the same thought over and over again. Isn’t it the same thought of EQ continues to develop through adult life and improves with Practice, which is a critical concept of the emotional intelligence of the high-performance teams?
Aren’t these teachings of Swamiji paint the canvas of our mind with the same style, colour and aura as the AGILE values, aspects, thoughts, mindset that we are familiar with? He believed that All power is within us. We can do anything and everything — we have to believe in that. So, we should stand up and express the divinity within ourselves. Problems follow us wherever we go and whatever we do. Running away never solves any problems. So, face the troubles and deal with them. Very similar to the mantra of any Agile team members.
We will continue to further explore the teachings of renowned leaders and the essence of AGILITY in them. Till then HAPPY READING. Ending with a famous quote of Swami Vivekananda “In a day, when you don’t come across any problems — you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path” — When there is no bug, there is definitely a missed test case. 😊
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are my own and don’t reflect company’s opinion. They should not be considered as an advice or suggestion in any way.
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This is the continuation of sharing our Agile Stories/Thoughts Series. I strongly recommend referring to the links below for previous insightful blogs from our #teamagile in IBM
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