Escaping challenges backfires!!- ODCL TISS Mumbai

Challenges in life have been quite challenging for me. I took a lot of time in life to understand the art of dealing with tough situations and challenges.
I always preferred to find safer ways and avoid difficult situations. I managed to do this quite well till the end of my college life. I never tried to face my fears and preferred not to talk about them. Neither my friends nor with myself. The moment I see a tough situation, I felt really weak inside and had no confidence to face it.

Things changed when I got placed. The first challenge that I came across while working and which I was not able to avoid was my poor communication skills. The sad part was that I had no time to work on that. Within no time, I had to face the client in meetings. And as expected, I performed really poor and faced several escalations from the client. Another issue was that I was not strong enough to take the negative feedback. I was really depressed facing all this bashing, from client, from manager and from myself inside. Seeing my poor performance, my manager asked an associate from my team to assist me in all the projects that were assigned to me. It was decided that he will be present in all my meetings and will shadow me.  I was asked to observe him and doing so improve myself. But I was so low-confident that I was scared to give it a try, and that’s what I had done so far in my life. But fortunately, this time there was no escape. It was my job and I loved the salary that I was getting at the month-end. And thankfully, till now I had realized that I cannot escape challenges forever. It was the time of high-pressure, anxieties and tension. I used to feel dreadful before joining any meeting. However, slowly and steadily things started changing during the course of those meetings. I observed my friend and he had exceptionally good communication skills. During that time, I got to know my skill that I copy people really well. I started copying him, his accent, the way he took pauses,  the way he handled difficult situations and eventually I learned. After gaining a little confidence, I started by handling a few ‘not so difficult’ questions during the meeting. Slowly and steadily, the number of these questions increased and within three months I started handling the meetings quite comfortably all by myself. After one year, I received uncountable client appreciations. I received a lot of applause from my project manager and at year end I got “A” band (the best one) in my yearly appraisals.

Challenges might seem very challenging at first. But we should never ever try to escape them. We should try to face them and fix them at the earliest in a safe place, otherwise they will surely come back most probably not in a safe place and you might not get the time to work on it.

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