Date: November 13, 2021 I will be on block leave next week. It's a 5-day consecutive leaves.
We are required to take block leave because as much as possible, our company wants us to unwind a bit from our 1 year worth of hardwork. It is mandatory and we have to conply accordingly.
In preparation for my block leave, I have conducted a Knowledge Transfer session with my colleagues. The purpose of the session is to familiarize them with the stuffs I usually do during my shift in APAC business hours.
Part of my duty being the APAC shifter is to attend in a ready for business call and report the status of each of our supported applications.
It is important for me to relay the correct steps and techniques to my colleagues because I've already set a bar to our Senior Managers. My manager told me that his boss walked to his desk one day and told him how he was impressed with the way I present our applications' status during that ready for business call.
And that impression I made for our team is what I wanted to maintain eventhough I am not the one to represent our application in the call. I wanted the senior management to see our team being one of the best team in our department.
Every Friday njght, we have a team meeting where each one of us has to present the work that each of us has done all throughout the week. Of course I reported the knowledge transfer session that I have conducted with my colleagues. And while I am talking I told my boss that we did a "mock presentation" so to give my colleagues an idea on how I am presenting our applications in that call.
Everything's okay from my end. I am confident with what I am discussing at that time.
But then suddenly, my Boss repeated the word "MOCK" into which I have pronounced as "MAK". So I elaborated what I meant which is like a practice presentation..and then he corrected my pronounciation and hence I learned that the correct pronounciation should be "MOK". They all laughed at me.
Will you be able to guess what's my reaction?
Do think I felt embarrased?
Did I feel ashamed?
Did I feel so low?
Did it make me upset?
Nah! None of the above!
I actually joined them laughing at myself because since I learned how to read english, I read "MOCK" as "MAK" instead of "MOK".
My colleagues actually teased me and ask me who is my english teacher back then? Is she or he still alive? Is she or he still in the Philippines? And guess what? That quick moment of mispronounciation made them all laugh and I felt like everyones mood has changed. Ahahaha. And you know what? I felt proud of myself because I became my colleagues medium to enlighten their mood during our team meeting earlier. I was the first called out to present and I am happy to share that the happy mood stays with us till the end of our call!
Eversince, during our one on one, I told him that I am not really good in grammar, I have poor twisted tongue, and I am not really good in english in general.
But you know what? my Boss always is always opposing it. He keep on telling me the opposite of it, and he even told me oftenly that I am a star!
That's how my Boss motivates me which help increase my confidence in speaking english.
So to you my fellow readers and writers who are also struggling in speaking english, don't loose your confidence! It doesn't define our skills. It doesn't define how far we can go or how high we can soar.
I know english is our universal language but we should never expect that all of us is fluent in speaking the same, because we do have different mother tongue.
Oh! by the way, this reminded me of my experience here in read.cash during my first few weeks in here.
I tried to submit my article to a community, but then the moderator rejected it.
And you might already guessed what's her or his reason for rejecting it. The moderator said that my article has lots or grammatical error. He or she even suggested me to use grammarly to check and correct those grammatical error in my article which I also followed. I tried to resubmit my article on the same community after I fixed the grammatical errors via grammarly but for some reason, it is not working already.
I can imagine the situation and if that happened to me, I would have done the same thing. I'll laugh with them. Really, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, you being so good at other things is already more than enough.
Most people make grammatical errors and I see nothing wrong with it as long as it is understandable. Academic materials, formal papers, legal papers and all that are an exception of course.