King Of The Jungle Or The Circus Lion, Decide Your Role!

King Of The Jungle Or The Circus Lion, Decide Your Role!

Circus lion has to respond to the orders of the man who has hunter in his hands. He has to sit, stand and jump from the ring of fire as per the ring master’s command.

Today let us discuss a thing or two about the king of jungle, the lion. There are 2 types of lions in this world. One which is found in the jungle and the other which is found in the circus. If I may ask you, which one is more comfortable, Jungle lion or circus lion.

Obvious answer will be a circus lion. At jungle a lion has to hunt for food, where as a circus lion is served food at a particular time, at least thrice a day. He lives in a protected environment, not to be afraid of anything.

At circus the chances of natural calamity are far less as compared to the jungle. His counterpart at the forest might get food and at times might even not get food. Success rate of a hunt of a lion is between 17 to 30 percent.

Many a times he does not even gets shade when it rains heavily in the woods. Territorial conflicts are deadly and mostly they end with the demise of at least one of the competitor.

Now given an opportunity most of us will say that they will wish to be the lion of the jungle and that’s perfectly acceptable, but the surprising thing is that most of us are actually a circus lion. That’s because we are in our comfort zones.

Circus lion has to respond to the orders of the man who has hunter in his hands. He has to sit, stand and jump from the ring of fire as per the ring master’s command.

Even the kids make faces at him. Most of us are actually like that, in our zones and making our living, but not making a life. For a parrot in the golden cage, he gets everything, food, love, protection from a cat and eagle, but only restriction is that, it just can’t fly.

If we observe closely, above analogy actually finds it’s parallel in our mind. A jungle lion represents growth mindset and circus lion represents fixed mindset. For a fixed mindset failure is the limit of its abilities. It ceases to try once it fails. For growth mindset, failure is an opportunity to grow. Fixed mindset drives us to comfort zone.

We do not improve our abilities. Referring to the lion in the jungle, he has to hunt a different animal every time. It can be a strong buffalo, or a swift antelope. Range can go from a small rabbit to a tall giraffe. Different skill sets are required to overpower each one of them.

This leaves him with no option but to develop and upgrade on regular basis. Hence challenges help us to grow. Fixed mindset hates challenges.

It wants everything on the platter. Consequently, growth ceases to happen. It just sticks to what it knows. In the other hand growth mindset likes to try new things. Learning and development is its part of life. Abilities are determined by the efforts and attitude. Growth mindset gets inspired by the success of others while fixed mindset gets frustrated.

Fixed mindset takes the feedbacks personally, whereas growth mindset welcomes it as an area of improvement.

So if you want to explore possibilities, you should transcend from fixed mindset to growth mindset. You can do that by embracing failure as a building block to future success, learning new skills, accepting new challenges, trying new things, taking feedbacks and getting inspired by success of others.

As said by the monk Dandapaani from New York, every possibility and success is there, available at a particular frequency. All you need to do is hit that frequency by your efforts. Be the lion of jungle, and become bigger than your problems…..and explore new possibilities….

-- Arvind Mishra/Lucknow

(The author is a city-based leadership coach, corporate trainer and an Internationally certified Design Thinking Master practitioner. This is a weekly column and every Saturday readers will get to read some of his finest motivational thoughts.)

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