How you overcame challenges to achieve your ambitions in life so far?
Let us go back in time to a few years ago, maybe a decade or so. I can vision a young girl, scared, timid, too wary of voicing her thoughts. She was always overshadowed by those with loud voices and the confidence to say what they thought. She really admired them. She really wished she could be like them. Strong, loud, powerful, confident; everything she was not. But she just could not be like them. And to her dismay, she lost a lot of opportunities in life just because she was not like them. It really irked her, but she could not change. She could not be someone she was not. But what she did not know was that she could be herself and yet achieve it all. Flash forward a few years, the young girl had just finished her tenth grade and the choices of life lay right before her, but she thought she had none. Throughout her life, she had heard from all the people in her life to follow the family legacy. Be a doctor, they said. Be what your father is and grandparents are, they said. And in the noise of these voices, she could not hear her own. Her soft voice was subdued, too weak and frail to be heard. It whispered, this is not what I want. So once again, she gave power to the noises she could hear, and not the one she should have heard. She gave up her wants and followed what others wanted. She studied the next two years for something she could not see herself doing, but how could she ever disappoint those who she thought had faith in her. But maybe her mind and heart was not in it fully. She failed to book herself a seat in a medical college, and maybe that was a boon in disguise. Her parents, throughout all this, were always by her side. Reminding her that if this is not what she wanted, she did not have to do it. But the girl knew nothing else. Her life, till date, had only been about this. What could she do now? She did the next best thing. She got herself into a course in Microbiology. She loved it, of course. She did well, of course. But she did not see herself doing this for the rest of her life. She felt suffocated by the small confines of the laboratory. She wanted to see what was beyond those walls. She wanted to explore. She wanted to learn new things. She wanted to see the world through new spectacles. So, she bought herself a new pair. She studied hard enough, she practiced hard enough, she put in all she had, and secured herself a seat in a great MBA college. Here she learnt that her differences from the rest were not a weakness. She was different, yes. But she was also diverse. And diversity is what everyone seeks in the world. Hence, she made her different characteristics her strengths, learnt from other diverse people and today, it is this scared, timid, soft-spoken girl that is achieving the most. And she wishes to achieve even more. She did not have to change herself, she just had to tweak her features and look for the place where she belonged. She learned how to voice her thoughts, she learned how to make her thoughts overpower others’ when she felt she was right, and most importantly, she learned how to love herself and her heterogeneity. She is me.
#NMIMSMumbai #ABGLPWooMe
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