Saturday, January 09, 2010

Judging a book by its cover

"Don't judge a book by its cover"... a common advice people give. But how many are actually practitioners of this phrase? Saying and practising are 2 completely different things. In corporate lingo: a plan is only as good as the implementation. They tell us not to take things at face value, must always uncover the whole situation, must analyse... blah blah blah.

But when it comes to their image in the corporate world, they still judge people very much by the packaging.

What sparked this topic? Well, recently there has been a terrible crisis at my workplace that has gotten my entire team pretty emotional, myself included. While my team & I were doing our job, extremely well I would say, given the situation... I still expressed how I felt to the top management of the region on behalf of the team.

What I got wasn't a pat on the back for being so passionate about my job, or being so involved and committed. The only speck they saw was that I was putting emotions into the job, I was not "controlled" and that is interpreted as immature & that if I ever wanted to move any higher up the organisation I must need to learn to act more mature.

Definition of mature: "Of, relating to, or characteristic of full development, either mental or physical"
If you have developed fully, mentally in this case and have very sound and wise judgment... does it ever mention in the definition that;
- you need to be purged of all emotions??
- Or that you need to be less human??
- Or that you must conform to the norm??

My stand on this is that having emotions about your work means that you are not doing it out of routine or force. It means that you genuinely have passion for it. Passion drives excellence in my vocab.

If this line of career means that I have to be less human, less passionate and less me... then I think it will not be the path that I would want go along for long. Item #12 on my wishlist is juz itching moved up a few notches. Luckily, for now I have a very human boss. So, I can still be me for now. Maybe I don't want to go up any further anyway, coz I want to keep my humanity. I want to keep my emotions. I want to keep my passion.

So, lantak la these people!! They're miles away anyway. I'm still going to do my job with passion for now and be darn good at it! I'm still going to carry my pink organiser, bling bling kitty hanging on my phone and dress like a diva to work. I'm still got be transparent with my emotions. I'm still gonna live a public life on FB. I'm still gonna be the one and only ME!!

Too bad if you don't like the cover of this book... coz it's all good stuff on the inside!! :p

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