Smell your enemy!

We keep having these so called Personality Development sessions quite frequently at my workplace. Not that it’s a compulsion , but I see to it that I attend most of these. The main reason being, it so happens that the person delivering the address, mostly is someone who’s experienced in a particular field or way too elder to me. More than the topic, I majorly be there to get to understand and see how he/she expresses his/her thoughts in that timespan. Well, there have been quite a few instances when I got knocked off just few minutes into the session and there have been a couple of those beautiful sessions wherein I’ve got deeply involved. Here comes the factor of how you relate to the topic in hand and how effectively the person communicates it to you; but before we go further I’d rather let you know that this post is not about effective communication, but just a light cast on how attending these sessions may help you from a different aspect and get you know facts that you’d be totally oblivious of.

A few days back I needed some information on organizing adventure activities, so I’d contacted a person by name Sandeep. Sandeep’s been into native adventure stuff for more than fifteen years now and besides organizing these events he’s one of the lead anchors for a flagship personality development organisation. He keeps giving sessions on Team management and Effective communication skills now and then and it is one of those sessions of his that I got to know him.

One of the reasons why I related to his school of thought during that session was, the way he co- related his real life adventure experiences and activities with team building and effective communication. In that session, He happened to bring out one particular experience of his in one of the tribal settlements in Andaman. He’d been there as part of group to help them out with navigating through the settlement. Tribals as we know, are pretty secluded in their outlook and they take quite some time to learn to trust an outsider. This particular group of which Sandeep was a part of, had to cross a certain part of the forest manifested with wild elephants to get to a secluded settlement. It was primarily a research team with not many having exposure to wild life.

One very fascinating aspect that he’d brought out was that the tribals used their olfactory senses to judge the presence of elephants in their vicinity. You’d be surprised to know, they could in fact correctly identify the presence of the wild animal at a distance of almost 1km!! It took quite some time for me to digest that fact but what he says makes absolute sense. We so called urban people have lost track of the power of our various senses. I personally , cannot identify what major ingredient is missing in a particular dish even if it happens to be one of my favorites and I’ll probably take years to earn back that olfactory power even if I stay amidst the tribals for a year and for all you know, I’ll be doomed even before I start sniffing an insect yards away 😀 .

They say you need to know your opponent much better than you know yourself. Sounds perfectly logical but how good a judge would you be if you’re not able to judge yourself properly 🙂 .