It was an important day in my life. Yes, my very first day at college. My mother and I were seated in a huge auditorium filled with students and parents for the inaugural function of the new batch. All new faces, lot of excitement among students and strong expectation from the parents. The staff and the senior students were busy carrying out last minute arrangements. As it was an Engineering college, most of them were speaking in English. When I saw that, fear gripped me, as I was an average student from a Tamil medium School, I can understand English to an extent but I cannot speak even a sentence. I had so many questions within me. Will I be able to survive? Will I be able to learn English? And so on. As I was getting terrified with my thoughts, one of the senior students of the college seems to be searching in the crowd. I thought he was looking for somebody so I stood up and asked him, if I could help him finding that person. Then he asked my name and the course for what I have opted for. Little later, to my surprise I saw my name being displayed as one of the two new joiners who were to share their views on why they chose this college to pursue their studies.
The program began shortly and everybody who took the dais spoke in flowing English. My heart started beating rapidly. How am I going to talk? I cannot even utter one sentence properly. Should I run out of the auditorium? Should I go up and get humiliated? No idea. Finally my turn arrived, without an option but walk up to the stage. I had never stood before such a big crowd. Then rouse a quick question in my mind. Why dont you proceed with your strength rather than worrying about your weakness? Then, with the new big positive frame of mind I cleared my throat and started my speech in Tamil saying "I would like to speak in Tamil in order to facilitate those eager parents seated here in this auditorium, who might not understand English" and spontaneously, the crowed started cheering with clapping that lasted almost for a minute. It was their claps, which made me understand that, there were so many parents and other students who had not understood even a word of what had been spoken in the program. That little moment made me win "a big first impression" throughout the college. Everybody appreciated me and lot of new students wanted to befriend me. During my stay in college, my teachers encouraged and helped me to overcome my short comings which later built my self-confidence and ultimately resulted in me passing out with a best student award in the final year.
This episode in my life helped me to discover a big lesson tagged as "Winning with Positives" which I would like to share with you through this article.
Having this in mind, let us do this small exercise. Take a piece of paper and list out all the strengths and talents you have. It may be your sense of humor or creativity or spontaneous skills or logical thinking or communication skills or organizational skills or responsibility etc. Once you are done with it, rank it. Now pick the top five. Finished?
Let me tell you, only these strengths of yours will help you to become a leader in the areas that you wanted to excel. Work on improving these skills. Working on improving your negatives will help only to be mediocre in that area but strengthening your strengths will help you to excel in that area and become a leader, a trend setter. Find out what is next for you to achieve in that area. Cross those levels and set your standard.
Dont underestimate your strengths, there are chances that nobody in this entire world got what you have within you. Your strengths can bring out a great solution to a grave problem that is faced by mankind.
Let us join together to create positive environment, positive organizations and positive societies which will be working with peoples strength and keep "Winning with Positives."
There is a separate branch called as positive psychology which is exclusively for bringing out something great using the positives built-in within each person. Let me quickly tell you what positive psychology is
Positive psychology is found on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within them, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institution entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethics, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and tolerance.