Back to my first love

 

This past week my cohort (c15) began the specialization section of the ALX program, in my last post I had talked about how overwhelmed and frustrated I felt towards the end of foundations. Which is the core of the program and runs for nine months. So in starting this new phase I knew that some things had to change in the way that I was approaching the program. One thing I had noticed early on is how I seem to have lost focus on why I was doing the program any way.

Slowly it became more about scores, getting the work done just to be done with it and when this seemed in jeopardy I would get very stressed and frustrated. But over this past week I made a decision to pace myself, to become more aware of what was working and what was not. I had to back to my first love. The reason I joined the program in the first place, my desire and thirst to understand how things worked. Understanding became my focus, I realized how this brought back the excitement to do the work. That when I faced a road block by way of something I did not understand instead of frustration I welcomed the idea to learn and know more. This idea of keeping my focus on the current work I had instead of having grades, scores and passing reminded me of an experience I had in my banking days

One of my first jobs was as a bank teller, and like any demand driven business where some days were slow and others not we had days the banking hall would be filled to its capacity. I remember one of my first experiences with this, I was petrified as to how to survive it. The banking hall was so full with customers I could not see the other side. Making sure that I carried out every transaction with precision was my biggest hurdle. Because the likelihood of an error in a transactions increases with a higher number of transactions. So I realized that in order not to run the risk of an error the key was having all your focus on your transaction at hand, so we had been taught.

Maintaining all my focus on the individual customer I was serving at the time, and surely enough I noticed the bank started to clear as I served customer after customer. The lesson that day was that sometimes when we focus on what is ahead rather than focusing on the moment we can lose heart cause of how daunting the task of getting to the end seems. But surely if we go by moment by moment we will get to the end. And not downplay of getting a good pass mark because that is important as well, but to get there I can only do it one project at time.