HoW iS It mEanT tO Be?

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!!