My #Stength Stories
#1 Staying organized
My inner Monica Geller has always been active and there have been a lot of instances where I have applied my organizing skills so here’s a story of one of those instances:
In the summer of 2019, I was planning to go on a family trip to visit my distant relatives who live in Faisalabad. The plan and the itinerary were ready but I faced the dreaded-by-most-people task of packing. The challenge I faced was that we had hundreds of items to sort and pack and only 1 day to do it. Everyone in my family always packs hastily and we usually misplace things or forget items before we return. So this time, I took it upon myself to handle all the packing. I collected everything we could possibly think of that we needed to take with us. Then I sorted them out into categories of items by the “user” and “type” for clothes, accessories, and other miscellaneous items. But the most useful thing I did was to install this app on my phone that allowed me to make a list of the items I had, categorize them, add tags to them and also take their pictures! By doing this, I shortened the time it took me to pack everything a lot but the extra effort I put in into sorting them all helped me in my return trip when I did not forget a single thing. :)
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#2 Public speaking
My university curriculum included a mandatory course on public speaking. The day before its first session was going to be held, everyone received a message that they will have to present a short speech in front of an audience on a topic of their choosing but due to some technical issues some of the students, including me, did not receive that message. When I came to university the next day, my colleagues told me that I have to give a speech in 30 minutes. I was very perplexed and scared at that moment and didn’t know what to do. But I gathered myself and thought of a few things to say. When I came on stage I gave a spontaneous speech on the topic “how to give spontaneous speeches”. I described the exact emotions I was feeling at that moment and put them into words. Everyone was amazed at my topic and how I was able to use my previous knowledge and praised me for my speech. While I know that preparation is an important part of public speaking, that one experience allowed me to build up the confidence to speak in front of audiences in my future speeches, and now I can speak in front of a large audience.
#3 Problem Solving
I have loved solving problems ever since I was a kid. From puzzles to riddles to quests to even reading mystery novels. I have always found excitement in the process of solving a problem. I have applied this super-strength many times in my life but one of my favorite times was when there was a public speaking event/theatrical play event in our college. I volunteered at that event as I thought it would be fun and ended up solving some major problems during the event. One of the problems that occurred was that while giving a speech, a girl who was presenting messed up the display screen behind her and somehow managed to rotate the entire presentation on its side. I was not in the technical team but I knew how to fix that problem temporarily using jugaad. I went up on stage from the side sneaking towards her laptop in my costume (I was in a play before) and used that jugaad to fix the problem. The audience was amused and the presenter managed to use that situation to her advantage and call it a “technical difficulty”. I solved that problem and multiple others including missing costumes, broken speakers, and many others using my problem-solving skills and jugaad methods.