Log kya Kahenge

Waking up to a feeling of joy and satisfaction, feeling like I’m one goal down. It’s a beautiful feeling of being validated and appreciated. I’ve been feeling like this recently as I got my skincare brand registered, I started building a skincare brand that was organic during the lockdown, I got rejected for a trademark earlier and I spent months working on a new name and a new mark and now finally I feel validated and I wake up to a feeling of excitement and immense pleasure and a great energy for work. I feel much better and much satisfied with my work. I’ve had a similar feeling when I received an award for launching a skincare brand at such an young age, a few day after that news, I felt super excited to get back to work and felt like its going ahead and all this time that i am spending is worthwhile and somebody else also feels like its a good thing, what I’m doing. While it feels good, I keep thinking should being validated be a good or a bad feeling. Do I always need someone to validate me or my work? Is it not enough that I’m satisfied with what I’ve done?

Is it just me or do people just impose their opinion on us as if I should do what they say?  

Other than professional validation I’ve had to deal with personal validation of how I dress, the kind of things I post. In the past every little thing that people said would always affect me, even a simple thing like uploading my picture on Instagram, many months back I’d ask a few people if it’s okay, does it look good. I’d always seek validation. I didn’t want anyone saying anything bad about me or about what I’m posting or any other personal things. But overtime now I feel a lot differently, I think now I’m a much more confident person. I think I have outgrown my fears of what people will say and I just keep reminding myself that either way people will say something, sometimes it maybe bad sometimes it maybe good, but I really need to remove the ‘log kya Kahenge’ factors while making choices and decisions, it shouldn’t matter. 

This is a good reminder and a great example of ‘log Kya kahenge’ :

I really like this example as it brings out the problem we face everyday, even most of the times I’m upset and my friends are comforting me one on the things is are you upset because somebody said something, it’s such a common question. But people don’t realise their words can affect the other person. People’s opinions are always weighing us down, we’re always wanting to make changes according what they say, like this image- they listened to what people commented and changed what they were doing. 

I think we are also not wrong to do as per people say, we’re brought up in environments where we value a social status that there are some things we can only do at home, behave certainly at home, behave certainly with work people.

I have come across professional validation and appreciation a few times in just the last months. I have had a few incidents around validation at work or professionally. Majorly is about my work on social media and getting more involved in the family business. Being invited to the family business meetings- actual having to share my opinion on the same. Like I mentioned earlier, one of the main reasons for me waking up to a feeling of being validated is that my skincare brand just got registered. 

Another feeling of validation that I get work wise is that my family wants me to get more involved in the family business, they have given me an entire department to Handle, they have started giving me a set of staff to train and also I got invited to family business audits and heads meetings, I would go other times also, but this time I had my own audit sheets of the resort and I was asked about my opinion on certain things. I feel responsible, happy and validated. I feel like my opinion is valid and its taken into consideration. This is an amazing feeling to be validated professionally. 

Other than getting involved and validated in the family business, in my own business, this being our first month of launching the products we set up a stall at an exhibition 2 weeks back, it was a whole new experience for me, I was very happy with the results. This was our first month of actual business and getting a good response made me very happy and felt good about myself and felt excited about what is to come. This was the first time I sat at an exhibition stall selling my skincare or any product in fact and this was an amazing experience. I think the main reason for my happiness is at the end of the day when I’d go back home with that days collection and be appreciated for it, was what gave me the most satisfaction and gave me a feeling that I can do better tomorrow as the exhibition was for 3 days.

I think professionally there is no end to seeking validation and appreciation, everybody is always going to need it and by now I’ve made my peace with professional validation. Any form of appreciation at work feels like a validation of my efforts and it gives me motivation to do more and better. I have experienced it in this conflexion also, the minute someone said that I like this aspect about it or this is nice but I could work on this also, it gave me so much more energy into putting this draft out better and structuring it. So now I take professional appreciation and constructive criticism and work on it. And to look at personal validation, I feel much better about it now, I just pick up my phone and I’m able to post anything, I care a little less about it now. I just keep in Mind no matter what I do, people will always have something to say about it, might as well do what brings me joy!