Heading: Follow your heart or head, role of a leader
Question: Should you listen to your head or your gut?
Sadhguru: Let us first look at how this gut feeling happens. When you are faced with a certain level of indecisiveness, fear happens in the system. This begins to function in your gut because fear and bowel movements are closely connected.
Fear means you perceive danger. When there is danger, you become alert. If you ever crashed your car or motorcycle or fell off a bicycle, it will be so bright in your memory even after many decades because your perception of danger brought alertness. Due to that alertness, you might have seen a little better than what you would have seen otherwise. That is how the idea of gut feeling has come.
But believe me, the gut is not the most intelligent part of your body. It is better to use your brain. When you use your brain, you can work through a situation with your own intelligence and also use information from others.
One should be able to weigh these two aspects. Going by your own ideas in every situation would be foolish. Similarly, always going by what someone else taught you would also be foolish. There is no perfect balance between the two. It depends on the nature of the activity and also the level of intelligence and information that you have. To what extent is your intelligence more reliable than the existing information is a judgement of your own that you have to arrive at.
Question: How do we groom leaders to take on bigger responsibilities?
Sadhguru: From my experience, if you pull someone who is doing great at one level up to the next step, even with all the necessary preparation they can still do badly because their internal organization does not allow them to function at a different level. Conversely, someone may not be doing so well in one position, but if you give them a leadership position, they may suddenly go like a bomb. In Isha Foundation for example, from one level of performance to another is a completely different skill level. What you knew in your previous level just does not fit. It needs a completely new human being.
So who will do well and who will not do well in a leadership position, there is no easy solution to identify that unless you have a certain way of reading people. You need to figure out a human being for what they will be tomorrow.
One important thing is a very close observation of human beings – not their performance or their activity. Simply observing how they sit, how they stand – observing them as human beings is a very important aspect before you give them deeper responsibilities. Because when they fall apart or when they do something improper, it is not only a question of their career; it is going to affect the entire organization. And many times, it is very difficult to make corrections after a mess up.
Question: Why do relationships, especially between girlfriend and boyfriend or husband and wife, become so complex?
Sadhguru: Everyone knows the sweetness of relationships, but there is also a lot of sourness. Unfortunately, today we have imbibed this idea from the West that if you utter the word “relationship,” people are generally thinking of body-based relationships. But relationships can be of many kinds.
If relationships are body-based, the excitement about each other’s body will usually die after some time. What you thought of as the ultimate is not ultimate after some time. It is natural that people begin to grow out of it when the main draw which brought them together starts to melt away. Without knowing why, they start being unpleasant to each other because, essentially, such a relationship is about extracting sweetness and happiness from another person. If you try to squeeze joy out of someone, after some time, when it does not yield the same results as it used to in the beginning, some bitterness will begin.
You must think of all the relationships that you hold in your life – not just biological relationships – in terms of an expression of joy, not an extraction of joy. For this to happen, you must first become joyful by your own nature. If you focus on becoming an exuberant overflow of joy, and your relationship is about sharing this joy, then you can hold fabulous relationships with every kind of person, irrespective of who they are.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service. He is also the founder of the world's largest people's movement, Conscious Planet – Save Soil, which has touched over 4 billion people.
