Every Role Asks Something Different of Us

Imagine meeting the same person in four different situations.

In one, they are comforting a worried child.

In another, they are leading an important meeting.

Later, they are caring for an elderly parent.

Finally, they are helping neighbours during a community emergency.

Would you expect exactly the same behaviour in every situation?

Probably not.

The person is the same, but the role is different. And every role asks something different of them.

We All Wear Many Hats

Life is like a stage on which each of us performs many roles.

Some roles come to us by birth. Others come through choice, education, work, relationships or experience.

At different times in our lives, we may be:

• a child
• a student
• a friend
• a spouse
• a parent
• a grandparent
• a colleague
• a professional
• a manager
• a leader
• a mentor
• a citizen.

Each of these roles carries responsibilities.

And every responsibility quietly asks,

"Are you ready?"

Success Means Different Things in Different Roles

Think for a moment.

What makes someone a good parent?

·        Patience.

·        Love.

·        Listening.

·        Guidance.

Now think about a good project manager.

·        Planning.

·        Decision making.

·        Communication.

·        Organisation.

Now think about a trusted friend.

·        Empathy.

·        Honesty.

·        Reliability.

·        Presence.

Notice something interesting.

The definition of success changes with the role.

No single quality is enough for every situation.

Instead, every role calls upon a different combination of competencies.

Competencies Are Not Random

Sometimes at work people believe competencies are simply long lists created by HR departments or management experts.

While at home, in family, community ‘competencies’ are hardly talked about. Individuals are evaluated in terms of success as defined by others.

In reality, competencies arise from life itself. Whenever life gives us a new responsibility, it quietly asks us to grow.

When we become students, we learn how to study.

When we begin working, we learn how to contribute.

When we supervise others, we learn how to guide.

When we become parents, we learn patience in new ways.

When we become leaders, we learn to think beyond ourselves.

Life itself is the greatest teacher.

Competencies simply describe the capabilities that life asks us to develop along the journey.

Growth Is Not About Becoming Someone Else

Many people worry that self-development means changing who they are.

It does not.

The purpose of development is not to replace your personality.

It is to strengthen your ability to fulfil the responsibilities that matter to you.

A thoughtful person can become a better communicator.

A quiet person can become an excellent leader.

An energetic person can become more disciplined.

We remain ourselves while becoming better versions of ourselves.

Why Organising Competencies Helps

If every role asks for different competencies, one question naturally follows.

How do we make sense of so many competencies?

Should we simply memorise long lists?

Or is there a better way?

Just as a library arranges books into meaningful sections, competencies too can be organised into groups.

Some help us manage ourselves.

Some help us work effectively.

Some help us build relationships.

Some help us lead people.

Others help us perform specialised professional work.

Organising competencies does not make life more complicated.

It makes learning simpler.

Instead of wondering "Where do I begin", we begin to see a clear path.

A quite Conversation With Yourself

I suggest spend a few quiet moments thinking about these questions:

• Which roles are most important in my life today?
• Which new roles am I likely to take on in the next five to ten years?
• Which role do I find most challenging?
• What qualities do I think that role is asking me to develop?

There are no right or wrong answers.

The purpose of these questions is not to judge yourself, but to become more aware of the journey ahead.

The Building Blocks of a Good Life

I was delighted to receive a call from a younger one. He had read my post “Continuous Development – A Development Journey”. He pointed out that I had started with often repeated advices “develop yourself”, “build Competencies”, and “improve your skills”. He was being inquisitive and asked more clarity on “competencies”. He said knowledge, skills, abilities are familiar concepts. Where does competency fit in the development process? I thought it will help me clarify my own concepts. I dived deeper to find answers to the younger one’s questions and could arrive at the brief that follows.

Opening Reflection

Think of someone you genuinely admire.

It could be a parent, a teacher, a colleague, a leader, or even a friend.

What is it about that person that earns your respect?

Is it merely their intelligence? Their qualifications? Their wealth? Or is it something deeper—the way they think, the way they treat people, the way they keep their word, the way they respond to difficulties?

We admire people not only for what they know, but for who they have become.

What Makes a Person Effective?

Every day we play different roles.

At home we may be a son or daughter, a sibling, a spouse, a parent or a grandparent.

At work we may be a learner, a team member, a professional, a manager or a leader.

Beyond our homes and workplaces, we are neighbours, friends and members of society.

Each of these roles comes with responsibilities. Some responsibilities are simple; others are demanding. Yet one thing is common to them all.

To fulfil any responsibility well, we need certain qualities, abilities and habits.

These are called competencies.

What Is a Competency?

A competency is the ability to perform a responsibility effectively and consistently.

It is not just knowledge.

It is not merely a skill.

It is not simply a personality trait.

Rather, it is a combination of what we know, what we can do, how we think, what we value and how we behave.

For example, good communication is a competency. It requires listening with attention, expressing ideas clearly, respecting others and choosing appropriate words. Knowing the rules of communication alone does not make someone a good communicator. The competency is demonstrated through consistent behaviour.

Likewise, integrity is a competency. It is reflected not in what we claim to believe but in the choices we make when no one is watching.

Competencies are therefore visible through our actions.

The Good News

Many people believe that successful people are simply born different.

Experience suggests otherwise.

Most competencies are learned, practised and strengthened over time.

Just as our muscles become stronger through regular exercise, competencies become stronger through repeated practice, reflection and experience.

Every expert was once a beginner.

Every confident speaker once felt nervous.

Every respected leader once had to learn how to lead.

Growth is not reserved for a gifted few; it is available to anyone willing to learn.

A Journey, Not a Race

When people first hear the word "competency," they sometimes imagine a long list of qualities they must somehow master.

That is not the purpose.

Life itself teaches us what we need, one responsibility at a time.

As our responsibilities grow, new competencies become important.

A student needs competencies that help in learning.

A young professional needs competencies that help in building a career.

A manager needs competencies that help others succeed.

A parent needs competencies that strengthen a family.

The journey never really ends because life continues to present us with new opportunities and new responsibilities.

The goal is not perfection.

The goal is steady growth.

Becoming a little more capable today than we were yesterday is enough.

A Thought to Carry Forward

Every responsibility in life asks something of us.

Competencies are the qualities that enable us to fulfil those responsibilities with confidence, effectiveness and integrity.

The more we develop these qualities, the better prepared we become—not only for success, but also for service, relationships and a meaningful life.

Reflection

It will help if you pause for a few moments and ask yourself:

• Which roles in my life matter most to me today?
• What qualities do I admire most in people who perform those roles well?
• Which of those qualities would I like to strengthen in myself?

You do not need all the answers today.

The willingness to ask these questions is the first step in the journey of growth.

Continuous Development - A Development Journey

Today while looking at documents related to an exercise undertaken by colleagues, I wondered how often do younger ones hear advice like "develop yourself," "build competencies," "improve your skills" from elders at home and bosses at work and how would younger ones be reacting? My conclusion based on objective observations over last 60 years is that such advises repeated over time become background noise.

I consider it is necessary we understand the topic objectively in detail for our selfish interests.  

What are they really saying?

Imagine that your career is like growing a tree.

• Your knowledge is the roots.
• Your skills are the trunk and branches.
• Your attitude and character are the strength of the wood.
• Your results are the fruits.

People who have lived longer or worked longer have seen that those who keep strengthening these parts continue to grow, and those who stop growing often get left behind.

So, when an elder says, "Develop yourself," they are usually saying:

"Invest in yourself today so that tomorrow brings you more opportunities, confidence, and freedom."

Why should young people listen?

Not because elders are always right. They are not.

But because they have usually seen patterns repeat over many years.

For example, they have seen people who:

• kept learning and became leaders,
• communicated well and built strong relationships,
• managed money wisely and enjoyed greater security,
• ignored feedback and remained stuck, despite talent.

Experience cannot predict everything, but it often recognizes patterns before younger people can.

How can a young person know whether they need to improve?

A simple test is to ask:

1. Am I learning something new every few months?
2. Have I been able to impress people so they can rely on me?
3. Do I complete what I promise?
4. Do I receive the same feedback repeatedly?
5. Am I more capable today than I was a year ago?
6. If I lost my job tomorrow, would someone else gladly hire me?

If the answer to several of these is "No," then growth deserves attention.

Which areas matter most?

Almost every successful person keeps improving in these areas:

1. Character – honesty, responsibility, discipline.
2. Learning – acquiring new knowledge and skills.
3. Communication – listening, speaking, writing clearly.
4. Relationships – working well with others.
5. Problem solving – finding solutions instead of only identifying problems.
6. Self-management – managing time, emotions, health, and money.
7. Professional excellence – becoming really good at one's chosen work.

How much effort is enough?

You do not have to become perfect.

Just ask yourself:

"Am I becoming a little better every month?"

Small, steady improvements over several years create extraordinary results.

A thought worth remembering

A young person's greatest asset is time. An elder's greatest asset is experience.

When the energy of youth combines with the wisdom of experience, growth becomes much faster than either alone.

One saying captures this well:

"Your future is shaped less by what you know today and more by your willingness to keep learning tomorrow."

That is why thoughtful elders and good managers encourage development—not to criticize young people, but because they want them to build a life with greater capability, opportunity, and resilience.

And if you need help, I am here to help you design your development journey.

Family Discovery: Naming a Practice We Rarely Name

I had finished my morning round of calls with people in office back home and was waiting for call from young developer. There were messages, delayed responses to a forward written covering compilation of notes shared with members of extended ‘family’. And that was the trigger. Question that arose was ‘have presumed that each one of us has same definition of ‘family’?’ One question led to the other and responses collected results in to notes which I am sharing in installments, hoping you will read, form your views and share.

There’s a strange gap in how we talk about families. We have family therapy for when something is broken. We have family history for when we look backward. We have team-building for workplaces, borrowed wholesale from the language of productivity. But we don’t have a common word for the ongoing, unforced practice of a family simply understanding itself — not fixing anything, not archiving anything, just knowing who its members actually are, right now, in their own words.

I’ve started calling this practice family discovery. It is easier for me to say what is is not that to precisely say what it is.

What it isn’t

It isn’t therapy — you don’t need a problem to justify it. It isn’t genealogy — it’s not about the past for its own sake. And it isn’t a bonding exercise borrowed from a corporate offsite — it doesn’t need games or forced positivity. Family discovery is closer to something researchers call narrative identity — the idea, from psychologist Dan McAdams, that people (and by extension, families) become coherent to themselves by telling and hearing their own stories. Most families never do this deliberately. They accumulate shared history by accident, through proximity, and assume that living near each other is the same as knowing each other. It usually isn’t.

Why it matters more now, not less

Three quiet shifts make this harder than it used to be, and more necessary:

Geographic dispersion. Extended families used to share physical space by default — meals, porches, Sunday visits did the work of “discovery” without anyone naming it. That default is gone for most families now.

Generational stake. Sociologist Vern Bengtson’s long-running family studies found something counterintuitive: parents consistently overestimate how close and aligned they are with their children, while children underestimate it. Each generation has its own emotional incentive to believe a particular story about the family — which means nobody’s unprompted account of “how close we are” is fully reliable. You have to actually ask, and ask separately.

Family as construct, not consensus. Family therapist David Reiss proposed that every individual carries their own implicit “family paradigm” — an internal model of who belongs, what the family is for, what it owes its members. These paradigms are rarely identical inside the same family, and almost never spoken aloud. Two siblings can grow up in the same house holding quietly different definitions of what “family” even means.

Put together: closeness is often assumed rather than verified, and the assumption is usually wrong in both directions.

What it draws on

I don’t think family discovery needs to be invented from nothing — it’s closer to a synthesis of practices that already have real track records, even though nobody has bundled them under one name.

Family discovery borrows from all four: the listening posture of StoryCorps, the oral history project, the legacy intent of ethical wills, a centuries-old Jewish tradition, the ritual structure Gottman found effective, and the narrative coherence goal from family systems work — applied not after a crisis, and not only to elders, but as an ordinary, ongoing practice across every generation in the family.

What it actually looks like, in practice

Not a single deep conversation. Not a survey. Closer to:

•             One-on-one conversations, not group discussions — because people tell the truth differently when they’re not performing for an audience.

•             Questions that ask for stories, not opinions — “tell me about a time…” surfaces more real information than “do you feel close to the family?”

•             Letting each person define “family” in their own terms first, before assuming a shared definition exists.

•             Small, repeatable rituals rather than one grand gesture — a habit, not an event.

•             Treating what’s said as data to understand, not a problem to immediately solve.

An honest caveat

I want to be careful not to oversell this. “Family discovery” isn’t a proven field with a stack of longitudinal studies behind the name — I’m the one trying to give it a name, borrowing credibility from traditions that do have real evidence behind them. What I can say is that each of the underlying pieces — narrative identity, generational perception gaps, family paradigms, ritual over intensity — has decades of research behind it independently. Whether stitching them together into a single deliberate practice works as well as I suspect is something I intend to actually test, starting with my own family, before I claim more than that.

The next post in this series will get concrete: the actual practices — how to run a discovery conversation, a glossary for telling a real problem apart from a values statement or a wish, and the small rituals that seem to matter more than people expect.

---

This is Post 1 in a series on family discovery — a practice, not (yet) a proven field. Written as part of an ongoing habit of sharing what I find and think worth testing.

Peacock Feathers & Life

"જીવન જીવવું હોય તો મોરપીંછ થાવ" (Live life like a peacock feather), a very well known Gujarati thought leader called out his NRI audience. Obviously those starved of earthy Gujarati with Kathiawadi accent, were impressed. 

I wondered how did the speaker used 'peacock feathers' to describe life well lived. Topic worth exploring, I thought. My search revealed highly philosophical explanation, I consider it worth sharing. Do we all not want to live such colourful life???

That is a beautiful metaphor. A peacock feather is not just colorful—it is harmonious. Every color has its place, and together they create something striking. A colorful life is not necessarily a life of constant excitement or luxury. It is a life rich in experiences, relationships, growth, and meaning.

One way to think about it is as a life with many "colors":

• ❤️ Red – Love: Deep relationships with family, friends, and community.
• 🟠 Orange – Joy: Laughter, playfulness, celebrations, music, and humor.
• 🟡 Yellow – Curiosity: Lifelong learning, reading, traveling, exploring new ideas.
• 🟢 Green – Growth: Developing skills, overcoming challenges, and becoming wiser.
• 🔵 Blue – Peace: Quiet reflection, prayer, meditation, time in nature, inner calm.
• 🟣 Purple – Purpose: Serving others, mentoring, leaving a positive legacy.
• ⚪ White – Integrity: Living according to one's values with honesty and compassion.

A peacock feather also has an "eye" at its center. Symbolically, this can represent self-awareness—seeing yourself clearly and remaining conscious of what truly matters. The colors radiate outward from that center. Similarly, a meaningful life radiates outward from self-awareness.

A colorful life, may not mean adding more activities; it may mean ensuring that each important dimension receives its own time and attention.

You might periodically ask yourself:

1. Have I learned something new recently?
2. Have I strengthened an important relationship?
3. Have I created something of value?
4. Have I helped someone without expecting anything in return?
5. Have I cared for my health?
6. Have I experienced beauty—in art, music, nature, or literature?
7. Have I spent time in silence, gratitude, or prayer?

If you can answer "yes" to most of these over time, your life is becoming more colorful.

Perhaps the deepest interpretation is this:

A colorful life is not a life with many possessions, but a life with many dimensions—where love, learning, work, service, beauty, adventure, wisdom, and spirituality coexist in balance. Like a peacock feather, every color enriches the others, and together they create a life of grace and meaning.

Ten Beginnings

A young relative once showed me his phone — three language apps, two fitness trackers, a half-finished coding course, and a meditation app he'd opened twice. He laughed about it, called himself "easily distracted." I didn't laugh. I recognized it too well — I over a period of time in my youth, started on courses including ICWA, CS, Law, each begun with great resolve, each abandoned by the third month, for reasons that felt different each time but were, in fact, the same.

The feeling in both cases is a small thrill at the start — the pleasure of something new — followed by a quieter restlessness once the novelty fades. That restlessness usually gets blamed on the activity itself ("turns out I don't like Company Law after all") and dismissed.

What it actually reveals is a gap between appetite and discipline. Starting is not a skill many people lack; finishing is. Left unexamined, this gap doesn't just produce a phone full of unused apps — it teaches a person, repeatedly, that they cannot follow through, which becomes a belief long before it becomes a pattern worth questioning.

The tool worth naming: time-boxing. Pick one thing, commit to a fixed, short window — two weeks, not "indefinitely" — and at the end, make an actual decision: deepen or drop. The boundary itself removes the guilt of stopping and the vagueness of "someday."

My young relative still has three language apps open. I suspect, like most of us, he hasn't yet drawn the boundary that would turn restlessness into a decision.

 

Next: the feedback we ask for, then quietly resent.

If this resonates: Cal Newport's writing on "deep work" touches this gap well — the difference between sampling and committing. Worth a search if the book itself feels long.

The Feed

I sat near a young man at a coffee shop who put his phone down after a few minutes of scrolling and exhaled — not loudly, just enough that I noticed. Nothing had happened to him. No message, no event. Just images of other people's days.

I recognized that exhale. I felt its older cousin once myself, decades ago, reading a college reunion newsletter full of other people's achievements, and closing it feeling smaller than when I'd opened it.

The feeling is a soft, specific kind of deflation — not envy exactly, more a sense of quietly falling behind. It usually passes in minutes, dismissed as nothing, not worth a second look.

But underneath it is a real gap: not knowing how to measure one's own progress except by holding it up against someone else's. Left unexamined, this gap doesn't just create bad moments — it can quietly erode the ability to recognize one's own progress at all. Leon Festinger named this tendency social comparison seventy years ago; Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy gave it a sharper edge more recently with their distinction between measuring against "the Gap" — an ideal, or someone else's curated highlight — and measuring against "the Gain" — who we were a week or a month ago.

The tool worth trying: once a day, before reaching for the feed, ask one question instead — what is one inch closer than where I was last week? It is a small redirection, but it returns the measuring stick to a hand that can actually use it.

The young man at the coffee shop closed his phone and looked out the window for a while. I don't know what he was thinking. But I suspect, like most of us, he didn't know there was a gap to look for in the first place.

Next: noticing these moments is one thing — staying with them long enough to learn something is another.

If this resonates: Look up Leon Festinger's original social comparison theory (1954) for the foundation, or for the modern, practical version, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy's The Gap and the Gain is a quick, useful read.