I have been called many things in my life. Team player is not one of them. It is not as if I have worked in many teams, or many teams have chosen me to work with them. I am the kid who was left out from the group formation as a kid in middle-school standard. Imagine the isolation. Recently, Aparna Piramal Raje, who is also my professor, quoted :
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to make yourself grow,
Dare to find your purpose,
Dare to make it known.
Imagine, I have been doing it since I was a kid. The presence of a group can seem less fortunate sometimes than presence of lone Sysiphious warrior. Although now, it is difficult in a hyper-globalized world. I am learning the art of group management and negotiation, treading Moore's law every second. Since years, when I started volunteering. In the past few months I have been found fortunate opportunity with Anant Fellowship. I am a part of team with four more people. We have frequent conversations on Google meet. We have weekly interactions. These are too frequent to recall what mistakes you do on every level. Hundreds of lines and millions of words. What if even a billion alphabets were sent by the behaviors learnt as a reaction to an incident in the school and enhanced over a period of teenage. This thought looms now. It seems there are a lot of stories to unpack in this supposition.
Recently I sat in review meeting above the people in the panel with team mates in one corner of the computer screen. Everyone spoke, I stayed silent. It was best 7 minutes of my silence. I wanted to contain my impulses of speaking up and speaking out. I wanted to get out of my head. I did until the 8th minute happened. When an open ended question is asked to the non-entity among a box of screens, I find myself scattering rhododendrons of words with metaphors and syllable. You must note I find myself at ease in the abstract. I find myself stick-up when precise notation comes up. You see it makes me remember the examinations in school and anxiety that streams through my navel and exits from the behind. It is a perfection with surreal experiences. So i went in and jumped up, pressed the space bar and activated my mic. There were many Is and so few We-s. You see the point I was making was specific to the work I had done. I see that team reigns supreme. I however, could not escape the child standing alone in the middle-school classroom. How the past rules the primitive senses. Makes current efforts nonsensical.
I then came up on a framework.
Step 1 -Calculate the minimum deliverable that you expect from today form yourself.
Step 2 -Look for tomorrow, and note down what happened today. Tomorrow is only as good as the documented today.
Step 3 -Seek feedback from the panelists and peers on one-to-one basis. Avoid self-deprecating ideas, especially un-empathetic biases which enrich the forms of self-judgement. They are self defeating prophecies.
Step 4 -Note, that anxiety will be a part of the equation where historically you see spaces for improvements. You never arrive, you step and jump over to the next platform. Just like a hoopla in Takeshi's castle on Pogo.
PS: People are generally kind. Primitive brain isn't. You see ? Who needs to be controlled ?
Comments