WW EP01: Divas x Dhruv

The main ideas from this information are: - Anxiety and fear of failure are common, especially in the workplace. - Journaling can help in understanding and addressing fears and anxieties. - Anxiety often stems from a performance-driven culture and the fear of not getting approval. - It is important to be aware of and manage anxiety in order to perform at your best. - Being vulnerable and accepting oneself can help in dealing with anxiety. - Mentors and coaches can provide guidance and support. - Different techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, and spending time in nature can help manage anxiety. - Each individual's journey and tools for managing anxiety may be unique. - The first 60 days at a new job can be particularly anxiety-inducing, but anxiety can persist beyond that period. - It is important to focus on personal growth and not get fixated on proving oneself to others. I would say if you can just be the best version of yourself the way you believe that you can be, then just do it. Sharpen your axe all the time. But don't do it out of fear. Don't do it out of anxiety. Don't do it out of wanting to please someone. The fear of failure is so high from a very young age that it is deeply embedded in us. The fear is coming from seeking of not getting the approval and that is something that we are trained or it's in our mind that is unacceptable in our life. Journaling is very important. Just write down what scares me, why does it scare me and what can I do about it. If you answer these three questions honestly, you'll feel more empowered about anything. In the piece where you wrote, what can I do about it, go deeper into that. Finally, I have got this great job and everything seems good. Except this lingering feeling of anxiety that I am unable to shake off. It's been almost a month that I am working at this place and I still feel anxious the same way I felt on day one. Before starting work, I was anxious whether I'll be able to prove if I am the right fit for the role that I have been hired for. And now, I am anxious whether I'll be able to deliver as per the expectation of my manager. This anxiety seems to pile up whenever I think about how I will make a mark in this organization. I know this role will help me a lot in my career growth and I really want to grow fast. But you won't believe me, I have had sleepless nights thinking about what more I can do beyond my new role and responsibilities. How can I connect with my team members where everyone is new to me? The work culture is different. Everything is so different. What can I do to be more visible to my bosses and a lot more? At times, I feel stressed out. From transitioning dilemmas like quitting or switching your job to the dreaded career breaks, from make or break situations like negotiating CTCs or handing feedback between peers, to people related complexities like having a difficult manager or a toxic work environment, to Workwise, we cover it all. Hi, welcome to Workwise with Naukri, a show to help you work better and accelerate your career. I am Deva Gupta. I am Neha Sundhu Batra. I am Deepak Parikh. We will be your podcast host, helping you better tackle those work woes. Whenever I have discussed this with my friends and family, they have told me that feeling out of place, anxious in the initial phase is but obvious and normal. They said, you shouldn't be so harsh on yourself. Everything seems like an uphill task when you start something new. People are generally resistant to change, but things ease out eventually. But is there a way to tackle this first 60 days of anxiety better so I can be my 100% and deliver my full potential? Have you been in a similar situation? What did you do? Yes, you want to showcase your best in the first 60 days at workplace, but when anxiety kicks in, things don't go as you had planned. Welcome to Workwise with Naukri. I am your host, Deva Gupta. And today's episode is about how to tackle the first 60 days anxiety at workplace. So take a deep breath and relax. Because to help us understand this theme better, we have invited Dhruv Bogra, who has a career spanning over three decades, working in different capacities as Senior Retail Director at Adidas, Head of Global Retail Experience at Rollin Field, Chief Operating Officer at Wellspring Group and currently the Country Manager, India Southeast Asia for Forever New Clothing. He is also an author of two books, an adventure cyclist and a certified life coach. Combining his corporate experience with lessons learned in the wilderness, surviving alone in some of the remote and dangerous parts of the world, Dhruv has interesting perspectives to share on this topic. Dhruv, I'm really happy to have you on the show. Thank you for having me on such an interesting topic. When I joined my first company, I was really anxious. I had happiness that, oh God, you know, I have got this new job. My parents are happy. Everything was good. But then when I was at the workplace, don't know for some strange reason, the first week I was kind of anxious. So maybe it's a new place, but then that stayed for long. How was your beginning? I mean, how was your first 60 days at your first job? It's a very normal emotion or state of mind to go through. Anxiety is about being super worried, whereas stress is something else. And anxiety manifests itself in different ways. My first 60 days was way back in 1989 when I joined Tata Tea. So here I am, a young 21 year old, just graduated from Bangladesh for college in Delhi. And I transport myself with one trunk all the way to a distant land far away from things that I'm familiar with. And it was definitely when I look back, certainly I was anxious about many things, about my job, because I knew nothing about tea plantation or agriculture. And I landed up in a very remote part of Assam. So it was a pretty dark moment in my life. So yes, the anxiety is valid. It's normal to have it. But on hindsight, I would say it's also important to reach out to others who are around you, your peers, your co-workers. When it comes to working, I mean, a job that you had been wishing for, you finally got it. But on that day, maybe in the induction program, the first few days, the 10 days, anxiety is still there. Where does it stem from? So anxiety has its roots in, especially let's talk about our context, our society, our ecosystem. And I have also been thinking about that because I've been through anxiety all my life. You know, it's not that I have somebody who's never dealt with those anxiety, I deal with anxiety every time. And but it's important how to manage it. And you can only manage it once you're aware of where it is coming from. It's coming, broadly speaking, it's coming from the performance culture that starts from kindergarten, you know, when we are at school. So it's the way our education system is built, it's created, and then the expectation of performance and marks and grade sheets. So the fear of failure is so high from a very young age that it is deeply embedded in our mind. Always wanting to seek approval, for example. I'll give an example. So I was in boarding school in Sherwood, and I was not a very strong child, I was not a very strong boy in the sense physically I was not strong, so I used to always get bullied. And so what did I do to compensate for that? I had to own the respect of everybody is to start winning in games. Okay, so I started participating in individual athletic track and fields. So what happens is that we try to compensate for a fear of failure and acceptance from people but trying to do something else. Okay, sometimes it does work. So and we then carry those behaviors of always wanting to win, of always wanting to prove ourselves, seeking a boss's approval back to work at every stage of our life. So the fear of failure is coming from seeking of not getting the approval. And that is something that we are trained or it's in our mind that is unacceptable in our life. And that is a self-generating thing. So if you fail once, then it generates more anxiety. So you want to perform better the next time and that has its own levels of stress. So it just builds on it, but you have to break out of the cycle coming from a childhood. And it's very important to recognize the events that happen in childhood influences for the rest of our life. And for example, for the longest period of time, you know, one of the schools that I attended, we were punished in very bizarre ways in the sense that we had to sit on a gravel field with on our knees, holding dumbbells for one hour. The pain that you feel in your knee from the gravel stone after 10 minutes is embedded in my brain till today. It's tattooed. Okay. And in the sun. So for a long time in the beginning, maybe first eight or 10 years of my life, I brought the same work ethic to work. And I realized that then I realized this is not the way to deal with it. Someone who has a presentation the other day, and he knows that there is his boss and there's that fear, right, where whether I'll perform or not, whether I'll survive over there or not, whether my thoughts, my ideas, my perspective will be accepted or not. And that anxiety, a lot of uncertainty is there. So I think for any role, be it a newbie, or maybe someone who has spent a few years in the industry, or maybe a lot of years, it is there with them. I mean, initially I thought that only the freshers who haven't seen the corporate jungle, they are scared. Listening to you, I sense that it is not just for the freshers, but for anyone. Yes. Is it true? Absolutely. Even though you said I have three decades of experience, but also I have three decades of anxiety. Okay. In my business, and I've been a sales guy all my life. So it's a function that is full of stress, because you're needing having to meet daily targets, weekly targets, monthly targets. And now it's also profitability targets. So when you're a young manager, you don't have to worry so much about profits, unless you're into a different field altogether, unless you're in finance, or maybe you're in stock trading or something like that, or you're running your own business, perhaps your startup. But as a regular guy, as a sales head, say managing even a region, normally we don't really get into profitability of the organization. So yes, when you have to deal with that, then it is about the fear of failure. And I have been dealing with it all my life. And I am, but now I'm dealing with it in a much better way. Just do your best. That's it. Don't bother about what anyone is going to judge whether your best was good enough for them or not. Because each of us lives and runs our own race. Great point. You know, whenever someone looks at their boss or the super boss, they think they're all sorted. But just understand that, you know, every individual goes through their share of anxiety. Yes. It's just that they have learned maybe how to hide it, or maybe how to manage or deal with it. And the biggest one which I took so far is about being aware that, okay, this is happening to me and also trying to map it to your childhood. In my childhood, I come from Dehradun. Yeah. School called Brightlands. So Brightlands is a place where they are very precise and it's very competitive. Everyone scores a 99% and then around. So proving yourself every single time, you have to be so accurate with your answer that if one word here and there, you lose half a mark. And today when I go for my sessions or presentations or any dealings, I have to prepare really hard that, okay, in case if I lose that half mark also, or maybe any kind of thing can happen. So giving that, you know, the perfectionism has been since childhood and it makes me anxious. So this understanding of where it comes from gives you a lot of peace that, okay, it is not something I am born with. There is some deformity. There is something wrong with me. It is coming from that place and you will get, okay, okay, peace, peace. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we all should strive to be the best version of ourselves. Some people call it perfectionism. Some people call it always being a workaholic maybe. But I would say if you can just be the best version of yourself, the way you believe that you can be, and if you love doing what you're doing, then just do it. Sharpen your axe all the time. But don't do it out of fear. Don't do it out of anxiety. Don't do it out of wanting to please someone, but to leave your legacy behind in the world. Is it also about that right now we might speak that we should not be anxious. We should accept ourselves. I think anxiety is still a lot of friction. A lot of friction that how can I accept that I am anxious. I'll be labeled as weak. Oh, look at this guy. He is so anxious. We can never talk about it openly. If supposedly in the interview, they ask you, hey, what's your weakness? I'll go with those typical answers that, hey, I'm a workaholic. I do this, this, this, this. But I'll never see that, you know, there are moments when I am anxious. Acceptance by people around is not there. How does one deal with that? Try being vulnerable. And you gave a very nice example of an interview. Four people are there and they ask you, and of course, we come up with these answers that we have read on Google, maybe, on how to address tech questions and things like that. Just be yourself. And if you're anxious, say I'm anxious. Now, if they don't select you because of that, then you're anyway joining the wrong organization. Because when you join them, that's the kind of culture they have where they don't allow people to be themselves. So it's good you didn't pass the interview because you chose to be vulnerable. You don't want to work in a company in which you don't want. We can't be vulnerable. We can't be ourselves. Sooner or later, you'll quit. Right? It doesn't mean that you have to be, you know, foolishly truthful also, like how do you take meetings that take them in their pajamas? You know, you don't say that. I mean, we can be proper about something, but definitely you need to, you have very rightly said, it's important to be vulnerable. Just like I'm being vulnerable at the moment. You know, I'm revealing things to you I never told anyone. I'm purposely being vulnerable. Otherwise, I don't think I can make my point adequately enough. I mean, this word vulnerability has stayed with me for a long time. Today, I am here with you recording this podcast. My voice is being heard. And there's this guy who has stammered all his childhood, was struggling with his speech clarity and I was hiding it. But when I share that, okay, see, this is who I am. And that's okay. This is a part of me. And that day I was so confident talking to my colleagues, talking to my boss, take a moment to look at the greatness that you are born with. I would focus on my voice. So every single individual has that kind of uniqueness, which can be overshadowed if we just focus on our damn insecurities and what all things that we have been through. You went through anxiety, you figured out a way to deal with it. You must have had some colleague, maybe some junior, some senior who's anxious. Yes, many of them. How do you handle those colleagues? The level of awareness that you might have had, or the level of introspection that you went through, helped you make peace in a certain way. Yes. But when you have to work as a team, and you have an anxious colleague for no reason, you know, it's like, hey, we can all work together peacefully, calmly. When there is one person raising the alarm, and always in that panic state, which just spoils the environment and even makes you also in that same zone. So how do you handle the situation? Each person at work is different. Though they may be suffering, or they may be exhibiting signs of anxiety and stress in different ways. Some people are communicative, some people are not. But as the job of a leader, it is important to be able to read your team well, and look for those signs where the anxiety is now creeping into productivity, and also leading to burnout, and perhaps a lack of focus. But broadly speaking, through my career, whether I was a young regional manager managing, say, other kind of people who are more field operatives, or as a middle manager, or as a senior CXO now, it's important to have a one to one connect with your team, understand their motivations, understand their peers, and mentor them and guide them. Because that's what happened with me when I joined TIG, when I was filled with anxiety. And there's this guy who, big, martial guy, who even kept a python in his home. He just took me under his wing, you know, and he mentored me, like almost like an elder brother for the first six months. So, and that kind of solidified my confidence as well. So when I became country head, was I ready to be country head? I've never been a country head before. So can I say, yeah, I was 100% ready to be a country manager. I wasn't. Maybe I was 70% ready. But I had to read, I had to educate myself, I had to talk to people. I even took on, you know, a coach for some time to deal with my issues. And that helped. So you have to find a coach. Now, everyone may not want to go to a coach or pay for one perhaps. But there's always a nice mentor in the family, an older cousin, perhaps an older brother, I had an uncle who was the managing director of Union Carbide before I joined Tata Tea. You know, I sat with him for a while when I was 20 years old and he had a lot of pearls of wisdom to share with me. So if we have to look at a step by step way, what I gathered in this conversation, the first one is accepting that it is okay to have anxiety, everyone has it. The second one is that you try to identify where it is coming from, map it, what was the incident, what all happened, just write it down, maybe that can help. Yeah, I think journaling is very important. And you know, one of the things that I thought about, that I want to speak about in this podcast is, you know, start a journal and just write down what scares me? Why does it scare me? And what can I do about it? If you answer these three questions, honestly, you feel more empowered about anything. In the piece where you wrote, what can I do about it? Go deeper into that, you know, for me it was, I'll meditate. I started meditating and now I meditate for an hour almost every day. And it really helps. And I've varied my meditation to various types of things, which really opens up the mind in many ways. So that's one technique. There could be many other techniques. For example, I'll do deep breathing exercises, maybe somebody will say I'll do yoga in the morning or somewhere. And one of the best antidotes to stress and anxiety is just go and sit in a park early in the morning, or go take a small walk, maybe half an hour, 30 minute, 25 minute walk, hear the birds chirp a bit. Even in there is pollution, you can hear the birds chirp, they're really resilient. They're not anxious. They're not worried about pollution like we are. They're still going about their daily business. So all these things, these are all techniques that will work for different people, differently. Everyone is different. Like I say, there are 7 billion people in this world. Each person, there are 7 billion personalities. Though scientists like to cluster them into 7 types or 10 types, that's more for convenience. But at the end of the day, we are 7 billion people or 8 billion people with 8 billion personalities and the tools that you adopt are going to be unique for you. These are just indicators of the path you can follow. This is interesting. Interesting. In the first 60 days, any person will have these thoughts, you know, like proving himself that I have to just showcase who am I capable of. They're expecting more of me. I gave those answers in the interview that I do this, this, this, this. And I'm not able to get those results. The culture is different. All those things are there. Yes. Once this phase is over, and if anxiety stays, you know, like 60 days, how do you handle that? Maybe I can say that what you shared so far with the meditation and others. That's what the anxiety is. My major focus is that anxiety at the workplace where in the first 60 days, we have those thoughts as we discussed with respect to proving ourselves. So can you say that the solution could be where you are okay that I'm not proving it to anyone? Can that help? See, where do the 60 days come from as a number? You know, there is no average Robin Sharma saying you can change any habit in 21 days and then change it to 68 days a few years later, you know, very confusing. So I think we tend to get compartmentalized into these days of thinking. And yes, they're important benchmarks because that's how society measures us, our performance. When I say society, it's the government, it's companies, it's organizations, it's communities, right? So yeah, they are important milestones for sure. But I would urge everyone not to think along it just being a 60 day or 90 day thing. Anxiety will come to you at every phase of your life. It will always be there. Just like you breathe, anxiety is part of our day to day life. Unless you achieve Nirvana, even when you go to the caves to meditate and say, now I'm going to be a Himalayan yogi, you'll be anxious, I hope nobody disturbs the meditation while I meditate. Okay, so the issue is anxiety will never escape a human being. The issue is, is it interfering with your state of happiness, your state of contentment, state of fulfillment, state of being productive. If it's really severe, then I would really suggest that you meet a counselor. Because a counselor is equipped to help you or maybe a coach who's equipped to help you move through the journey of finding expression and sort of being able to overcome anxiety on a more sustainable basis. So true. I'm at peace. A lot of reassurance, a lot of clarity. I'm sure the listeners out there would have felt the same. I hope they do. I hope. Thank you Dhruv. I mean, I was anxious before this podcast. Now I'm not. I'm kind of sure that the honesty with which you shared your insight, your journey, I'm sure, I'm damn sure that people will resonate with it. And they will be much more acceptable of who they are, where they come from, what is going within them and continue to navigate through the path. Dhruv, I wish I had this conversation when I was having those sleepless nights because of anxiety. Certainly, the first 60 days are challenging and the way you highlighted gives me a lot of peace and clarity. Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Workwise with Naukri. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. If you did, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening to this. Also do share this with your friends who would benefit from this episode. I'm curious to know how you tackle the first 60 day anxiety at the workplace. Is there anything that we can learn from? You can share your perspective on Twitter and LinkedIn and use the hashtag Workwise with Naukri. Three of the best perspectives will get a special surprise from us. So go ahead and share your perspective on your social media. Thanks again for listening to this episode. Next our host, Mehr Sindhu Bhadra, will bring an interesting episode on his being a boss, a thankless job. I'm Pratap Gupta and you are listening to Workwise with Naukri, a career podcast from Naukri.com produced by Vine Studios.