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Aziz Haider

Leadership - Your True Destiny By Sandeep Chaudhary and Manisha Chaudhary Publishers: ResourceGroup Thoughts, New Delhi Price: Rs 350

It is difficult to believe but the truth is that Einstein suffered from learning disability (dyslexia) and even failed in Physics, the very subject he became a legend in. One of the world's greatest scientists, Stephen Hawking, is a paraplegic and is bound to a wheelchair. Nearer home, we have the example of a frail, lathi-wielding man named Gandhi, who after once being thrown out of a train never looked back till he threw those very colonial rulers out of his native country.

Conviction breeds leaders! It's not that these people didn't get a few strange looks, some comments, a few rejections and also some encouragement, as we all get whenever we go out to try something new. But their success was due to their resolve to excel and their faith in their leadership qualities.

The book, Leadership - Your True Destiny, salutes these leaders and their leadership qualities and gives their examples to enumerate that we are all destined to lead since birth even if our sphere of influence is as small as one other person.

We can look around and see the leader at work in our domestic helper or the neighbourhood chowkidar. Every one of us is leading some people, somewhere, in some manner. Whether our followers are just five others (our friends, children, workers, helpers and so on) or 500 or 5,000, the fact remains that we do lead others, consciously or unconsciously, out of necessity or naturally. Eventually, it is not the conditions of our birth or the circumstances of our lives, but our choices that create us, making us what we become.

Potent question, however, is if we all are born to lead, why is it that everyone is not a leader? "Simply because free will and the baggage of opinions and thoughts that we pick up during life's journey, blind us, create obstacles for us or move us in different directions."

The book is written by Sandeep Chaudhry, an internationally certified master trainer from Hughes Training International, whose company, ResourceGroup has facilitated strategy sessions in more than 50 organisations.

Sandeep bows down to the giver of the leadership experiences and challenges, God, and through contemplative sessions with colleague and life partner, Manisha, who sought answers from him, reaches the point from where he discovered that "the same potential exists inside all of us, you, me and everybody." And that is the predominant theme running through the book, that we are all destined to be leaders; we are all born leaders.

Destiny is out there, for certain, waiting for all of us! There are a lot of us who dream big. But within the group of these ambitious aspirants, most merely talk about it while few share a sense of belief that they can actually do it one day. In a nutshell, we are all born with the following ingredients to be a leader: a common ability to dream, a potential, waiting to be expressed, a life full of challenges, a life full of opportunities and a free will. "It is these resources that are the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle called destiny — the destiny called leadership."

But if Gandhis and Buddhas were leaders, so were also Hitler and Osama. The book also goes on to explain the difference between their leadership qualities and the modus operandi followed by both to rope in the followers.

A conversational and easy-to-register style is followed throughout the book. Easy and thought-provoking sentences have been used that would inspire any reader to strive for the better. As Steven Readhead said: "Beyond your wildest dreams, lies the door to your potential reality. Create your ultimate reality with strength of focus and desire, that through your imagination, your expectations can be manifested in reality."

The book also gives severalike you and me who have excelled to become cherished leaders in their areas of work. Like that of Somya, who was once at the verge of a breaking point, being pulled and pushed in different directions by the varied forces in her life. Or that of Rajiv Wadhwa, who realised how to build his team as collaborators instead of followers, thereby, reducing several of his headaches and getting time to do so much else.

These people are real, their stories real. But like thousands of others, they went after the dreams in a self less, desire-less way, and had the conviction to work for its realisation.

After all, "today is our laboratory to develop tomorrow, the destiny called leadership."

Illustration by J.A. Premkumar

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