Adding color to water — Visualization of my experience

A few days ago when I was working on our circle’s mega project presentation, the monkey in my brain woke up and naturally I began to procrastinate because of it. I decided to take a bit of a break then, got up from my desk and went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, before resuming the sitcom I was watching.

As I drank the water, and the glass was half-emptied, I paused to look at it, it reminded me of myself at the start of my career fellowship journey.

My main reason for joining the fellowship program at Amal Academy was to learn new soft skills and to improve and practice the skills I already had.

So that’s how I felt at the start, like a half-filled glass, knowing a couple of things, but still having a lot of room to learn more.

The first two weeks were very surprising and completely different from what I was expecting. We got to learn about the basic soft skills I was expecting like teamwork and leadership. But what I wasn’t expecting was working on figuring out our WHYs and setup SMART goals according to them.

As someone who never really knew what he wanted to do, these activities were a game changer. I sat and thought about what I really wanted to do, both in my professional life and in my personal life. The first draft I came up with was pretty basic, like Get a job, make money, etc. It wasn’t until the mid of the week, when we had our circle’s 1st meeting that I got a better idea on how to do this.

My previous circle members gave me constructive feedback on my draft, on how I could improve it, like for example if one of my purpose was to get a job, I needed to dig deeper into why I wanted to get that particular job and why not something else.

There were a lot of things I discovered I wanted to do, some I wrote in my weekly project work and some I wrote in my journal. For example, I discovered that I really liked writing and cooking and wanted to work on improving myself in these areas as well.

I got to learn a lot in those two weeks. I got to learn a couple of new skills, and how to set my goals; I also got to learn about other fellows dreams and their struggles, which turned out to be a great source of inspiration.

At the end of those two weeks, the glass might’ve not been filled all the way to the top, but a bit of color was added to it to liven things up.