ChalkAvenue

Talking. Seems easy isn’t it? You can talk to your parents, your family and to a certain degree your relatives, with much ease and comfort. Beyond that, we normally find it very difficult to communicate with people, especially our community. With people outside of our comfort zone, we normally implode into obscurity, prefer to be unknown, lowering our heads as low as possible hoping that it touches the ground, or hoping that the meeting ends soon.

This is our problem. We just don’t know how to communicate. We are brought up in a culture that does not celebrate debates and dialogue. We are all about obedience, filial piety and ‘talk only when you are spoken to’. Such rules gravely affect our ability to communicate with the outside world, to inform people of our ideas and wants, the opportunity to be eloquent, and generally, the ability to progress in the bigger society. Certain things need to be put in the limelight here.

Why are the children not talking? Well, if we always prevent them from speaking up, engaging in conversation with you, or kill their curiosity for answers with standard responses as - ‘apsal banyak tanya ni? Pergi tanya cikgu laa! Jangan berlagak pandai or ayah sibuk laa!’, surely we can expect our kids to grow up being more and more passive, and prefer to keep mum because all their lives they have been put off by your attitude.

Our prejudices does not help either. By planting in our kids the idea that people outside have an evil design against us, that they are infidels destined to hell and hence should not be worthy of conversation etc, we are essentially putting our children off from engaging with the outside of world. Slowly and slowly, without us realising, we are building ourselves a small, high-walled community who would only talk among themselves and minimal contact with the outside world. This is a recipe for decadence.

Many of us, especially Malays fall in that trap. We bother ourselves with many restrictions on the danger of saying something wrong, the danger of questioning certain things, the rudeness of talking to elders etc, to the point that we lose interest in talking.

In the working world, or in any public setting, the ability to communicate is what makes or breaks the opportunity for you to succeed. I remember my former boss, the late Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee, told me that he turned down many candidates after interviews even though they got first class in Oxford or Cambridge, simply because they cannot express themselves. They just can’t talk. All their days of learning are simply to pass exams and score on assignments. That is not real success in the real world.

In the real world, it is not so much about paper qualifications but how you are able to express and articulate yourself on your ideas. This is much more of an asset to someone than anything else, and is arguably the main factor of your success in work and in life.

Therefore, we need to always try to get out from the comfort zone that we are so used to, and start to build your self confidence to talk to people, and articulate your ideas. You can start small. Start with your friends in class, then of other classes, then start to chat with teachers, the Indian rojak seller, the bilal masjid, your parents, your colleagues, your society members. Expand the list in this manner. Don’t worry if you fumble on grammar or that you fear proposing a ridiculous idea. The fact you are even sharing that idea with them, means a whole lot of difference. Learn from other clan members like Umi who tries hard to pave her own way in society. These are people we should be proud of. So, please try hard because if you don’t, no one or nothing can help you improve.

Fazil