Inspire Someone Today
Inspire Someone Today
E178 | From Metal to Minds | Desikamani
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Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to help you change, and that single fact explains why so many goals stall, so many training programs flop, and so many leaders feel stuck repeating the same patterns. We sit down with Desikamani (Mani), founder of Mental Learning and creator of result-oriented learning engineering, to explore behavior change through an unusual lens: metallurgy. When people buy steel, they do not care about steel; they care about properties. Mani argues the same is true for learning and leadership: people do not buy information; they buy outcomes that protect identity, reduce fear, and increase capability.
We dig into the neuroscience of learning, especially the two-processors model of the brain and the amygdala’s veto power. Fear becomes the hidden driver, while the neocortex plays a different role: it influences by creating experiences that feel safe enough for new habits to form. From there we build practical models for transformation: belief multiplied by skill equals behavior, and skill development equals practice plus objective feedback. We also talk about evidence-based training, simulations, and how AI can help leaders rehearse hard conversations before the real stakes show up.
We bring it to the present with AI anxiety, reframing the fear as “what will happen to me” and returning to identity, value, and adaptive intelligence. You will leave with concrete micro experiments to build emotional awareness, reduce the urge to give advice, and read the fears and filters in others so you can lead with empathy. If this sparked a new question for you, subscribe, share this with someone who is trying to change, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.
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Quiet Opening On Value
SPEAKER_01No one really cares about what we create. People only buy what uh what they want. So I realized that men and material were very similar because both of them are light or related to for their properties. I love the word Rasya. That's so indique, you know. Uh secret is a very Western idea, and only humans have secrets. Nature does not have any secrets. I read something beautiful about emotions. The statement was: please remember, all the waves in the sea are not you. You are the sea. The waves are inside the sea.
SPEAKER_00Not everything that matters needs to be loud. Some conversations help you pause, some help you see differently, and some stay with you long after the end. Welcome to Inspire Someone Today, my dear listeners. A space for honest conversations about life, wealth, and the choices that shape who we become. No quick fixes, no borrowed certainty, just real stories, thoughtful reflection, and the quiet courage to live with intention. This is Inspire Someone Today, where conversations are human, reflective, and meant to stay with you.
Meet The Metallurgist Turned Mentor
SPEAKER_00Hey my dear reasons, welcome back for yet another episode of Inspire Someone Today. Today we have somebody who began by studying metals, their structure, their strength, and their response to pressure and heat. And somewhere along the way, he realized that humans weren't very different. Why do some people bend and grow while others break? Why do organizations spend millions on learning but struggle to change behavior? And what truly transforms people? Is it information, reputation, pain, environment, or intention? In this episode of Inspire Someone Today, we speak to Desh Kamani, founder of mental learning and creator of the philosophy of result-oriented learning engineering. This is not a conversation about training programs, my dear listeners. It is a conversation about human behavior. About why people stay stuck, about what actually changes us, and about the invisible patterns that shape our lives and leadership. It's an absolute joy and pleasure to have Mani joining me on this conversation of Ins Person 1 today. Welcome to the Shir Bani. Avasta. It's a pleasure, Srikant.
Why People Buy Properties
SPEAKER_00You spent your early years studying metals. You're the metallurgist. At what point did you realize humans and materials behave similarly?
SPEAKER_01I don't know if there was an exact point, but I think it was a process. It began hitting me regularly. So initially, when I kind of interned at a steel plant, a lot of steel got made. I mean, I would ask myself as a metallurgist, what's my job really? The answer was funnily, for me, it was very confusing. I thought we were creating materials, we were producing materials. But then one day it occurred to me that, you know, that's a very inanimate way of looking at it. And uh people who bought steel did not buy steel. They didn't care about the metal. All that they wanted was properties, okay? Someone would say, I will give you 70,000 rupees a ton. Can you give me something to build my fence? That's all mattered to him. No one really cares about what we create. People only buy what uh what they want. So I realized that men and material were very similar because both of them are light or related to for their properties. So that was a big revelation for me.
SPEAKER_00So that was the start point. And your engineering uh degree also taught you about the basic human nature. That's how you were able to kind of do that uh compare contrast between metals and uh human beings.
SPEAKER_01I wish my degree taught me that. Okay, unfortunately, today no engineering program teaches people anything about human behavior. I wish it does, okay? Because end of the day, engineers are, at least in our time, engineers were not this many. Engineers were a very small select group of people, okay? You were probably in the top one, two, three percentile maximum. So therefore, you went on to become leaders, and you and we were not taught really anything about human behavior. Okay. I think your question was very uh it's very perceptive. When did I realize? I realized that you know, one thing led to another. The first realization was the similarity on your like for properties. Then I began to ask myself, uh, what is one of the funniest human traits, you know? I don't want to change, but I want everyone else to change, okay, to adapt to me. It's a it's a very unfair, but a very human uh need that I saw in people. So that led me to asking myself, how do materials change? Because I was in the business of changing properties of materials, okay? No, nothing really came as it is. Uh, in fact, one of the funny things I noticed was that iron doesn't even exist as iron in nature. Nature wants iron to be a couple with oxygen. They are a very wonderful, beautiful couple who will never leave each other's presence at any point in time. You throw it away for a few days and go back, what do you see? You see rust. And what is rust? As people think it's iron oxide. No, I think it is pure love. Uh, you can't see that kind of love anywhere else. Just because poets don't, you know, use it as a metaphor, we don't see it as love. So that was my uh second interesting uh revelation. You know, iron and oxygen want to be together, but we don't like their properties. When they are together, they are the properties are not inspiring at all. You cannot do anything. But the moment you separate iron and oxygen, iron becomes a civilization changing material. Now go back and look at 120 years, last 120 years. What do you see if there was no steel? If there was no steel, you have nothing, right?
SPEAKER_00So everything has a component of iron to this.
SPEAKER_01Totally. Without steel, uh none of your progress today would be possible at all, uh, Srikant. Most people don't realize it. Okay, I sometimes feel we are a very ungrateful species. We have a Mother's Day, Father's Day, and all kinds of days, but you don't have a steel day, which is what is making you uh do everything. So that was a very interesting trigger when I realized all materials have their inherent properties. So if you want to change any of the properties, okay, for example, you have a bar of steel, you don't like its hardness, you want it to be harder because it's going to wear against another surface, then something inside that metal has to change for its exterior to change, okay? I mean, a phase changes, molecular arrangements change, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's a beautiful contrast that you're bringing in about metals and human uh behavior. We'll definitely dwell deeper into this.
The U Turn Toward Humans
SPEAKER_00What shaped you at critical turning point in your life?
SPEAKER_01I I keep thinking about it. Uh maybe when I was uh in school, I loved human behavior, but I did not realize it. You know, sometimes you don't know what is happening to you. I was uh a kid, you know, who probably elder kids would respect. I wouldn't know why. A bunch of my friends would be teased, but I would not be, okay. I didn't know why. Slowly, I think you kind of keep recognizing that you have a way with people. And after a few years, okay, of dabbling with materials, working on engineering, changing properties, all of that. I began to realize that I enjoyed working with people. What gave me the highest joy was, you know, working with people, and I saw people, you know, opening up to me, talking to me, felt good about, you know, being vulnerable. Okay, so these were things that I recognized. And that was the real turning point. That's when I realized, and this, you know, interesting um comparison of uh men material similarity, okay. You know, in our society, we are very fixated about profession you choose, why you choose, oh, you studied this, you know, you're supposed to work on that, you're not supposed to waste this, waste that. We have a huge sunk cost policy, okay? So coming out of that and going back to what I always wanted to work on, human behavior, okay, was that. So that was the turning point. That's when I realized I will take a U-turn and shift to behavior science from metallurgy.
SPEAKER_00That's a good point of realization, also what you want to do, what you enjoy doing it, and turning wheels around
Corrosion Identity And Change
SPEAKER_00that. And you speak about corrosion that happens to metals. I'm sure corrosion happens to human beings as well. What weakens human beings the way corrosion weakens metals.
SPEAKER_01See, uh, in fact, corrosion is seen as a bad property by humans. But corrosion is just a phenomenon, okay? All of us are meant to be in a certain way. And what happens is when you are forcibly changed to something, you always look forward to going back to who you were, okay? It's a question of identity. As I was telling you, I was meaning to tell you that I saw life in the materials, okay? Every material has a life. Now it's just not as animate or the way we are animate. Okay. We are animate in a far more active way. Animals are animate in a far more active way. Materials, okay, and other things are not inanimate, but they just have a life of their own. For example, many engineers don't understand the principle using which you separate iron and oxygen. You can't forcibly separate them. You need to know the rasya, you need to know where what is it that is binding them together and what will actually take them away. In a in a sense, you know, this was a very deep realization for me. Iron and oxygen love each other. They are not willing to go away from each other. So, how do I distract oxygen and make her move away? I'm using the word her because almost every metal is a masculine metal, you know, married to a feminine gas. I'm using the word masculine and feminine more as attributes, not as gender. Very interestingly, these two are happy to be together. Now, if I want to distract oxygen away, so we have Eellingham diagrams, there are a lot of enthalpy studies, okay? Metallurgists love gossip. They've documented every possible piece of gossip around in a book. So we know that, you know, oxygen loves carbon a lot more than iron at a certain temperature. And that rahasya is the key. So it makes us make her move away.
SPEAKER_00So let's
Rahasya And The Fear Engine
SPEAKER_00talk about that. You keep uh sharing about rahasya. So rahashya means secret. So let's kind of get into some of those secrets. The hidden principle or the deeper truth, that's what you kind of refer to, these rahasias, right? It's layered information. Layered information. So, what are the hidden laws? Hidden laws of the human behavior that most people miss.
SPEAKER_01You're actually asking for uh how to become a millionaire in thirty days, kind of a question. On this podcast, I'm saying in 60 minutes. I I love the word Rasya. That's so indick, you know. Uh secret is a very Western idea, and only humans have secrets. Nature does not have any secrets. So in nature, everything is out in the open. But information is layered. You are not always in a vantage point to see everything. Only when you move around, okay, when you go to a vantage point, you're able to see things that you couldn't see earlier. And uh the guru's job is uh fundamentally that. The guru is able to take you to a vantage point from where you are able to see uh the truth. Until you see it, it doesn't become the truth, okay? Even then it's not the truth, it's only your truth, but it's truth. But until you see it, it's a belief, right? You only know it as information, correct? So these rahsyas are interesting. And uh coming to your question, one of the foremost rahsyas that I discovered, okay, was that fear is the fundamental driver of human behavior. Your emotions, okay, propel behavior, they are fuel for action. Now the rahashya is human beings must come in touch with their fears. They should know their fears. They should know what is it that they are afraid of. And these fears keep shifting. As you learn, you overcome a fear, okay, or you kind of begin to manage a fear, right? And uh that is a very important uh rasya for you to know. The second uh amazing rasya that I discovered, okay, it was an accident when I, as part of my work in learning, I've always believed that you know training is approached like prayer, quite like prayer in the industry across. By that, what I mean is prayer is you do something and you hope something happens, okay? That's how training is looked at. And I was very upset with that. Okay, and as an engineer, the fundamental principle is you always begin with the end, okay, and you work backwards. You never start with something, you always work with what is needed, okay? And then you work backwards. And uh engineering is one of the pinnacles of human achievement, I would say. Your ability to reliably deliver something. And it's only getting better and better. We're able to do more and more complex things, right? So when I began thinking about engineering behavior, I discovered this rasya. In your brain, you have an amazing part, okay, called the neocortex or the orbitofrontal cortex. Nature has given you this ability to imagine, which it has not given to any other species. You know, you can virtually uh see something which does not exist. And that is, in my opinion, the real, what do you call, secret portion of all our progress. We are a dominating species on the planet and entirely because of that. But do you know something interesting? In your brain, for example, you and I are talking now, and you are receiving what I am saying and you're processing it, and you would probably be thinking in your mind, what is the next question to ask, or how do I respond, right? Okay? Now, whatever you are receiving not only goes to this fabulous part called the neocortex, it also goes to another processor inside your brain called the amygdala. And amygdala is a tiny almond-sized fellow, very limbic and you know, extremely crude and analogous. Now, imagine in your computer, instead of one processor, you had two processors. And you send in an input and the input goes to both the processors, Pikant. Right? Obviously, both of them will have some response, right? Now, nature must have given the veto to one of them, right? Now, the Rasya I discovered was that we think the cortex should have the veto. But nature does not trust the cortex. Nature actually trusts the amygdala. The amygdala keeps you safe, and therefore, fear is the biggest driver of human behavior. Because amygdala is blind, it can't see what's happening to you. It knows what's happening to you either as a threat or as a safe thing, okay? So wants it to be safe. Now, this completely transforms human behavior, Sikhan. In fact, uh people who run learning programs or design learning programs, okay, if they cannot understand fear, if they cannot understand the reason for the behavior, which is the underlying fear, they won't be able to uh create any behavioral change.
SPEAKER_00So that's a great call out. So you're calling out fear as one of the biggest rahasya that you have uh uncovered. Yeah. And I think I will add imagination to that particular list.
Belief Plus Skill Creates Behavior
SPEAKER_00And you say if people have awareness of why that fear is there in the first place, you can overcome. My question is awareness alone rarely changes behavior. I know I'm fearful of something, but that awareness alone cannot change the behavior. What next?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Very good. I mean, if awareness could change behavior, all of us would become such intendulkers by merely watching him play.
SPEAKER_00True that?
SPEAKER_01It does work like that, yeah. In fact, I would ask you this question. First day when you sat in your car and began driving, the very first day when you learnt driving, as soon as you sat in your car, what were the parts of the car that dominated your what it was the mind saying that how am I able to balance everything out? Correct, correct. But if you noticed, you know, carefully, the clutch and the brake dominated your entire canvas. You couldn't think of anything else, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So your cortex, okay, was telling you you could do this, you could do that, but your amygdala was very clear. Those two things matter. Don't take your eye off the ball. Okay? Now, two, three weeks later, uh somehow, you know, things change. Okay, you're able to look at the road, you have forgotten the clutch and the brake, clutch and the brake seem to be operating. And now the road seems to be the biggest barrier to life, right? Okay. You're wondering which uh uh tiny creature is gonna come and, you know, test your vehicle, okay, and things like that. Six months later, you have moved on, okay? You have essentially you're able to work on the phone and say, yeah, tell me, and then your hand is working the wheel and you know something is happening in front of you. The same amygdala, which made you, you know, focus on the clutch and break on day one, has moved on. But it's now telling you take the call, because if you don't take the call, something could be lost. You get my point? Okay. But how did the amygdala let go of the initial fear? So the beautiful part called cortex does not have the power to decide, but it has unlimited powers to influence. Okay, so the cortex convinces the amygdala that, you know, the new behavior is safe. Okay, that's the mechanism, right? If you want to understand learning, first of all, you know, knowing and learning are not the same. Knowing is the awareness part that you spoke about, okay? Learning is for you to be able to habitually display a behavior. So I I keep defining learning to HR guys like this. Learning is producing a behavior whenever it is required, not whenever you feel like it.
SPEAKER_00And that requirement stems from what Ahmedila. Feels that that is the requirement. So basically, it's got to do with the environment changing for the individual.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Absolutely. It is all about, you know, the learning environment. So I I would essentially split the awareness to behavior into probably just two parts. The first part is the belief. When beliefs change, amygdala is convinced, okay, that this is safe. Then the barrier of the amygdala is gone. So in all my work, I try very hard to change belief. Okay, and the only way beliefs change is through experience.
SPEAKER_00Something we we keep calling out on these conversations is uh a fact about micro experiments. We nudge our listeners to go try a micro experiment. And this is a wonderful uh conversation that we are leading to. You kind of said fear, first identify the fear. Merely having the awareness of the fear is not going to do anything, but it has to be belief. Yeah. That belief needs to have an environment around it for you to kind of get the learning out. Correct. What next?
SPEAKER_01So, for example, what do beliefs do? Beliefs essentially transform your fear. First of all, you have a fear because of a belief, and when you become aware of the fear, the belief changes and your fear changes. Okay, your original fear goes away, giving way to some. Fear is also the elixir of life. Without fear, you won't survive even for 20 minutes. Okay, it's nature's gift to you. Uh, nature gifted fear to you, therefore you survive. Okay? And nature, in fact, gifted, you know, emotions like jealousy, envy, and all, so that you thrive and you grow, right? You evolve. So all the rasas, okay, in our Natashastra, we call them Navarasas. So rasas are all essential. They're all, you know, ways through which your Avikdala knows what's happening around you. And that's the beauty. So coming back, the second component of transformation to behave behavior is the skill. So, we all have to have a way of converting an idea into reality, and that's what I call as skill. For example, one of the easiest things that we could tell, okay, a customer service person is be confident, be polite. Politeness is an outcome. How does one become polite? How does one become confident? So I would rather tell him, or I would rather, you know, make him see that when instead of explaining or defending your position to the customer, if you actually ask the customer how he is feeling, and then build on an idea that, you know, comes from him and therefore propose an alternative, the customer's amygdala is not shut to you, it's open to you. On the other hand, if you explain and then, you know, you defend and then you repeat and then you deny what he is saying, his amygdala is shut automatically, it's not open to you. So it's a very beautiful neuroscience process that's happening. And very interestingly, awareness cannot bring this out, okay? Learning is a combination of what is the fear or what is the belief that is leading to the fear, and therefore, how do you shift that belief so that you know this new behavior is no longer going to be a barrier to you? Part two of the sciences what are the steps to the behavior? Human mind is very complex, okay? We have something called, you know, our cognitive load, okay, is very limited. We can't process too many things at the same time. You'll freeze. So you have to learn to break down the final behavior into steps. So I call them skill models, okay, or skills. So when your belief shifts, and when you have a proven skill model which engineers, okay, to the behavior. Yeah? So the equation is simple, uh Vikant. Belief multiplied by skill is equal to behavior.
SPEAKER_00We have a formula here, belief into skill is equal to
AI Anxiety And Self Identity
SPEAKER_00behavior. I don't want to kind of get us to the present. I think this is where a lot of listeners are also dabbling, is the fear of AI. Let's take that as a real example, uh Mani. And if you can break down that AI fear into how that behavior shift can happen so that everybody can be what they would want to be, minus the fear.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Actually, I want to correct that statement. The fear is not of AI. The fear is what would happen to me. That's right. Yeah. So uh it is not that you are facing competition or you are facing a threat for the first time. Lifelong you have faced competition, lifelong you have faced threats, okay? And every time you face threats, who wins the race? People who focus on the threat don't win the race. People who focus on who they are, what their identity is, and what is the value that they bring to the table is, okay, they are the ones who win the race. In fact, if you study uh all kinds of evolutionary studies, anthropology very clearly suggests this, okay? People who are fundamentally rooted to their identity and their strengths, and those who evolve their strengths and you know their identity seem to be progressing far more easily. They're able to beat threads, okay, because they're rooted to who they are. I'm not saying you should not change. Change is a beautiful thing, but change is something that you wear on you by choice. And you always, you know, wear on that by playing to some of your inherent strengths. So the answer to your question is how do you deal with AI? AI is a tool. Don't forget that. A few days ago, I read something beautiful about emotions. The statement was, please remember all the waves in the sea are not you. You are the sea. The waves are inside the sea. You should never forget that. Therefore, you know, my uh simple call out to people is that whatever you are producing as value today can be enhanced multiple times. And both the effectiveness of what you are doing and the efficiency of what you are doing, both can be enhanced multiple times with AI. So learn AI, master AI. Okay, see how you can use it to offer the fundamental value.
SPEAKER_00Mani, you have always constantly spoken about understanding the metal compositions to human compositions and what are humans really composed of is something you articulated.
Values Attitudes Personality Layers
SPEAKER_00What are the allowing elements in in life? Okay.
SPEAKER_01You know, allowing interestingly, also, somehow is uh seen in a very complicated way. Allowing is essentially a way of changing properties, right? You add, you know, someone's goodness to to the way uh someone else is working and you uh make the product entirely different, okay, kind of a thing. Allowing in some ways is uh is uh is a form of influencing. So my allowing elements, I would say are all uh everyone's allowing elements. I call it as the way human beings are layered. Now, if you look at a computer, you see that the computer is three-layered. You have the hardware, which is essentially the physical form of the computer, but on its own the hardware is useless. Then you have, you know, a bunch of applications, okay, uh interfacing uh tools with which you really interact with the computer, correct? Yeah? And uh right in the middle you have an operating system which creates capacity for more and more applications to be absorbed. It's a clear three-layered uh thing. Now, similarly, a human being is also three-layered sritant. Right at the core, if you re- if you uh remove the physical brain and you know all of that away, the core, the hardware equivalent of the human being are what I call as values. Now, values are hard and belief systems which uh give you fundamental guidance, okay? They are like the North Star in the sky. Clearly, you can't get into right and wrong here. For example, for one person, end justifies the means, it's a value. For another person, means are more important than the end, okay? Now, these two people are going to really behave very differently. They are going to really experience different kinds of stress, they are going to face different adaptive challenges, okay, to situations, and therefore their behaviors are going to be under challenge. So that's number one layer. The second layer are slightly less rigid belief systems, which we call as attitudes. For example, the way you take responsibility. Some of us believe, you know, we are responsible for everything that happens to our life. Some of us, you know, believe others are responsible for everything that happens to our life. Some of us could believe that luck is the only factor that drives my life. These are actually belief systems that you have acquired and they are more easily changeable, okay, compared to the values. Now, these are the operating system equivalent you can change. The third layer is the personality, okay? Your construct, your behavior construct. Some of us are by nature adventurous, spontaneous, want to control, action-oriented. Some of us are very sensitive to what others think of us, okay? So the fuel inside us is if I do this, what will other people think? And yet another set of people say, I will only do the right thing, the correct thing, the accurate thing, the fair thing, okay, correctness becomes the pivot for them. Another set of people, I want everything to be done methodically, slowly, steadily, established way. I want everything smooth. Now, within us we have forces that are operating which make us respond to the world in very peculiar ways. We call them personality. Now, to come back and answer your question, what are the alloying elements? So, you alloy yourself to situations by playing with all the three variables. You need to become aware of your personality. In fact, that was another asya that stayed with. People are struggling to deal with differences in life. Whenever there is a difference, okay, emotions disturb you and you don't know how to handle the difference. Now, to handle the difference, I realized that a Rasya is you need to see that, you know, different is not wrong. It's just different. And for you to be able to operate with clarity, you need an awareness. You need knowledge of why people are the way they are. And I'll I'll kind of, you know, crystallize it with one simple analogy. I'm sure you must have handled sodium in the lab sometime, okay? Sodium is a metal. Now, sodium, when you expose it to air, it flares up. Sodium doesn't like oxygen, okay? They hate each other. The moment uh it comes in uh contact with oxygen, it flares up on birth. But if you want to use sodium, you submerse it under water, and whenever you need it, you take it and use it. Now, my simple analogy is you can't blame sodium for flaring up in air. That's sodium's nature. But if you want to use sodium and you know, utilize it, okay, and exploit it for whatever purpose you have, you have to find the kerosene. Okay. Now, uh knowledge of people and understanding of people, okay, listening, knowing the nature of people is extremely crucial. I also cook passionately. And cooking, I find, okay, is really transforming properties of people. Properties of things, you know. So you play with texture. Unless you understand the nature of things, you won't be able to work on it. So my biggest alloying elements in life have been my ability to sense, understand my values, understand my attitudes, okay, and understand my personality and effectively adapt intelligently to situations. And that's exactly what I teach people. If you don't have adaptive intelligence, okay, you will struggle quite a bit. And how do one go about developing
Adaptive Intelligence Through Experience
SPEAKER_01that? Another million-dollar question. I think it it has to be in the way you approach learning. Uh, given the way we are culturally oriented, uh Sri Khan, and you know, the schooling system that we've all been exposed to. Very unfortunately, we always see learning as cognitive. We always see learning as knowledge-led. I think that is the biggest enemy to adaptive intelligence. Adaptive intelligence comes from experiences, okay? Your ability to experiment. To another very important acculturization or another very important, you know, element that has been indoctrinated into you through our systems is you fear failure. Now, failure is such a beautiful thing. You tell me uh everything that you have learned in your life, okay, has not come from success. Everything you have learned in your life has come only from failure. But uh, we have the habit of culturally scaring people to failure, right? We make people run away from failure. We somehow, you know, detest failure. We think failure is bad. We don't want failure. So I think uh these two are the important uh ways in which you do adaptive uh intelligence. Let me kind of, I think this is my general learning uh for people. Learn through experiences, don't learn through knowledge. Focus on your experience, and if you don't experience it, then it's not learning. Richard Feynman famously said that. Don't know the name, know the thing. So you you don't know the name of the bird, you you actually know the bird, okay? It doesn't matter if you don't know the name of the bird. The second thing is celebrate failure and be open to failure. Uh if you change your view to failure, you will learn. You will learn much faster.
SPEAKER_00Good one. Thanks for sharing that. And what changes people more? Is it the insight, is it the pain, is it the reputation of doing stuff or the environment?
SPEAKER_01Actually, all of them. In fact, the word environment consists of everything. So insight in some ways is belief, Srikant. When you gain an insight, it can remain as knowledge, as a piece, or it changes your belief.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah? For example, different is wrong. Can overnight become different is just different.
SPEAKER_00Just insight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that is insight turning to a belief. So I would say insight is needed for you to change beliefs. Anything that we say inside, call us insight is usually simply put an aha moment. So there is an element of surprise, there is an element of, you know, realization. But does it translate to a belief? Okay, does it translate to a meaningful new belief? In fact, my work of engineering behavior always starts with what are the three or four or five beliefs that you need to have for you to display a behavior. That's how I model my learning. I will change that belief inside you first, even before introducing a skill to you, right? That the second part that you said about repetition, about environment. I remember, you know, I had a coach when I used to play cricket for university long, long ago. The coach would tell us in theory, for example, a perfect sweep is one where your right wrist rolls over the left wrist at 45 degrees and your left toe is at the pitch of the ball and your right toe is pretty much parallel to the stumps. Can you imagine? Now, honestly, if you do a slow motion replay of a Mike Gatting playing a sweep or a Clive Lloyd playing a sweep, you will see this exactly manifest. Now, this knowledge is not really going to kind of make me become a very good sweeper of the ball. What is going to happen is that all behavior, okay, are not cognitive. All behavior are the body-mind coordination. So skill is, you know, your muscle memory. Skill is, you know, the way your body and the mind, you know, coordinate. Uh so that requires repetition. That requires an environment where you are not afraid of failure. So only when you are able to kind of go and try it out and you see failing as not a problem, okay, that's when your muscle memory works.
Practice Feedback And Evidence
SPEAKER_01So another equation that I will give you is skill development is equal to practice plus objective feedback.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I actually use AI as part of my work, okay? So I use a platform. So if I teach, you know, leaders how to give feedback, I actually ask them to I curate the simulation in an AI platform and I ask them to go and repeat it probably ten times, okay? And I curate the uh feedback parameters. So unless AI tells me that you are ready to give feedback, you are not going to go and give feedback. So, uh, how do pilots train? How do doctors train now? How will a surgeon know that he's not going to cut the wrong nerve?
SPEAKER_00Repetitions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is repetition with objective feedback. But I will tell you what is the real ras. The real ras is not assumptions about what might work, but more and more evidenced models of is this behavior likely to get me that outcome? So it's very important for us to know what is the scientific correlation between, you know, the behavior you use and the outcome that you get. That's another interesting aspect in which the training industry needs to improve a lot. We have to use evidenced models, okay? So you do this.
SPEAKER_00I learned of this uh particular segment of our conversation with what you started off first, the love affairs between iron and oxygen. No metal exists alone in nature. That is something that you kind of observed. Yeah. What does it teach us as human beings?
Ubuntu Connectedness And Service
SPEAKER_01I'm so happy that you asked this question. I'm coming back, you know, I'm very deeply engaged in a practice called Chittavidya, okay, where we are trying to understand the the humanness. Let's put it like this. At a fundamental level, the human being is unable to see the undifferentiated way in which we are all connected. Okay? Now, metals or men, okay, both of us, okay, are part of the same cosmos. We are beings, right? And what does the being really want? The being inside us wants two things. The being inside us, A, wants expression. Even metals, if you notice, all metals have a form of expression. You will find a property which is very visible. You will find a property which is very clear for you to see. You actually take a liking to that material only because of that property. So that's the metals expression. The shiny, uh light, flexible nature, okay, of aluminum is its expression. The strong but pliable with some effort is the expression of the of iron. So each material has its expression. So all being one of the most beautiful things about the being, okay, nature is that it wants to express. There is a second beautiful uh need of the being, which is connectedness. Without connection, there is nothing. I actually love this African idea called Ubuntu. Have you heard of Ubuntu? Yeah. So apparently Ubuntu means I am because you are. I use you. Okay. I mean, if you are not there, I have no meaning. Today, this podcast. Is meaningless if you are not there. Correct. For me, if you are not there, there was no podcast. So that connectedness to me is the core. And what metals teach us is that you cannot exist alone. And you always draw your meaning from being with others. And all metals have happily served us in spite of all the terrible things that we have done to them. So to me, the biggest learning from metals is serve, be, okay? And eventually your destiny will carry you wherever you have to be. But serve okay, I serve is the message.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So there is so much out there in nature that we can just look at it and see what profound messages it's sending us day in, day out. But we kind of fall short of identifying, recognizing some of those hidden, subtle messages there.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You just have to open your eyes and see. And you must genuinely want to invest that time with nature.
SPEAKER_00So, Mani, what mirrors should every leader consciously build around
Mirrors For Better Leadership
SPEAKER_00themselves? I'm calling leaders very generically, it can be individuals as well. What are the things that they should consciously build around themselves?
SPEAKER_01See, number one, I think they need to create mirrors for themselves in the form of, for example, they should they should assess themselves. Okay, they should look at different lenses that are available to view the world. Mirrors are not necessarily only other people. I find the ability of leaders to explore the different lenses with which they can see the world and therefore understand how they are seeing the world. Are they seeing reality effectively? Is one of the most important. In fact, um studies that I have done tell me that 2% of our waking time we spend in front of a mirror. So, what do you see in the mirror, Srikant? What does the mirror show you? Just you. You know the fiction. You seen by who? The mirror actually shows you seen by others. That's why the mirror is so useful. It tells you how you are to others and therefore how you serve, therefore, how you kind of work, how you impact others, how others impact you, right? Now, one of the uh real mirrors that a leader should keep around himself, okay, is good quality feedback. Both uh nice, evidenced, good quality, you know, uh methods through which they can understand the lenses, okay, that I can second, they should listen. Okay, I think it's very important for them to create rituals for listening, okay. That is a big mirror. Third, I think you should you should have a small group of people with whom you can be totally vulnerable. Okay. I think that is the I wouldn't complicate it any further. A good system of lenses, tools, psychometric tools, and you know, frameworks and lenses through which you see. Second, your natural willingness to listen, open yourself and listen. Uh, you should be able to resonate with the rasas of other people. You should be able to feel what other people are feeling. That's the second part. The third is you should have a group of people with whom you can be totally vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00If Mani and Srikant were to do this podcast five years out, what advice would you give to the future self of yourself?
SPEAKER_01Become more open, yeah, become more accepting. That's advice one. Number two, listen more, yeah, sense more, listen more. And number three, just don't be afraid of failure.
SPEAKER_00So if human beings are compositions which we spoke a lot through the conversation, what are three qualities you believe creates in strong inner structure in a person?
SPEAKER_01My favorite mythological archetype, my favorite god is Hanuman. If you notice Hanuman carefully, Hanuman is the intersection of passion, compassion, and humility. That's my answer.
SPEAKER_00Good tough. Only looking back at your journey so far, what are three unexpected teachers, or who are three unexpected teachers that have shaped you deeply outside of the classrooms or certifications or just formal mentoring?
SPEAKER_01First teacher has been uh failure. Okay, has been my biggest teacher. Second has been my ego, my hubris. The third and the most important teacher has been the love I have received, unconditional love that I have received, okay, from people. I'm very deliberately using three attributes, okay, or three aspects of life that you learn from. These three things uh make you, in my mind, very rooted, okay, very rooted to your essential existence. As I'm learning now in yoga, the Western psychology can only see the differentiated you. Srikant, okay, some personality and you know, money, some personality and attitude. So it's a very differentiated way of looking at humans. But I'm realizing our tradition teaches us, you know, you go one layer below, we're all the same. There is an undifferentiated humanness in uh all of us. And to be able to sense them means that you learn from failing, you learn from uh your uh, you know, fixations and your ego and your hubris and your inability to manage yourself. And you also kind of pay attention to the unconditional love you receive from people around. Okay, all the three of them could probably be, I mean, they have been my big teachers. All the changes that I have experienced in myself, I would attribute to either of the three.
SPEAKER_00Great.
Three Micro Experiments To Try
SPEAKER_00We are talking about small little things to do, experiential learning. On that standpoint, what are three micro experiments that you would recommend to all of our listeners for them to try?
SPEAKER_01So, uh, the first micro experiment I would suggest is you need to become aware of your feelings. And you should be able to label them, articulate them, and know what they do to you. So the first micro experiment is what I call as a two or two random alarm audit. You set two alarms every day for yourself. Random. And when the alarm goes, you ask yourself the question, what am I doing now and why am I doing that? And what am I feeling now and why am I feeling that? So it's very important to do this. Both the alarms, okay, when the alarms go, you you do this. Eventually, you will start becoming very sensitive to why you feel the way you do, and feelings will no longer control you. You will begin to become aware of the feelings. So this is one beautiful micro experiment. The second uh experiment I would uh ask people to do is go 24 hours without advice or without projecting anything that you know on others. Either give or receive. Yeah. Okay. Receive is okay, but give no. Yeah, uh clearly no. No prescriptions, no advice, nothing. Go 24 hours. It's like intermittent starving. Okay. You have to starve yourself of the need, okay, to project yourself on others. Now that's very important. It teaches you humility. The third micro experiment I would do is on any given day, at least with two, three, four, five situations, the number is yours to go, start pivoting on the fear and the filter of people. So, in any conversation, ask yourself what is the fear that this person is undergoing at this point in time, and how can I mitigate that? And what is the filter through which this person is seeing me or seeing the world, and can I pivot and adapt to that? Some people see the world through data, some people see the world through relations, some people see the world through vision and bigness. Okay, so you should know what is their filter and pivot to that. You should know what's their fear and pivot to that. Now, this will make you the most empathetic leader that you could ever become.
SPEAKER_00That's a very powerful micro experiment. I think uh analyzing or pivoting fear through filters is very, very powerful. Thank you. Absolutely. Pani, the last of the power of three round question here, having been a lifelong mentor, lifelong learner yourself, what is that you see that mentors are able to catch or grasp that the lesser uh known people have not been able to do so?
SPEAKER_01It is actually listening in a special way. One of the toughest things that I have found and I'm learning and I'm trying to learn hard about is to be able to listen to people truly, to be able to understand where you are, why you feel that way, correct? Without wanting to project me onto them.
SPEAKER_00That's true. We will first should not know who our listeners are across the spectrum, but we know what they're looking out for, and through this conversation, I'm sure we've been able to touch some elements of what can translate in their own personal journey and personal transformation. Bani, thank you so much for uh doing this, bringing in in those nice differences between metal and human beings in a nice way that we can all relate to and we can all go back and practice. This show is all about creating ripples of inspiration.
Closing Message And Reflection
SPEAKER_00So before you and I sign off, what is your inspiration today message to all of our listeners?
SPEAKER_01Ubuntu, I am because you are. So I think just just uh celebrate the humanness. There's uh so much. All other organisms are restricted to surviving. Okay, only we are capable of thriving. Only we are capable of focusing on beauty, focusing on aesthetic, focusing on goodness, focusing on excellence. No other organism is capable of thriving for excellence. That's my message.
SPEAKER_00Thrive, Ubuntu, that's a message from Mani and I as we sign off. Thank you everybody for listening to us. And Mani, thank you so much for taking time and doing this. Thank you for spending this time with us. Conversations like this remind us that blood doesn't always come from answers, it often comes from better questions. Not to grand gestures, but to everyday choices. That belief still holds now with a little more depth and a lot more listing. If something from today's episode stayed with you, carry it forward, share it, sit with it, or explore it further through the IST ability or the book inspires someone today. Until we meet again, stay curious, keep inspiring, and inspire someone today.
