Constant Work on Yourself to Become the Best

‘Organizational behavior is the actions and attitudes of individuals and groups towards one another and the organization as a whole, and its effect on the organization’s functioning and performance.’ Before taking this course, I had never given much importance on the actions and attitudes that should be shaped within an organization. However, through this course, I realized that organizational behavior is a whole field within itself that has constant research going on among various countries, to understand the effects of many attitudes and actions that come to either make the organization better or to break the organization towards failure completely.

Through this course, I learned many things that would help me shape myself to be a better employee, a better teammate and to hold strong values professionally and personally. I have realized that there are some weaknesses that I had never recognized I had. I always saw myself trying to improve my current weaknesses and developing on my strengths. Through this course, I gained an understanding that I have to be more self-aware about things that I need to work upon further, as during our everyday lives we establish that there are many things that we have never put light on towards improving. One of them includes having control over my emotions, as many times I lose my ability to reason when I am feeling a certain kind of emotion.

During this course, I got another opportunity to understand how different people from different cultural backgrounds work. Since we had a decent number of in-class group activities, we all as a team had the chance to brainstorm and share our opinions. I also understood that a team that shares their core values makes the process of working as a team more pleasant, and helps us understand each other’s expectations.

I always looked at teamwork as one of my key strengths, but after doing a set of activities and the group project together with my team in this class, I developed a skill of how to make the process of forming an organization more efficient and fun at the same time. The forming, storming, norming and performing theory is what we followed in this class and this in return helped me understand how to work as a team in a stepwise form to face the least number of conflicts and in return work more efficiently and understand each other’s opinions more effectively.

This theory helped me build further on my teamwork strength. We as a team gave everyone in the team the opportunity to tell how they felt about topics. We believed that at the end of the day we were all trying to achieve the same goals, and build a strong foundation towards doing that. For example, during one of our group activities, we also put up our opinions on deciding who would go up and represent our team. Overall, we always spoke to each other, and made reasonable decisions with everyone’s agreement, and found ourselves away from conflicts.

One of my biggest weaknesses that I also overcame during this time was not being as afraid to voice my opinions and instead learned how to say them out loud in a refined manner. I consistently worked towards understanding everyone’s thoughts about a topic and then streamlined my thoughts in a way where I made sure that I in no way said they were wrong, instead I just added to the opinion or built it further. This weakness always made me uncomfortable as I never want to make someone feel that they are wrong, or their views aren’t taken into consideration.

However, from the many opportunities that I received from this class to develop myself and overcome my weaknesses, this was one of the big ones — another gap that I still find myself working on and have not yet mastered the ability to say no. However, through this course and the material we covered, I understood that it is the way you say something that makes a difference, not what you mean. Like I mentioned earlier it is essential to say things in a refined manner, and it is far more necessary to make sure that our mood doesn’t affect the way we express ourselves. Many times, I end up being in my bad mood, and since I am a very expressive person by nature, it is indeed challenging for me to cover my emotions.

The best way I tried to do that is by actually just staying quiet, and if asked anything, answer the question straight to the point. I realized this during one of the group activities, where I was affected by something that had happened earlier in the day. I didn’t put too much effort into trying to understand what we were doing, but instead, I kept thinking about what had happened earlier in the day.

The following day I felt like I had not been very involved in the group, and I sent a message apologizing to my team about my behavior the previous day. I tend to overthink a lot, and that often makes my emotions out of control, which in turn takes a toll on me and triggers all my thoughts that hold a negative impact. I then instantly realized the topic that we covered in class, and that’s when I understood that it is so important to make sure that we know how not to let our emotions take over our rational thought process. Ever since that experience, I now find myself making sure that I find a way to get over my feelings and negative thoughts through many ways that work for me. One of which is by talking to someone I trust and making sure I clear out my thoughts so that they don’t hinder my thought process and what I say negatively.

It is said that the journey is never-ending. There is always going to be growth, improvement, and adversity; you just got to take it all in and do what is right, continue to grow and continue to live in the moment. We come across new challenges every single day in our lives, and often we don’t know how to react in these situations. But if we continue to look at these as opportunities towards growing and getting better at it, that’s what makes the difference. I started as someone who would never appreciate constructive feedback and instead look at it as criticism.

I rarely found myself saying that something is wrong with me. But with time I evolved and looked at every situation that comes my way as an experience that will make me a better person in the future. I turned myself from a follower to a leader, with the help of this course and many past experiences. I learned how to voice my opinions in front of the people I work with and interact with on a daily basis. I turned myself into an extrovert by making sure that there is no harm in being wrong sometimes, and there is nothing wrong in taking a step out of your comfort zone to say what you think is right. The little things that we think may not make a difference as we grow are the things that accumulate and make us capable of what we really can do.

I saw myself evolve and overcome my weaknesses little by little but more than that. I saw myself grow through this time to become a better self. This course and working with a team gave me the strength that I never held before, and today I can proudly say that I made it to my first job through these skills that I could show in my interview landing in my first full-time job.