Optimism

My last post was on how I learnt a big lesson in life to never say never. I have been through many situations where grabbing an opportunity has gifted me with new things in life, new friends and new beginnings as well. It’s never easy to understand what effect an opportunity will have on your present and future and thus, there’s no point debating over whether to take it up or not. The key here is to stay optimistic and experience the whole event with a positive outlook.

This post is on optimism and what role it played and continued to play in life. After completing my Graduation studies in Kolkata, my sister suggested that I move to Mumbai for higher studies and that the city has a better scope of work opportunities in the field of communication. We weighed the pros and cons for a while, worked on the financial issues and debated over a few other things. And finally, I ended up going to Mumbai to pursue my post-graduation studies there. The education system in Kolkata and Mumbai are different. If one follows the traditional method of black board teaching, the other used PowerPoint presentations for each subject. If one believed in giving in hand-written notes, the other mailed us presentations to refer to.

The initial few days were a cultural shock. I have grown up studying in the traditional method where, classes and teachers were all about taking notes, memorising them for the exams and write pages and pages of answers. And here I was, referring to presentations to understand concepts, given a free way to refer to any book I want on the concept and prepare presentations on them. Now, our assignments were mostly presentations and interactions and not written tests. It was difficult to give presentations where you cannot just keep saying what you memorised last night. My initial presentations went wrong on many factors: I passed the allotted time limit, I was not clear in explain what I wrote in the presentation, my body language lacked confidence and when it came to interacting with the audience, I failed. These all affected my grades and after a few assignments, I started all my motivation. There wasn’t any positivity in my mind and lacked confidence every now and then.

The miracle that changed my ‘this’ frame of mind, was when a professor called to check if I required any help. He exactly understood what I was going through and suggested a solution. That I should not take these assignments as only ways of scoring marks but as a process of learning. That I should observe why some of the students are always carrying away the brownie points and how they appeal to the audience to listen to them. It won’t help if I starting losing confidence but it will definitely bring about a change if I start being optimistic about these opportunities of self-improvement and development. Confidence comes when you are optimistic about a situation and I had to realise that. True to his words, it worked. I realised that more than explaining the concept, I needed to interact about the concept; I need not spell out every word but explain the concept with its main points only. This paved the way for a new beginning in my life where interacting became easier, confidence was re-built and optimism never left the inner self.

Good or bad, things will be the way they are. The only thing that we are capable of doing is work hoping that it gives the best results.

I am linking this post to A to Z Challenge #Day 15 for alphabet O.