Strengthening Executive Endurance with Raja Jamalamadka

Our journey with Lean2Lead has taken many leaps since the time we started. With huge enthusiasm we started 2020 and planned our big event for march 8th only to postpone it and later we had to cancel. We resumed slowly with zoom and continued our networking journey virtually. Conquered many milestones and fears this year.

One of the sessions this year stood out for us was “Strengthening Executive Endurance” by @Raja Jamalamadka – Industry & TedX Speaker, IIT & Harvard graduated, Neuroscience coach and LinkedIn Top Voice.

Raja started the session explaining about the brain structure, explaining where our likes and dislikes are stored, how brain starts imagining and builds expectations, starts releasing Dopamine, creating feeling of happiness, mere journey of interest to expectations and if expectations are met they become habit. How we can produce dopamine naturally in the brain by doing what you love to do.

He further deep dived into motivation – explained intrinsic and extrinsic factors, discussed dopamine absence with productivity drop. He then moved on to explaining Oxytocin and explained why women are better suited for decision making roles. Further explained third magic ingredient serotonin, the mood chemical in our brain.

Easily built the complex topic into practical learning experience and gave us the mantra that dopamine relates to my interests, oxytocin relates to my relationship with other people and serotonin relates to my mood & ecosystem around me. From here the journey of leadership and relative examples drawn from his deep corporate experience and his coaching journey made the session spell binding. This was the most scientific explanation of all practical traits and behaviors that are expected out of a leader and gave a one life time experience in one hour. It didn’t matter we were in zoom session and not meeting him in person the energy flow and aha moments were so high that even if I am writing this note after almost three months of the session, I am able to feel the energy and learning still alive. 

Summarizing the learning or take away of the session for guaranteed success:

• love your profession & / or find out what you love to do and do that
• you can only control what is in your hands - build people up and build trust up
• give positive feedback to your teams, negative vs positive has 6:1 ratio of impact
• 360 degree decisions are better made by women as genetics has endowed women with better decision making power
• Do not judge people if work does not meet expectations
• Do not decide, involve
• Do not impress, express
• Do not Pity, help
• Do not conclude, give chance
• Take breaks, walks, away from your desk and listen to music
• Reaction destroys endurance, hold things for 90 secs before reacting
• Sleep - rested and relaxed brain has more creativity and connections are build while dreaming
• Be present in now, focus on one task atleast 11min without distractions
• Keep phone off while working on the task, tune off from external distraction
• Yoga and meditation improves focus

List is endless ... we shall soon have another in person deep dive with Raja!