“Respect your elders”
“Don’t question your teachers”
“Teachers are always right”
There are many statements like these, running through my mind since the beginning of this week, a lot of them nonsensical. What I want to talk about today is the environment in which I grew up. An environment that looking back now, didn’t always build me up to face some of the challenges I face today.
I understand respecting your elders, that’s a given and everybody does that, but the other two are highly suspect, because we know that’s not true at all. I had mentioned something similar a few years on back on Facebook, saying that in our educational institutions we were taught to never question the people in charge. You weren’t even supposed to look at them in the eyes, because that was seen as disrespectful. The same thing applied at home. If you were being scolded by an elder, staying quiet was interpreted as you thinking you were better than the person scolding you. Replying was even worse, because then you would hear exaggerated, falsified stories of how it really went down, when the story was being told to relatives. I’m not necessarily saying that this happened to me, I’m just relaying to you a ubiquitous culture of confidence shakers.
When you grow up around that kind of mentality, it doesn’t help your confidence it cripples it. It wasn’t all negative either, through it all we learned the respect of values, hard work and doing the right thing.
The problems come when you have to navigate an environment where the foundations of confidence are implemented from the very beginning. This is a life changing game changer for real. You can always acquire confidence later in life, but if you can get it from the minute you’re born it’s even better.
When I say confidence I mean being encouraged to speak your mind, being honest and direct about any and everything, not being afraid to speak up. This is especially evident in school and the workplace. The most common example of this is how we call our teachers by their first names…while this is a normal practice here, in Cameroon I can’t even begin to imagine that happening. It took me a while to get used to his, I can tell you that.
Here people aren’t scared of asking questions or saying things that would be seen as “violating social norms” in the environment I’m used to. When I hear how some people talk here, the kind of questions they ask, I only hear one of two things: “You don’t say that” or “You don’t ask that kind of question,” which are two statements I heard a lot of.
Watching coworkers maneuver conflict, tense situations is a learning experience for me because I’m a special case. In addition to not having the same confidence foundation that they naturally grew up with, I am also a shy person, who is too nice…and that’s not a good recipe in 2017.
I haven’t lost hope though, even though it gets difficult. There are so many times I’ve had to deal with clients who have either said things or said something in ways that I found rude and irritating, but was forced to not react, being at work. It’s an experience, but one I’m sure I will come out of intact. Until then, it’s through the fire.