Becoming What I am Meant to Be - The Discovery 3

When I was younger, I wanted to learn to play the piano.  There was this toy piano, it was light blue in colour, and I would make songs from the limited keys of the toy piano.  Seeing such interest, my mother enrolled me in Yamaha Music School and I was ecstatic at the thought of getting formal piano lessons on a real piano!

Fast forward MRSM days.  There was my good friend Kim, Mei Ling, Azni and a few more that seemed so much better than me at the piano and more advanced in their grades.  They would take turns playing the Negaraku song on the piano during assembly.  I wanted to be like them, at the very least able to play that Negaraku song during assembly.  I never did.  I never even learned to read the notes and play that song during assembly.  That comparison remained inside me, though, that I was never as good as them because I never played that song during assembly.

All the years of living a life of wanting to be seen to be good, to achieve, get married, have kids, have a meaningful career, being a good mother, and the list goes on and on......the expectations that I have built for myself came about from this flawed logic that I have, and that is how I am seen in the eyes of others and how they perceive me.  It is this flawed logic that I set such high expectations of myself and in that process, I became a perfectionist.  It has to be perfect or not do it at all.....

Another greater flaw is comparing myself to others and I think this is the real root cause of my anxiety. In that, I wanted to be at par or perhaps even better than others in terms of skill, ability or achievements. And in a work environment that I am in now, it gets even worse. I tell my direct reports to not be lead by fear of underperformance where the truth is I fear of my own underperformance.

As a mother, I want to be the mother who sends her kids to school, cooks them their favourite foods, help them out with their homework, bakes cookies and cupcakes....and that image compared to the reality of a working mother who is tired by the end of the day and not able to supervise their school work, let alone bake anything, is always in my head and creates even more anxiety.


The humbling truth for me is that I can never be and should not aim to be anyone else.  The choice is mine and I choose this path.  The humbling truth is that there will always be someone who is better at doing something than I am.  Comparing myself to someone else in every aspect of life should stop.  I should just focus on my life, my needs and decide what is best for me.  I don't have to be the best at everything.  I should just try my best.  Not being perfect and being just "good enough" will probably make me a happier person.  I do have talents and should just use whatever talent I possess.

This year, my stress levels demanded that I make a change.  I need to focus on being focused.  I need to decide on what is good for me first, before deciding on what is good for others.  Stop multi-tasking and worrying and more importantly, the state of being busy does not mean I am delivering value.
And now I only need to remind myself every now and then.....