| Being a management student is a contradiction in itself for someone who is geared more towards the intuitive, sensitive, and emotional, despite no doubt very righteous claims of business people as being part of the more "creative" lot. What sparked my thoughts is a very legitimate personality test that I took, called psychotic. As much as I am drawn to these supposedly revelation-full tests, like most people I have never developed much respect for them - not only out of dreading the results but more so because of issues with the pretentious nature of the very framework on which these gems of entertainment are built on. You are pushed into categorization within one dimension or another, one segment or another, one profile or another. You are either pretty or ugly, an extroverted excitable social butterfly or an introverted freak lost in a world known to yourself only. You are either an astronaut, a musician, a social worker or a chef but never all four. From a psychological perspective, you will try to follow the pattern of the profile you know you are boxing yourself into, or will you instead customize answers so to balance out the results to end up falling in a safe middle-range or screw up the system completely. In marketing, one of the first step is to segment the market according to variables. As a marketing major, I have of course developed a taste for these segmentation practices for the sake of direction, clarity and overall business success. But of course this is not about trying to showcase my understanding of marketing or my disdain for personality tests. This is about realizing that the fundamentals of becoming a better person, lectures I have subjected myself and a few - fortunate or not - listeners to, is daily discouraged by my field of studies, or possible future occupation, or thing that I will dedicate a serious portion of my energy and life to. For example, the art of listening, truly listening in the sense of receiving and responding to the message as originally intended by the transmitter. Students are proud when they can dodge a question just the right way to seem to have answered it. Approving nods shake the room when a quirky student catches the professor on that one word he might have used wrong. How can one listen without selectivity, when such peer, societal and institutional setup for biased, excuse me, critical, thinking encourages them daily to do the opposite? And then we wonder why girlfriends or boyfriends complain that their significant other "never listens". They do, but only to what they want to hear, or to what they think you want them to hear. I feel slightly innocent to be putting such serious thoughts into a common and routine thing like school, but I believe they lead to even more worthwhile matters. Such has, I am finding myself becoming a more logical person, reasoning that it is the superior state. As mentioned before, one can hardly simultaneously be a severe detail oriented planner while embracing spontaneity and the bigger picture. Business schools, clearly favours one direction: distribution of free agendas on the first day, enforcement of tight project deadlines and praise given for facts-based, rational case cracking. Most critically, as school and career choices takes center stage at this current stage of my life as it should, the resulting thinking patterns, or even the very decisions, have tainted onto other dimensions of my life such as personal and emotional, in the form of self-contempt rationalization. For example, when I reach for a multigrain bagel as opposed to whipped-cream covered chocolate pancake, do I really want to be healthy or am I an unsuspecting victim of applying my own rigid situational analysis. When evaluating "traits" that I find attractive in men and women, am I being sincere to myself about it, or do I merely THINK they are attractive? Should “traits” even be a consideration when instinct screams differently? In a moment of part-delusion, part-boredom, I once created a Hoover's Online company profile style snapshot of who I am as a person. I also tried to uncover weaknesses and identify opportunities by scribbling into quadrants that looked awfully a lot like a SWOT table. More and more, I am excessively rational in my decisions, choosing what is best over what feels right sometimes. Is this the right approach? I admire people who are strong enough for keeping true to themselves and not letting schooling influence them to the point of doubting who they really are. After all, I do believe schooling is not synonymous with education, however, how does one manage four years of conditioning to a certain way of thinking? The absurdly scary part is that it seems to be considered perfectly normal, and even desirable. Adapt or die. The question then becomes, is there any reason why I would not want to become industry standard? Or maybe I am simply experiencing that very human effect of resistance before surrender. Naturally, this leads to thinking, is there a way for the two to co-exist? I believe there is. But of course, like all good things, adaptability and flexibility do not come easy, and is at the pre-condition of constantly seeking improvement and re-evaluating your position on your life path. And by committing to do so, one sometimes is engaged to make choices, rational ones once again, that will help the direction one is set on taking, or at least not contradict it. But then again, we all have a taste for the wrong, the forbidden, a little evilness that if surrendered to may or may not cause disruptions in varying degrees of severity, with mine staying for now at the level of sincere wondering about my motivation in decision making and the origins of my character traits. On the topic of rationalization, is it a derivation of mere school process? Or is it a compilation of life experiences so far? Or is it a late blooming of my natural pre-disposition? In any case, I will not settle to finish a questioning without finding some patching for the void created, or an answer. No matter its source, I guess it all cumulates into finding the right balance. Balance is a universal themes of all philosophical teachings, in different forms and under different names, yes, but always an unmistakably solid foundation for guiding human behaviour from economic equilibrium to the yin and the yang. Balance seems to be the only truly perfect state, bitter-sweet chocolates taste the best, have professional ambition, but have a life as well, anions and cations in a chemical cell just to name a few. Is it too much to ask to believe in such a thing as thinking with your heart and feeling with your mind? If not, I would like to apply this to everything in life, please. Writing is such a relief that cannot be described in words, ironically. But most of times laziness overcomes the sudden moment of inspiration, and only times when really, genuine questioning almost physically overcrowds my brain in such a way that I feel a compulsory need to express through words do I write. I wish I was Dumbledore and owned a pensieve.  |
