IT IS JUST A BEGINNING
By: Swaiba Mazahir
Tags: Taking Flight, Lessons, Careers, Journey, Beginning

Emotional Quotient (EQ) is one of the important parts of our life but many individuals fail to develop balanced EQ and this results in an emotional imbalance that causes severe problems for an individual. And that’s why I think it is important to connect and do things just for your emotional uplift sometimes because you have that potential but still you do not even try to get there. Sometimes all you need is emotional uplift from a close one or it could be from anyone. Work is also an important part but sometimes you can’t handle your emotions and it is hard to focus on work. Therefore, the priority should be your mental health. Once you have it back, you will start focusing on your work too.

Me in the first session

Lack of confidence, poor communication skills, and many other things as well drive me crazy and then I found Amal Academy and I learned various skills in this fellowship like problem-solving, teamwork, time management and leadership without authority, and so on. Many people were asking what would you do with these skills. The positivity I have now can be seen in my reply. I replied that If I get a job then I will be going to use these skills there but what if I don’t. I will be using these skills in whatever I will do in my life. I won’t be facing any difficulty in time management in any case because I have learned the Pomodoro technique and that is very effective. In that way, all the skills can be used anywhere for any purpose.

The three months journey was amazing and here we are at the last session of the fellowship which was called ‘Taking Flight’. It was the happiest and the saddest day as well because we all were excited for the activities of the last session, even some people joined before time and those happy faces can be seen from a mile away. We were sad too because we will never see each other’s blurred faces in a zoom meeting. We gave a thank you surprise to our facilitators (Sir Saad and Ma’am Fizza) and showed our gratitude to them.

Giving Thank you note to our facilitators

We were really excited about it and during the first activity of the scavenger hunt, I was in group 1 and we lost. But we were satisfied because we tried hard and applied all the principles of Amal (Amal, Khudi, Kam Kam Kam and Aik or aik gyara) and did our best and we believe in adversity as an opportunity. And the second activity was to portray Cinderella’s story from a character’s perspective and we got ‘Prince Charming’. My team members: Nabeel, Shahzaib, Maham, Ashna, Salman and Hasan were amazing. We enjoyed those 15 minutes because some people never have seen that movie before while some were portraying that story very differently, but somehow we managed and wrote down the story. When shahzaib was called out to tell the story, he told the story in Urdu with real comedy. Everyone was laughing hard and we enjoyed that session very much. The lesson I learned that day was to help each other out, if you know something while others don’t then just teach them and call out to every member so everyone could take part.

It was amazing to just talk and connect with different people, our facilitators provided a safe place and everyone was so comfortable to share their happy and sad moments as well.

Me in the last session

My batch is as amazing as I imagined. My Amal Family is a part of myself. I have the best classmates. I can’t even think of losing these people and that’s why I added them on every social media platform so I will be in touch with them. In one of the courses, we got connected on linkedln but now we are friends. I send friend requests to many of them on Facebook. I have the numbers of each classmate so I could connect on WhatsApp as well. And those who become such close friends are on Instagram. I won’t be losing them because I have added them everywhere.

In the end, we took the final selfie in a graduation cap and that was amazing :)

My batch in graduation caps

I wrote few lines to my Amal Fellows ❤

It’s hard to share

Because it’s only 3 months instead of 3 years

The journey of strangers to friends

Just because of weekends

From the first day till last

They were top class

We laughed, we cried

We shared every emotion with cake and chai

Although we got scared of those ‘cold calls’

But still, they keep excited us all

Even in some boring sessions

Sir saad and ma’am fizza keep us high

We all were broken pieces when we arrived

But we all are leaving this place with hopes high

There’s a lot to share but didn’t have time to hear

We learned the Pomodoro technique with peer

This type of safe place, you will never forget to dare

That’s why you feel sad when your time to leave is near

No matter how much your heart is grieving

If you keep on believing

That dream will come true :)