Hitendra Wadhwa

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Intersections, where inner mastery meets outer impact. I am Hitendra Wadhwa, your host for the day, and it is a joy to be back in action with all of you. How have you been? Let's take a few seconds just to get reconnected here, in our judgment, and so many of you have already started to do so. Can you just use the chat to say hello, greet us in your favorite language from whichever part of the world you're connecting from? Perhaps share with us where you're connecting from so that we can get to sense the footprints around the globe that Intersections is starting to have.

Today's focus is on the power of your personal journey and I want to start with a story. So several years ago, about 12 years ago, I was teaching at Columbia. At that time, I was teaching classes in marketing and strategy. I had just wrapped up the semester. I was teaching my last class to our MBAs on a marketing subject and by that time, I would fall in love with my students. I would be inspired by them and connected with them. I would feel a dampening of spirit about how they and I would go our own ways at the end of this class, the last class of the semester. So this time around, I felt a surge of motivation to be of the highest possible service to them. The night before the lecture, I pivoted a little bit and I said, you know what? Let me use the last 15 minutes to offer them the most powerful lessons that I have learned about life and leadership since I was their age. So I went back to when I was about 28 and then I said one of the biggest things I've learned the next day in class. I told them that this is about all I could offer you about marketing, but I wanted to share some thoughts about life and leadership. So here are three stories I want to leave you with, recognizing that all of us are never going to come back together as a collective after these last 15 minutes. I shared what I had to and then the class wrapped up and people gave thoughtful applause. Then they were leaving and this one student came up to me and said, professor, I want to thank you for the class. It has been a precious learning experience for me. I also want to tell you that the most valuable lessons came from the last 15 minutes. That was a turning point in my career because it was at that moment that I got solidified with this sense that I had, that more personal sharing can be a tremendous force of inspiration and influence with people. Until then, I shied away from sharing my stories. I would share stories about great organizations and great brands and great leaders. But I wasn't sharing my stories. That was the first time I was able to provide authentic expression to what was stirring within me.

From there on, I was able to launch this class on personal leadership. At some point early in the class, I got this sense that something was happening. There's some magic here that I also need to draw out from my audience. So I created an assignment in the class where every one of the students to come to class, prepared to share a personal journey, a story from their lives, from their careers, something that was related to them or perhaps to a loved one or to a former mentor or a boss, or just like a poem that inspired them in life or a certain hobby that they had, which enriched their experience of the world and I said, "You will get 3 to 5 minutes. That's it. That's your platform. Speak from the heart and do it as a service to us, as a contribution to us." That was it. Then I stepped back from the front stage of the class, and each of them would start coming up and sharing their journey. I tell you, I was on tenterhooks. I was just so anxious about how this moment was going to go because I was losing control. I was losing control at a very, very critical moment in this class. I had no clue what might transpire there. Having done that, having ceded control, I was amazed at the power of these personal journeys and today, I'm here with you reflecting on that experiment.

I've had the privilege of experiencing hundreds of stories every year, and I know how transformational they have been for both my students and me. So I thought, at this critical hour, with all that is going on in the world, is there a more pivotal moment than this for us to dine on our life experiences? What is stirring within each of us and creating a certain structure and scaffolding through which we can start drawing that out? Some of you will be natural storytellers and others might have it as a latent capability, but you may not have given it active expression, just like I hadn't. So I thought, what better moment than this to create that invitation for you and all of us? I want to do it, not just merely as a conversation today with all of you, not just sharing some examples, but also giving you some guidance on what I've learned over the years as to how to do that effectively. I want to do it to create a community, creating a project where we can come together. I can hear your stories just as much as you might listen to some from me today so that we can collect these stories in a library that is digital and that is searchable so that tomorrow, when one of you is becoming a parent or another one is transitioning from one career to another, or a third one is agonizing for sudden choice as to whether they should go down an entrepreneurial path or not, and they can have these stories from their peers about their journeys in a searchable format.

Another benefit is that you get to think about how cultures are built. One of the first things that we hear as babies, often before we even know a language, are the stories that our caregivers, our parents, for example, share with us from our culture. The values of that culture are encoded in those stories. Silently, the culture is getting encoded in our DNA, even when we are little children, through the power of storytelling. So it's a powerful mechanism through which to propagate culture. As many of you shared, stories are engaging. So it's a very interesting way through which to transmit ideas. They're memorable. When people walk out of the room, they may not remember the facts, the data, the jobs, the analysis, or the logic. But it is pretty likely that if you've shared a terrific story, they will remember the story. So it's the memorable stories that are an excellent way to inform people intellectually and inspire them. It's not just that the mind is convinced, but the heart is actually on fire to pursue a certain kind of path based on what the stories you invited them to do. Also, stories are things that people like to share with others. So if you offer a good story, that story is your way of imparting an idea or value. Then that story is shared by the people who are with others. They're then starting to propagate that value to others as well.

A story is also an excellent way for you to teach somebody a lesson or push somebody back on something. With the story, you're imparting a message to them, but you're doing it in a way where you say I'm not seeking to judge. I'm not seeking to push back. I just want to offer this story. You allow them to conclude for themselves and implicit in that is the power of stories. Right now, let me offer up an account to you. Abraham Lincoln is well known to have been an incredible storyteller. He had used the skill to significant effect in his inspirational work as a candidate and then as a president of the country in the United States. Now, where did he learn the craft of storytelling? Well, it's interesting because when he was a young lawyer in Illinois, there was a practice that he and his fellow lawyers used to engage in, which is that in the evening, when they were done with work, they would go over to a local bar. They would sit there and they would engage, believe it or not, in a storytelling competition. In this storytelling competition, each of them would share a story and at the end of the night, they would judge the winner to be the person who had the most powerful story. Now, let's do some math on that. Let's say that you were Lincoln and let's say you did that for about 3 years. Let's say you did that for about 3 nights. So 3 nights for about 50 weeks. That's what, 150 evenings. 3 years. That's what, 450 evenings. You had 450 opportunities to share stories, not just share stories, but get feedback from the audience on how effectively they landed.

Not just that, if there were, let's say, four or five other friends of yours, you collected together about four or five hundred stories from each of them. It is an incredible asset that you built just by habitually engaging with each other for a few years, and it is quite possible that Lincoln became a great storyteller because of this. He had so much time to practice it. And that's certainly going to be one of my recommendations to you, which is that if this is something that you're passionate about, then create forums where you can practice. I found it beneficial to practice at home with my family, a friend, or casually with a small team and watch their reaction. How engaged are they at the end? Did your message land? Did they find it to be an interesting story? Did it have an impact? If not, don't feel bruised and burned. Just feel like you've gained some new understanding about what's working and what's not working and then keep working on that.

Personal stories create a level of psychological safety. If you are, for example, seeking to make the team feel comfortable in challenging you or in expressing things that may not be going right or just being open to acknowledging their challenges or issues. A story will allow you to do that and connect with them at a deeper level. You will be in a position to make them feel like this is okay. This is just part of life. I invite you to be just more open and comfortable with it. Okay, now let me offer up one more dimension to the benefits of storytelling. See, when we tell stories, it doesn't just affect the person you're telling the story to, it also affects you. What do I mean by that? We are telling stories to ourselves all the time in our minds. We are taking events in our lives and we are weaving some meaning around them and that becomes a story. The point is that depending on the kind of storyteller you are, you will benefit from the listener's or your happiness after you've recounted the story.

The kind of stories you tell shifts who you become in life and leadership. Just paying attention to the unconscious weaving of facts and meaning into stories in the back of our minds is a critical component of our personal leadership.

To that end, let us get into the craft of storytelling and what I want to do is start by sharing a story with you of something that happened in my own life. So a year and a half ago, I had the incredible privilege of going to Israel with my wife, daughter, and mother. We had a blessed time in Israel. We were getting so much from that country's spiritual richness, and at the end of it, we were in Tel Aviv. My mother had gone to sleep. My wife, my daughter and I were at dinner at a restaurant and the conversation was about the depressive state of the world. I remember at that moment there was a lurking concern within my mind that, hey, Hitendra, we should be agents of positivity, hope and change. We shouldn't allow ourselves to wallow in this kind of negative discourse for more than 30 seconds or so. I ignored that little intuition in me, and we further lamented about the state of the world and all that. Then dinner got over and we were walking on this beautiful Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and out of nowhere, this gentleman came over.

From his dress, he seemed like an Orthodox Jew. He comes and he says, "Be like the bee, not like the fly." I thought maybe he was proselytizing. Perhaps he sees me as somebody from beyond Tel Aviv and is just trying to excite me about his path. I didn't know what was going on at that moment. I hadn't had any stranger just come up to me and talk to me here in Israel. So I said, "Sir, what do you mean?" He says, "Well, what do bees do and what do flies do?" I said, "Well, what do they do?" He said, "With a fly, you can have the most beautiful nature around them and they're always searching for the dirt and they're going and picking up the dirt. Then with the bee, you can have a lot of trash and garbage, but they're always searching for the flower because that's where they will go and make the honey. You and I, we can look at the world as very messy and very troubling and keep looking at that trouble. Or we can see it as beautiful." I was stunned. I smiled and expressed my gratitude. I wondered if there was going to be more to that interaction, but there wasn't. He just smiled at me. Then we had a gentle exchange for a couple of seconds and he left.

That was it. That's all he wanted to say to me and it has stayed with me since then that this was not this gentleman talking to me. This was the universe talking to me. The universe had first started to talk to me 30 minutes ago at dinner, giving me essentially the same message just through the subtle stirrings within me, through my intuition. But I hadn't paid attention to it. Then the universe felt it had to show this message a little bit more directly to me. So it used the gentleman who came and spoke about it to me. I wanted to share that story with you because it has probably been one of the most beautiful moments in my life. It has reinforced a belief that everything is connected to everything and that when experiences happen, they happen to us for a reason.

If we are processing and connecting the dots in the right way, then we'll get a sense of significance for what seemed to be the most insignificant things in my life. I share that with you because I wanted to offer an example of how we share and craft the stories in our life. These stories are not just given to us on a platter. Life experiences are the things that are happening, but it is for us to connect them, interpret them, resolve them, analyze them, think about them, puzzle over them, and then weave a story from the derived insights. We choose what kind of story we really want to make in moments like these.

How many of you would say I'm a storyteller in my life? I actively engage in that muscle of looking through experiences in my life with the passage of time and interpreting them, reinterpreting them and crafting my story this way.

So this is a story that Mother Teresa shared. She said that after she had won the Nobel Prize, she was back in Calcutta doing her work. And one day there was a knock on the door and it was one of the impoverished, local people, what they call in Calcutta, a beggar, somebody who just asked for alms, for money. She knew him because they had helped him in the past, so she asked him what I could do for him? How can I help you? And he held up his bowl and in his bowl, he had a small amount of money. And she said that he told her, "Mother, I heard in the community that you won some kind of international award and it filled my heart with so much joy that I promised myself that everything that I earn today would be yours. So I wanted to bring this to you." It is such a powerful story. She took that little piece of money, and she had it on her desk with her as a remembrance of the beautiful heart that this man had. This was her idea also of illustrating that it is not enough to love, but that we have to put into action. We're going to talk a lot more about lessons we can learn from that really powerful force in the world, this incredible woman, this incredible saint, this incredible leader, Mother Teresa.

This is the moment that I want to invite another story into our midst. So I'm going to invite Anna Pavlick to join us. And Anna is going to be with us for the next 10 minutes. Anna, thank you for joining us. Great to have you. Welcome.

Hitendra Wadhwa

And Anna, since this is in session all on personal journeys, let us just begin right there. Can I invite you to share the personal journey that you did in our executive MBA personal leadership class?

Hitendra Wadhwa

We've been so moved by this incredible, awesome power, and I know the story will live on with all of us, just like it has lived on with me over the years that I've known it, and will be a source of great strength to us in those moments in our life where we feel kind of beaten up by the gods. To translate that pain and loss into a greater sense of wisdom and love and service to the world is a hero's journey. Thank you so much for what you're doing for the community and for the example you're giving to us. I'm just incredibly grateful that you were open to coming here and sharing this with our friends here as well. So thank you so much. I know we have limited time, so let me just kind of maybe end with a question for you, which is, what do you see as your next chapter in life?

Hitendra Wadhwa

Well, on behalf of all of us, I want to wish you Godspeed and a beautiful next step as you continue on this path of bringing so much strength and grace to the medical profession. So thank you, Anna. It's a real joy to have you here. I look forward to having you back on Intersections at some point soon. You also set an example for this community to share their journeys, which I hope will translate into certain recordings that we can propagate in the weeks ahead.

So I wanted to kind of offer up a couple of thoughts about your journeys. First of all, not every story is ready to be shared, because sometimes certain experiences in life are still a work in progress. You still feel like you're processing, you're still going through a certain kind of emotional moment and you don't feel really ready yet to share it, perhaps even with a loved one, let alone with the public at large and I respect that. There might be certain things about my past or my unfolding present that I just don't feel that comfortable with. And so I don't want any of us to take away from this conversation today, the idea is that in every aspect of our life, we should be free and open up to the world. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Let's take these last few minutes to have me share a couple of other thoughts and ideas around personal journeys and then I'm going to try to swing us into action by thinking about a way for you to engage and contribute to this work.

Another thing I would say is that stories don't have to be larger than life or dramatic or kind of really deeply taking you into, for example, a space of like pain and loss, et cetera. They may have that. That's a very natural place to go to find the most powerful, defining moments in life though they don't necessarily have to be that as well. One of the stories that I find really helpful is one where my daughter just wanted something from a friend's place. Then she came back and said, "I need to have us go back there and pick up my frog." And we were like, "No, it's too late. We can't have you go back there and pick up the frog." Now, by the way, this wasn't any regular frog. This was an origami frog. So at that moment, we hadn't slept well so we said it's too late. We told her that "You're not going to get that frog right now. But in the morning, we have another sheet of paper like this, a green sheet of paper. So your mom will fold it and make it into another origami frog for you. So you will have your frog in the morning." So then she said "No, I want my frog." We thought she's turning into a devil. What have you done not to make or learn proper behavior? She wants instant gratification. She wants it now. But we have to be disciplinarians as parents. We don't want her to grow up in this kind of crazy way. We should assert ourselves. "No way we're going to make that frog for you in the morning." She was like, "No, I want my frog." "We'll make it for you in the morning." She's like, "I want my frog." We were again having a lot of fun with her. Then she looked at us and she said, "If you make it for me in the morning, it won't be the same frog."

Suddenly, my heart burst open because I realized that she was not protesting that we were saying we would give it to her in the morning. It wasn't instant gratification. It wasn't any kind of disobedience. She had this idea that we were going to replace her actual frog with a new piece of folded paper prop. Then I realized she must have an emotional relationship with that frog in the same way as we have a relationship with her. Maybe she thinks of that frog as her baby, and perhaps she's wondering that, look, if my parents are so casual about relationships, what is going to happen tomorrow? They're going to leave me in some summer camp and they'll come back and then they'll say no. What's the point of going there to pick it up? Let's just have another baby.

We need to be tuning in to what's happening in the inner life of our children and at that moment, rather than look, we will make a prop for you in the morning. If we had just simply said, "Mrinalini, you seem a little bit extra upset. We offered to make the frog in the morning. What is it about not having it with you between now and the morning that upset you?" And she might have said, "Well, what's upsetting to me is that you are copping out on going to the friend's place and picking up my frog, and you are just seeking to replace it with some brand new frog. I don't want a brand new frog." "Okay, well, if that's the case, you go and pick it up from the house in the morning." I mean, you could easily have done that. Did you notice in that story? I mean, it's not very profound, but it's an everyday occurrence. But in these ordinary moments in your life and mine, they are rich with the possibilities of stories. So let us recognize that there is living all through our lives, just a whole lot of raw material that we can use to translate into stories.

The story that I've shared with you about my daughter, I use in executive sessions to teach moving to a learner mindset. I will reflect with these executives that this is just an instinct that all of us have when we feel we are the experts in the room. We are the elders in the room; we are the seniors in the room. Therefore, we will unleash our genius and our wisdom on the more junior folks and the less talented folks, etc. But sometimes, it's the opposite. We need to tune in and listen and understand right again. So that's little thought for you. I like to encourage keeping these stories. Similarly, some of them are life journeys. They're not just stories. They're about three or four stories embedded into one another. But in general, if you're interacting with people and with yourself and you're going to try to codify that lesson or an idea, I recommend keeping the story to about three minutes, write three and a half minutes. Maybe if you stretch it, then it becomes sort of like four or five minutes.

By the way, I know we're over time. I will go for about five more minutes, and then we will bring this to closure. So you can put a level of suspense, mystery, or drama in a story. Do you notice that? In my story with my daughter, I started by talking about how she forgot her frog. I didn't tell you that it was not a real frog. Maybe some of you were thinking, like what kind of a family has a frog as a pet? And then I got that part in that it was an origami frog. But by delaying the divulgence of that fact, I created a little bit of suspense and perhaps at the end, maybe a little bit of humor, so these kinds of embellishments can help you, perhaps give the audience a little bit more engaged along the way. Lastly, I want to offer to you that always tell stories for a reason, always do it in the service of your audience. A big thank you to the production team. Thank you so much, Dr. Pavlick. I look forward to having all of you back next week. Take care.