Fear is the Key

Blog 12 of 30

I recently read a biography of a woman who had risen to the top of her professional career. I had always admired her professional success, but as I read the biography, I realised that many of the decisions she had taken at various points in her life were ones which I would never have taken.

Was that the difference? Was it the road not taken? Somehow for me I would never have been satisfied being a complete professional or a complete stay at home mom. I deeply believed that I needed to marry these two sides of my life as closely as possible in order to find my own happiness. , Looking back today, I have no regrets. But I think back to my early years and realise that a predominant feeling, somewhere, underlying everything else, was fear.

Fear that I would not be able to deliver on a client request because of the demands of the household. Fear that I would not measure up because I was distracted by something at home. Fear that I may not be a good mom or would neglect my children because of the demands of the professional world. Fear that I would somewhere lose out on the very essence of home life because of the demands of the professional world. Fear that I would be found wanting. It was fear all the way.

Many would argue that it was perhaps not a very healthy emotion, and I guess it comes down to how you would deal with it. For me that fear drove me to be better, drove me to improve, drove me to be more efficient, more organised and drove me to be a perfectionist.

Even today there is nothing I do, no matter how small, where I won’t give my best. It echoes in my school song – Whatever we do must be our best. Maybe it was a lesson instilled in school, maybe it was a reaction to fear. Even today I find myself unable to accept anybody doing less than their best. Be it at home, or be it at work, I seek it, I demand it, I encourage it, and to me that drove me right through my personal and professional life.

Not soon after I got into my first assignment, I fell very ill. A bad attack of typhoid had me hospitalised but the minute, I was well enough to think, I realised that the next issue of the magazine for my client had to go out. I pestered the family till they brought me printouts, so I could check it, finetune it, approve it, correct it before it went into print.

It was a lesson in crisis management, it was a lesson in training myself to think in the worst of times and it was a lesson that no matter what, when you are juggling a number of balls, none of them can ever be dropped. And that is the fear. Fear of dropping the ball.