Choosing a profession amidst numerous career choices and cut-throat competition is daunting for many students. Hoping to be of some help in dispelling the confusion is Lifology that offers guided mentorship and gives parents an insight into new career options. Co-founder and CEO Praveen Parameswar elaborates further about the concept and scope of Lifology.
How does Lifology empower parents to lead children to the right education?
Our core premise is that to lead children to a meaningful future of happiness, financial security, fulfilment and purpose, parents must first be empowered. They are the most powerful influencers in a child’s life, especially with decisions regarding education and career. Only if parents are properly oriented, they can influence children. To guide the 21st-century kids, parents should be ‘Super Parents’.
Many parents don’t know beyond 10 to 12 traditional career tracks. So, we introduce parents to new-age careers, courses and education possibilities. Our super parents are capable of engaging in conversation with children about nuclear physics or space science, a career with the United Nations or the anti-ageing studies under the leadership for Peter Diamandis. They know how to guide children to applying for a Rhodes Scholarship or admission to Stanford University.
They know it is ideal to lead a child with proper spatial intelligence, creativity and passion towards design to become an architect rather than a computer programmer or a bio-medical expert.
How did the idea of Lifology take shape?
For around eight years I have been working as an Organisation Development coach and consultant for various Multinational Companies, Government Projects and Educational Institutions across India, GCC countries and the UK. Everywhere I went, I was asked to fix a single problem, ‘employees are not performing well’. Upon close interaction with people across various verticals and horizontals, I observed this happened largely because ‘Right People Reach the Wrong Places’.
It is often stressed that kids want to make their own decisions regarding their career choice, irrespective of the parents’ choice. What are your views?
We support this thought and acknowledge this as the right approach, that children should take the final call regarding their education, career and future. But it is not fair to follow the ultra-liberal approach anchored on the Western thought line, ‘their career, their life; let them decide, do not interfere’. Just as every top cricketer or tennis player needs a coach, our children need one too. This coach helps children to dream big, know self, think right and arrive at the suitable decisions. They are not expected to make decisions for children. But their focus should be to guide the children towards the appropriate decisions.
How does your model work and what are the services provided?
Parents can subscribe to Lifology Super Parent eco-system on an annual basis. They get access to every feature in our platform, which consists of comprehensive career and education information, world-class assessments, access to career coaches, LIVE mentoring sessions by amazing experts and sessions on ‘how to enhance life skills of children’. All these features are aligned as per ‘Lifology Disk Model’.
Tell us more about the life skills program.
To turn parents into Super Parents, we have a strong team of former royal marine commandos, Mount Everest explorers, corporate learning and development experts, mind management professionals and mindfulness gurus. Through online sessions, they equip parents with the right approaches and techniques to enhance the life skills of children. We also request children to attend the sessions along with their parents, so that the benefit would be enhanced. These sessions are accessible for our member parents anytime from anywhere.
At what point did you think of launching services for parents?
To understand the effectiveness of our activities, we tracked the children who we supported to make the right decisions. It was a bit shocking to understand that most of them who, according to them, ended up making the right decisions did not pursue them in life. Even though they decided to follow certain education pathways and career options, they ended up changing their mind later. Our team reached out to many of them and understood that they were influenced by parents to alter the decisions. Unfortunately, the latter decisions were not right. This makes us think that our mission can be achieved only if parents are properly guided.