building life by Sanath

My Score Card
Great Tool for Personal Planning and Development
Plan your personal and professional lives using this innovative tool. Its highly practical, flexible and and the experience is amazing. It helps you to design the best future plan you have ever dreamed about.

Sanath P. Vidanagamage

CEO, Business Development Centre

Mob: ++94 773647717

Email: sanathv@bdcsrilanka,lk

                        sanathvidanagamage@gmail.com

Create Your Own Mission Statement

A personal mission statement tells you who you are; how could you become a great achiever and serves as a great sense of purpose and promise. It keeps you accountable to yourself and focused and prevents you from drifting off course. It’s something clear and concise that provides direction for creating a lifestyle that will be satisfying. Referring to your personal mission statement can help you make decisions and be a guide in your life and career. Creating a mission statement is not easy or quick. The best mission statements require time, inspiration, and positive thinking. It is vital and helpful to take a serious personality assessment of which the results will provide you surprisingly accurate reflection of yourself and your talents. You have to consider both personal and professional dimensions of life.

The statement generally appears to be; “My mission is to (few words to explain personal and professional priorities – step 1) by enhancing or through the use of/with (include the most important talents or competencies you may have to develop - step 2) to serve the needs of or I value being … (write about what you really value - step 3).”

There are three simple steps to follow;

1. What are the two great priorities of your life?

First clarify what are your personal and professional priorities of life. Where do you truly want to direct your talents, energy, time, and resources? Mission statements are formulated based on the great personal life-priorities and are the backbone of any personal mission statement. There can be one or two such great priorities in your life too. Remember, you need to align both personal and professional priorities having a clear understanding on how the two factors affect your success interdependently.

Examples:

1. To assure wealth, security, happiness and love for my family
2. To play the role of most productive and dedicated production executive
3.  To become an outstanding marketing manager and caring father and husband
4.  To become highly qualified HR executive with better financial stability
5.  To an outstanding manager with higher income and significant wealth
6. To have the opportunity to appreciate and benefit from nature and the arts
7.  To continually educate myself in my field of psychology and career consulting
8. To balance health and spiritual sides of my life by getting adequate exercise, meditation and rest each week

2.  What are the strengths/talents you want to develop?

Begin crafting your mission statement by listing your character strengths or talents you want to develop in future. Try to define who you are and what strengths or personality traits you need to develop to achieve success in personal and professional lives. Define the best set of strengths or talents and decide the most crucial ones.

Examples

1. Being creative and innovative
2. Being highly productive
3. Result oriented
4. Leadership/leading
5. Team player
6. Open-minded
7. Being a dedicated learner
8. Empathetic communicator
9. Critical thinker

3.  What you really value or interest?

Think about personally and professionally again about what you value most at the end. Personally, you might be passionate about emotionally supporting your children helping them to lead meaningful lives filled with joy, purpose and good relationships. It can be something about your education, social work, contribution to poor community, dedicated religious practices or an intellectual commitment.

Professionally, you are pulled in the direction of helping team members find their way. Perhaps you can be committed to make your department the best among others or to achieve higher productivity level or to create better working environment for the co-workers. You can be committed and to devoting the skills and effort necessary to helping and delighting your clients. I would be better if you combine both personal and professional interests to make it more balanced way of thinking. It further gives you inside out perspective to create lot of synergies in future.

Examples

1.  I value supporting my team members to overcome their difficulties at work
2. I would dedicate my spare time for possible social development activities for disabled people
3. I am dedicated to support the charities of my church
4. I value compassion and caring for all people, including myself, paying particular attention to my family and closest friends.
5.  I’d maintain my meditational practices to become emotionally intelligent person

Tips for Final Touches

1. Make is simple, meaningful and inspiring
2. Use powerful works avoid jargon
3. Read it with a rhythm and make modifications till you get nicer meanings
4. Don’t make it too longs and four to five sentences are enough
5. Get more ides from personality development experts or coaches
6. Memorise it and read it loudly and repeat more than three time
7. Visualise with pictures and use your mind camera
8. Print it and decorate with graphics
9. Formulate a set of SMART goals to realize your mission

Create Your Own Mission Statement

A personal mission statement tells you who you are; how could you become a great achiever and serves as a great sense of purpose and promise. It keeps you accountable to yourself and focused and prevents you from drifting off course. It’s something clear and concise that provides direction for creating a lifestyle that will be satisfying. Referring to your personal mission statement can help you make decisions and be a guide in your life and career. Creating a mission statement is not easy or quick. The best mission statements require time, inspiration, and positive thinking. It is vital and helpful to take a serious personality assessment of which the results will provide you surprisingly accurate reflection of yourself and your talents. You have to consider both personal and professional dimensions of life.

The statement generally appears to be; “My mission is to (few words to explain personal and professional priorities – step 1) by enhancing or through the use of/with (include the most important talents or competencies you may have to develop - step 2) to serve the needs of or I value being … (write about what you really value - step 3).”

There are three simple steps to follow;

1. What are the two great priorities of your life?

First clarify what are your personal and professional priorities of life. Where do you truly want to direct your talents, energy, time, and resources? Mission statements are formulated based on the great personal life-priorities and are the backbone of any personal mission statement. There can be one or two such great priorities in your life too. Remember, you need to align both personal and professional priorities having a clear understanding on how the two factors affect your success interdependently.

Examples:

1. To assure wealth, security, happiness and love for my family
2. To play the role of most productive and dedicated production executive
3.  To become an outstanding marketing manager and caring father and husband
4.  To become highly qualified HR executive with better financial stability
5.  To an outstanding manager with higher income and significant wealth
6. To have the opportunity to appreciate and benefit from nature and the arts
7.  To continually educate myself in my field of psychology and career consulting
8. To balance health and spiritual sides of my life by getting adequate exercise, meditation and rest each week

2.  What are the strengths/talents you want to develop?

Begin crafting your mission statement by listing your character strengths or talents you want to develop in future. Try to define who you are and what strengths or personality traits you need to develop to achieve success in personal and professional lives. Define the best set of strengths or talents and decide the most crucial ones.

Examples

1. Being creative and innovative
2. Being highly productive
3. Result oriented
4. Leadership/leading
5. Team player
6. Open-minded
7. Being a dedicated learner
8. Empathetic communicator
9. Critical thinker

3.  What you really value or interest?

Think about personally and professionally again about what you value most at the end. Personally, you might be passionate about emotionally supporting your children helping them to lead meaningful lives filled with joy, purpose and good relationships. It can be something about your education, social work, contribution to poor community, dedicated religious practices or an intellectual commitment.

Professionally, you are pulled in the direction of helping team members find their way. Perhaps you can be committed to make your department the best among others or to achieve higher productivity level or to create better working environment for the co-workers. You can be committed and to devoting the skills and effort necessary to helping and delighting your clients. I would be better if you combine both personal and professional interests to make it more balanced way of thinking. It further gives you inside out perspective to create lot of synergies in future.

Examples

1.  I value supporting my team members to overcome their difficulties at work
2. I would dedicate my spare time for possible social development activities for disabled people
3. I am dedicated to support the charities of my church
4. I value compassion and caring for all people, including myself, paying particular attention to my family and closest friends.
5.  I’d maintain my meditational practices to become emotionally intelligent person

Tips for Final Touches

1. Make is simple, meaningful and inspiring
2. Use powerful works avoid jargon
3. Read it with a rhythm and make modifications till you get nicer meanings
4. Don’t make it too longs and four to five sentences are enough
5. Get more ides from personality development experts or coaches
6. Memorise it and read it loudly and repeat more than three time
7. Visualise with pictures and use your mind camera
8. Print it and decorate with graphics
9. Formulate a set of SMART goals to realize your mission

Entrepreneurial Learning Process (ELP)

Applying entrepreneurship in graduate studies would be one of the key qualitative improvements in the field of management education. However, still very few Sri Lankan Universities have initiated specialized entrepreneurial courses or ELP within their degree programmes. There is still a big question about applying entrepreneurship in management education or youth empowerment and that is; why isn’t it applied widely across the universities and professional education field if entrepreneurial endeavors have created a world of sustainable innovations during the past two decades? Another alarming issue in absorbing graduates in to the private sector emerged repeatedly in Sri Lanka during the past decade. The private sector desperately pointed out the lack of appropriate life-skills is the common deficiency among today’s university graduates. These skills such as creativity and innovation, risk taking, communication, teamwork, marketing and leadership are critically requires to perform in the highly competitive and changing business environment. As a matter of fact entrepreneurship is the only subject where one can truly learn and practice such life-skills through a well designed Entrepreneurial Learning Process. Learning entrepreneurship without practicing, just for the sake of getting ahead of the exams does not motivate students in to possible ventures or may not sharpen their skills in a significant manner.

 
In order to design an effective entrepreneurial learning process (ELP), it may be worthwhile to understand the concept of entrepreneurship in a skill empowerment perspective and the key competencies within the entrepreneurship. It will help us to formulate a realistic scope for a successful entrepreneurial project for university students and sets a framework of possible outcomes (what skills would better off and to what extant) of such project.
Entrepreneurship?
The French economist most commonly credited with giving the term this particular meaning is Jean Baptiste Say who make an effort to put it in a different way giving a different definition to the one traditionally accepted in 19^th century and he praise entrepreneurship as the mechanism of creating economic value. He says “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. Entrepreneurs create value.”  

However in the 20th century, the economist most closely associated with the term was Joseph Schumpeter. He described entrepreneurs as the innovators who drive the creative-destructive process of capitalism. In his words, “the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production.” They can do this in many ways: “by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.” Later Peter Drucker starts with Say’s definition, but amplifies it to focus on opportunity. Drucker does not require entrepreneurs to cause change, but sees them as exploiting the opportunities that change (in technology, consumer preferences, social norms, etc.) creates. He says, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

Putting the most vital aspects of above three definitions raised by Say, Schumpeter and Drucker, we can come in to a common idea of key aspects of a successful Entrepreneurial Learning Process (ELP).

Say                              Change agent or a creator of higher value on resources

Schumpeter                  Innovating new methods, products and technologies

Drucker                       Exploiting new opportunities

It may be appropriate to put these three aspects in to competency framework of entrepreneurship to elaborate more practical picture of how it looks like. Changing resources in to higher value products; innovating new things and methods and exploiting new opportunities seems to be the great impacts of entrepreneurship. So creating such impact, one needs to possess number of key skills generally known as entrepreneurial traits and obliviously there are very specific approaches to implant such skills in young graduates. Although there many traits pointed out by different scholars and institutions, it would be more appropriate to choose only the right combination of traits that goes with above three key aspects.

To be continued......

Bandula and Bull Talks

Education Minister of Sri Lanka Bandula Gunawardane assertion that Rs 7,500 per month is enough as ‘living expenses’ for a family of three. Meanwhile the UN poverty index of the poor being defined as those living below US$1.25 (Rs 150) per day.

Education Minister of Sri Lanka is one of the former private tuition masters is Sri Lanka. Thanks to the majority of brainless Sri Lankans he became a parliamentarian and later a minister of Trade and now unfortunately the minister of education. He actually holds a basic degree in Economics and this is something he gained through free education system which is maintained with the tax money collected from the majority of poor Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka.

Thanks to his administration in the field of education non of the national level exams were carried out without trouble, even he could not issue a single question paper in OL and AL Exams without printing and other types of mistakes. And not only that last year thousands of innocent AL students were disappointed due to sabotaged in paper making and exam results miss calculation. Generally this is common in any ministry under Mahinda Rajapakses’ Government where a bunch of idiots are destroying the whole country and they don’t care what would happen to the people and their day to day lives.

The current leader and the others of this government strongly believe that all Sri Lankans are idiots or perhaps fools and they never respects the basic human rights declared in the constitution of Sri Lanka. According to Bandula this government assumes that the people in this country need only to eat something (that worth Rs.83.00) just to digest it for the purpose of “going to toilet”. This is clearly indicated in Bandulas’ words “live without dying” in his famous statement. This shows where the government stands about the well being of people, human rights and dignity. So dear all Sri Lankans, just think about it and what difference it make with the vote you cast.

This minister Bandula Gunawardana who is probably spending more that Rs.75,0000.00 of public money monthly for his every need is now asking the people to survive a day with Rs. 83.00 (US0.69). It seems that he has completely forgotten the people who actually spent for his childhood, free health service, basic education, higher education and now for his luxury life as a minister. First thing I can say about his next life, well that is definitely in Hell. A man who has a good father and a mother would never be able to say such a worst thing to the people in his motherland. So, secondly I assume there is something wrong with the information in his birth certificate and actual parents.

Future Leaders Training-for Undergraduates

Based on the prevailing conflicts among undergraduates and number of youth related research findings, the Institute of Growth Concepts (IGC) decided to develop an innovative training package called Future Leaders targeting the University undergraduates in Sri Lanka. A team of training and development experts worked enthusiastically together to study the youth behaviours, analyse results and to design Future Leaders training solution. This training package can be implemented in any faculty or department of Sri Lankan Universities with the support of academic staff utilising the training facilities within the university. IGC has conducted “Future Leaders” mostly for the undergraduates in Art studies as they normally get exposed to fewer opportunities in management based trainings. Objectives of the training were:

1.      To strengthen youth by setting future goals, changing attitudes and enhancing personal productivity through skills such as, leadership, communication, time management, team building, conflict transformation and entrepreneurship.

2.      To encourage young graduates to become competent for private sector jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.

3.      To enhance personal productivity in academic and personal lives.

4.      To empower youth by enhancing conflict sensitivity and emotional intelligence.

Future Leaders is a not an academic exercise but a short term life skills development initiative (training series), that guides and motivate undergraduates to reap optimum results as a cohesive and proactive individual during the academic period as well as to become talented job hunter after University. The scope of the programme is to enhance positive attitudes, self-confidence, creativity and certain skill areas such as leadership; teambuilding; presentation/communication and entrepreneurship. The training series consist of five sessions including one outward training event. It on the other hand uses interactive training methodology rather than teaching approach. It is a high-bread training methodology that combines classroom based training sessions as well as out-door action learning sessions. First four sessions are focused on attitude change and skill areas mentioned above. The purpose of fifth session is to give opportunity for the trainees to present what they have learned and to take the leadership.