Personal Growth "Lab"

The sheer positivism flowing around the PG lab exercise somehow made me wonder, can it really help? We face such transforming experiences in life and that certainly doesn’t come out of the class rooms. The more you have cuts and bruise the better are the chances that you will learn the lesson. Very unlikely in the classroom setting. Still the class worked wonder and people felt happy that they are a part of it.
Is PG Lab a business preposition or a real tool to create the required change in the person. It is certainly creating value for the participants as it will throw the lights on the territories undiscovered till the time. And this revelation gives a feeling that you have conquered the monkey and from now on you will be the slave of your planned approach. How many of you did not know before, that you tend to talk a lot even when it is not required (A bull in the china shop), or for that matter you don’t take feedback even when you know that the change will work wonders for you (A tortoise). The terms are assigned to the already known things. Now you know what type of a person is that called, or maybe the better use is to criticize somebody comfortably in a larger group where people will understand your wit equipped with the jargons.

Now it is creating value for the participants as the participants are the customers or the main objective of all the exercise. Few other important aspects which stand out in the full exercise are as follows
• The place where the classes will be conducted, close to the nature. As if otherwise we have not seen trees and grass and mosquitoes and sunrise and sunsets and we are living in most unnatural of all the places (some kind of different unnatural galaxy).
• Trekking, which is always fun. Learn or not learn it is fun to trek. Few quick advantages are no classes, you can take lots of pictures for facebooks and orkuts to show the world that you are learning in a superhuman way, feel that you have conquered something which by now was hidden under the golden natural reserves, think that you did a great team building exercise even when you did not bother who has finished the trek and who doesn’t.
• Games, now this is really exciting. It is a mess to finalize a strategy. More than the strategy people think their perspective or analysis is the thing to crack the game. Well there is no right strategy for that matter, the one which worked wonder for you is the right one for you. I should write a full blog on how the politics of finalising the strategy for the game is not a matter of the innovation but more a matter of team players sticking to whatever stupid thing has been finalised.
• I guess 99 percent of Indians (I do not know much about the other nationals, and hence can not comment) love to play ‘antakshari’ and you give them a chance to play this game or let them sing under a cosy setup of bonfire and evenings and you have their happiness quotient shoot up like anything. It’s like you make them sing for some time and then ask about whether India should attack Pakistan or not and there will be philosophies raining. You know, because people are happy and their take on life is different from what it is under stress and lots of assignments.
• Thank to SPJIMR admission process that the ratio of male to female participants is something which I should not even mention (to escape from the wrath of my batch mates as it will not be a good thing to reflect), otherwise the happiness quotient of few more participants would have increased dramatically and we would have had great life changing experiences from the PG Lab.

Without going further into details of everything, the one thing which stands out in everything that has been done there is that the participants were made to believe that they are happy, they are achieving, they are rediscovering and then the effect of the lab is what you can observe. From where this sense of happiness or achievement or rediscovering has come? This sense has been injected into us without even using an injection, and that is the power of a human brain (now please don’t imagine an injection which works with your mental strength). And when you think that you are emerging as a winner you tend to accept the outcome.

This is where the crux of it lies, make life a PG Lab. Don’t wait for somebody to take you to garudmaachi and then do a locus of control of belief test and then come to a conclusion that you are a self believer. Make the surroundings natural (grow more trees for that matter, or have small plants in the so called GAMLA). Achieve one thing daily, the point is to realise the achievement (as simple as you have managed to attend all classes without your brain thinking about anything else). Be happy and don’t ask me to give you a reason to be happy. Otherwise I will ask you make a team of your reptile brain and your rat brain with the mammal brain as the referee to play a game of antakshari or to sing a group song with all the three brains, so that you can just be simply happy without any complications. PG Lab is a wonderful thing not because it discovers the territories not explored till now but because it proves that life is just about the happiness, achievements, antakshari, music, nature, sun rise and sun sets, laughter, team building, losing happily, johari window and all the wonderful drawings everybody had made.

Don’t come back, stay there at PG Lab.