Learning to live without

Which, if any, is the more difficult to cope with: A disfigured physique or a traumatised mind? "More difficult" being the operative words. I ask because I am reminded of an incident that was recounted to me some years ago.

It concerned a young employee, fuelled with enthusiasm and ambition, poised on the first rungs of the corporate ladder - a fresher, in other words.

We've all seen how a brand new recruit sails into the office like a pretty paper boat set afloat on the seemingly placid water, but by the end of a week, if not sooner, a wetness has begun to insidiously spread through and overtake the neat, well-ironed, well-folded majesty.

Alacrity and ardour are threatening to fold up, too. Expectations, somehow, are not being met and matched - either by the employee or by the company.

In between the two - the worker and the firm - is a sea of colleagues made up of waves of various sizes some of which roll up to one gently and offer a little lap of friendship; others that come crashing in at high tide, leaving one with horrifying memories of spray and spittle, making one feel perilously unsure of oneself.

This particular employee's misfortune was to be tossed into an ocean filled with gigantic breakers. She clung desperately to her vessel - which was a first class degree in marketing.

Months of agony and agonising went by, as the situation continued unchanged. Meanwhile, she lost two things: her appetite and a fair few kilograms.

She took the route from slim to anorexic, riding the dishevelled vehicle of stress. Still, she hung on. Her best work was somehow always downplayed.

"It's just not good enough! These targets you're meeting are unbelievably low," was the consistent refrain that issued from her immediate boss.

Then, purely by chance, she happened to accept an invitation - from a young corporate client she was actually in the process of marketing a product to - to attend a seminar-cum-lecture.

Fascinating

It's fascinating how life can sometimes spin so exclusively on a whim. The young corporate client, in due course, became her husband, but that's just one half of the "whim" thing.

The other bit concerned the lecturer himself - one of a host of motivational gurus emerging from the west.

At his lecture, he showed the most repulsive-looking slides of hideous facial and body disfigurements. Gigantic, bulging warts that covered one side of the face entirely and so on.

Parallel to this, on a second screen, he projected "difficult", sometimes seemingly "devastating" situations one usually encounters in the workplace.

The young, dispirited recruit could immediately identify with the lecturer's second screen.

But it's what the lecturer said that helped alter her perspective and took her, in five more years, from the brink of the abyss to nearly the top.

"Look closely at these hideous disfigurements," he commanded. "Someone was unfortunate enough to be given them. Now say to yourself: 'This is one thing I can live without'. Once you acknowledge 'one' thing you can live without, you can easily deal with 'a hundred' other so-called 'difficult' things you have to live with."

She probably went back to office the following day, a pretty, neat boat once more.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.