The Monkey Bar kid lets go…..
by Sunil Bali, Chief Energy Officer, 18-09-11
Do you remember swinging on the monkey bars in the playground when you were a kid?
In order to move forward and reach the other end you have to let go of the bar.
Sometimes in life we have to let go of something that has served us well in the past and this can be really tough.
We’re conditioned by our physical environment, by what our parents and others tell us, by events that impact us emotionally, and by the social structures that surround us. As adults we quickly become comfortable inside our individual box and continue to live on ‘autopilot’.
Many of us who are in large corporations know first hand, that the hardest task is often to get the corporate mind to start to unlearn some of the gospels that have made them successful in the past and that will no longer work in the future.
Just as we can’t plant new crops without first uprooting the old roots and giving the new seeds a chance, we need to unlearn before we can learn anew.
Last Monday, Novak Djokovic the World No. 1, beat Rafael Nadal to win the US Open. His record in 2011 is outstanding: Played 66, Won 64, with 10 tournament titles, including 3 Grand Slams.
But it wasn’t always so. After winning the Australian Open in 2008, Djokovic got "stuck" at World No. 3. Many of us would be happy with World No. 3, but Djokovic’s childhood dream was to win Wimbledon and be World No. 1.
So last year Djokovic decided to go back to the drawing board and analyse every aspect of his game. His key findings were that he needed to hit his ground strokes both deeper and harder. This was easier said than done as he had essentially been playing the same way, day in day out, since he turned professional eight years ago.
The result of Djokovic unlearning and then learning a new style of play was that this year he fulfilled his childhood ambition of being World No. 1 and winning Wimbledon.
So don’t just learn to learn….. learn to unlearn and ask yourself:
“What is not serving me that I need to unlearn?”
As the following 60 second video demonstrates, let go of any mental baggage that is holding you back so that you can
Quotes
In a time of drastic change, it is the unlearners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists
– Eric Hoffer
The most important lessons lay not in what I needed to learn, but in what I first needed to unlearn
– Jim Collins (author “Good to great”)
The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of have been, into the corners of our minds
– John Maynard Keynes
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of choice – John F. Kennedy
Humour
One Liners
1. We’ll be attending the National Schizophrenic’s Convention. Anybody who’s everybody will be there.
2. She quit speaking to me when I wouldn’t open the car door for her. It’s not my fault. I just panicked and swam to the surface.
3. Yawning is the body’s way of saying "Low Battery".
4. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
5. Calories make the world go round.
6. Sign in restaurant window: "Eat now – pay Waiter".
7. Procrastinators of the world unite…..tomorrow.
8. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.
To your success,
Sunil
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