Appreciation v/s Criticism

Appreciation takes you to such heights that you wish to achieve and learn more and more. It is unequivocal that everybody wants some appreciation. Everybody tries to excel more in any field f he is appreciated. If you take some time to stop and appreciate yourself as well as people around you, you can enhance everything about you as well as the person will also try to improvise if he feels appreciated about whatever he has done. 

Self-acknowledgment and appreciation are also necessary as it gives you the insights and awareness to move forward toward higher goals and accomplishments.

There is also one aspect as Critical Appreciation, which implies the ability to assess the value in something towards showing the strength or good of it. But if you involve only criticism in your words for any person, that person will never ever think of doing something good for you or in other words impress you, as the mentality of every person in our society is.

So we should learn to praise people for their good deeds and not only this you should also criticize if the work is not up-to the mark, but that should be done at a level which doesn't demoralize the person and he looses the interest to learn and excel. 

Rightly quoted "Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

Leadership

Few days back I watched a YouTube lecture on "Leadership" by Field Marshal Sam Maneskshaw given to the students of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. I would recommend everybody to watch it as was recommended to me by my brother-in-law. And the first time in my life as I remember I was not dozing off while listening to a lecture :)

Field Marshall is a great orator and the points he mentioned for becoming a good leader is absolutely true. I will just summarize what all traits he mentioned for being a good leader so as to imbibe those qualities in my personal life as well.

A person is a leader not by birth but made and developed during his lifetime by his/her own capabilities and perseverance. Everybody should understand that if a person has a common sense and decency then he may be capable of becoming a good leader. According to Mr. Manekshaw ,  Indian lacks a good leadership not only in political field but also in administrative and educational fields.

There are a lot of attributes which one must embody to become a good leader, the foremost being professional knowledge and competence. And obviously it can be achieved only by constant study and hard work. The next is the ability of a person to make a decision and take complete responsibility of it with full confidence and that can be made sure only if you have professional knowledge of the aspect in which you are about to make a decision. As perfectly quoted by Mr. Marshal, " An act of omission is much worse than an act of commission", and we should try to implement this in our lives.

Now we come on to honesty, fairness and justice which forms one of the key qualities to be present  in a good leader. Moral and Physical Courage is also necessary for a good leader's attributes.

Moral courage is the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and having the nerve to say that in front of everybody irrespective of what anybody else might support. According to him, a ‘yes man’ is a dangerous man as he will never have the courage to make a good decision just to be the good person in everybody's eyes. And ultimately will fail as a good leader.

Physical Courage is needed for a good leadership, in the sense that if you become frightened then you will not be able to direct or instruct your group or sub-ordinates. It is when you come across a fearful situation, a true leader comes out.

Loyalty is also very much needed if you want to be a good leader.You should be loyal to your subordinates and colleagues if you want loyalty from them. And last but not the least , discipline and good character is what is needed out of a leader.A good code of conduct and behavior is very essential for living decently in the society. As mentioned by the orator, good character is knowing yourself, your own faults, weaknesses and being mentally stable when people praise for you.

Mr. Manekshaw's lecture was an excellent learning to improve my own leadership skills and hope to imbibe them in my personality, whatever is missing, though I think I have some of them in full fledged way. :D