What is the best way to get the best out of a
person/relationship/colleague/subordinate/child? Is it by constant dismissal so
that the concerned person does not go overboard with a profound sense of
achievement and stop working hard to create better results in future? Or is it
by praising them, giving them incentives and celebrating their accomplishments?
Modern philosophy tells us that praising in the right
quantity and at the right time energizes anybody beyond imagination and almost
always propels for better next attempts.
I am a QA (Quality Analyst) in a software firm. I get paid
to catch defects or ‘bugs’ as we call them in the codes that our developers
script so that the product or service we deliver our clients becomes a quality
delivery and as risk-free as possible. I am supposed to let no defect or error
go undetected and eventually unresolved under my nose. When I OK a product, the
product has to be Ok! Thereby, my efficiency is calculated in terms of the number
of valid defects I sniff against the total bugs detected by me. But in this ‘professional’
case also, I’m never expected to deliver 100% efficiency. This is for the sole reason
that under the pressure to perform cent percent, at some point of time I might
be frightened to even log a defect. This would, without a doubt, affect my
performance on the work front. And no organization would want their employees
to work with a monkey on their shoulders (a very big one in this case!) Doesn’t
the case remain painfully similar on the personal front too?
People extremely close and special to me want to focus completely
on the mistakes I commit for the only major reason to make me better and better
by the day. But I crave for a single word of appreciation, a single pat on my
back for a single, any job well done. I work hard and harder that may be this
time, if I am not praised, at least I won’t disappoint anyone. But, as they
say, when you are hungry, all you see is food, all you smell is food, all you
listen about is food! I feel the same way. That if people have accepted me as
wrong, no matter what I do (or I don’t) I will always remain at the receiving
end.
And this in turn has made me lose my self-confidence. I am
now actually scared to do anything. Because I fear that whatever I do, I’ll
land myself in hot soup. My desire to take initiatives, risks and to be
obstinate about issues I feel strongly about is diminishing exponentially by
the day. And this further drops me in hotter soup for being ‘disinterested,
inactive, killjoy and pessimist’. The trouble is intensified because of the
sense of ‘nothingness’ and ‘helplessness’ I fight with. Deep inside me. Every
day. Every moment. I know I am not what I am being considered to be, I want to
keep my point, fight it out, but cannot, because some huge arbit baggage of my
past always, always keeps me from defending myself.
I keep hunting for inspirations, keep pulling myself
together, bringing to practice all self-motivation techniques I know of, but
when a wound keeps getting wounded, doesn’t it take simply too long to recover…?
But I have promises I sometime made to myself that I need to
keep up, an image I have of myself that I have to live up to and a desire to
present to this world the real character of substance that I always have been, inspite
of all layers on me.
And I’m sure that day shall dawn soon when this world will
see me the way it is actually meant to be!!
