June Challenge: Day 25: Something someone told me about myself that I'll never forget (good or bad)

Day 25, Tuesday: Something someone told me about myself that I'll never forget (good or bad)

I actually think this was one of the easiest blog topics of the month, mainly because I tend to take to heart what people say about me and additionally where things are at in my life right now I've been having a lot of conversations about me and where I am going the past few weeks. 

I think the thing I would focus on that I feel I need to change, although that doesn't so much mean it's bad, is that someone very senior to me has told me recently that I'm a workaholic and that I will burn myself out before I'm thirty if I'm not careful. Anyone who knows me would probably agree with that and I'm frequently being told I work too hard. I guess for me it's trying to balance what I need to do with what I want to do and what I believe other people expect me to do. All I know is that burning out is not an option that I wish to consider so I think there definitely needs to be some time taken to reflect on where I'm going and what I'm doing, plus more time spent writing as I find this settles my soul when I'm all over the place. 

However what I've described is not the thing that has hit home the most. Many years ago now I got myself into a bit of a pickle because I did what I believed was the right thing to do despite knowing that other people would perceive that differently to me. For a while I was terrified I was about to lose everything I had worked so hard to achieve but when I was called to account for my actions things did not go as I anticipated. I was asked to honestly answer whether if faced with the same situation in the future I would act differently and I had to answer that I would not. For me what I had done was a matter of principle and conviction so therefore I was prepared to take the consequences. Far from being angry at me the person called on to challenge me over what had occurred turned to me and said that I had the strongest moral code he had ever come across and that he doubted anyone else would have been prepared to sacrifice what I had on the line over such an issue. He then made the point that they knew exactly who they were getting when they got me and that he wished there were more people like that in the world, people who were prepared to stand up and put their head above the parapet when it really counted. 

To this day that conversation remains one that I can recite because I learned a lot about how other people perceive me that day and that you can gain far more respect from people by having an opinion and standing by it than you ever can by just being a "yes man".