Students’ Speak: Understand your weakness and work on it

By: Neha Deore

If failure comes across, it should be accepted and should be taken as a challenge to clear it next time. So, how to overcome it?  Neha Deore talks about this citing instances from her life.

This article is all about fear of failure but it's not the only failure that students fear rather it's more about the consequences of failure that students get scared of. The consequences include feeling ashamed, guilty, worthless, disappointing parents, losing impression in front of college staff and classmates. They think they have lost a chance and it’s more about their status in front of the known ones. But in any competition, there are only two choices, either you win or lose.

If failure comes across, it should be accepted and should be taken as a challenge to clear it next time. So, how to overcome it?  You can support yourself by understanding your weakness and work on it. You know it better than anyone else. Once you know about yourself then you can surely overcome your weakness and that will definitely help you. Thus, next time this will definitely lead to success.

I would like to tell you my story. A couple of years ago, I shifted to Mumbai. I was very nervous to face my classmates. The teachers and staff were speaking in English only and I was not good at it at all. But on my very first day, there was an introduction session conducted for us. I was lacking confidence and was having a fear to face all the students.

Students were introducing themselves one by one but I was very nervous. I introduced myself just by saying my name and tried to avoid further dialogue to save myself from any embarrassing conversation. I preferred not to speak much about myself. I know it was not a big task but for me, it was. One of my professors noticed that and later on, he called me and told not to get scared of anyone.

He told me that everyone is like you, no matter what you say just try to speak in English. I was extremely happy that he noticed my problem and helped me overcome. Later on, when presentations began, professors helped me to improve my presentation skills and I improved a lot as compared to my first presentation. Next big task was choosing a specialisation.  First-year is common in MBA and in the second year, you have to choose a specialisation.

So, I decided to select finance as I had an interest in the stock market. But as I am from Science background, everyone said that I won't be able to perform well. You know that the people with whom you are surrounded are the ones who motivate you and at times, they are the only ones who can get your morale down and demotivate you. We get influenced by them so quickly and change our decision and the same happened to me every time in my college.  

I was told that my personality was best for marketing. That time was quite depressing. However, my family and my finance professor helped me overcome this fear and also guided me with the right path to follow in my second year. It was not easy to throw out the fear in me which was increasing day by day but I decided to do finance. I was aware of my weakness, so I tried to overcome it and was successful in achieving my goal.

About the Author:

Neha Rajendra Deore is from Mumbai, Pursuing her 'MBA in finance' from Indira Institute of Business Management, Mumbai. A state-level sports player in diving (water sports) and she loves to dance as well.