Fighting With Grace

A quote which has been resonating greatly with me recently is Ernest Hemingway’s ‘courage is grace under pressure’. It has made me reflect on what constitutes strength, what is tenderness and what it means to be authentic to one’s own self. Working in a high-pressure environment, often in meetings with powerful and authoritative people, this changed the way I looked at myself, my relationships with people around me and how I navigate difficult situations. Let me narrate one such incident.My team and I had worked long and hard on an assignment for the client. However, the end results of the assignment showed that the strategy being adopted by the client would backfire. This was a bitter pill that no one in the management wanted to accept. Further, this was not something that the team was comfortable sharing with the management. So, everyone skirted around the truth. Then when we had to address the elephant in the room, there was pin drop silence in the meeting. When we presented the hard facts, the seniors in the room didn’t take it well. There was a little bit of yelling and some angry outbursts. However, it took us all our strength to stand our ground.In a polite but firm fashion, we finally convinced the management that this is something that had to be shared with the client as well. Again, it was a test of our integrity. Should we mask the truth? Who would go present it to the client? Why not look for alternatives? Or should we blindly go with what the client suggests, despite our homework suggesting otherwise? The team was timid, but sure that the idea would backfire. So, we again egged the management to present the contrary findings to the client..The D-day of the big meeting with the client came around. It was the who’s who of the organisation and a motley bunch of us in our late 20s and early 30s. Some of the stalwarts on the client side had work experience that far exceeded our ages. Still, we were given the space to present, and we stuck to the bitter truth. Once we presented our side of things, there was awkward silence in the room. We did all we could to present our work without showing any sign of disrespect or insult to the original idea. We were respectful of the client’s seniority and collective wisdom, but we had to make a point.Then one of the client-side leaders spoke, ‘Why do you think so? What could be the alternative?’ Luckily, we had done some extra work and presented other ideas that could eliminate the need for the first one. Still, the room seemed tense, and no one was fully convinced. One of the other team members on the client side said, ‘It looks like you guys are too young to know such things. Why don’t you go and think this over again? Also, send someone senior for the next meeting.’We were mortified. It looked like the end of our careers, to be sent back by the client, our ideas all but rejected. But the first leader spoke again, ‘No, I see their point. This is more complex than we thought. Let’s brainstorm on this together.’ That convinced us to try our luck a little more. We tenderly suggested more ideas which were initially rejected by the client but made all the more sense now. One of those ideas got picked, it got polished by the minds in the room and when it ultimately got implemented, it bore stunning results..We knew none of these eventualities would fully happen. While in the room, only two things mattered. Were we standing by the truth in the face of power? Were we doing it without hurting our relations? This certainly was grace under pressure. Neither did we back down; nor did we compromise on our truth. Often when we think of courage, we imagine battlegrounds and soldiers. Little do we realise that we are soldiers everyday fighting battles in our own minds. In our external worlds, this could reflect as choices that we make in our classrooms, in our relationships or in our boardrooms. Yet the important thing is when pushed to a corner, do you choose to be authentic, truthful and kind? If your answer is yes, then know for a fact that it is an act of courage.

Fighting With Grace

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