A confident attitude makes a big difference
“NO matter what happens, I can handle it…” Wouldn’t this be a wonderful motto in life?
Nearly all the successful people I meet, from all walks of life, tend to have this approach to work and life. Their confidence is high even when facing adverse conditions that most people would feel overwhelmed by.
It is easy to think that they have some inborn “magic” mechanism to propel them to such confidence. Or, that they have just learnt the “know-how” to cope with such circumstances. Through my experience though, the truth is that these people also feel uncertain about doing things for the first time. They too, like you and me, can mess things up.
The only difference is their “attitude”. A person with confidence understands that they will have to try new things, or have to deal with tempestuous circumstances in life. But they approach these situations by thinking about all eventualities and preparing for the different permutations that any given problem may present.
It is their attitude that ultimately makes all the difference. Your conditioning and life experiences shape how you deal with confidence. This is perhaps why I have always tried to surround myself with people and environments that help me become more confident. This is an active choice, on my part. But the early foundations of this, however, came from my schooling.
Today, October 21, my alma mater, Penang Free School (PFS), celebrates its 200th anniversary.
Founded by Rev R.S. Hutchings, PFS is the first English-medium school in
Southeast Asia, and is the oldest recorded school in the country. Notable alumni from PFS include the first prime minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman; the first chief justice of Singapore, Wee Chong Jin; 1935 Nobel laureate Dr Wu Lien-teh; iconic Malaysian film star and musician P. Ramlee; and, the list is long, varied and hugely impressive.
I went to PFS from 1984 to 1988, from Form One to Five. During my time there, we had a formidable headmaster. His name was G. Krishna Iyer. Physically, he was a diminutive gentleman with a whimsical moustache. But he packed a powerful punch. As students, we’d run helter-skelter when we heard the sound of his shoes as he did his twice-a-day circuit around the school to keep a keen eye on things.
He was a no-nonsense type of guy. A serious disciplinarian, who took his job with extreme gravitas, Mr Iyer would have no problem giving any student, or for that matter, any teacher, a public dressing-down. He subscribed to old-school management.
But what left an indelible imprint in my mind is that he successfully instilled in all of us a tremendous sense of pride, that we were students of a great school with historic relevance.
Mr Iyer was a former student of PFS himself. The man was relentlessly passionate about excellence and drummed it into our heads that we must walk tall as PFS students, and that the world was waiting for us to come out and make our mark on it.
As 16- or 17-year-old boys, this message was, by and large, lost on us “schmucks”. But his message was so strong and recurrent, that I reckon it got entrenched in our subconscious minds. The things I learnt at PFS, and with this headmaster in particular, have kept me in good stead throughout my career and life.
I have faith in my own abilities and have positive yet realistic expectations of life. I can tolerate failure because I have schooled myself not to always need the approval of others. I am able to see the funny side of things even when I make mistakes and have to deal with misfortunes. I work hard at making myself feel good, and I have spent my work-life focusing on making others feel good about themselves.
My attitude towards everything I do is predicated on a strong sense of confidence that I can cope with whatever that is thrown in my direction. And I have no doubt this has come partly because twice a week, without perhaps fully appreciating its meaning, I sang with great gusto the words: “Let us onward to win and new laurels gain, Free School for the brave and for the true.”
I have classmates from PFS that I continue to connect with. At the time, we were a motley crew of teenagers wrapped in a bundle of raging hormones, grappling with becoming adults. But today I count among my dearest friends, Farez Rahman who has a PhD in computer science, and lives and works in London for local government; Loh Keng Jin, a senior manager in one of the world’s biggest multinational companies, responsible for millions of dollars of revenue; Kevin Lim who heads Southeast Asia operations for a global brand; Mohan Ganapathy who runs a successful manufacturing plant, overseeing hundreds of employees; Alvin Ung who is an accomplished author with his critically-acclaimed book “Barefoot Leadership”; Feisal Dzulkiflee who is the global IT planning manager for one of the world’s largest oil companies; Daniel Rajkumar who is a plantation manager responsible for thousands of acres of prime plantation; Raja Azlan Adam who is a director of a pharmaceutical company and is based in Paris; Ch’ng Han Peng who is the CFO of an organisation in Indonesia; specialists like Dr Sunder Ramasamy, Dr Adrian Tan, Dr Andrew Lim; entrepreneurs and technocrats like Chris Gan, Rizal Faris Mohideen, Tan Yik Ming, Balvinder Singh, Tan Wei Khang, Quah Hock Soon, Rosli Suparlan, Diljit Singh, Michael Chin Kok Weng and list goes on. As much as we have all achieved in our careers, when we gather, we just morph back to being a dodgy mob of old friends with a shared heritage.
None of us knew what we could accomplish when we said our goodbyes at PFS. But because of the attitude instilled in us by Mr Iyer, our teachers and by just being students of this grand institution, we left with the confidence that whatever happens, we can handle it.
Happy 200th anniversary, Penang Free School. And, thank you for giving me an attitude of confidence.
The writer