Jasprit Bumrah through a strengths lens

Bhumika Shah of Gallup India watched my earlier full length video on YouTube on India's victory in the 2024 T20 world cup and asked me for a short write up on the current victory.

Last Wednesday, on my way to attend a Medicine Free Life retreat in Velhe outside of Pune, I quickly sent her a note which she has shared with this video on the Gallup Certified Strengths-Coaches India Alumni Group.

Thanks a lot Bhumika for sharing that note.

Here is the full length note.

Tagging and thanking you Anurag Pathak and Parth for the help in editing this shorter video.

Few more short videos coming in the weeks to come. For the moment, here's my take on Jasprit Bumrah from the current victory and the video is my take on him from the last world cup from a strengths lens:

Consistency is a term that is more than often used to describe winners.

But one person who has been consistent in India’s performance over the last 2 wins has been Jasprit Bumrah.

He’s been consistently accurate and deadly to the point that even the legendary English bowler Jimmy Anderson has called Bumrah a freak for being able to bowl 5 fast yorkers and a sixth slow yorker in the same over.

The current Indian T20 captain Suryakumar Yadav has rightly called Jasprit Bumrah India's national treasure.

Yet the reason for his deadly consistency could be hardly consistent.

He showed one of the talent themes we speak about in strengths-psychology: Adaptability.

He adapted to the pitch in the stadium in Ahmedabad and craftily bowled his slower ones still making sure that those slower ones still landed as yorkers.

It puts to rest the wild accusations of sore losers that the pitches were favourably curated for Indian players.

The pitch and conditions were the same for all to read and exploit.

Only the mindful win.

Bumrah is an excellent case study of Theme Dynamics.

The late Curt Liesvled at Gallup insightfully looked into the permutation combinations of the 34 talent themes.

The 34 themes are divided into 4 leadership domains of Strategic Thinking, Relationship Building, Executing and Influencing domains.

For sure Bumrah might have lots of Strategic Thinking themes in his top 10 dominant talent themes.

As he ambles into his short run up, his eyes are telling us clearly that he is not just thinking what he’s going to do but that he even knows what will happen once he releases the ball.

The thinking is already done. And now it's the batsman's turn to keep thinking as to how the ball is going to behave and that's a nasty edge over the batsman.

Most of us are victims of habitual execution which makes it difficult to adapt or innovate given the muscle memory that consistent execution builds in us leading to blinkers on our side vision.

Not Bumrah.

He’s a thinking bowler.

At a time when I had stopped watching matches because of the lopsided rules in the game that favour batsmen, it’s refreshing to see a Bumrah raising the flag for fast bowlers and planting it firmly for generations to come.

As and when Bumrah does his CliftonStrengths assessment, I would not be surprised to see the following themes in his top 10: Discipline, Focus, Self-Assurance, Adaptability, Strategic, Responsibility and Achiever.

Coming back to what I wrote earlier about theme dynamics, I guess what this series threw up for us to see through Bumrah is what happens when Self-Assurance and Adaptability come to party; to say the least.

Or for that matter, Strategic and Adaptability or even Responsibility and Adaptability or even Discipline and Adaptability.

Finally, most people will have a leaning towards one of the four domains that I wrote about earlier.

But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t good in other domains.

An interesting saying in the world of strengths psychology is that “We are all uniquely powerful.”

So we all relate, think, influence and execute in our own ways even if we don’t possess all the themes of a particular domain.

Seems like Bumrah is an Executor through his Thinking themes.

There is something special I observed about Sanju Samson in his final act. More about it in another write up.