Perceptions

Is it worth trying to change perceptions that people create in their minds about you? Normally my answer would be “no”. There are 6 billion people in the world and each of those 6 billion is entitled to their opinions about everything – including you. But what made me write about this topic was perceptions which have been created about me in my workplace. I’ve been with my current organization exactly for 4 years today and very much to my surprise, I haven’t hated it enough to quit. Infact I have quite enjoyed most parts of it. For the last one and a half years I’ve pretty much been home bound – pregnancy and child birth have kept me home… Though I’m not naive and I had some inkling of my general perception within my peer group, I was still taken aback at the severity of the negative perceptions that my colleagues have developed against me. I was thought of as a prolific “ass-licker” – some one who leaves no stone unturned in licking my bosses ass to get up the corporate ladder. There were some nasty comments around my absence on maternity, my workload when I was back from maternity, questions around my actual work – both quality and quantity etc.. What shocked me – and I thought I was impervious to such gossip – was a comment by an unnamed co-worker “ Did she think she was doing a favour by taking calls when she was pregnant – if getting pregnant earns better ratings, then we could all go that way”. A lot of these negative vibes were generated after I got an unexpectedly good rating at office for my mid year performance. Even I was shocked with the rating as I was out of action for almost 2 months of the 6 and even when I was in action, I was working limited hours. So I would be justified in attributing most of these comments to pure professional jealousy. But then given that this is human nature and that I need to continue working here and work with these same people, should I actually have a go at trying to mend my reputation. If yes, how do I go about this onerous and self demeaning task? I guess I have my answer – if I think of the task as self demeaning – something which I think if I engage in will make me lose respect for myself, then it’s not worth it. I’m no Mother Teresa or Aung San Suu Kyi – I don’t stand for ideals or higher causes, in fact am quite an inward focused person who pays little heed to ongoings around me, except in case they actually impact my immediate life and family. But I do have an enormous amount of self respect which many a times is misconstrued as arrogance… but I’ve always been proud of myself. Should I quit while I’m ahead, start afresh in a new place with a clean slate – where I always have the risk of my past reputation catching up with me or should I stay put, fight it out and have these same people reverse their opinions of me? Come to think of it – do I actually care what they think of me? Obviously I do and apparently enough to have me write about it – so I’m disturbed by it. So should my focus be to try and not be perturbed by such shoptalk or should it be to take these as “developmental feedback” and work upon them? I still can’t figure out what to do… so I have decided that the simple course of action is to do nothing.. let life take it’s natural course – let me take one day, one person, one comment at a time as it comes at me and deal with the way the circumstances play themselves out and hope that I can do right without losing too much of myself in the bargain.