Having confidence, learning curves and Mirela Pasca's vault

Hello again everyone. Here's the funny thing, I am headed to Singapore in a week and there's an issue that I find it a lot easier to talk about to my regular readers and even strangers on my blog than with my own family. I didn't blog much this week - well, I did publish that last post about the Irene Clennell case yesterday but I had been in a difficult place at work. There's only so much I can divulge because it would be unethical and wrong for me to give out too much details, but I can still talk about why I am in a strange place at the moment - and why I wouldn't want to talk to my parents about it. I had started with this company almost a year ago: I took up the job after I took that very long trip to America last summer and by the early part of this year, I had become rather good at my job. And then things started to change the day I went to the Henley Regatta - now whilst I was having fun at Henley, they had a meeting in the office and decided to change the strategy and game plan. I'm going to use a lot of gymnastics to analyze the situation as that's how my brain works.

Well, that was back at the end of June and in the last two months, I've been moved to a completely different role and they want me to do something totally different. I had a feeling that this was coming as I had heard talk about it, but it was just so easy to ignore it. After all, accepting the inevitable would mean taking me out of my comfort zone and making me climb a whole new learning curve. I had spent much of this week studying and learning so many new things, to prepare me for this new role in the company. Is this a bad thing? Only if you look at it from the point of view of having to climb a new learning curve: when I told another friend who was also in corporate finance, he told me, "dude, that's a big promotion. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth - just take it and say thank you very much." And I was like, "I was perfectly happy doing what I was doing, I was good at it. Now they wanna change my role just as I had hit my stride." To which he replied, "and why do you think they are offering you more money?" I said without thinking, "I was perfectly happy with the amount I was earning, it is a helluva lot more than most people in London. But no, I can't have my old role back because they have changed the strategy, therefore I just have to accept that the boat is sailing is a different direction and adapt."

Oh and there's then the negotiation of my pay deal - I wasn't happy to be yanked out of my comfort zone, so we'e going to renegotiate my pay deal and there are three components to it: a basic, a bonus and commission. I'm asking for more money and because I am about to go to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand for a 4 week long holiday, I have agreed to start those new negotiations when I get back. That negotiation is weighing on my mind: but I know the directors are so crazy busy now I just agreed to kick the can down the road since I'm about to go on holiday anyway. I know the negotiation can go two ways: there's the money now or money later dilemma, otherwise known as the classic delayed gratification choice. My gut instinct is to ask for more basic and a bigger bonus, but I know they want to offer me a much better commission package. You see, if I get more basic and a bigger bonus, I know I will be guaranteed the money - but if they offer me a better commission package, then they make me take the risk and only pay me a lot more if I end up selling to this brand new client base we are targeting with our new strategy. I am risk averse: hell, I'd gladly stick to my old role as I know I can deliver but that option is not available. And if you want me to work on a new market, then I'd rather have the money up front, as soon as possible please. And quite frankly, I don't know if that's the right thing to do.

For a businessman, I'm rather risk averse actually.

If it all works out, well, I could easily earn an obscene amount of money - if, it all works out, that is. If it doesn't, then they would fire me and get someone who can do the job. I have access to our trading system and I can see that someone just got paid £160,000 in commission for one deal and well, that's the kind of deals that my bosses want me to bring in. I had been bringing in a steady stream of deals of modest sizes and I keep saying, "hey it all adds up!" But no, the bosses are getting tired of that and want me to forget the small fry and start catching the big fish - the multi-million pound trades. I will be selling to a new client base that I have little experience with and to be fair, when I started last year, I knew nothing about the product - but I did the Mike Ross thing (it is a Suits reference) and just memorized vast amounts of information about the product and entire sector until I knew everything there was to know about trading this product. Yeah you can take the boy out of Singapore but you can't take Singapore out of the boy: that's what we do in Singaporean schools, we memorize vast quantities of information for our exams. In Singlish we call that mugging, though in the UK a mugging refers to a robbery - but I digress. It is one thing to memorize information about a product, it is another to sell it and nobody is going to invest with me just because I know every technical detail of the product. I knew enough people in the industry to get me those modest investments, but I feel somewhat out of my league now that my bosses want me to play at a totally different level. Whilst this is really quite exciting, I am also quite daunted by this if I may be totally honest.

So whether I like it or not, I've been told, "Alex you're doing this and you're going to love it as you're going to make so much more money" And I didn't get a say in the matter. Allow me to share with you a story that started when I was 15, in 1991. I was a gymnast with an unusual vault, for those of you who are gymnastics fans, I did a half on, one and a half twist off. For those of you who have no idea what that means, just know that it was original, quirky, but not that difficult skill. I was proud of it though as it was a skill that I had taught myself whilst everyone else trained more traditional vaults. I thought it was my signature move but that year, I kept finishing outside the medals with my quirky, original signature vault. My new coach in 1992 took me aside and said, "you're learning a Tsukhara, no ifs, no buts, you start today. You wanna be so special, go dye your hair blue or get a tattoo, but you don't mess around with stupid vaults like that and finish 4th or 5th in the finals. That vault may have been okay in the 1970s but not today." I did as I was told as I didn't get a choice in the matter - I won the vault finals that year and vault became my best event. I became one of the best vaulters in Singapore in the 1990s. Even when I had a bad meet, I could still always win the gold medal on vault. Would this had been possible if I kept on doing my original, quirky, unusual vault that wasn't worth much to the judges? No. I would have been at best remembered as the guy who did something unusual but never won. Sometimes you just have to do as you're told when you're being pointed in the right direction. But whilst we're talking about vaulting, allow me to share with you a video from 1990 featuring Romanian gymnast Mirela Pasca when she famously scored a zero on vault.

Pasca had been one of the best vaulters in the world at that time, but in that 1990 meet in Glasgow, she ran past the vault three times and didn't perform her vault. As you can see from the video, the moment she missed her first vault, her confidence evaporated. She was merely going through the motions when she tried again and by the time she was going to try it the third time, I would have thought that she might have attempted a much simpler vault than the one she had trained, just to make sure she didn't score a big fat zero, but her mind was so frazzled by then that she simply crumbled under pressure. Pasca was on the Romanian national team at the time which was one of the best in the world at the time, so we know she was an amazingly talented gymnast. But even the best in the world can crack under pressure: it is one thing to attempt the vault and fall on your face or your bum (see montage below), it is another to fall apart mentally to the point where you can't even bring yourself to perform. I wonder what was going through her mind at the time - but there's one thing I know as a gymnast: if you ever let any self-doubt creep into your mind, then there's no point in even attempting the skill in the competition. If you go into a vault thinking, "I might land this, I might not, I hope I get lucky" then you're definitely going to fall. The only way you can perform well is if you completely believe in yourself and even then, sometimes that's not enough. So you may perform well if you believe in yourself, but you're almost certainly going to crash if you don't believe in yourself. It is one thing to learn the skill, it is another to perform it when it really matters.

I know this principle only too well as a gymnast - that is why I don't want to return from my holiday and do what Mirela Pasca did in 1990. I don't want to fall apart mentally just because I freak our or lose confidence in myself. If I want to at least run towards that vault thinking, "I'm can totally do this" without a shred of self-doubt and if I fall, so be it, but at least I am not going to doubt my ability to do this. So here's the thing: my parents don't know what I do for a living (that's right - they have no idea), they just know that I am employed and earn pretty good money, but the details, they don't know. I don't know if I even want to raise this issue with them because I would expect anyone to hear this story to at least offer me some form of encouragement, to rise to the challenge and make me feel a bit more confident about climbing this new, steep learning curve. My wonderful sister is good at that. But my parents have never ever once encouraged me before - that is especially weird when I look at the way they shower my nephew with praise and encouragement for doing the most basic, simple tasks like eating his meals. Go figure. I want to avoid the disappointment of their lack of interest by simply not raising the topic; but conversely, if I don't raise the topic and tell them that their son is getting this big promotion and raise, then can I blame them for not knowing what is going on with my career if I am the one deliberately withholding information? But they are so uneducated and stupid, I don't even know where to begin to explain what I do to them: it will be like trying to explain advanced calculus to a cat. How can I reasonably expect them to react in the correct way when they simply don't understand what I am telling them? I wonder if I am even being fair to them in the first place.

What would I like? In an ideal world, I'd love to tell this to my parents and for them to react positively and encourage me: but I know exactly how they are going to react. They would be nervous about me failing and losing my job - they would ask me to beg my boss to allow me to continue doing the role I had been accustomed to and could deliver confidently (and as explained, that's not possible, the company has changed strategy). Then I would be hurt because I would take it as a sign of them having no confidence in me. Why go through all that when I can just have a pleasant time talking about something else? Yeah there's a part of me that is scared and nervous about the challenges, but I'm also the gymnast who gave up the quirky, unusual vault to train the more difficult Tsukhara vault in order to become the champion. There's a part of me that thinks, this is what I do, my gymnastics training has prepared me to have the right mindset to take on challenges like that. And then there's another part of me that thinks, holy shit what if I fail? I don't want to fail. There's really nothing my parents can do to influence the outcome, but a bit of encouragement would be nice, though I know I'm not going to get that from them. That's why I am probably just going to discuss this with my two sisters and my brother-in-law because I know they will surely understand and empathize what I am going through and offer very helpful advice.

What is the point of telling my parents anything anyway?

But I'd like to end by talking about Mirela Pasca again. After her meltdown in Glasgow in 1990 when she scored a big fat zero for vault, you might have thought that the strict coaches in the Romanian gymnastics programme would have dropped her like a hot brick, because it doesn't matter how talented you are, if you can't rise to the challenge and handle the pressure of competition, then you're no good to the national team at major competitions. I can imagine them saying, "shame about young Mirela, so incredibly talented but not mentally prepared to cope with the pressure - maybe she can go join the circus but I am not sure if she can even handle that pressure of performing for a big audience." But no, Mirela was given a second chance after Glasgow, she stayed on the programme and even made the team that represented Romania in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where she picked up a silver medal. So there was a happy ending to the story: it looks like she did learn her lesson after what happened in Glasgow and became a tougher, more mentally resilient gymnast for the experience. Perhaps I shouldn't be too worried about making mistakes after all, as long as I can learn from them and become a better person for it. I'd like to end with a video from Mirela winning her silver medal at the 1992 Olympics, so she did rise to the occasion when it really mattered. Leave a comment below and thanks for reading.