People at Work & Play

Sachin Tendulkar achieved a milestone that had eluded him till now. A century at Adelaide - home to the legendary Sir Donald Bradman. In the first day of the final Test at Adelaide, Sachin today held the Indian innings together with a spirited 124 not out.

This was his 39th Test century. He leads the list of century makers in Test cricket. He is now way ahead of Brian Lara with 34 and Ricky Ponting with 33 Test hundreds.

With 11, 740 runs, Sachin is only 213 runs behind Brian Lara for the most runs in Test cricket.

The reason why the late Sir Donald Bradman is considered the best batsman ever lies in the fact that he scored 6996 Test runs in 80 innings with an average which will never be beaten of 99.94!!

There is a big difference between what is portrayed on screen and what happens in real life. “Chak De, India” became a very popular movie showing the brilliant performance of the Indian womens hockey team led by their coach, played by Hindi movie super star, Shah Rukh Khan.

TV channels yesterday showed how different in reality the world of Indian womens hockey is. The living conditions provided to the players was pathetic. All 14 of them were made to share one large room. The players who recently returned from a tour of Australia were made to pay for their own kit!

On the other hand, CNN- IBN quotes Shah Rukh today as saying that he would like to be associated with other sports besides cricket when he won the bid for the Kolkatta team for BCCI-IPL Twenty 20 extravaganza. His bid: something like $ 75 million.

The list of franchise owners are (all amounts in US$): Vijay Mallya’s UB group (Bangalore, 111.6 million), India Cements (Chennai, 91 million), GMR group (Delhi 84 million), Deccan Chronicle (Hyderabad, 107 million), a consortium led by Emerging Media (Jaipur, 67 million), Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment (Kolkata, 75.09 million), Preity Zinta, Ness Wadia, Karan Paul and Dabur’s Mohit Burman (Mohali, 76 million) and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited (Mumbai, 111.9 million).

Even if a small fraction of money was spent on games other than cricket, we would do better as a sporting nation.

” I am lucky to have reached here. I can’t do more than this” said the manager ” I am not as smart as some of the others. They have better education and can take risks. I can’t”. Although he was doing well in his job and was being actively considered for higher responsibility, what was holding him back was - his fears and lack of belief in himself.

James Waldroop & Timothy Butler, authors of ” Maximum Success“call this kind of behaviour ” career acrophobia”. They are Directors of MBA Career Development at the Harvard Business School. In this context, “career acrophobia” means a fear of heights or more accurately a fear of falling from a height. People in this state feel that they have reached a position beyond their capabilities. They are hesitant to seek higher responsibilities.

The reasons for such behaviour can be traced back to events in their past life where they were made to feel inadequate or not good enough. The messages they got invariably hammered the point that they should not be over smart or too ambitious or simply ” too big for their boots”.

These messages over time affect the way they see themselves. They think they are “lucky” to have got selected or promoted. They do not give enough credit to their own efforts or merits. In short, say Waldroop & Butler, “They never feel good enough”.

Career acrophobia does not happen overnight. It has developed over years. Likewise, overcoming this also takes time and effort. It starts with self-awareness, identifying situations when they get such feelings of inadequacy, seeing patterns in such feelings and learning to counter each of them by using more positive thoughts and alternate behaviours.

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