Being a corporate person for the past 16 years, my area of focus has always been improving key performance indexes and creating productivity benefits along with added value. From time to time, he took on additional responsibilities, created visibility across cross-functional projects, and worked to optimize resource utilization. Without a doubt, the goal was to drive performance, become extremely results-oriented, and therefore drive efficiencies.
Professionally, I have started from scratch and have reached a certain level that I can be happy with. I appreciate achieving some important milestones in my career effectively. Although I had my share of stress, struggle, roller coaster rides along with constant ups and downs on my corporate journey. With some of my praise, I have been to Cloud Nine and literally enjoy the pinnacle of success.
In addition, I also committed myself to exploring certain areas of work and getting involved in challenging roles of being a coach, trainer, motivator, teacher, drawing on my strengths all these years. These complementary roles have definitely given me a high and the feeling that I am in seventh heaven. In fact, I did not know until then that I was a multifaceted person until I chose those areas and made those achievements with confidence. The idea here is not to praise myself, but to set a context for something closer to my heart and more intriguing.
As I embarked on my corporate journey, I kept wondering all these years. What have I done as a responsible citizen of this nation and its people? India is still a developing country with multiple problems related to the economy: poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, pollution, to name a few.
Believe it or not, with the existing ecosystem around us, it is very easy to blame and criticize the government, ministers, politicians, bureaucrats for the malfunction, lack of transparency and accountability for different problems that prevail and corrupt our society.
So my question is that everything is fine for the people. Have we really volunteered to contribute in one way or another to any of these social causes or economic problems?
When we interact with different people on this topic, they have numerous arguments that resist social work and some of the most common are listed here:
1) I donate money quite often, so why do you expect me to work on these issues separately?
2) I pay my taxes regularly to the government from my earnings on every product or service that I buy. Rather, it should be the government’s responsibility to address these issues.
3) I’m too young to get into all this nonsense in this dating age and enjoy life.
4) I can barely cope with my monthly income, so how do you expect me to contribute my income to these causes?
5) I am already quite busy with my personal and professional problems, what help can I give to solve these problems?
6) Most NGOs are typically corrupt as portrayed in the media and my contributions will never reach them as witnessed in the past.
Before I volunteered and ventured into social work, I even had these thoughts on my mind.
However, all of these misconceptions were addressed. Thanks to some of my direct reports who actively participated with some non-governmental organizations and convinced me to take the step. So, I decided to take a step forward.
After a detailed discussion with my colleagues on how to do my bit, my perspective towards these organizations and the people associated with them completely changed. I discovered a new challenge, a new thought process. It transformed my idea of wasting my time doing charity work to use my time constructively to help our society and people prosper.
I started thinking about what ways I could partner with these organizations. I came to the conclusion that there are only 3 golden rules to follow before venturing into any of these causes:
1. I must clearly understand that my role is that of a volunteer or participant and will be formed or grown only according to my discretion, experience, will and intention.
2. My contribution is to pledge my time (even if that means investing only one hour a week and even if I don’t want to contribute financially to them).
3. I choose to dedicate my time as a volunteer only to causes close to my heart, causes that really concern me, causes in which I might have knowledge / experience. In short, I chose the area of my work, my time and my goals.
Finally, I made the decision to work with two non-governmental organizations that
provided training and skills development to underprivileged children in our society.
With an organization, I volunteered to teach English once a week for an hour to children under 14 years old. And with the other, I decided to start a job related to improving social skills and client engagement skills for adolescents from economically weak backgrounds once a month for 4 hours. After their training, they would be expected to start earning money for a living.
This type of work really provides me with a lot of inner satisfaction and a factor of well-being as I contribute in my own way to society, to the nation, to people, especially children. And I love doing it because I feel connected with children and with the field of Education.
This work has broadened my horizons, enriched my experiences, given me renewed energy, and transformed my perspective on different things, adding new meaning to life. Universally and scientifically too, it is a known fact that positive work and energy attract positivity on this planet.
While other colleagues of mine care about issues like pollution control, agriculture, women’s well-being, health care, security and that’s why they work in those areas.
So what are we all waiting for? Let’s start volunteering with just 1 hour a week to make this country and planet a beautiful place to be with minimal problems and wonderful people in every corner of this world.