{Announcement}: Yoga of LinkedIn Pilot Workshop
Invitation for a workshop I am doing this weekend to "see" LinkedIn from the lens of Yoga.
I began using LinkedIn seriously around 2014. And over the years, this social network platform has rewarded me immensely.
It helped me change my career from tech consulting to agriculture; It was here where I discovered my co-founder and (partner in crime) Maggie Inbamuthiah in the non-profit Mandram I currently run; I also discovered many friends for life along the way. And of course, a large chunk of the global clients I currently work with at Gigyasa Labs in India, Europe, and Central America and the customers I serve at Agribusiness Matters also came through this platform.
But there is one thing that supersedes all the gifts I have received through this platform: It has given me a perfect platform to write for myself and use this platform as a lab of self-discovery.
Today, at a time when the entire fabric of our digital lives are revolving around the status we are cultivating through various means, writing for yourself can be a gift to go beyond one’s status and prestige and discover something more meaningful.
Why "Yoga of LinkedIn"?
Today, the trouble with social media is that if you start to play the game well, chances are it is going to screw you up.
When you jump into the content hamster wheel, you are going to become a slave to the algorithm and dole out all those which tap into our basal impulses and make you go "viral".
It breaks my heart to see many wise people around me jump into this and share stuff from their WhatsApp feed just to get the vicarious thrill of going "viral".
Having closely seen a few of my pieces go "viral", I can assure you that what you gain out of it is nothing more than a few minutes of "dopamine" high and a lot of irrelevant audiences who don't have a clue about who you are and what you care for cluttering your feed.
What is the point of success if it's only going to make you further anxious to get a number count that will make you feel "you have arrived" and warp your understanding of reality? Is there anything worse than being a victim of your 'success'?
What if there is an alternative way to exploring the social world, where you are using it as a mirror to help you discover parts that you have never known about yourself?
Today, the social media game, whether it is Twitter or LinkedIn, is such that their algorithms will reward you for "boring consistency". It essentially boils down to picking one point of view and talking about it over and over again.
That will help you gain "followers" and help you play "status games". But at what cost?
What could happen if we don't take the algorithm seriously? Can we discover something more precious and meaningful about ourselves and the world when we use this space as a self-discovery lab and a serendipity engine?
When you write for yourself, you discover that 'you' are a 'verb' and not a 'noun’ as it often seems.
Although LinkedIn receives a lot of ridicule for the cringe that creeps in due to the way people have gamed the algorithm, in all these years, I have discovered that when you write for yourself without paying much attention to the algorithm, what you get in return is PRICELESS.
As a student of Yoga, one of the precious lessons I have discovered from studying Patanjali Yoga Sutras under my Yoga mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan is that it is far more important to practice yoga outside our mat than on the mat.
Because, essentially, to practice Yoga is to pay attention to what we are doing. In doing what we are doing on LinkedIn, what are we really doing?
And so, when I decided to share these nine years of learnings and experiments I have done in this laboratory called LinkedIn as a course, I decided to name it "Yoga of LinkedIn". As the byline suggests, it is a distillation of an idiosyncratic approach I have discovered along the way to "Master LinkedIn without becoming a slave to its algorithm".
Of course, this course is not for everybody.
It is not for those...
... who want to treat other fellow humans as "connections" or "leads".
...who want "secrets", "hacks".
It is for those who want to delve deeper into the 'metaphysics of narrative', 'infinite game of your profile', and how paying deep attention to the 'process' of writing helps you discover amazing things about yourself.
Here is how the course is organized:
As a part of the preparation for this workshop, I signed up for many courses on LinkedIn and online writing. While most courses focused on the physics of the narrative, none of them were looking at the metaphysics of the narrative.
In this workshop, through this framework, I will provide a language and an approach for you to examine your stance, and your context and discover a narrative based on your stance and context.
And this entire process is dynamic and recursive.
Every time you change your stance and context, you get to discover newer narratives, and the deeper your probe into your narratives, the more powerful insights you discover about the stance you take and the context you are in.
Since I am doing this for the first time, I am limiting the participants of the workshop to 90 seats. And the prices are bound to increase after the pilot edition.
Yoga of LinkedIn Pilot Workshop
Date: 20th May 2023
Time: Saturday, 1030 AM to 12:30 PM
Registration details are available here.
If you have any questions about this course, feel free to reach out.