It isn’t everyday you get the opportunity to hear from a senior academician who has spent 27 years of his life teaching at renowned universities and institutes across the world and authored eleven successful books within a span of two decades. Prof. (Dr.) M. Ashraf Rizvi, Director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Lucnkow is one such man who has been a name to reckon with in the world of management.

On July 1st, the 5th day of the Induction Programme of Class 2017-2019 of Jaipuria Institute of Management, Lucknow students had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Rizvi on the topic “Communicating for Happiness and Success.”

Prof. Rizvi commenced his session by underlining the importance of communication by making the students think about questions like: “Has this ever happened to you that in a situation of emergency, you did not have the right words to summon someone for help?  Or maybe, when someone came seeking for your help, you denied it to them because of your inherent behaviour? This is why communication skills are important.”

Prof. Rizvi’s sessions have typical characteristics. They are fun, dialogic. engaging and amazingly insightful. He brings real life instances and examples to help audience connect to him instantaneously. During this session, he brought forth the example of Mr. Dilip Shangvi, Founder and CEO of Sun Pharmaceuticals and explained how he started with INR 80,000 and currently stands as one of the richest people in the world, and is equally happy in his life too! According to Dr. Rizvi, “good communication has a major role to play in his success.”

Through all his examples and enactments Prof. Rizvi tried to sensitize the students as to how communication influences ones thinking about themselves and others. He highlighted that communication is important for one to be happy and successful. Being unable to communicate properly might even mean “losing a part of ourselves, for we, communicate our self-concepts, our sense of self and awareness of who we are – in many ways through words”. He further shared that people share meaning in what they say and how they say it. He emphasised on focusing on the approach of communication we follow- an open conversation wherein we are open for all sorts of suggestions and options from the other end too is always the most valued one.

According to Prof. Rizvi, “a good communicator is the one who is a good listener too” and stressed that people who initiate close ended conversations often have too many assumptions and do not even bother to check them. Consequently, “assumptions which are not realities have the power to ruin relationships, both professional and personal eventually neither allowing you to be happy or successful, ” he illustrates.

Further in his session, Prof. Rizvi said that communication skills are not about listening and talking alone but involves a lot of body language and facial expressions and observations too. In his words “your body speaks louder than your words” and he underlined that in a world that finds it easier to press randomly on a flat screen than talk face to face with someone, this may be a difficult thing to practice.

“Communication is a two way, mutual process, which should be open from both the ends. Therefore, communication is one of the most important attributes needed to be both happy and successful, and must be incorporated within us if we wish to reach the peak of success and be happy at the same time,” Dr. Rizvi concluded.

The session ended with an interesting role-play of a company having a communication issue with its GM HR and Senior Manager HR. Two students Arnab Kumar De, a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering with four years of experience in Mining Industry and Amlanjyoti Borkakati, B.Tech with 15 months of experience in Telecom Industry played the role of GM HR and Sr. Manager HR respectively. They did a great job in the role-play and the session had valuable lessons for each one of the attendees.