Prakash Raman
Prakash Raman is passionate about helping leaders recognize and achieve their potential to create collective success. At LinkedIn, he brings practical tools that leaders can use to help remove their own obstacles for success and happiness. He coaches, facilitates, and runs workshops focused on leading through values, connection, and shared human experience. His background enables him to take a unique and actionable approach to developing leaders. From starting his career on Wall Street to globally scaling a nonprofit, to marketing the Oreo cookie brand, he has worked through key business problems, enabling a business-rooted perspective when working with leaders. In 2016, he was selected for the 100 Coaches project created and led by Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s #1 executive coach. The project aims to mentor the next generation of leader, and includes leading academics, bestselling authors, corporate executives, and top executive coaches. He also serves as a facilitator of the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ course Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion and is engaged in continuing studies there. He has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a BA in economics from Rice University.
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I grew up in Houston, Texas, the youngest child of an immigrant family from India. As with most immigrant families, my parents had given up everything and come to America with nothing more than a drive to provide a better life for their children. Between implicit immigrant parent expectations and the blazing Texas sun, most of my friends spent their childhood indoors focused on education. However, my years growing up were spent entirely outside mapping my future on the tennis court.
To my parents’ credit, they fully supported my obsession with tennis. The minute my chubby hand first wrapped around a racket at age five, I was hooked and eager to play with my father the minute he came home from work. I would wait by the door of our brown, one-story house every day at 5:30 p.m., with my hands overflowing with the necessary gear: my dad’s shiny red racket, mine with a dirty white handle, a water jug, and a can of Wilson tennis balls waiting to be cracked open.
As soon as my dad got home, I would beg and plead as young boys do best, imploring him to hurry up and change. We would play every night until the sun finally disappeared behind the trees and then proceed to walk home and discuss the evening’s match at the dinner table. Even my mom and older brother would indulge me by asking what I could have done better and what my key focus areas were.
Even when off the court, my mind was on tennis. I would record every match available on national television (cable wasn’t an option for my immigrant parents) and watch the tapes with feverish repetition. While most kids would sneak out of their bedrooms to play video games or watch cartoons late at night, I snuck out to watch VHS tapes of my favorite tennis players like Stefan Edberg and Andre Agassi. I studied their technique and analyzed their strategy so I might have an edge on Dad the next day. I soon gained basic competence in the sport and would valiantly lose to my dad and brother, feeling empowered by the knowledge that, with reflection, I could come back the next day and play better, even win.
Like many young players, my goal in life was to be a professional tennis player and win Wimbledon.
Resulting from my obsessive focus, I started to improve and classified myself as pretty good. At age 8, I was competing with the 12-year-olds, and winning. After any match (win or lose), I would reflect on what went well, and more importantly, on what could have gone better. And in this simple reality is why I loved the sport: I could break down success into the smallest of movements or the shortest of moments to see what had gone well. Each point in a match could be peeled back to reveal opportunities and corresponding microchanges to address them. Between matches, I had the power to make adjustments based on prior information to improve my chances of succeeding. While I was enamored with winning, the foundation of continuous learning truly drove me.
The results shortly followed. Fast forward a few years, and I was the #1 player in Texas, a ranking I held onto longer than anyone in Texas history. I began traveling around the United States and was soon ranked #6 in the country. I received racket and clothing sponsorships and found that my social and tennis ranking were correlated. My teenage self was seeing everything fall into place, all according to plan. By mastering this intense focus, I was giving myself a shot to achieve my dream of being a professional tennis player.
Then one day I found myself practicing a little less. I didn’t want to miss out on other aspects of my life – classes, friends, clubs, dating. Even though I was practicing fewer days each week, I initially still won. My results for the next year didn’t point to any decrease in ability; instead, it signaled to me that perhaps I didn’t need to practice so much and I’d still win. The story I created was that I just understood the game better than my peers. Perhaps I was better than others at tennis and I could forget the obsession that had consumed me for most of my early adolescence.
I turned 16 and experienced my first loss in Texas in over two and a half years. It was a typical summer day and well over 100 degrees. I was playing someone I knew well and had beaten six straight times before. Walking on the court, I knew something was wrong. I was physically present, but my mind was already looking to get off the court. Less than half an hour later, I was down my first set ever to this familiar opponent. Was I not feeling well? Was it too hot, or just an off day? Another 30 minutes passed and I was down match point. I lost in symbolic fashion, falling to the ground while trying to retrieve the final shot.
After the match, I didn’t reflect or analyze what went wrong. I instead dismissed it and didn’t hold myself accountable for what had occurred. I thought, I know I am not practicing and focusing as much as I used to. But come on! That cannot be why I’m losing. The past three years I’ve been better at every turn, and everyone loses at some point, right? Not the best internal dialogue, even for a teenager.
Then the floodgates opened. I lost to more people in Texas, and I started losing early in national tournaments. I questioned my own ability, my own game plan, and started copying my peers to try and play more like them. I wondered, Maybe they know a secret I don’t. Maybe they have a better technique right now and I should hit more like them. Needless to say, I was freaked out. But that didn’t help me solve what was going on.
Losing on the court started a chain reaction in other areas of my life. I started performing poorly in school, turned in assignments late, and stopped attending my extracurricular meetings. In essence, I became self-destructive.
This state continued throughout high school. Luckily, nearly 10 years of dedicated practice enabled me to sustain a high enough level of tennis such that, despite poor performance for two straight years, I remained one of the stronger players in the country. However, I never recovered to the point of driving toward my childhood dream, and by the time I was playing Division I college tennis, the sport had become a side story, an add-on to my life as opposed to what it had been – the very core of my joy, potential, and future. The most challenging thing for me was not that I didn’t reach my dream, but rather that I never gave myself a fair shot at achieving it.
While I went through this experience a long time ago, the lessons I learned serve me today in countless ways. It allows me to help business leaders bridge the gap between inspiration and operation to achieve their individual and organization goals. I would like to share three of those lessons.
The old adage is true: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. My early success was built on a set of habits: focus, discipline, and consistency, all wrapped in deep intention. Prior to my downward turn, I enjoyed what I was doing whether I won or lost. I felt confident that if I lost, I would come back stronger and sharper, especially since I had a set of habits to iterate on and drive continuous improvement. Once I started seeing success, I let go of the habits and focused on the outcomes to dictate my success, and in turn, my self-esteem. Doing this led to a self-destructive pattern that began to permeate my life.
When I was at my best, my individual confidence, my sense of being successful, was based on measuring the consistency and discipline of my habits rather than on the outcomes. I focused on what was within my control.
We all have a responsibility to drive our own success, but our metric for success is often wrong. Any outcome or set of outcomes will always be partly based on factors that are out of our control. If we focus on what we can change and influence built on a foundation of habits, we have a chance to be successful every day. We will no longer be held prisoner waiting for outcomes to manifest. Fundamentally, success is built on habits, not on outcomes.
While I was good at reflecting on all the strategies and tactics I could use to improve my game, I never gave due time to reflecting on how I was feeling and what that may be signaling. My inability to identify my fear of failing on the court started a spiral effect of self-sabotage in other areas of my life. Being able to identify my fear, what I thought was driving it, and what part of it was real would have allowed me to take a rational and constructive approach to forward progress. I couldn’t change what I felt, but I could have changed how I responded.
This lesson serves me to this day, as I put it into action through the following questions:
Doing this daily has helped me to better understand my triggers and have tangible, operational ways to address what I am feeling. Then those feelings can actively serve me as opposed to creating a pervasively destructive pattern.
It is not enough to simply reflect on your actions. By reflecting on your emotions in conjunction with your actions, you can unlock the greatest impact and development for yourself.
There is a difference between learning from others and trying to be like others. In my early years, I would look at the strengths of other players through the lens of my own game. How could I incorporate their strengths into my game in a way that felt authentic?
By filtering like this, I found the intersection of what others did well, what seemed to work on the court, and how I wanted to show up as a player. In other words, I was playing inside-out. This made me feel authentic. Whether I won or lost, I could go back to getting better and picking up new techniques in my own way, knowing that my own game was at the center.
However, with that in mind, as soon as I started to struggle, I went from trusting my ability and learning from others to playing outside-in and blindly following what others were doing without considering my game or the way I wanted to show up. As a result, my commitment was limited and my game didn’t feel authentically me.
Learning from others is one of the greatest things we can do. The absence of trusting our own judgment, though, can lead us to live someone else’s life. In his commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs told the graduates, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” Find your “inner voice” to live your life of fulfillment. In doing so, you will play your game inside-out.