Motivating myself by motivating others

(Note: this was originally published on 17 Dec 2013 before moved here)

Few weeks ago, me and my colleagues started to have knowledge sharing session among ourselves with the purpose of sharing and learning from each other.

We hold this session every week, with the rules of everyone should take turn to prepare something and share with others. We have a group of around 10+ people so it takes around 3 months to reach a cycle.

I started the first sharing session. Then another of my colleague did next week. Then I noticed we have a problem: some of the people seems to be a bit reluctant to share, perhaps due to our asian culture — we’re shy. Also I noticed that some of them might not be interested in some of the topic, and yet they still choose to attend.

This might not be a good knowledge sharing culture, because we don’t wanna ‘force’ people to be in the sharing session they’re not interested, and ‘force’ people to share anything regardless of they are willing to do so or not. This breaks the purpose of knowledge sharing.

So I voiced out my opinion about how I think a knowledge sharing session should work:

• We should respect the audience time: If there is a topic one is not interested in, it’s ok to not join the session, because one might not benefit and learn from the session and yet wasting their time, it might bring more harm than good.
• Instead of forcing, encourage everyone to present: This shouldn’t be another presentation one should prepare, just for the sake of presentation. The purpose of sharing session is not only for the audience to learn something, but also give presenter an opportunity to learn public speaking, expressing thoughts, and a more in depth of understanding the topic he/she who tries to present. As an IT company we don’t have much chance to expose and present ourselves, this may serve as a platform and opportunity for all of us.

I didn’t expect them to feel inspired from the suggestion. I can see in their eyes that there is a sense of motivation from within. The idea kick start the way they think of knowledge sharing, as some of them started to propose what topic they can present and share in the coming session.

This may sound a bit exaggerating, but I feel overwhelmed from their respond. I didn’t know some of my thoughts can inspire other people in some way. I feel like some of my action can affect others, in a (hopefully) good way.

Yeah, this tiny action may not look like a big deal to others, but it taught me something:

• motivating others can also motivate myself
• dare to voice out any thoughts in mind
• don’t try to change thoughts of others. People will choose what’s right for them.