Hey everyone! Today’s guest post is brought to you by Chiara Lo Faro. We featured her in the People You Should Know Series on the YBC® app because of her extensive knowledge of foreign markets and how to cultivate relationships in new cultures. She really advocates for a think-outside-the-box mentality when it comes to entrepreneurship and approaching new situations, and the lessons she’s learned from business in India are applicable to any new endeavor. Read on to see what you might be missing in navigating new business relationships or how you can change your perspective to overcome a perceived obstacle. If you have any questions for Chiara, leave them in the comments for her! xo - Candace
Chiara Lo Faro is an Indo-Italian professional working towards bridging understanding gaps between the world and India. Her work covers business, language and music. She has been awarded Top 40 under 40 Europe India Young Leaders by EICBI at a conference held at the EU Parliament in Brussels. She has spoken at TEDx Insa Toulouse, France on what we can learn from life in India and often hosts talks. She loves unconventional fact-based books, has worked in the corporate sector of doing business in India and is a political science and international relations graduate from LUISS University, Rome, with major in political sociology.
In this globalized world, distances have become negligible. Unlike for our parents, it is common today to travel to exotic destinations on holiday, while switching from Latin beats to world music, and enjoying some Italian pasta for lunch, Japanese sushi for dinner and an evening break with an infusion of herbs… from India. Right, India. This federation of states whose status as an unified democratic nation dates back only to 1950, has become increasingly popular.
What are the first things that come to your mind when I say “India”?
I bet I’ll be right if one (or more) of the them are: mystical rituals, ancient practices, poverty, chaos, unruly traffic, female discrimination, spicy food, dance and Bollywood. To each their own.
Yes, India is famous today: it is a retreat for those in search of inner peace, a place where to learn about rituals and colourful traditions and a honeymoon destination. Unfortunately, it is also one of the go-to places for documentaries on poverty and the condition of women in the society.
As I go deeper into the topic, those who are into international business or have a passion for world news, will also say that India is one of the fastest growing countries in the world. It is indeed. One of the trends of recent years is for young students to spend a semester there or to get some quick work experience to bring back home, in an attempt to learn growth tips from the Indian working style and infuse them (pun intended) in the Western corporate culture. At times it is the opposite. Top executives are sent to India to lead subsidiaries and to avoid behavioural clashes between the local ways of working and the company culture back in HQ. In both cases, it is a common feedback that an Indian experience is great, but things are messy. Processes are missing. Standardization needs to be implemented. There needs to be better respect for rules, and certain things are illogical. I am sure that, if you have ever traveled to India, the first thing you see as you walk through the airport exit door is chaos. The India identikit is done upon arrival.
Yet, in my experience, this is not it. As I take reference from late Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, what I have mentioned so far are the real-life examples of the categories our brain creates to understand and simplify an otherwise overly complicated world. Let me – or rather, let him – explain:
“Everyone automatically categorizes and generalizes all the time. Unconsciously. […] Categories are absolutely necessary for us to function. They give structure to our thoughts. Imagine if we saw every item and every scenario as truly unique – we would not even have a language to describe the world around us. [But] the necessary and useful instinct to generalize, can also distort our worldview. […] And, maybe most unfortunate of all, it can make us jump to conclusions about a whole category […]”.
I would add that categories are used for our everyday living as they shape our actions. If I categorize a place as hot and humid, I would surely not wear a wool sweater to go there. In brief, it is human to categorize. We do it with others, and others do it with ourselves.
Alright, you are telling us that India is more than this and we are categorizing, then… what do we do? When I moved to New Delhi, I was 22 years old and I can confidently say that for the first 2 years, I could not understand much. Things were chaotic for me too.
Just like the theory of categories, the chaos tag is probably the good-faith explanation of the ignorant. In other words: is the so-called Indian chaos really an unintelligible mass – like the “confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms” or is it us, outsiders, who lack the tools to understand what is actually going on? The truth is, there is always more to it than what meets the Westerner’s eye. There is a working mechanism, but we cannot see it, because we are not equipped with the mental tools and experience to see it and to decode it. Let me quote Hans Rosling again talking about a trip to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India:
“[…] we […] visit a public hospital. When they see that there is no paint on the walls and no air-conditioning and 60 people to a room, my [medical] students whisper to each other that this place must be extremely poor. I have to explain to them that people living in extreme poverty have no hospitals at all. […] The hospital administrator helps. She explains that not painting the walls can be a strategic decision […] it’s not that they can’t afford the paint. Flaking walls keep away the richer patients and their time-consuming demands […] allowing hospitals to use their limited resources to treat more people in more cost-effective ways”.
I cannot even count the number of such strategies I was enabled to see during my 7 years in India. Of course, for me they did not mean anything first, and it was only through explanations that I saw the logic behind them. As I learnt Hindi later, I could see this even better. When facing new situations, Rosling says: “it will be helpful to you if you always assume your categories are misleading” and “be cautious about generalizing from the [rich world] experiences to the rest of the world, especially if it leads you to the conclusion that other people are idiots”. Again, the good-faith explanation of the ignorant.
Alright, let’s go back to processes, or lack thereof. For us coming from highly structured places, the first impact with a situation of less processes is fear. Fear of corruption, for example, but deep inside, I believe, it’s another type of fear: it’s fear of being lost. If we look at it more, it is fear of freedom. If all my life I have had to follow a pre-written script, what do I do when, all of a sudden, I don’t have one? First reaction: “This is so wrong!” followed by “How can they live like this?” and finally: “What do I do now?”. In my opinion, it is the what-do-I-do-now kind of situation that is scary, because we are not used to it. We are intimidated by this sudden freedom, and we don’t know where to start, which direction to take. For those who are musicians like me, we could say: if all my life I have read sheets and nobody has taught me to do without them, can I suddenly improvise a masterpiece? Most probably not.
As time went by, things became inversely proportional: the less time I spent criticizing the situation, the more I started to appreciate its positives.
As I see it now, if you are in business, if you want to advance your career or just for your personal growth, facing a situation of uncertainty means more opportunities.
It pushes you to think and to think differently and it pushes you to be different. If I am free to think and act -within the boundaries of the law, of course – and if I train myself to practice thinking, I can shape my thoughts better and I can think in terms of growth and success, and maybe I can reach where I want to reach, faster. If I am working as an independent professional, I can create my own cursus honorum. If I am employed, I can provide more value to my company as I am free to bring about change. As citizens, we can craft out-of-the-box ways of living for the betterment of the society, without dreaded never-ending processes required to implement our solutions. We can be free to create. If our goal is genuine, we can reach higher. Of course, this is not an apology of disorder, certain processes should be and must be there. This is rather the opinion that some things should be made easier.
Once I heard a line: “When they say that in India there are no processes, it is not entirely true. We have processes, but processes are meant to guide us, not to restrict us”. Saying it otherwise, it is not “only this way or no way”.
You can add value by freeing your mind up! What a great takeaway. For more interviews with inspiring people in the health and wellness industry, with a focus on entrepreneurship, download the YBC® app and opt-in for the exclusive People You Should Know Series. If you’re a health and wellness professional, or yoga teacher trying to make your way in the business, join us in Austin this September for a Business and Marketing Retreat designed to help you connect with your authentic gifts and give you the tools you need to succeed.