17 – Damodar Prabhu – Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Pt 1 – Private Victory

Krsnendu: So we here to talk  about um, the 7 Habits how it relates to Krishna Consciousness. What would you have to say?

Damodar: I was introduced to the seven habits by his side of the street. It should have been early 90s. I think I just become the TP so. And was really grinding a focus on Excellence particularly on the visitor experience to Anise content.

And this was the medium that he thought was particularly useful a book by Stephen Kovac called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Um, it was particularly helpful for me because I was already maxed out as a temple manager and it’s quickly realizing that everyone will love you. For being a manager, in fact spend most of the day just disappointing people that you can’t deliver on their expectations.

And so I found a person that is for liability for a few years previously at about first started to think about the role of competence just basic managerial competence in supporting a temple president to do that service, whether it’s just like how to run a meeting well or listen to somebody or how to manage your time.

Um, so the Kobe stuff became really interesting. I think one of the first interesting things was principles so making decisions based on sound principles. Um, not arbitrarily I think there was a tendency that decisions would be untrusted by the devotee Community because they didn’t really know what basis did decision had been made was we figured if we could actually figure out what was the.

Applied, um the degree of trustworthiness behind any decision that’s made and it would be more readily accepted and so for several different reasons, that’s these Concepts really resonated and appeal. I think it was also being promoted at the time by the Krishna who is the GPC for management and he was trying to build a community of practice amongst couple leaders and myself.

Uh fellow devoted karuna and the Prisoner for the all went after Florida and got certified within Ascot to train Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think we started Rolling Out programs in 95. I think the first one was in the prasada in the back we had about 30 devotees most of them national leaders.

I have to say it was uh, very fortunate because his Holiness Shri Ram Swami sort of sponsored the event personally came personally attended and that made it easier to get other people’s buying. I think there was a bit of controversy because even though you could say that she looked at by utilizing tools that might not have been designed with Christian my mechanic and krsna’s service.

Because this is in the realm of ideas. I think some devotees thinking invades property Sacred Space pods unique authorities space and I don’t see it that way at all. I just see it as sort of helpful tips for living just as you might use a car or a type writer or a computer. The instrument itself is completely neutral what you employ it to do is everything.

I’m sort of the same thing. This is just a form of knowledge. Um, perhaps most basic level psychological insights as to what makes people tick and just certain tools at listen how to settle on your values how to build your life around those values priorities how to relate effectively really basic stuff very useful.

Krsnendu: All right. So I was telling you before about how you know, I developed this Mayapur Success formula, which has got the different elements in. After doing the survey with the devotees. The key issue was complaining around, you know, Japa. So I was thinking it would be, it makes sense to look at it in the same way from the point of view of the seven habits how we can first of all actually get the habit of you know, getting around every day and then from there, you know, improving the quality as well.

Damodar: So any habit based on the Covey idea is a combination of knowledge, desire, and skill. I suppose knowledge is the conceptual reinforcement. So to me, being regularly exposed to Prabhupada’s teachings about the importance of chanting the maha-mantra should actually put that top of mind and you know kirtan, chanting is generally a response to something you’ve imbibed, so what you’ve heard initially. Desire is obviously how badly you want it.

Sometimes that means you have to have a good beat up by the material energy before you become desperate to turn hare krishna. And skill I think is the attention that you put in I mean, vibrating the sound, hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hareee, hare, hare Rama, hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama  There’s no great complexity to that but the skill I think is a completely bringing back the mind.

My own experience is that when I’m attentive, the taste is much higher. Much of that chore of chanting is when the mind is actually just been allowed to go completely ill-disciplined and flabby and wandered all over the shop. And after a while, I think just the fruit of the offensive chanting comes back as “I’m over this”, which is that is of course of a wrestling with the mind. So maybe if I start relating it to the 7 Habits to some extent.

Krsnendu: Yeah.

Damodar: If I talk very broadly, so these are seven habits that anyone can cultivate and you can direct them towards anyting. They’re almost meta living principles or something, best way to describe them. So the first of those is to be proactive. Proactivity essentially means taking responsibility and perhaps the perfect example of all of this is Srila Prabhupada. He didn’t allow adverse conditions to throw him off.

He didn’t wait for some perfect conditions to make something happen. He proacted. His Guru Maharaj gave him a mission. He made it his life and soul. He went without even any hope or expectation of return over to America and wasn’t deterred by various setbacks. I think this is quite an important principle when it comes to chanting because our resolve will be tested throughout our spiritual lives.

Covey often talks about proactivity is to subjugate one’s temporary moods to one’s commitment to principles. I think a lot of devotees get disillusioned with adverse things that happened to them in life. And that could be a reason to either lose faith with Krishna Consciousness in general, certainly lose faith with the organization, often become cynical so develop a cynical mood towards devotees or what is Krishna Consciousness.

And so proactivity is about that ability to ride out the mines trying to shake us off our purpose. The Bahavad-gita talks about a podium on nandachala, you know the self-realized person allows the thoughts to come in and just drift through. A little bit like a sea has always been filled with the rivers but is it disturbed by it?

So productivity would be somehow preserving that Central purpose that ultimately my success lies in turned Hare Krishna. I think that allows you at the moment to bring your mind back. We need to tackle its wandered. And I think it also helps you push through times when you’re just not into it. And that would be a way of pro acting.

Krsnendu: You think one of the ideas of proactivity is that responsibility that you talked about not blaming others or circumstances, you know for what’s happening?

Damodar: Well, there’s lots of different concepts, sub-concepts within it. So Covey talks about four things that separate human beings from animals, which is a really interesting thing for devotee’s self-awareness, which is a lot about self scrutiny and self-inquiry for you explore that with, you know, some examples that Prabhupada would give. A dog doesn’t have big questions about the universe and the meaning of life.

It doesn’t even know why it chases Postman. He’s just following instincts. And whatever feelings, you know is his mind whatever prompts there’s no filter. There’s no “Does that fit with my principles? Is that ethical?”, you know, no consulting of conscience. Instinctive behavior. Human beings have that gift to actually question and analyze behavior.

And that’s one of the things that can separate us from the various stimuli that life, you know throws in our direction. Another thing, that is imagination – the ability to conceive of alternative possibilities that aren’t here now. I think a lot of perseverance in Krishna Consciousness comes from maintaining that sense of what we’re about and what’s possible and where we really want to head to. Conscience, checking in with one’s value system and independent work or discipline, resolve.

I got me kind of with here. Okay, we’ve got to be fixed on that non-distracting single principle that loads through the most brutal mouths that turning the moment is the goal. So the proactivity can be a really helpful thing. You can apply it to every aspect of Krishna Consciousness. You can play it to every aspect of life. You fundamentally recognize that our life isn’t a function of conditions. We have our karmic conditions, but then we have choices and the choices that we make we’re entirely responsible for. No one can make you miserable. No one can make you deviant. No one can destroy spiritual life. It’s about sense of full responsibility. My life is what I make of it. It’s an expression of proactivity. Shall I go on?

Krsnendu: Yeah. Shall we move on to the next habit?

Damodar: Yeah. So again begin with the end in mind. Prabhupada’s the perfect exemplar that he can see the very thing he wanted to design within ISKCON way before he manifested. The famous conversation went that Mr. Cohen, whatever his name is on a park bench in New York many years before.

Stuff he’d manifestly talked to this international society with schools, and farms and multi-generation, you know devotee community and at that point it was just a dream in his head. But the logic is habit 2  begin with the end in mind. Everything starts out as that intention, and if we clearly developed an intention chances are that will manifest. If we start a meeting without a clear agenda, chances are it’ll be a waste of time. If we start putting up a house without a decent blueprint, chances are it’ll cost us all way much more money and probably look a bit ugly and messy. You can apply the same thing to a marriage. You can apply the same thing to your life. So it is about designing your life.

So begin with the end in mind can very much be about to getting in touch with your true life priorities. One of the actions we often used to take people through when delivering workshops was building a mission statement. Who are all the people that you value? What’s the kind of impact that you want to have with those people?

Probably one of your biggest roles would be Jiva Eternal Servants of Krishna tells of Google guru Maharaj, which would make one of your fundamental deity priorities, your connection with Krishna, your chanting, your reading. There’s lots of stuff that we have to do in life to get busy. But if we’re trying to design a life around certain principles, this would suggest that we you know, prioritize. And chanting would be not at the mercy of everything else. But yeah, you can also design your temple community using the same principle. What’s the experience I want people to have lets me then now design the processes to deliver that experience. You can look at that in relation to your children.

What kind of adult would I like them to grow into? What kind of character would I like them to form? And you can design your parenting accordingly. Just like Prabhupada, we’re not, you know, we’re not controllers that can guarantee the results. But that clarity of focus that regular checking of “Am I on track with the life that I wish to create?” is a really useful meditation.

I think Srila bhakti Anna Nicole said every Academy should ask yourself “Well, what programs have I made since the last account?” And that evaluation and taking stock, again leads to a more purposeful existence than drifting or just being dragged around by the various demands that the world shatters.

Same principle appears in other cultures. Socrates, “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” So devotees can be a bit lazy in this one because sometimes our identity and purpose is literally handed to us by the Vedas and if we haven’t truly reconciled whether “I’m not just accepting that as a cognitive piece of direction, but it’s actually aligned with my heart, my soul, my head, my behavior.

Sometimes we only have a surface understanding, you know, just doing philosophical or conceptual grasp of that, without a deep heartfelt commitment in taking stock.

Krsnendu: Yeah. That’s an interesting idea that comes to my mind in this discussion is about individuality. Like we’ve got a common goal that we all have as devotees that we read in Prabhupada’s books, but then there’s also the individual application of it, you know, and I guess we need to adapt the end goal in a path to it according to our own position now and our own nature. And like I often think of that example of the boat, you know, the yacht the wants to get to destination that the waves are coming in. Depending on the type of yacht, you will take a different approach. You know, one of these America’s Cup yachts can go quite on the Wind. You can go quite direct. But others that are, you know an old boat that’s not so streamlined, we have to go a little bit more across the wind to be able to make the same progress, but you know.

Damodar: And life rarely facilitates a direct line, but if never lose sight of your goal when the ultimate expression of begin with the end in mind is untainted that the moment we leave this life, we need to be completely focused. So you could say that the whole of Krishna Consciousness is around preparing for the end of this life, that our consciousnesses in the right shape.

But even for instance if you think about fulfilling a role in ISKCON, one of the purposes, one of the real measures of success and a really purposeful person is always asking. Otherwise it’s very easy just to get locked into habituated ways of doing things that might have said that purpose that was valid at a point in history, but have often ceased to be the necessary means anymore.

And you often see that in religious organizations. You often see it in lives where people keep banging their head against a brick wall because it wants produced a result and have actually lost sight of the real goal. S o that idea of regular checking your compass, occasionally you might have to deliberately steer somewhat of course, but you never lose sight of where you want to wind up and you make your decisions accordingly.

Krsnendu: So bringing it back to the chanting again in particular japa and you know, daily sadhana. How do we apply it in this case in particular? I guess you’ve talked about reflection. Is there any important thing to see “How is my progress and my chanting and my consciousness, my attention?”

Or even just the basics “Did I chant all my rounds this last couple of weeks?”

Damodar: Even planning your day. What’s going to be the most favorable time of day? When will it be in the best consciousness? Let me block out that time.

Krsnendu: Right. Otherwise, it’s like yeah, I’ve gotta chant 16 rounds. Sometime in the day I’ll probably do it. And then the day goes by “What happened? The time went by.” It’s like, you know, you have to actually block it in because if you want to do 16 rounds, it’s basically a two-hour block and it doesn’t just appear, you know we have to actually make that time and plan for it. Right? You have to think ahead.

Damodar: And same thing for instance if you listen to Prabhupada’s lectures or read his books, or even just associate with devotees, if you haven’t ultimately really committed heart and soul to it, which goes further than floating intention, it means typically good calendar management. Then life will conspire to steal the available time. Prabhupada often tells us that Maya is really there to test our resolve and she seems to be very inventive with coming up with hurdle. But if we haven’t really got that strong burning desire and focus, very easy just to get distracted and waylaid. I particularly think that the other side would here versus is very personal. And Prabhupada often made reference to being the secret of success and spiritual life focusing on the order of the spiritual master. That being our sole purpose that all advancement comes from policing the group.

So have no other desires are not cutting up money answer. Then that sort of informs our choices. Whereas as soon as you lose sight of that goal many branched.

Krsnendu: Yeah. It’s interesting because that word priority itself, it’s a singular thing. You can’t talk about priorities. It’s incorrect grammar. There’s no such thing as priorities. Priorities can only be one from the technical grammatical point of view. It’s kind of interesting.

Damodar: Yes exactly how we’re not alike. Nowadays for instance we have more incoming messages than we’ve ever had on a daily basis. I’m checking WhatsApp, Facebook, email, LinkedIn and phone messages and voice mail messages and literally just staying on top of everything.

Everyone wants to communicate, so you could consume every moment. And my experience is most of those things are quite enervating as well. They sap energy. Othe of the next ideas that we’ll look at is time management.

Krsnendu: It seems a natural progression to the next level.

Damodar: Well, some people argue that’s not really time management because we don’t actually control Kala, we don’t control time. But it’s actually energy management and it’s about having the right energy for the right things.

And so again if japa is a true priority, when can we give the best of ourselves to that activity? And of course, then there’s no better time than brother. But you know, sometimes people have to organize their days differently. But if they’re organizing it with the end in mind, Japa will never be on the ‘I’ll carry it over to another day.” I’m sure we’ve all done it. But to me, that would be a sign that the end in mind has slipped.

Krsnendu: That concept of energy management’s an interesting idea because like we… Well I experience that there’s slumps in this energy at times of the day. So choosing instead of fighting to do something when your energy is down then, you know, allow yourself to rest at those times and then when you energy is higher then you really put your attention to the important things.

Damodar: So habit 3 is put first things first. So it’s a direct extension of the other habit. If your highest value is to write books or saving humanity then that is your priority to which your time is devoted. And we can see Srila Prabhupada was very disciplined about where his time went.

Very early on he was saying I want to hand management over and delegate that and train you up, just invest in a few mentoring relationships to bring new leaders on to actually carry the responsibilities of managing asserting. My focus is books. And we can see how many hours of the day Srila Prabhupada focused on.

He gave his most attentive focus to that time, even though he took on a huge amount of activity. Prabuhpada’s structure to his day is really very interesting structure. So getting up after bare minimal sleep, writing during those really sacred hours of the day. Doing his, rounds giving the morning class, morning walks a little bit of exercise and little bit of teaching to disciples and so on, some correspondence and monetary affairs, massage, a couple of meals…

Krsnendu:  Naps.

Damodar: Yeah, it was a very well-tuned, focused day and putting first things first is that recognition, everything’s not of equal value. So what are the first things to me and how do I represent that that’s where the majority of my time goes. So again an extension from the last habit begin with the end in mind is asking yourself. “What is my most valuable contribution that deserves and warrants the best of my time?” As we said most of us have lots of complex roles. It’s very easy for your temple manager to be entirely consumed by the managerial duties. They’re almost never done. In fact deciding what to neglect is often an important part of the decision-making.

You could easily do that to the exclusion of your rounds. I think that’s been a casualty for many devotees. Certainly it can be to the expense of working on devotee relationships having time just to listen to somebody, explore or associate often for many people but in expensive morning programs. The challenge that most people face as grihasthas is just how many hours are involved in making a dollar these days. By the time we’ve, attended to you know, just domestic chores and perhaps things to do with parenting and so on, got ourselves to work and back, just survived and stayed alive. We might be down to the last couple of discretionary hours in the day.

And if we if we haven’t decided very deliberately how that’s got to be about japa and reading and associating or other Krishna conscoius pursuits. It’s like the fag end of our day when we’re just beaten up from the long commute and hassled meetings all day. It could easily just be blocking in front of the Box. Not the best use of the here and for life.

So that idea of being very judicious with time and the focusing on the longer term preyas and shreyas comes in with habit 3 put first things first. So are we just focusing on the immediate, the here and now? Or are we thinking of you know longer range things? Because often, immediate things solve today’s problem, but ignore the problems coming down the road.

So a lot of this is about having that vision of what we’re trying to create in the society. A lot of managers in the society end up almost having a hand-to-mouth survival form of management. Stuffing the rest of each day just getting to the next month’s finances. Haven’t thought about how do I design this community?

What are the investments of time that I need to put into? Build succession into the you know talent pipeline in the temple, cultivate the right kind of relationships with different constituent groups within the temple. Quite often we simply passively serving people are coming and outreach at the longer-range things get neglected.

None of this is easy. None of these habits are easy. They’re actually in some ways counterintuitive. Srila Prabhupada if he hadn’t been judicious could have easily been completely engulfed by managerial woes. And it was quite a discipline step. People might catch even criticize Prabhupada.for handing so much over to seemingly unqualified people. Prabhupada was building capacity for the future and investing and divesting himself of lesser important to focus on the truly major contributions like his books.

So putting how to turn three together. What’s the major contribution that we wish to make and how do we design a life including that calendar so that we’re doing justice to that? What’s our end in mind as parents and how can we invest as true Krishna conscious parents and what kind of devotees our kids are going to become.

As opposed to just managing the managing managing diversity, managing to clean their room, managing to do the homework, managing the school, managing the after-school activities. That’s just management. When do we start to actually involve the parenting?

Krsnendu: It’s interesting when you mentioned parenting and also Prabhupada’s program. The principle of routines. If every day is different you can never be peaceful because your mind is thinking “What I have to do now?” or “Should I do this or should I do that?”

And you can see that Prabhupada was very regulated like even though he traveled so many places, every day had the same routine. He’d do his massage at a certain time, of his naps at certain times, meals at a certain time, his morning program, you know. And it’s the same thing with children, you know, if you want life to be easy with the children and then, you develop a routine so that you don’t have to like drag the kids out of bed every morning. It’s like, well, this is what happens, this time this happens and you just kind of flow through it without having to use your limited mental, what do they call it? fatigue, decision fatigue. But, you know save that decision fatigue for you know, focusing in mind when you’re doing your japa or something like that. Yeah.

Damodar: Yeah. And so much of the fruit of it is focus and it’s true, regulation is a satellite way of operating. Part of the challenge in kaliyuga under Samantha was we’re completely haphazard and always disturbed. Life is becoming more and more disturbing. If you look back to the 50s, probably most families could actually get by on one salary and had a lot more discretionary time.

Somehow rather Srila Prabhupada point out with all our advancement and all our gadgets and all of our you know, technological advancements, we’ve actually reduced quality of life.

Krsnendu: The office doesn’t finish at 5 o’clock. It follows you to your bed with your phone and the notifications you’re talkin about before they go off and every you know, so the idea of trying to stick to our regulation is challenged at every practically, every second of every minute by some sort of distraction or notification or something.

Damodar: Well in some ways, Habit 2 – Begin with the End in Mind is about really cultivating the ardent desire to focus on the ultimate goal, which in many ways gives you the strength to resist distractions. So much of Habit 3 -Put First Things First is about dealing with distractions.

There’s some research that says 50 to 60 percent of people’s day is actually taken up with unplanned activity interruptions or almost avoiding activities. You know, we’ve got so beaten up by life that so much energy goes into escaping. But it’s again, it’s short-term escaping. It’s numbing the pain rather than truly extricating ourselves from life’s entanglement.

So Facebook’s a classic example. You can literally be distracted all day. And these meteor have been designed in fact to entrap the consciousness. I was listening to a podcast recently that was talking about how Facebook’s economic model is based on click-throughs. And so there’s a lot of stuff there that’s a paid advert and all the person who’s set that advert cares is if you click on it. And so they actually continue to serve you stuff that you typically do click on. So if you’re an angry person that spends a lot of time being angry and outraged that will be what will fill your news feed because they know that…

Krsnendu: It’s what you respond to.

Damodar: That’s what your respond to. If over time they get you to click, they get some dollars. Can you imagine how scary that is? That literally means we’ve allowed our minds to determine our reality. Like, there’s so much shock about why Trump won the election and in many ways it was a Facebook election that people are so lost in their little echo chambers.

The only news they were getting was from Facebook. So their whole view of the world, their value system was just informed by advertisers exploiting their mental moods.

Krsnendu: It’s amazing what you’re talking about. It was just like the Law of Attraction, what we focus on expands. And now you’ve got this platform, Facebook and it’s artificial intelligences directly manifesting that.

Damodar: In many ways the more we fall in love with technology and actually hand over choices to algorithms and artificial intelligence and all of these things, the more we will reap a whirlwind of a completely uncontrolled mind with no clear sense of values. Yes, so again Prabhupada’sexample is always the best example of a really regulated and disciplined life focused on true value, focused on the ultimate principles of love. So together those first three habits:

Proactivity

Clear end in mind and

The discipline to put first things first

constitute what’s called a private Victory.  So the whole idea that anything we try and achieve in the external world is fundamentally an expression of how well our inner  world is ordered and disciplined and those are just three kind of organizing ideas. A pretty much a form of sattva-guna. That’s probably a good way to think of them.

They’re not inconsistent with Vedic truths. They stop short of you know Vedic Revelations. But then in the spirit of yukta vairagya, let’s adopt anything that potentially adds value and can help us if it’s favorable towards Krishna Consciousness so that then builds a platform for the public victory which is about relationships with others.