Watched a TED video by Simon Sinek. Rivetted me completely. An excerpt from the talk:

Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result. By “why,” I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?

Well, as a result, the way we think, the way we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in. It’s obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out.

Let me explain what Simon means by Outside-In by using a typical Bulls Eye ad:

We have market leadership, good results (The What),  We have great faculty, good infrastructure, Computer based testing (The How), So join us.

What seems to be missing is our core: Why join us? What do we BELIEVE in? If I ask this question, I will get ten different answers. I grappled with these answers myself for many years – and the insight came in 2002 when I invited my friend D Sanjay, of Numero Uno Advertising, to attend a Group discussion on what our students think Bulls Eye stands for. All of our students then thought we were non-professional – read – concerned, going out of our way to help the students. This led to – ‘Personal Attention for Personal Success’ – that you still see on the cover of the text books we print. As the number of students in our family grew, we diluted this concept of being the concerned pseudo-parent (term coined by Bulls Eye founder, Harihar ‘Bull’ Narayanswamy). Its time to get back to our roots.

The only reason a student joins Bulls Eye is to IMPROVE. Once we re-examine our beliefs, then it is time for the Bulls Eye ad to reverse:

We are Bulls Eye – we are genuinely interested in your improvement, everything we do, we ask – is it helping improve our students, We have great faculty, good infrastructure, a great testing software – and yes, we deliver on results. Come join us.

Did you notice any difference in this communication?

Let this reversal not be superficial. Let us start at the core. Let’s work on what can we do to help students improve?

The Why of Improvement

We exist to make a difference in the lives of our students. At Bulls Eye it is our job to first understand who our students is, what is her aspiration, what are her strengths, how can she leverage them the best to improve. Our students are wasting their money and our time by only coming to us to warm our benches. Hard work is of no use if there is no learning from it. Learning happens when we have the time to sit back and reflect on what we do. I’ll talk today of one of the things which I have tried and reflected on this month – and it positively works. And that is the one-to-one mentoring of a student.

The How of Improvement

1. Begin by emphasizing that you are very keen that your score goes up.
2. Ask student to open her hitbullseye student account in front of you and first check how many tests has she done. Also see her initiative level by checking on Bull Mocks.
3. Go to Cummulative score and check whether the trend is increasing, decreasing or fluctuating. Ask students the reason for the above.
4. Highlight strong area.
5. Go to last test taken and look at what can be done to improve score.
6. If a student has already at 99 percentile in strong section, start work on weak section, else stay on strong section.
7. If accuracy is less than 66 %, then ONLY work on accuracy.

Ask student to do self analysis of mistakes and come for next mentoring session. Only in next mentoring session give tips on improving accuracy. Typically this problem is more for Verbal. Solution is to write own answer before looking at option. Will illustrate with example of Shweta Marathe, student from Pune. Her median percentile was 25 – highest being 35. Made her do RC exercise using IIFT 01 paper and answer without looking at option. Got 7 out of 8 right then. In her next BullCAT her percentile shot up to 50. Will not draw any conclusions, till I see the results of her next test though.

8. If accuracy is more than 66 %, then check out attempts.
9. If attempt is less than 80%, check out area wise analysis. Advise student on how to improve attempt, Typical attempt problem is more in Math. Give assignment to student – do an exercise where you only write down logic of solving problem. See assignment done by Amit in Ambala in Appendix.
10. Students to be told to reflect – summarise and mail the action points.
11. Set up time for next mentoring session, typically 2/3 days later. The next session will take much less time. Ensure that each time you have a student signing off on an idea for a new experiment that she will try in her next test. Continue doing the same till end Sep. In Oct she should stabilize strategy for her CAT.

The What of Improvement

I started my mentoring experiments at Ambala this month. The hypothesis that I wanted to check – does a one to one communication have more impact than the same thing said in a one to many classroom setting. I picked up 5 students at random. I gave students my email address – and asked them to jot down their reflections on our conversations. Some students responded. Please find in the appendix the thread of the conversations that I had with him.

This was a random selection of 15 students. The email exchange seems to be positive. As a teacher I also learned. In Ambala only 2 people emailed me, by the time I finished my trip in Jammu, I could motivate 6 students to mail me.

What conclusions did I draw?

Faculty initiative is required, but improvement happens when a faculty can motivate a student to reflect and show initiative.

I learnt that you have to force a student to reflect – and that this reflection has to happen the same day as your mentoring session.

You cannot have one sided conversations in mentoring. Following up with people who show initiative is always a pleasure.

I learn that as a teacher I have to continually work on my listening skills.

I realized that when you sit down with a student and look at his Reports online – our software does not record times of questions that a student spends significant time on, but does not end up answering.

As a mentor, now I look at the sum of the times spent on individual questions and subtract that from 70 minutes to get the time students spend on questions that they start and leave without finishing.

I learnt of a great teacher colleague that we have – Suman Puri in Ludhiana. Though I did not get any any student mails from Ludhiana, am happy that Suman has started work whole heartedly on mentoring. I am looking for more Sumans amongst us.

I am looking forward to your reflection, now that you have finished reading this note. Somewhere deep down, I am hoping, that there will be at least 3 of you who reflect and respond to this note – and mail me back. My promise is to work with each of you who mails me. Go ahead, reflect, type out your thoughts to start your journey to the center of your self and transform yourself into an inspired leader!

You can see the TED talk by Simon Sinek by following this link:

(http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html)

This month’s mail is again on Mentoring.

We start with an excerpt from an article which gives some good ideas about motivating our students.

Autonomy is a student’s need to perceive that she has choices, that what she is doing is of her own volition, and that she is the source of her own action. The way teachers frame information either promotes the likelihood that a person will perceive autonomy or undermines it.

To promote autonomy:

• Frame goals and timelines as essential information to assure a student’s success, rather than as dictates or ways to hold students accountable.
• Refrain from incentivizing students through competitions and games. Few people have learned the skill of shifting the reason why they’re competing from an external one (winning a prize or gaining status) to a higher-quality one (an opportunity to fulfill a meaningful goal).
• Don’t apply pressure to perform. Sustained peak performance is a result of people acting because they choose to — not because they feel they have to.

Relatedness is a student’s need to care about and be cared about by others, to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives, and to feel that they are contributing to something greater than themselves. Teachers have a great opportunity to help people derive meaning from their work.

To deepen relatedness:

• Validate the exploration of feelings in the class. Be willing to ask people how they feel about an assigned project or goal and listen to their response. All behavior may not be acceptable, but all feelings are worth exploring.
• Take time to facilitate the development of student’s values — then help them align those values with their goals. It is impossible to link work to values if students don’t know what their values are. Connect student’s work to a noble purpose.

Competence is a student’s need to feel effective at meeting every-day challenges and opportunities, demonstrating skill over time, and feeling a sense of growth and flourishing. Teachers can rekindle a student’s desire to grow and learn.

To develop people’s competence:

• Make resources available for learning.
• Set learning goals — not just the traditional results-oriented and outcome goals. At the end of each day, instead of asking, “What did you achieve today?” ask “What did you learn today? How did you grow today in ways that will help you and others tomorrow?”

Next is an article by CAT 2013 100 percentiler, Aviral Bhatnagar. Although Aviral is not our typical student, but he has a great idea. An Excel sheet to keep tabs on learning. Worth experimenting with. Some of our mentees can take this on.

I harbored the idea of preparing for the CAT in early April, and I sort of started figuring out what I had to do in May. I was in my 3rd year and interning, so till July it was pretty random and I wasn’t doing much of my work and was probably just testing waters. During this time, I understood that being great at English doesn’t necessarily amount to doing well at Verbal and being an IITian doesn’t imply you’ll do well at Quant. That said, having both of these are considerable advantages (in relative terms), and I would strongly suggest starting as early as possible. You may hear a lot of people “who don’t prepare and get in”. They are either lying or probabilistically lucky. What you have to do is ensure you qualify come what may, regardless of a good day or bad day. I think I started late, and because I had an internship side by side, I was more or less working for the day (here’s a sound out to the work-ex people for time management).

I enrolled in both TIME and IMS. I personally believe TIME is good for Quant and IMS is good for Verbal in relative terms, and that they both provide excellent test interfaces. I didn’t attend any of the classes, because I conceptually knew what to do/didn’t have that much time. If you feel you’re lacking somewhere, do go to classes, but do this early and probably not in the last three months. IMO, all you should be doing is testing yourself in the last three months. 

Now that I had my data in place, I made it a point to dynamically learn and improve from the results from my excel sheet. This probably helped me to be highly efficient given the time constraints I had (I put in no more than 4 hours a day). I was constantly identifying what I was doing right, doing wrong and pathetic at. I can basically break it down into 4 broad steps, and you can find the elaboration of this in my strategy for Verbal

• Identify your sweet spot
• Identify your weak spot
• Improve and analyse both strengths and weaknesses
• Leave what you will do wrong

I think the last step is the most critical, and the more you work on it, the smaller the set of what you can leave will become. Hence, the earlier you start preparing, the smaller this will be. As I was constantly analysing and looking for trends in what I was doing, I started isolating my mistakes. What did I do then? I practiced questions on only those topics. I used all the material I had, exhausted all the tests I had, left nothing that I had not done. The results showed, except in parajumbles – they were my arch-nemesis (lol) an Excel file that monitors my preparation with hard data would be the best thing to do. It was probably the one biggest reason in my success and I managed my time much better. 

Over time, because of giving tests, I became less “emotional” and more objective towards my questions. You need to treat your exams with the coldness of an object, and it’s very easy to curse yourself for bad performances and feel miserable. For me it was here where I learnt that “failure” teaches you much more than “success”. To me each bad test and each mistake was a learning that it was never to be repeated again. I style myself as a cold blooded question killer. 

Finally here is stuff done by Praneet in Bulls Eye Ludhiana Team. She has worked with 3 mentees so far. She talks about her mentees: 

One of them is Shubham. He is 22 years old.He is pursuing Bank/PO+Govt. exam classes with us. His father is into govt.services with electricity board and mother is housewife. Shubham is an engg. student and done engg. in I.T.He want to secure his life so pursuing the mentioned course with us. But his interest is into IT sector. So I asked him to think for long term plan. “Out of the two discussed profiles which will make your life healthy and sound?” Which profile will give you happiness?”.On this he frequently replied: “Govt.service Ma’am”. He also added, “I want to enjoy I.T.sector life too as I have done engg. in I.T.and gave my 4 years to I.T.stream”. On this I recommend him to purse I.T.sector job right now and later on switch to govt.services profile keeping in mind the age limit criteria. He finds my suggestion valuable. He also tried for some of the job walk-ins and today finally it got the call letter from SQL Technologies company for the profile of automation engineer. He will be joining the company from monday.

Another one is Sachin. He is 25 years old. He was pursing CAT course in 2015 batch with us. He has done engg. in Mechanical. He could not able to crack the CAT exam with good score. But he wants to purse MBA from IIMs only.So,he was confused what to do.So,I suggested him not to loose hope and prepare for CAT once again with increased concentration and perform maximum no.of full length test this time that will increase speed and accuracy too. On this he agreed to start the preparation again and wants again to be connected with bulls eye for preparation. He will be reverting us soon after discussing with his parents.

I would think it would be a good idea for Sachin to also get at least a part time job, or help part time in case he comes from a business family. What are his long term goals and happiness areas?