how i became a facilitator

I started off my career in training, working with security guards in the right protocol and postures at Progressive Security Services. This was a challenging job because the individuals I was dealing with not very educated and not used to training. Then I moved to GECIS, where I worked as a facilitator for various businesses in the space of language skills, culture, customer service and Quality control. That was another journey because now I was dealing with the educated lot. Not an easy job! GECIS provided a very whole-some learning space for its employees and the access to various information was an added benefit.

Then I left, and collaborated with Peach Communications as a freelance trainer. Run by Arjun Raina and Ashim Ghosh, Peach Communications was a space full of creative minds being put together to deliver top quality training. All of us at Peach, free of hierarchical structures, were working together, as a team with no body sitting and passing orders. The story was simple. If you had an idea, go ahead and do it! If it is a success, everyone will bask in its glory. If not, the support is never missing.

While I was working at Peach, Syngrity Consultants was brewing in my head. The support I got from Peach to respect the though process of Syngrity is much appreciated. When I left GECIS, the purpose was to go back and eventually forward to what I already knew - Martial Arts, music and sound, esoteric systems, theatre, writing, language skills, a whole new idea of customer service, real facilitation etc. Peach had given me a lot of space to bring that in and Syngrity took it a lot further. Finally, Syngrity happened! Syngrity happened but no work came in. This is year 2003. Who wanted music and body movement therapies in training sessions? No one at that time! I was training at BPO's, restaurants (trained stewards and worked as one too -a very humbling experience). Then someone recommended my work in Mumbai. And then started an era of fabulous learnings and sharing. My dream was to be able to work with artists who had a penchant for language and communication skills. And then, out of nowhere, I created a team of fabulous super trainers - who were dancers, musicians, photographers, actors and fabulous people. We worked hard, worked joyously, worked with no ego and we flourished. Our lives improved! Outer and Inner.

By now, my focus was expanding from inter communication skills to intra communication skills. The reasons were my shifting to Pune, meeting some brilliantly silent and still individuals who were also facilitators, being away from everything familiar in Delhi and finding Falun Gong as my cultivation practice. I was exposed to a very systematic way of dealing with holistic sciences and their relationship to science and beyond. Very fascinating. Things were falling in place and I stopped training for a little while as I was learning again. Syngrity was awake and yet, still. 2006 onwards, I started designing playshops and joyshops and workshops which used a lot of body emotive therapies like Alexander technique, Gurdjeiff, Laban and inter-weaving them with musical sciences like percussion circles, Guided Imagery and Music etc. In the mean time, I was working on a project to create a listening skills module from a physical perspective. Yes, it is an attitudinal shift required to be an active listener but there is something in the ear which also doesnt work right, keeping in mind our affinity to sticking phones inside our ears and infra sounds in the environment around us - the middle ear, which deters the correct processing of sound. I ended up creating sounds, in a studio with an acoustic engineer and electronic genius, which served the function of improving this issue and also ended up creating sounds which apparently link both the hemispheres of the brain - binaural beats. It was wonderful creating something like this - a total mistake. Wah! these mistakes should happen more often. Then something else dawned on me. Either we are more left brained or right brained. More logical or more creative. What if we are able to use both the hemispheres of our brain at an enhanced capacity. The binaural beats are supposed to link the two hemispheres. So where is it! To an outsider it seemed like i was flipping my lid because i rounded 10 of my friends, paid a bomb, and had MRI's done while these guys listened to the binaural beats. And mauja hi mauja! the alpha activity denoted by red started to increase. We repeated the experiment after 5 days without the sounds and the alpha activity still remained increased. I roped in a neuro-physicist and he had no clue as to what was happening but he couldnt deny the fact that something was happening. Something good.

So now, my work is about carefully studying all that i have experienced, inter lace it with wonderful management studies like panscheel, blue ocean strategy, Mckinsey 7 S model and bring it to the people who i end up working with in my joyshops. East meets west and viceversa. Its hardly linear, more circular or octagonal, or pentagonal or..... just fun. More as I go deeper.