Many many many moons ago, I was sitting with all my colleagues, and we were casually chatting.
A friend asked, “What is your greatest fear?”
Each one of us had to answer that question.
When it came to me, I said: “I fear that I might be fired from this job.”
Now, here are some things about me that you might want to know:
- I am the same person inside out. If something is in my head, it is expressed too.
- This does not mean I am rude or ruthless or say anything that comes to my mind. You are not being real if you are not being respectful.
- However, at the same time, when it comes to expressing myself, I do not find the need to be two persons at the same time—the one that the world sees and the one that I suppress. It is humiliating.
- Which is why, the job I was in when we had that chat, I was constantly becoming two people at the same time—trying to impress everyone, manage the team, manage everything at work; and at the same time, because a lot of low performers in the team had been fired, I always feared the next person would be me. Even though I was the best performer in the team.
- Needless to say, that fear did come to be real. Yes bro, I was fired 🙂 Partly because I feared this would eventually happen, partly because there was so much good for me once I got out of that team. Not even for one day, not even for one day did I miss that job. This does not mean the team was bad, but because now I was on my own.
Here is something weird happened, once I was out of that job:
I stopped trying to impress people.
I started saying no (politely) to work and engagements I did not want to join.
I also started feeling a sense of confidence and self-worth I had never felt before.
Why? Because now I was certain I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t lying to myself. I wasn’t mincing words in order to be loved by anyone else.
Reminds me of Oprah. She started her career as a news journalist. She would report incidents of pain, and would feel in pain herself. So much so, that after there was a cut, she would go to the victims at the site of pain, and offer them blankets and other help.
The TV network she was with, did not like this approach of hers. So they demoted her to a talk show host.
“The day I felt on the chair of the talk show host, it felt right,” said Oprah. She knew she wasn’t doing anything for anyone, even though she was doing everything for everyone.
This isn’t just Oprah, my friend. This is for you and I, too.
Till when will you continue lying to yourself, so you continue being a labourer to a building you hate in the first place?
This is the point where people start saying they are miserable and must be in this job because of their bills.
Everyone has bills. But the ones who go beyond the pills of bills and create their piles of bills uses two secret ingredients: Courage and action. With the backdrop of the right books, right thoughts and elimination of wrong thoughts and people.
The recipe gets right, there is no way the dish isn’t. With time and expertise, you can also modify the dish to what you like :))