 It's Friday afternoon Thursday afternoon post lunch and I'm going to be talking about Little bit about my cancer journey So maybe it's only appropriate that I have the graveyard shift I think all of you have had a nice lunch and Some of you Some of you might be feeling like that if you do I have only one request of you Please don't snore too loudly Because you might wake up the person next to you anyway Well, I'm here today to do three things first I Would like to share my journey second, I want to pose some leadership reflections Because my journey may be fine by itself but all of you are Leaders And I want to see what connections we can make between some of the insights that I have in my journey and Your leadership so as I present I will be asking you To reflect and make some notes So I'm going to invite everyone who hasn't taken out those beautiful ecliffe pads from their bags and I'm sure there are some of you. I invite you to please take them out Keep a pen handy because you're going to need it Okay, can I request that please? Thank you and Then if we have some time at the end of my session I'll be more than happy to answer any questions in the big group over tea after the program whatever now Today I'm standing here by myself speaking to you But this journey this 13-year journey Has been taken step by step with me by my beloved wife Neelima who isn't here today So in a way, I'm representing both of us and not just me This is my way of hiding behind her if I say something silly Okay, I also realize that I am sandwiched between two amazing scientists And I just want to tell you and confess that I'm not a scientist I'm not a researcher. I'm not a clinician what I am is a human being who's experienced cancer and I therefore want to focus not so much on the science and the research I will mention it, but I want to focus on the human experience and what lessons we can learn from it That might be applied to leadership This sounds like a brave and inspiring story, but let me assure you that it was not When I first heard about my cancer diagnosis, it was a cold and dark December day in London 2001 and the doctor brought me out of sedation after an endoscopy and said I'm very sorry to tell you but you have cancer and At that moment the first thought that went through my head was that's it I'm gonna die and I discovered very soon after That I might have had a fantastic career in the advertising business I might have been a reasonably good husband I Know I was a pretty good father But in that moment I discovered that I was not a hero. I was a coward And the same thing happened to me that happens to everybody who gets a cancer diagnosis It punches a hole through your sense of self and so I Asked myself that Typical questions what's gonna happen to my family? What's gonna happen to the children? how are things going to be and Somewhere this question of why me came up. It's a very common question I want to tell you a story that I found very inspiring. It's about the famous tennis player Arthur Ashe As you know, he died of HIV AIDS and In his last days he was being interviewed by a TV channel, I think and somebody asked him mr. Ash you've achieved so much and Now you're in this situation Have you asked yourself the question why me and what was your answer? And what Arthur Ashe said is that look I've won Wimbledon. I've won many big tournaments I've stood up there. I've held up these trophies. I've kissed these trophies. I've given autographs I've been in press conferences at that time. I did not ask the question. Why me? How can you expect me to ask this question now? Why not me? He said and so I realized Many years later, of course that this why me question actually puts us into a very tight corner and Underneath that why me question There are three fears and Since I'm an expert on cowardice. I Can tell you what these three fears were for me at least the first fear is the fear of death. It's a very existential biological Fear the second is the fear of loss the loss of a future The loss of life as I would like it to be and the third is the fear of uncertainty I have no idea what's going to happen in the future until then I had a reasonable idea of what was going to happen in the future So in a way the rug gets pulled out from under your feet and You're left in this very strange kind of place and because I was So disoriented so scared So desperate to regain some sense of semblance some semblance of normalcy of Equilibrium I did what most people do. I Externalized my illness I Quickly jump to the conclusion that the illness had come from outside in some way and How was I to know any different all my previous illnesses had come from outside? bacteria toxins viruses All this stuff. I had no idea at that time that I would discover that cancer is something different. So The first leadership reflection for you to think about When an unexpected crisis hits you What are you most afraid of? It could be a business crisis could be a health crisis It could be a financial crisis Whatever that crisis is just take a few seconds 30 seconds and I really want you to write down in that book When a serious unexpected crisis hits you what are you most afraid of? So as you can see I was serious about taking you along in the journey Okay So, please think about this. What are you most afraid of I'm aware that all the blood in your body has rushed for digestion and that you may have to do a little bit of Kapal Bhati or breathing to bring the blood up to the brain again Hopefully these reflections will help you to do that two days after my diagnosis I did something very counter-intuitive to me Most people when they have a cancer diagnosis they turn inwards They withdraw They go into a shell For some reason that I can really not explain even today. I did the exact opposite. I Wrote an email to about 500 of my family friends colleagues associates around the world a Long email titled a new mountain to climb and I told them exactly what was going on I felt good about that because I was living in London far away from Home, which is India and to my amazement and delight all of them responded and They responded with so much love so much support so many ideas so many resources And I was just Saying wow, I didn't even know That I had so much goodwill in the world and so One of my really early and important lessons is that relationships Are the forgotten factor in healing love matters? Love is the only thing that illuminates the dark night of the soul So when people today ask me should I be talking about it and so on I say yes go for it If you feel the need to share Go for it and the universe in the shape of all your well-wishers Will respond so I'm very grateful to all those people because they stormed heaven on my behalf I was in no condition to storm heaven, but they did Means a lot to me Now this has become a ritual Then every month every three months every six months every year. I would write an update And it is poured in and it's a file. That's about this thick It's one of my most cherished possessions. It's my storming heaven file So the second reflection for you as leaders When you're in a tight spot How and when do you reach out for help and Perhaps a more difficult question What blocks you From being vulnerable when you're in a tight spot How soon when do you reach out for help and what blocks you from being vulnerable? What's your first instinct? I know what my first instinct was and when I reflect back This was really crucial for me even in my leadership role. I Realized that I had been very successful But it had very little to do with just me in the company that I worked for which is a multinational company called Ogilvy and metha one of the unusual things about the Ogilvy culture very strong culture is You get brownie points for asking for help you get minus marks if you don't ask for help and perhaps this had been ingrained in me for all those years, so I just Reached out and asked for help when I needed it most surgery happened surgery was successful Took me a few weeks to kind of start getting back to my feet because you know colon cancer big surgical cut and in the process as People started interacting with me and a few weeks later the doctor said come on I think you're doing really well your recovery is fantastic. You can start going to work for an hour or two and So I did I started going to work Everybody was warm and welcoming and supportive, but I felt strange. I really felt strange for two reasons one When I was in the hospital The doctors, you know, it's called a tumor board for those of you who know they would have a conversation and sometimes they probably assumed that I was sedated or Not paying attention or couldn't understand English or something. I don't know But they would refer to me Based on my cancer classification. Oh See a colon t3 n0 m0 Subtotal collect me ELEO ELEO rectal anastomosis. What do you think? How's he doing? And so I had this feeling as if the real me had disappeared gone somewhere behind the gowns and the medicines and the technology and all that stuff and then I went back to work Something had changed inside for me from that experience and I did not feel like the person I was I did not know who I was becoming But I did not know who I was and It struck me that You know the story of rip van Winkle Who fell asleep for 20 years and woke up to a reality that he could not recognize and the others could not recognize him So this is rip van Vijay There was a sense of disconnection and disorientation From what was going on and the same company that I worked for that I'd worked for for then Almost 18 years I Started to feel as if it was strange and I was really not part of this anymore And I really had to work at answering this question. Who am I and I had good help at that time So one of the people who was helping me He played this little game with me and he said, okay, so who are you? I'd say Okay, I'm Vijay Bhatt and so the person would say Okay, if you went underneath the name if the name was taken away, who are you and then I would say well I'm the Global whatever category director for Ogilvy and metha. Okay, the title is taken away. Who are you? And then I would say I'm the husband to Neelima. Okay, if that husband role were taken away. Who are you? And he kept doing this and I really had to Struggle and find out and say who am I and there were no answers forthcoming at that point in time So in a way this became my quest to say who am I and this quest continued for many years My cancer is me is the title of our book and I realized going through this process that it's very easy to be a victim It's very easy to blame the external environment. It's very easy to blame one circumstances But when I started reading about people who had survived and done well from cancer I started to see that these were people who alongside their medical treatments were also working on themselves and It seemed to me that the more they worked on themselves The better their results were and so I started to have this sense that you know Maybe my cancer is not just about some tumor in my colon Maybe it's pointing to something bigger and deeper. It's pointing to me and slowly this theory started forming in my head which we finally brought down to these four words but that Cancer is a disease of our cells. It arises from within us because a cell goes haywire Nobody really knows why that happens. We'll talk about that a little bit later But I started to see that Externalizing the illness would limit my healing and that I've truly wanted to heal If I truly wanted to heal then I needed to take some Responsibility for what had happened It was really tough getting to that place I promise you but it was the turning point it shifted my perspective because the person or the The thing that I had most influence and control over is So I could do something about me. This is a very important Perspective and inside according to us the process that time our kids were young and My son was an absolute master at Lego, okay And he could put things pull things apart and put them back together again like magic and I realized that for the first three to six months of my journey that was pretty much what I was doing to myself I had good help. I wasn't doing it alone But essentially The process was about deconstructing and then reconstructing now. Here's the interesting thing Who is doing the deconstructing of whom I'm doing the deconstruction of myself? so in other words there is me which I and There is this thing that is getting deconstructed And then there is me and there is this thing that is getting reconstructed So I started to see that there is another part of me Which is slightly removed from all this chaos that's going on and really for the first time I started to get in touch with the deeper part of myself that was really unaffected by all this stuff This was in a way for me the Early doors of spirituality opening. I started to sense that oh, this is what's actually going on here and because of this distancing and because of this process of Deconstruction and reconstruction. I started to see that cancer any other major life-threatening illness or any other big traumatic event Can perhaps become an opportunity for self-transcendence What does that mean? What does self-transcendence mean? It means to Let's assume this is our normal level Right and you have a traumatic event and your equilibrium goes down To minus five and you can work work work and bring it back to this normal level But I don't think that is self-transcendence. That is just a return to normalcy Self-transcendence means going to plus five Rising beyond what I was before so the old self had to be transcended this is tough because We are asking that you set a very high goal for yourself when you're in an extremely vulnerable place But I think it's worth doing because In my opinion Cancer made me a better person than I used to be I Don't think I would be what I am today if I had not been through the cancer experience And they say if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger So I can say for myself I'm speaking for myself cancer made me stronger So here's the interesting thing that the trauma itself becomes a mirror The trauma becomes the mirror in which you can start to see Your blind spots you can see start you can start to see yourself in a way that you've never seen before If you care to look and then if you care to stick with that process Then the trauma itself also becomes a springboard for your future growth was talking with a few people at lunch and They were talking about how Malaysia took the opportunity of the 1997 crisis to reform many things about the financial setup within Malaysia and That has stood the country in good stead. It was a traumatic event But perhaps other opportunities were not taken fully and some some of those jobs remain unfinished So in exactly the same way The trauma itself becomes a mirror to show you Here are some gaps here are some things to work on then if you stick with it. It springs you forward The trouble is we run away from the trauma We don't go towards it. We withdraw from it. That was my big learning. So reflection number three for you Adversity professional personal family social What does it reveal about your true character and for me the more important question? How have you grown from it? I? promise you every one of you has faced adversity for sure Think of the most extreme adversity you have faced and think about what did it reveal not to anybody else, but to you? Of your true character and How did you grow from it take a bit of time? So here's the interesting thing. I like to say that cancer healed me I think you will start to notice That my relationship with cancer was changing Rapidly how many of you have seen the movie the life of pie whose Richard Parker? Was he really a tiger? probably not and How did pies relationship with Richard Parker change? Over the book and over the movie. It was a hostile relationship to begin with fierce survival against this predator and then over a period of time a kind of Relationship closeness interdependence develops and then at the end and They are both completely drained and dying starving Pie has to lay that great tigers head on his lap and say Richard Parker. I love you and then at the end he can Let it go. So my relationship with cancer started to take the same The same perspective and Therefore I today can say that cancer healed me many people Like to use words like how did you cure yourself of cancer? I'm not sure that I could say that honestly about myself this I can say honestly about myself Cancer healed me and so one of the crucial things in this was the act of taking responsibility as I mentioned What is responsibility? It's not about Blaming myself or anything else. It's not about being a victim Actually, it's about making choices with awareness Responsibility is about making choices with awareness and Responsibility is about Being willing to take every outcome of the choices we make so for example Because my surgery was successful. I was given the choice by the doctors in the UK. I Could decide whether I should take chemotherapy or not and They gave me the statistics and they said look if you take chemotherapy Your chance of recurrence is 28% if you don't take chemotherapy your chance of recurrence is 30% 2% difference So for me it was pretty straightforward I'm not going to put my body through the horrors of chemotherapy for that 2% but having made that decision now. I was responsible For minimizing that 28% and bringing it to zero isn't it because as far as the doctors are concerned. I made the decision so therefore Nilima and I dived into the whole holistic and integrated approaches to say what else could we do What else could we do to minimize the chances of recurrence. I Cannot tell you how many diets I've tried I Cannot tell you how many herbal drinks I've consumed I cannot tell you how many counsellors I've met I cannot tell you how many energy healing Reiki light healing sound healing every conceivable type of healing I've tried and And the reason why I had to do that was because there was nobody Who could do some selecting and sorting out and say for you Vijay, but this is the right thing And this is also the reason why we chose to write the book. We said look if we have done all this research for 10 years excuse me Why should we expect other people to do the same? Why can't we put our Insight and make it available for people in a book so that they can make quicker better decisions Excuse me taking responsibility also says one other very important thing, which is that as I deconstructed and Myself and reconstructed. Do you think everything was pretty can't be I Had to go down to the deepest and darkest places of Myself and Accept them as part of me This is not something that we are conditioned or trained or encouraged to do and I believe that That is extremely important for leaders that you understand those blind spots that dark side The things that trigger you The things where you have a disproportionate reaction Your flash points in a way and so Reflection number four all of us all of you have some innate gifts and talents What are they but equally? All of us all of you Have a dark side. What is it made up of? What is it that triggers you to be? extremely angry sometimes or Extremely worried or anxious sometimes or extremely fearful sometimes or Extremely sad sometimes Extremely resentful sometimes extremely guilty sometimes. What is it? What is that stuff that's sitting there? That remains unexamined Until it leaks out into your subconscious from the subconscious into the conscious and people say oh what happened to this person He was okay. Just a few minutes ago being authentic means also being whole accepting the noble sides of me and accepting the shadow sides of me and Feeling responsible and feeling okay With every part of me noble or Depraved is the writing flow getting a little better. I know the questions are getting harder Yeah over time as Rajiv explained it so beautifully as I was changing and This reconstruction was taking place Slowly this new life purpose also began to take shape No individual started to come to us and say oh we heard that you've had cancer so-and-so in my family as cancer Would you please talk to the person and tell them that it's possible to survive and grow that person's taking it very badly So one person then a few people then we started running some little groups in our home This was in Hong Kong Then somebody gave us the chance had said can you come to an interfaith meeting and please talk about what you've done with cancer? It got bigger bigger bigger bigger and then we decided to after we went back to India We decided to run a retreat seven-day intensive therapeutic retreat and For the first time we kind of said oh my god This is when we are in full flow This is our purpose This is what we really want to be able to do You know the cancer statistics are just deadly one in three people in the western world are gonna get cancer one in three in some countries is already up to 40 percent and There is no answer on the horizon just yet. In fact, it's a very mysterious disease So anything that we can do to mitigate that to address that we believe is worth it So this is how the new life purpose started to take shape and that leads me to Reflection number five. It's kind of the peak of the bell curve for leaders. What is your life purpose? What is the legacy you want to leave behind? earlier today Rajiv outlined Some of the possible steps that you could take to getting to that life purpose after which Workstops being work as we started delving into this field of cancer We noticed that the language that is used in cancer is extremely negative. In fact defeatist Cancer is described as the internal terrorist The scourge of mankind We've turned cancer into this Implacable enemy against whom all of mankind is in battle and we are currently losing and we are all bloodied and sweaty and dusty Kind of feeling this is the language that we use Fight it battle it overcome it This is our language And I was doing some study somebody mentioned NLP neuro linguistic programming And I was starting to see that language and mindset Have a close connection The second thing I noticed was that people were throwing stats at me when I started talking about cancer recovery. Oh One in three people this Mancreatic cancer average time is within four months and two years and you know lots of statistics But if you sift through the statistics There are some nuggets. There are some rare folks Who in relative terms are very small in number, but in absolute terms there are thousands of people Around the world who have faced cancer and Who have come out of it successfully? I? Call them the anecdotes Okay, because most clinical scientific people dismiss it as anecdotal not scientific Well, I don't care. They help me Thousands of people like that anecdotes and so In my view, I don't want to be a statistic Statistics die on schedule Somebody was mentioning this earlier right, I Want to be an anecdote. I don't want to be a survivor Survivor makes me feel as if I'm in a choppy sea I'm somehow treading water and the next wave will come and bush dunk me again I want to be a survivor. I want to be a thriver. I Want to be somebody who has become a better person and can spread a much more positive message in the world I really don't like being called a cancer patient It's got this sense of you know somebody lying passively In a hospital bed. I'm a cancer impatient. I Want to get past this? I'm okay fine, you know, I want to grow from this experience So the question is what will it take for our language to change? What will it take for our mindset to change? What will it take for our conversations around cancer to change our internal relationship with it will have to change first? Without that none of this is going to be possible. So reflection number six as leaders and Rajiv I think mentioned this earlier All of us have self-talk You know that harsh voice in the head that tells you na na na you can't do that Really, you're going to try that you're bound to fail. So what is the self-talk the inner critic is? The technical phrase for it What is your inner critic telling you as a leader? But no Things are tough and so we might just about be able to make 18% but don't commit 18% because Commit 15 and then you know under promise and over deliver all this stuff What is that self-talk? What do you need to let go off that is disabling and limiting and Instead what are those enablers? That you want to embed instead realistic ones mind you Not Superman stuff X-Men stuff the realistic stuff that you as a leader can truly feel stretched by challenged by But it's in the reach. It's in the realm of possibility What do you need to do pick one that you want to let go today and Whenever that little inner critic on your left shoulder says that tell him stop So what do the thrivers and impatience and anecdotes do I? Talked about these thousands of people if you really look at it and you study it carefully. They do five things Underneath is this basic attitude that they are not Fighting their cancer. They are in fact honouring it and transcending it. But what do they specifically do? They reclaim their power when you're a when you're struck by cancer in the early days You're so vulnerable so fragile that everybody else has the power your family has the power the priest has the power the doctor Has the power everybody has power over you and in the early days. It's okay But I have seen people with cancer who don't reclaim their power for years They've given it away. So number one they reclaim their power Number two they don't see cancer as a bump in the road Now in Malaysia, this may not ring a bell. I can tell you in India. It rings a bell. We have many bumps in the road And many potholes Right, but these thrivers look at cancer as a fork in the road a new direction their life shifts number three They learn to access their deeper resources and perhaps this is one of the most important things That they do they don't rely only on the external resources They start to find a source of energy within themselves That is inexhaustible We'll talk a little bit more about this for They stop worrying about quantity of life. They totally ignore all this prognosis about four months and six months and stuff they just ignore it and They say in whatever time I have. What is the highest quality life? I can lead and interestingly almost magically And you focus on the quality of life It seems there's good Evidence now to show that the quality the quantity of light might also increase and finally five They turn their experience to serve others We heard about volunteering Gifting all of that Well, I look at it much more directly Helping others is part of my own healing. This is what thrivers and anecdotes do so reflection for you When you find yourself in change and transition How open and adaptive are you and how do you access your inner resources? What do you do? couple of drinks in the bar What do you do so I want to very quickly zip through I know that time is of the essence I want to very quickly zip through this part Which is our approach it actually starts with a very simple question While the doctors are treating the disease who is healing the person we believe that Somebody needs to focus on healing the whole person While the doctors are treating the disease the doctors don't have the time They don't have the bandwidth. They may or may not even have the interest Perhaps they're not even trained for it. This is very important according to us the science on which this is based is The stress immunity illness access stress compromises immunity compromise immunity leads to illness and The science behind it is called psycho neuro immunology Pni on your all a psychology How we think affects the neurology Nervous system affects the immunology the endocrine system That's how it works good research on this stress by the way Isn't a time problem. It's an energy problem and I'm sure you've seen this in Malaysia. We certainly see it in India And this is the important part that according to our work and our approach stresses multi-dimensional And therefore we need to deal with it at all these five levels physical mental emotional systemic and Spiritual physical mental emotional Systemic and spiritual now when I look at my own analysis on this and I think back to my life before cancer My physical stressors were very high I was traveling too much not eating the right things not exercising enough etc etc etc Mental stressors were okay emotional stressors were quite poor reactivity Having snap judgments and things like that Systemic stressors were okay spiritual stressors. I was very much in that crisis mode. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? I come from a very Spiritually oriented family, but I had personally lost touch with spirit and so therefore my reconstruction Was focused on these three elements Physical emotional spiritual This is how we approach it for myself. I did it for myself and we approach it with others as well so we've talked about sources of energy and From our work We think that there are three sources of energy The first is the body the food we eat the way we keep our physicality in shape, but the body is like a battery It has a certain charge and then it winds down and then it needs to be recharged again The second is to look at the generator the mind what we heard today the mind can have a great impact On the body it can rev us up it can slow us down it can do many things But perhaps the most important one from our perspective Is to be connected to the grid I'm not talking about putting your fingers into a plug point talking about being connected to the grid of Prana chi whatever you want to call it inexhaustible that's continuously just whoa and this requires some Contemplative or spiritual practice of some kind so reflection number eight. How do you manage your stressors? Where do you source your energy from from the battery? from the generator from the grid essentially we Offer a holistic and integrated approach Holistic means addressing all aspects of the person we talked about this earlier physical emotional mental systemic spiritual and Integrated means drawing upon different systems. It could be western Indian Chinese mind body energy, etc. etc. etc and the trick is To combine and tailor it for each individual. There is no formula. There's no formula Because each person is different. What are the outputs from this approach? We've been blessed We do one-on-one cancer coaching We are in the process of now certifying cancer coaches We conduct residential retreats We have created an online diagnostic tool that actually tells you what your illness risk is likely to be Based on an analysis of the stressors We run a blog We have a YouTube channel We have a monthly newsletter reaches about 15,000 people We've written a book We get fantastic media coverage We must be doing something right just showing you a few examples Media has even come forward and said we'll give you some free advertising space So we've run a few ads It says cancer will change your life may be for the better Your best chance with cancer to stop fighting it And so on. So last point is gratitude and if I look back on these 13 years There is just absolutely no way that I could have done this alone just no way Neelima was totally with me. I would say she saved my life But there have been zillions of other people supporters friends relatives and Perhaps the people who still keep us grounded are the people with cancer that we work with I Don't know how many of you have had this experience When somebody dies in your arms Completely changes you completely changes you so I'm filled with gratitude for all those people and For you for patiently listening Reflection number nine. What are you truly grateful for? Nipun asked this question yesterday as well And how do you express it? So the last point I want to make I want to show you a three-minute film Which is about honoring cancer and honoring life It's based on the idea that no one is your friend. No one your enemy all alike are your teachers Before I show you the film. I want to give you reflection number 10 Last one Perhaps it's the culmination of what I've been saying adversity is a worthy adversary Adversity is a worthy adversary So as a leader How do you show grace under fire? I'm not just talking about not giving up. I Know we've heard the not giving up persisting staying the course etc. I'm talking about grace under fire Which is really bringing our highest self Our noblest self Into the trenches. How do you do that? What do you do? You're all senior leaders. I'm sure you've been faced with adversity and I'm sure you've demonstrated grace under fire What is that quality? What do you bring? So can we show the film please of course a crab is a strange pet to have Unless well, if you're a mermaid, which I'm not or if you're a cancer driver, which I am Think about it One minute. He's harmless even docile and then suddenly He'll snap at the hand that feeds him quite like the disease itself, you know, you never really know when the next bites coming That's why I brought this guy home Cancer is his name and He's more than my pet He reminds me that I once had cancer and that experience Changed me forever More than the surgery what really hurt was the truth It wasn't fate that gave me the cancer. I Gave it to myself with the life choices I made so To be cancer-free what I had to do was to make better life choices That's where this guy comes in be healthy Vijay. He says and be whole most importantly He's my pet and I'm in charge of him Not the other way around I like to describe cancer as a scare-giver Because it did threaten my life But it was no match at all for Neelima my caregiver Now together they keep me focused and positive People call me a survivor Well, I don't like that very much Look at me. I'm no survivor. I'm a driver I've been cancer-free for 11 years and Through it all we've been co-travelers To tame your cancer you have to see it differently Remember how you feel is how you feel So get past your fear of death and Learn to respect your cancer experience That's when you two can stop surviving and start thriving. I Used to look at a crab and see hot spicy crab soup Now I look at him and I see a new life ahead of me. I just want to say may your roots burrow deep may your wings take you high Thank you very much