Positive Reflection
As an electrical engineer, I’ve always had a deep interest to know more about the Chernobyl Disaster. This interest led me to watch the HBO special, which is the most accurate reconstruction of events. In that series, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, says,
“Our power, comes from the perception of our power.”
I always found myself perplexed by this statement. Somedays I thought there’s no better quote than this, other days I regarded it as a hoax. I never got to be on one side of the argument when it came to this assessment of power.
On 19th May, our Program Manager, Ma’am Afreen conducted an activity in our session where every fellow was given an incomplete doodle sheet. The instructions? Just draw whatever your mind tells you to draw. Initially, I was completely blank. I didn't even want to grab my pen as I was convinced I’d be handing back an empty sheet. The timer started, and I just went with the flow. I did whatever my mind told me to. All of a sudden, dots started to connect out of nowhere in my mind. I was having amazing ideas as to how to curve the line into a cloud, or how to make a cactus out of a straight line.
I could not believe this was the doing of the same brain that told me to ‘forget about it’ minutes ago. This activity was stuck in my head for a couple of weeks. It seemed that the shackles on my creativity had been broken, and that I could achieve anything. I never cared about how disciplined or neat the drawing is. I grasped the principle my instructor was trying to convey. The most crucial thing is to believe you can, everything else follows. I’ve always tried to evolve my mindset from either my own learnings or from others, and this activity definitely did the job of turning the wheels in my head.
I now link this back to the quote I mentioned in the start. I’m now fully confident that my power is dictated by not how other people perceive it, but by how I perceive it to be. That’s what makes me believe that I can do it, and that belief is what drives me to do anything. Now that I look back to that activity, I would take that sheet with ‘Picasso’ level confidence and just enjoy myself without putting a leash on my abilities in my mind. That’s the way I look at life now as well!