Adversity Challenge 2

Over the past two weeks, I have been challenged to four individual tasks in order to learn more about myself and push my limits. I have struggled, laughed, and grown a-lot. Below I have documented some of what I did and what I discovered about myself and what I can do.

I would not say I have any enemies, but there was one person in my circle that I hadn’t really interacted with before and was not sure where we stood. This specific challenge requires a lot of vulnerability as my own and someone else’s feelings were in the mix. Trying to befriend someone, especially someone who you may not gel with at first is hard! It was the most difficult out of all the challenges I selected because it is so personal and required really putting myself out there. As I have grown up though, I have matured a lot in understanding that not everyone will be my friend, just as I may not want everyone as my friend. As I already have this mind set, the rejection hurts a little less. I think it will be extremely important as I move forward in life and in the workplace to maintain this thinking.

Update: we are now friends, we just needed to find what made us mesh

Applying for reality TV is surprisingly easy. I looked up “reality TV application” and the first result was for the Netflix reality portal. Here it allows you to browse all the shows you can submit an application for. You are allowed to select as many as you want, so for fun I chose Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo, Get Organized with The Home Edit, and just to be extra cheeky, I applied for Love is Blind. Just as mentioned by someone else in class, I won’t really know if I get rejected for probably weeks or months. This challenge was the easiest out of all of them as I didn’t have to talk to anyone, it was all online, and I would feel pretty neutral if not HAPPY to get rejected. I mean I don’t really think being a reality star would be for me, let alone on Love is Blind. From this task I was able to reflect and understand the pretty obvious observations I had; 1.) it is a lot easier to get rejected when you don’t care about what you are going for and 2.) when you are not afraid of rejection, applying or trying random things can be sort of fun and thrilling. You will never know unless you try.

I am a tutor for an accounting and finance class and what started as a way to make some extra pocket money each week, essentially became a full time job, having worked sometimes over 8 hours in a day as my students booked additional time with me as their exam was approaching. Thus, my solution was to try and host a webinar cram session last week that all my students could attend at once so that they could all get help and I could lessen my individual session workload. Unfortunately, over the next few days, my students began responding to my text letting me know that they would prefer to stick with our 1-on-1s.

This rejection was not only disappointing since I had already put some planning hours into the cram session, but also stressful, as I knew I would have to teach so many more individual sessions. Reflecting back on the rejection, I learned that I need to respect myself more and increase my assertiveness within my correspondence in order to achieve the results I want.

In terms of respecting myself, I should have set boundaries with my schedule instead and book time off to actually eat, get more sleep, or even do things that I enjoy. Despite this being Rejection Bingo, I actually did want my students to participate in my group session as it would have greatly decreased the number of individual sessions as I could attend to all students in one go.

When sending my text to each student to let them know of the webinar opportunity, I included in the end that if they did not want to participate in the group session, that that was totally okay and we could continue our individual sessions. This pretty much set me up to fail as I gave my students an easy out because I didn’t want them to feel I was pressuring them to participate in something. For this reason, I want to improve on being more assertive in my correspondence so that I get a clear message across and hopefully achieve my desired result.

I called my internet provider to negotiate a lower bill. As a kid I used to have phone anxiety (what an odd yet universal experience I have come to learn) but have grown out of it over the past decade. The one thing that I still find near impossible is to ask for things over the phone, especially from customer service agents. For example, Apple incorrectly serviced my computer so I had to report the problem back to them. Despite having been pretty severely inconvenienced, I felt bad having to call customer service and let them know of the mistake the genius bar made (again I have come to learn that not wanting to inconvenience others is a very gen Z thing). So now calling my student house internet provider, I felt the same pang of uncomfortableness because I was going to be taking up someone’s time. Long story short, my decreased rate request was denied. I don’t think my feelings of guilt for calling customer service will ever really go away, and honestly, I am okay with that.

The rejection didn’t really sting since I already advocate for myself to companies despite not wanting to burden customer service. By this I mean I still negotiate to ensure I am getting fair prices for services and that the product or services are up to the quality I expected. In this case, the rejection was warranted, but only because I had already negotiated the price of my internet down a few months ago. I seem to have the most success with getting what I deserve from companies in terms of prices or fixing errors by showing respect for the agent helping me, while ensuring I am still advocating for myself.

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