Who Are You?

I'm taking faster steps. I delivered my next project at Toastmasters as well.
The objective of this one was using visual aids.

I had a beautiful PPT accompany me on stage. But sharing the first draft of what I spoke:

MOC introduces me:

TM Aman Who Are You? Who Are You? TM Aman

"Wish I could answer that in 7 mins.
*laughter*

But instead, today, I’m going to tell you, who you are.

And instead of pointing at you, which would be intrusive, I’m rather going to tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself.

Fellow Toastmasters and Guests

Have you ever felt that you’re not in the right job? That’s just not who you are?
Or maybe you don’t prefer going to parties and when you go, you don’t feel your most natural self?
While people around you are totally happy to be there.

It’s simply because we all have different preferences. And they boil down to our personality.

Let’s try a quick activity. I want you to cross your arms.

Now you probably didn't even think, "Which arm do I put on top?" You have a natural preference for how you cross your arms.

So, try crossing them in the other way.

You can do it, easily. It doesn't feel quite as natural.

That is it with our preferences. This.. (enact) may feel natural, whereas here, you did have to put some effort. Similar it is with our personality. Some activities, some decisions come to us very naturally whereas to others it may feel alien to them.

I recently got certified in one of the personality assessment tool that not only helps me understand myself but also others around me, better. That tells me how different people see the world differently.

Chances are you’ve taken Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or will. Roughly 2 million people a year do.

The fundamentals of MBTI include identifying the four main personality preferences pair which describe who you are. How do you act and think.

The first what we call ‘preference pair’, is about where we do we draw our energy from. This pair is E and I. Where Extraverts or the Es tend to focus on their outer world, Is focus more on their inner world. Now, these are not social skills. This is about energy. While Es want their energy to go out and, when it goes out, it comes bouncing back to them. And Is want their energy to go in. By looking at ideas, impressions, facts inside their head, they create more energy. We believe that you have both within you. It's just that you prefer one over the other.

How Es and Is appear in meetings is kind of interesting. Extraverts in a meetings are more likely to be talking their ideas out. I have a preference for extraversion and I feel if I bring it out, it becomes real, and I may start over here and end up over here, because I've made it real as I'm talking it out. Now, an I listening to that E may be thinking, "If they just shut up, we would get somewhere." Whereas an E looking at an I is probably going, "Are they awake? Are they listening to me?"

Silences for Es are space to be filled. Silences for Is are space to be cherished.

For example, both an introvert and an extravert may like going jogging after work. And while the extravert notices people, things around in the park and draws energy from these outward sources, the introvert's energy is turned inwards. He uses the time outside to mull over ideas and what has happened that day.

Moving to the next one, which is how we gather data and the kind of information we like and trust. The preference pairs here are sensing and intuition. S and N. People who prefer sensing want things to be practical, actual, real, facts and data. They just really want to get down to the here and now, the present of what's going on. By contrast, intuitive types like possibilities, meanings, the big picture, the future.

Let’s have a small experiment.

Unlock your phone and look at it for 3 seconds.

Alright, what’s the time on your phone?

Okay, that’s a good start.

Can also tell me the battery percentage on your phone?

Even though all of us got the same time to look at our phones, for some it was natural to look for these details.

While the Sensing types would look at the details and the intuitive types would be interpreting some bigger picture behind all these details, forming patterns. So next time, someone points things out the things you didn’t even say, check if they are forming a bigger picture and interpreting your facts differently.

Alright, once we have information in, we make our decisions. The third preference pair: thinking and feeling. Thinking types when they take a decision, they look at the information that they have, in an objective way. They look at the pros and cons, and make their decision. But feeling types step into the decision. They become aware of, "How is this going to impact people? How does this fit with my value system?," and they're looking for harmony with their value system. It does not mean that Feeling types are emotional people or use their emotions to make decisions. Rather they use a structured way of using their values for it.

Hence, the definition of being fair, if different to both the types.

Giving you an example, let’s say you have 10 DIFFERENT chocolates to be distributed among a group of 10 children. How would you distribute it?

A person with Thinking preference would distribute they equally for they need to treat everyone according to same standards, and equally. However, a person with Feeling preference would give each kid the chocolate each of them likes. Because for them, being fair means treating everyone to what they need. Individuals are different and they need different things.

Now, both thinking types and feeling types came to the exact same conclusions. They just did it in different ways.

Our last one has to do with how we like to go about living our lives. And our words are "judging" and "perceiving" in this preference pair, and "judging" here doesn't mean "judgmental." But what J types like to do is organize things, make decisions, get on with it, and perceiving types like to kind of go with the flow and be spontaneous and continue gathering information. So, I'm a perceiving type, my life is all about options. It’s about going with the flow. And routines and strict organization of things make me feel suffocated. True confessions. Okay.

Now, I happen to have a friend, who prefers Judging. He thinks I'm nuts. He loves to make lists, and checking things off that list. So, you can imagine what happens when we go out for a meal: He’s making his decisions -you know, judging is about, "Let's make a decision and get on with it" -And I’m looking over the menu, looking at what other people have, trying to decide what I’m going to have, that's perhaps new and different, and he’s getting hungry.

But, for perceiving types, it's no decision before its time. So, judging types will often use words that end in "ed": "I've finished that," "I've completed that," I've decided that," and perceiving types will often talk in "ing" words: "I'm finishing that," "I'm completing that," "I'm deciding that."

So, this is about how you live your life.

All of these come together in a magical way. So, we've got four preference pairs. We've got

how you gain energy - extroversion, introversion -

how you gather information - sensing, intuition -,

how you make decisions - thinking or feeling -,

and how you live your life - judging or perceiving.

They come together to form 16 unique combinations.

So does that tell you who am I or who you are already? Is that all we are? Are we a bunch of these alphabets? No, we’re not.

You’re like some other people and like no other person. And that is what makes us who we are.

Do all humans get divided and boxed into one of these 16 combinations? No, there’s more intricacy to it. But it sure is a small window to your soul. And understanding the personality type sure does help you understand yourself better and the others who have surprisingly different preferences.

Remember, these are just the preferences. You and I can act other ways when I need to. Maybe not want to.

So, I'm going to ask that you help me demonstrate preferences for one last time.

And that is I want you to clap your hands and just freeze them. So, clap and freeze. Okay.

Now, you probably didn't even notice that you have a way of clapping, you have a preference for that.

So, I want you to practice, as loud as you can, the other way.

It's a cheap way to get applause. Thank you."

Secret Lives

Hey,

I'm back. And I'm happy for I'm back home.
I'm excited to share the stories that I have gathered all along in the past year.

Beginning with the latest one. I recently gave a speech at my Toastmasters club. I have reached the level 7, Project 7 as they call it here.

Here's a draft of what I spoke:

"It was the fateful day of 9/11. Two planes flew right into the twin towers. As the whole world saw the towers crashing down, there stood a man.

Howard Lutnick. The chief executive of one of the world’s largest financial-services firm, stood, watching 658 of his co-workers, friends, including his own brother being burnt to ashes. As much as he was grieved and pained by the sudden, catastrophic loss, one of the things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous but it was not.

Fellow Toastmasters and dear guests.

The biggest threat to the survival at that point, became apparent almost immediately- no one knew the passwords for hundreds of accounts and files that needed to get back online in time for reopening of the bond markets. The attacks also knocked out one of the company’s main backup servers.

To crack the passwords, the Microsoft technicians performed “brute force” attacks, using fast computers starting from the alphabet “a” then work through every possible letter and number combination before ending at “ZZZZZZZ”. But even the fastest computers working through trillions of combinations, could take days. Even a day’s wait was unaffordable. Wall Street was not going to wait.

If you were a part of that team, what would you have done?

Microsoft technicians took advantage of two facts:

1.       Many people use the same password for multiple accounts.

2.       These passwords are typically personalized.

The technicians explained that for their algorithms to work best, they needed large amounts of trivia about the owner of each missing password. The kinds of things that were too specific, too personal, and too idiosyncratic for companies to keep on file. Even though it’s these details that make people distinct, that make them individuals but back then it was the reason for chaos. The officials of the organizations soon found themselves on the phone, desperately trying to calm their own agony while calling the spouses, parents and siblings of former colleagues to console them, ….. and work their way through a checklist that had questions like- “What is your wedding anniversary?”, “Tell me again, where he went for undergrad?”, “You guys have a dog, don’t you? What’s his name?

Remember, this was less than 24 hours after the towers had fallen. The fire department was still referring to it as a search-and-rescue mission. Families had not accepted their losses. Forget about answering the questions and breaking the passwords.

The tendency of employees being lazy and choosing a simple, “weak” password, that day ultimately proved to be the organization’s only saving grace, helping them crack it easily.

As I completed reading the case study, I was myself drawn into the stories of my own passwords. Not forgetting the strain it takes on my mind remembering all of them but also the extreme irritation whenever this expiry notification pops up, “Your account password will expire in the next 5 days”. Like most of you, I always change my password on the 5^th day. Never before that.

But there is more to the passwords than their annoyance. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, emotions, mischief, and sometimes even poetry. They derive from anything- horoscopes, an inside joke with ourselves, a lost love, a defining emotional scar. And we try our best to hold onto these, not letting a story, love, idea, person go away by keeping them close in form of our passwords. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, intimate, compact and expressive. Often though, the story behind these passwords has an emotional edge to them.

Fiona Moriarty, a competitive runner had “16:59” as her password— her target time for the 5kms on the track.

Data suggests that setting your password to something is also a unique way to remind yourself of the goal you have to achieve. Have you ever done that?

While I was doing this research, a person I got into a conversation with around passwords, George mentioned how setting his password to “Meditate@Today” set a reminder for him to continue the momentum and eventually build a routine around it. Because his computer demanded that he changes his password every 30 days, he moved to other goals, “LearnCalligraphy”, SUCCESSFUL, “GoForASoloTrip”, SUCCESSFUL, “CompleteTheCC”, SUCCESSFUL, “LooseWeight”, IT NEVER WORKED, HE’S STILL FAT. :D

Some people even set passwords that are reminder of what they have achieved.

Stuck in a middle of traffic jam in Bombay, I sat next to a chatty man, Mr. Sinha, who judging by his expensive watch and suit, seemed to have done well for himself. We made a small talk about our jobs, and eventually I told him about my interest in passwords. After a long, silent look out the window, he turned to me and said that he typically uses “83.59” in his passwords. This was his CAT score and he liked reminding himself of it because he took a certain satisfaction in how far he had come in life in spite of his mediocre showing on the standardized test.

Passwords may not completely bare our souls, but these passwords do represent pages, or perhaps pieces of pages, torn from our mental diaries.

The fact that we construct them so that we and only we will remember them makes it a unique take on the secret lives.

Try asking someone their password and the rich back story that it holds in it. Because it’s not every day that you stumble upon a conversation topic that teaches you new things about people you’ve known for years.

Or maybe look back at your own passwords and the stories they have been holding in them.

Who knows, your password may contain a story in itself that you may narrate to your grandchildren."