I have come across several articles and books on "Success" and all of them have very special messages for the reader. It is truly motivating to read and learn how people are making their dreams take shape. We can certainly benefit from the lessons learned by those who have driven themselves on the road to success and read the milestones they have placed along the way there, for inscribed on each are invaluable insights of life.

To achieve anything noteworthy in life calls for a certain amount of "stretch" which put plainly means that one has to "struggle" with the performance and delivery of results that meet higher standards that those in play. I would rather call this a raising of the bar or an aspiration in action. Performing within our capabilities guarantees delivery against promises made, but these are mediocre performances delivering mediocre goals. Satisfaction with this leads to a dull sense of happy mediocrity and diminished dreams.

At, Valmar International, we have put together our own definition of success in our Vision Statement, drawing from all those lessons others have learned and shared and our own experiences and aspirations for success. Allow me to share this with you, as we have found these simple truths of life very useful.

We look at adopting these tenets of life as we A-S-P-I-R-E for success learning Six Shining Lessons of Life

Ownership of the task along with responsibility for performance is a prime element of success. Effort no matter how earnest, without focus or direction cannot deliver excellence. "If it has to be, it's up to me !" is a common enough phrase, but we need to get it off the page and into our work ethic. Desire without a will, subscription to excellence without action, and action without accountability together deliver shallow performances and empty dreams.

The guide-ropes across life are woven with the values we bring along with us. Values with hold us accountable not just for what we do, but how we do things too. Values contribute to a life with honor and morality. Values provide the higher ground, on which we can breathe the purity of the air of accomplishment, instead of suffocating in the sulphuric swamps of dishonorable practices.

Good corporate governance at the organizational level and personal ethics at the individual level can help create a single transparent and honest agenda of action.

Not having to watch your back or cover your rear while you are engaged in delivering excellence, is a major relief and allows everyone to commit resources without any reservation. Standing firm on what you believe in allows you to advocate your position and interest soundly It's not about being obstinate, but about being definite.

Consider this. You visit a well promoted township and see towers, buildings, parks, restaurants, shopping malls, schools, hospitals and all that makes a township strewn across the landscape with no apparent design or town planning. You further notice that many of the structures were only partially complete, some surrounded by dense brush and overgrown wasteland whilst some with pruned lawns. Roads run smartly through the town but some abruptly end in rough mounds of rubble. Restaurants run glitzy advertisements of their fare and entertainment programs, but this is only in print and not in practice. Hospitals gleam with the most professional equipment but the medical services are run by it's lone pharmacy dispensing OTC medicines. You quiz some of the townsfolk about these strange to bizarre matters, and find that they do not sense anything amiss!

Do we recognize our lives in this context too ? How often do we really plan the township of our life ? Giving in to the flavour of the moment we may develop competences that die faster than they are used, redirect our focus mindlessly into convoluted and often unfinished paths, build towers of performance without the support structure in place, leave the "insignificant balance" of competence, performance, values and relationships unfinished or half constructed for completion at an unknown later date. But all this has a sense of tremendous busyness and activity, leaving us feeling we have accomplished things! As we go along we make do with what we have and this makes major withdrawals from our energy and enthusiasm bank balances, till we resign ourselves to living with inconvenience and a poverty stricken future.

Bringing passion and purpose to performance allows us to create the right architecture and platform for our dreams to rise to celebrate a rich and rewarding present and a promising future.

Integrity is like a precious stone. A flaw in the stone will not only devalue the stone but also may cause problems for the wearer. Interestingly enough Integrity begins with "I" which means that it lies within us to manifest. The completeness or wholeness of the Purpose we bring to our performance and relationships as well as the truthfulness and honesty of our intentions, allow us to shed the disguises and garbs of "strategic" intent which is usually opportunistic in favour of an upstanding unconditional largeness of intent which enlarges the playing field to accommodate others too.

Amidst the fog of deviousness, manipulation and exploitation, integrity of intent is a clear beacon which illuminates the entire relationship with the purity of true partnership in progress.

The word relationship itself shows us that just like a ship, all hands must be on the deck and the ship of relation needs the synergy of all members to pull together, especially in rough weather. This applies to teams and associates at the organizational level or families and friends at the individual or personal level. Navigating the storms and tempests of suspicion, doubt, misgivings, moments of weakness, inadequacies and incompetence, can take a severe toll on the most weather-beaten of sailors afloat on the sea of survival and success.

Establishing a resourceful relationship which counts on the contribution of all elements in the network of life, trusting and respecting those in the network and staying with the ship provides the robustness to the relationship. Investing in the relationship unconditionally by contributing first without calculating the returns, and living all the tenets we have described this far, creates the reliability needed to put wind in the sails.

It is all about being there when it matters. Finding the right role to play and a set of convergent goals to guide individual contributions to the relationship is crucial for one to deliver at least what is expected.

Making excellence a way of life, means demolishing the middle class of mediocrity and aspiring for the "dance of delight". Life at the cutting edge of excellence, cannot possibly be played by performing with competences one is conscious of possessing. Instead the thrill and exuberance of a full-blown life comes from reaching higher than the "essential expected" and delivering at the very "pinnacle of performance". It's all about asking yourself if what you do is enough or can you go the extra mile.

Pulling performances from the slums of mediocrity can be one of the most rewarding and thrilling experiences one can have. Like an eagle, once you experience the heavens, it is hard to live below the clouds. Finding refuge in being "grounded" or "down to earth" or "in touch with reality" leads to exactly that in the rewards. You are grounded in the earth, immersed in a false sense of security of a rationalized reality instead of soaring to embrace the universe.

With these Six Lessons of Life may you fulfill your dreams and ASPIRE actively for all the success that the world can possibly offer.

The arbiter of knowledge and skills, the Teacher, is a revered figure around the world. In India, the Teacher is known as the Guruji, the Wise One who can be trusted to lead the knowledge-blind and shine the light of competence and skills in the darkness of ignorance and incompetence.

Over time it has been realized that the Wise One is not necessarily the most skilled teacher. Learning proficiently and transferring the learning just as well is not really as simple as it seems. It takes far more skill to teach than to learn. The teacher has not only to have a full and wholesome appreciation of the subject but also know how best to transfer this in an intact and useful manner to the learner considering the learning styles and needs of each individual learner.

Whilst studies have been popularized concerning learning styles, and suitable adaptation of knowledge transference has been undertaken to match the varied learning styles of participants, the newer platform of transference has to do with the multiple intelligences that seem to be far more effective in reaching across to the learner.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University. It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited. Instead, Dr. Gardner proposes eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:

The theory of multiple intelligences has strong implications for adult learning and development.

Many adults, young professionals seeking to make their mark in life, often find themselves in jobs that do not make optimal use of their most highly developed intelligences (for example, the highly bodily-kinesthetic individual who is stuck in a linguistic or logical desk-job like Customer Care when he or she would be much happier in a job where they could move around, such as in front-line Sales ).

The theory of multiple intelligences gives adults a whole new way to look at their lives, examining potentials that they left behind in their childhood (such as a love for art or drama) but now have the opportunity to develop through courses, hobbies, or other programs of self-development. This is another way of chasing away the boredom with the routine or the mundane work one becomes habituated to accept and live with, lowering the levels of enthusiasm, responsiveness and creativity - some of the essential ingredients for success in these competitive times.

• Trainers / Teachers / Learning & Development facilitators - to use varied methods and practices of transferring and processing learning deliverables
• Participants - to acquire and learn varied methods of addressing work itself, using creative methods to address work issues through the favoured and more developed intelligences

Dr. Howard Gardner says that other than areas of developed expertise, most of us react or process and infer learning outcomes in all other areas in the manner we used to do as 5 year old kids - the earliest levels of cognitive intelligence.

Implications of this are as follows for Trainers/Facilitators/Teachers and our corporate participants.

Concluding Remarks

This exercise leads us to some interesting conclusions in the training-learning process

• Content transference is easily possible at an adult learning level. Summarising receipt of content at the end of the program is not an indication of learning or understanding as pointed out by. Dr. Gardner
• Understanding can only be ascertained when participants apply the learning in simulated real world experiences that are necessarily different from the experience created when delivering the concept. For example, participants can offer each other their own past experiences and ask others how they would use the learning to have handled the situation, or offer their own new approaches to the old experience
• Training Videos, Role Plays, Case Study Experiments, Training Exercises, need to be processed with "understanding" in mind - not a simple analysis of what happened in the experiment or video or exercise, which is what participants tend to explain, but how this learning can be applied at work / back in real life.
• Similarly hoping that the video/exercise or experiment is "self-explanatory" is not constructive as the learning derived by participants is likely to be unprocessed content management and learning summaries are derived from the 5 year old child-like "theories of life" . The "expert" must anchor the learning rather than leave loose ends to be automatically tied.
• Understanding can be investigated only by moving from "Foundational " Questioning / Basic Questions = What, Why, How to the more advance "Aesthetic" Level Questioning Skills / Questions that ask participants to offer personally processed input that has direct bearing on their work practices or behaviour
• This points to the program design and delivery process. Program designs which are packed almost like a school-time table leave very little processing and understanding time. The program flow is often "impaired" by handling lack of understanding or processing by participants and therefore participants learn to respond by cleverly managing the showcasing of content to represent learning and understanding, in order to release the program flow and time which tends to be the casualty, in a concept-crowded program.
• The Facilitator has to be equipped to deal with the following learning hurdles which participants will unconsciously throw up.

The children of today and their parents are subject to innumerable stressors and pressure-cooker circumstances of a competitive-crazy world. Managing daily life itself is a stupendous task. There seems to be no time or patience for anything or for that matter any person out of control or even out of the careful alignment with our regulated lives. The careless and carefree child, both real and the one in all of us, must conform or convert to a sedate straight-jacketed adult.

Living on the leading edge of life in today's rushed and rough times, involves both parents being actively engaged with careers that turn in the money to fund the household and lifestyle economies. Growing awareness of competitive careers and advancement vistas in the great big span of working life, has helped cast the dragnet over even the most the unsuspecting home-warming individual.

Bounding out of the couch of comfort, both men and women are brandishing degrees and skills that lay claim to jobs and careers that demand an all-consuming attention absorbing time and life like a gigantic blotting paper.

Regulation, regimentation, rigour are the watchwords of a timetabled life, driven by the need for bringing certainty and predictability to an anticipated incredible combo of a see-sawing roller-coaster life.

Instead of creative-constructs we seek regulated-regularity. The happy lull of mediocrity is the way to an undisturbed life. But ever so often Life has other plans….

What happens when we are faced with uncertainty, when our time tables have no meaning, when our plans find no place to unfold, when our carefully crafted lives are ripped apart by reality? What happens when all this happens because of our children? Or the pressures put on our children?? Such as competitive social lifestyles, expensive gadgets & gizmos, tuitions, peer-pressure, overly competitive exam pressures, study-load, rivalries at school / college, victimization by teachers, failure, fear-of-failure, success itself, substance abuse like smoking, drugs, alcoholism, absenteeism, sickness - real and imagined………… ???

Parenting can be a bizarre experience for both the parent and the child. Almost all parents, teachers and tutors expect the child to develop in to a superhuman composition of talent, knowledge, skills, competence along with vision, foresight, clarity of purpose, ambition, all neatly folded and pressed into the sharp edges of the shining blade of the sword of success. All this must of-course fit into the pre-constructed timetable of the mentor, unfortunately soon to be tormentor !

Parenting from afar, remote controlling results, financing concern, and funding the future is the order of the day today. But where is the Love ? Where is the Care and Compassion ? Where is the Connect between lives ? Where is the Soul of the family ?

The expected brusque answer you invariably get is: Where is the Time? Aha! Find Purpose and the Means usually follows. Alas, the Means is oft the End !

So here is a potful of parenting goulash for the modern family meal:

• Be involved :

• Connect :

• Value :

• Co-create :

• Be patient :

• Support & guide :

• Commit :

• Lead by example :

• Forgive :

• Have fun :