HAPPINESS PARADIGM

HAPPINESS PARADIGM

 

RAISING HAPPY & SUCCESSFUL KIDS :

 

This and the previous blog 3A+3F model are the precursors to the spreading of happiness and bliss in the civil society, which the Madhya Pradesh Government wants to achieve by formation of an infrastructure to make people of Madhya Pradesh happy and blissful.

 

Let me first start with the outcomes of my personal experience by using the concepts of 3A+3F and this blog for my endeavour to make my family happy.

 

I normally do not share my personal family affairs but since now the stress level of parents and children are peaking and children are harboring suicidal tendencies, I am compelled to share my experiences for the benefit of other stakeholders.

 

It is the responsibility of the parents to make this children happy and successful without high levels of stress by earning their trust. Therefore parents have to educate their children with open mind, open heart and open free will. Parents have to use ethos, pathos and logos at the same time and this requires continuous learning, unlearning and relearning by both parents and the children.

 

Let's first look at the outcomes of personal experience with my two children.

 

RAJ (Born 4th November, 1976):

We are blessed to have such a wonderful son. He has blossomed into a very humane, truthful affectionate and trustworthy person. He puts others interest before his own interest and is endowed with a great sense of empathy, fairness and justice. He has self discipline, self control and is non greedy. He has one or two weakness such as sensitivity and becomes very stressful in meeting commitments and targets, why it is so, we have not able to visualize as of now.

He was very attached to his grandfather and was in grief for a very long time. He has an above average IQ but we purposefully avoided goal oriented approach to keep him free from stress as he was suffering from heart ailment since the age of twelve. We were told by the doctors that if proper medication is not given at the time of attack, it could be fatal. He was advised to refrain from rigorous physical activities and was put on medication, which continued from 1988 – 2003 on a daily basis. With the advent of new breakthrough technology in the heart surgery, he was operated in the year 2003 and since then he is absolutely fine. Because of his heart problem we had become very protective of him. He liked rigorous sports requiring high levels of physical activities and at times couldn't resist participating in such activities and had few attacks during that period. It was very painful for us to tell him not to play.

He drew lot of support from her Mom in his academic pursuits and seemed to derive energy from her mere presence. He wanted her to sit along with him, while he studied even when he had become an adult and was appearing for his CA examinations.

Raj excelled academically and was always in top 1% percentile. He won the best student award at the school among 3000+ students. He was in the merit list of B.Com at Pune University. He married his long time friend SMRITI (she was also in the merit list) in 2004. He received scholarship for his graduation and CA certification.

Both of them are CA's now. CA examination is one of the toughest examinations with a success rate of less than 1%. Raj got 5th All India Rank in the CA inter examination. Both of them are working at London for last 9 years with internationally reputed banks. Their son DHRUV is around 8 years old and studies at one of the best schools in London. They are a happy family and every day they consciously practice awareness habits to enable their son to learn navigational lessons to lead a happy and successful life. He is already in the under 9, Essex county cricket team, loves to play piano and he is very fond of solving complex puzzles.  

Like us they want to coach and train their son to be a great human being and we are confident that with their values and cultural upbringing, they would be successful in their endeavor. We are blessed to have such a son and a daughter- in law.

AARTI (Born on 2nd October, 1978):

Aarti is a precious gift to us from the almighty. She could not even sit when at the age of 7 months, she spoke her first words, she responded to her mom's question – What is your name? She said AARTI and every time we asked this question she responded by speaking her name. That amazed and baffled us. At the age of 2+ years, she could read sentences and could do elementary summation by the age of 3 years.

She was way ahead from other children at preschool and primary levels and wanted to learn more and more.

Then in 1984 came Dr. Howard Gardeners theory of multiple intelligences and that changed our mindset and outlook on coaching and training of our children. We converted his multiple intelligences theory into a fish bone diagram, listing the activities needed to boost each kind of intelligence. We did another exercise to combine intelligences to make a product. For example musical intelligence can be  combined with body kinesthetic intelligence to create a musical dance form and if a song is added, you are touching upon linguistic intelligence, the dance form had been further strengthen by intrapersonal (self awareness) intelligence by learning from others and how it is presented to is the audience is done through interpersonal intelligence.

We gave deliberate eco environment exposure to our children on various forms of intelligences to enhance their awareness.

In her school, each student was encouraged to give few presentations every year starting from 9th standard to the whole class. Aarti prepared a presentation on Stephen Covey's seven habits of the most effective people.

Luckily when she was giving presentation to her class, the principal entered the class and listened to her presentation and she was very impressed, she asked her to put the presentation on the main notice board of the school. The presentation went viral at the school. The principal was enthused since it helped her in improving the culture at school. These habits and the contents of the epic book "How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie were discussed regularly at morning school prayers.

The awareness habits have made Aarti a great human being with humility and she on her own never talks about her  accomplishments and has involved herself in saving human lives globally along with her husband Dr. Vishwajeet Kumar (alumni of Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A.). They are fully devoted and committed to make difference to the lives of the people globally through Global health and educational issues.

Her accomplishments in chronological order are:

• National Talent Scholar at school level.
• Member of MENSA.
• State Ranking in Mathematics Olympiad at School level.
• Cleared IIT examination in first attempt but choose to join Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore on a Singapore Airline Scholarship and received degree in Computer Engineering and a post graduate degree in Bio Informatics.
• Knows Hindi, English, Tamil and French and understands Japanese and German.
• Partnering her husband Dr. Vishwajeet Kumar on Global health UN millennium goals. They have been able to reduce infant mortality rate in the famous Shivgarh (near Lucknow, India) research oriented project, from 80 per thousand to 40 per thousand in a span of 3 years with  change of behavior in the community. Their project has been acknowledged by Lancet, Gates Foundation (Melinda Gates has specifically devoted 3 to 4 minutes on their project at her addresses at Harward Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities) and WHO etc. and is now being implemented in other countries as well.
• Working on "Great Global  Challenges of  the World" on a Canadian Government grant and initiative to do research work on cognition of children up to the age of 8 to change the methodology of present day education.

Her 7 year old daughter Shaambhavi is learning leadership skills by teaching students who are in the age group of 9 – 10 years and social entrepreneurship by running a shop of products design and made by her and her teammates for children. The money so earned goes to the welfare of underprivileged children. Right now she is planning a big exhibition for the Rakhi festival. She owns a library that contains more than 300 book. She reads atleast one book a day.

In future building self awareness vis-à-vis eco awareness at an accelerated pace furnished by disruptive technologies shall be the key for speedy evolution of human beings. It implies that human beings must observe the environment with multiple filters by balancing both the fixed and open mind set and belief system supported by values, character and ethics.

To fathom these outcomes, me and my wife Jyoti followed the following process :

 

- Focusing on growth stages of dependence/independence/interdependence.

- Follow the 3A+3F model – Open mind, open heart, and open free will to generate trust.

- Dr. Horword Gardners theory of multiple intelligence.

 

The MI modal helps to create a road map for child's development by honing various forms of intelligences at the different stages of dependent stages of dependence/independence/interdependence.

 

You learn real interdependence through struggles, experiences, crucibles and epiphanies. At this point of time, one has to take up challenges to meet the realities of life. You have to decide the navigational coordinates of your life.

It has been a fascinating journey of awareness and awareness habits. But before I do that, I want you to tell you the reasons of my falling grades in Engineering. The answer I got was by reading "Frames of minds" by Dr. Howard Gardner who pioneered the multiple intelligences theory wherein at that time in the 1980's, he talked about seven basic intelligences with which the brain is prewired, and that these seven intelligences decide the overall intelligence of any person and IQ was not the overall measure of intelligence. The basic intelligences were linguistic (writers, journalist, speakers etc.), Body kinesthetic (Tiger Woods, Jimmy Connors, Carl Lewis, Kapil Dev, dancers, athletes, sportsman), spatial (Engineers,  Architects and Painters etc.), Logical mathematical (Scientists Engineers – Examples Einstein, Stephen Hawkins), Musical (Joan Baez, Michael Jackson) Intra personal or self awareness (The who am I, know thyself) and interpersonal (social, networking etc. – Leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and JRD Tata etc.). When I analyzed this in my case, I was convinced that I have been very weak in the area of spatial intelligence and to some extent on logical mathematical intelligence, which were confirmed by subsequent tests that I undertook. This discovery brought back my self-confidence. Gardner has now added two more intelligences – Native/commonsense and spiritual intelligence.

Indeed I used the multiple intelligences model; the seven effective habits model of Stephen Covey, added by 60000 hrs of deliberate personal reading in last 47 years for all that went into coaching and training of my children along with my wife who is an outstanding teacher as well.

The blog shall help you to rediscover your family ties and take the whole family towards a new level of awareness and to the processes and outcomes which would give you all joys and bliss of life for, which we all strive.

With Gardner's multiple intelligence theory, Stephen Covey's “Seven Habits of most effective people, Napoleon Hill”- Laws of success in mind, we began our sojourn into our children's development. They have been fortunate to get training in each critical area of human activity by relevant role models according to the following table:

Functions Roles

Information and Data Adhyapak

Knowledge Upadhyay

Skills Acharya

Insight Pandit

Vision Drishta

Wisdom and awareness Guru

 

This is an old Indian way of learning through role playing. In English the word teacher is generally used for all the six steps for gaining wisdom but in Sanskrit it is defined by six different role player as depicted in the above table.

 

My children have been given deliberate exposure to some of the best role players in each area.

 

The ultimate learning i.e. wisdom and awareness is imparted by “Guru” he is the one who has gone through the other five stages and has integrated them to create “wisdom and awareness”.

Life is laboratory of learning and therefore the learning processes could be based upon lessons from realities of life. It works best when learning goals resonate with a person’s dreams and when performance goal hover around dreams, learning becomes intrinsic.

Modes of learning in real life could be:

• Real life experiences.
• Conceptual and reflective thinking.
• Success/ failure models.
• Trial and error method.

Goals should be person’s own and should be built around interest, potential and strengths. Goals should be stretch goals and should be flexible. Goals are always time bound.

The Hindus have three Gods, Brahma (creator), Vishnu (looks after present), and Shiva (Destroyer). This in a nutshell means continuous learning (Vishnu), unlearning (abandoning the old, Shiva) and relearning (create something new, Brahma).

The technological up-gradation operates in a similar fashion. At one time the number of jewels inside the watch decided the Swiss watch quality. The Swiss watches lost their market share to Japanese digital watches (not noticing change in technology) but since then the Swiss watches makers have re-branded their watches as jewelry and ornaments and they are back in competition.

Such is the power of learning/unlearning/relearning.

Finally to be successful and counter adversities in life with confidence one has to judiciously and consciously use the above modals with interconnectedness to achieve designed results and outcomes. Connecting the dots is the prime skill now.

 

Once the children practice these models, soft skills are acquired naturally as they are the world with multiple perspectives, possibilities and opportunities. They develops a knack of the dictum "see different and be different" i.e. they develop innovative and creative skills.

 

Lastly happiness depends upon positive attitude, which I shall focus in a later blog.