It was a hot, sultry day like most days in Chennai. I was in my 7th grade and I had just failed my first maths test. That moment, when I walked back to my desk with the answer sheet in hand, is forever etched in my memory. It’s the first time I experienced feeling dizzy in my head, my knees wobbled uncontrollably, my ears rang with a deafening high-pitched frequency and I collapsed at my desk. All through my primary school I’d been an #overachiever. A quiet child who excelled at most things. And so, the entire class was shocked at this unlikely event.
However, I still had to face my biggest #challenge – telling my father. I was fearful although I acknowledge that despite being a doctor himself, my father had never projected his academic expectations or #career ambitions on me. I was also ashamed. I had a sense of identity attached to a certain outcomes and now it was shattered. If not #successful, I was therefore a loser.
I remember standing in front of my father that evening, trying to speak between my sobs. It was one of those few times when he hugged me as he told me to breathe and pause because otherwise “you’re going to have a nervous breakdown”, he said. I’m #grateful that my father turned that moment around for me. I found the opportunity to learn several invaluable lessons from that incident. Although they didn’t all land on me instantly and I took time to unpack and learn from it, over the years.
1. I learned how to build #trust and #respect in a relationship by accepting the other person and their situation without judgement
2. I learned that it’s important to place our #mentalwellbeing above dogmatic societal expectations
3. And the most important lesson is that my sense of #identity cannot be defined by my current outcomes alone
Even as an adult I have gone through periods of languishing, #burnout and outcomes that I can easily label as #failure. But if there’s anything I’ve learned through my experience on that hot summer’s day from my childhood, then I know that I am not defined by my outcomes, whether they’re successes or failures.
A much better path would be to start by defining who you want to become and then consistently make slow and steady progress towards that ideal, while also embracing the pitfalls along the way. Today, when I #coach young executives I use this learning from #LittleMeInspiringMe to see the possibilities and greatness in each one of them and coach them towards achieving it. In the words of the NBA Coach Doc Rivers, “I’m not gonna coach you to who you are. I’m gonna coach you to who you should be some day”
PS: I went on to do well in Maths again. Although it involved a massive shift in my environment including my peers and teachers.
