Easy for you to say…you may scoff under your breath at the topic. Well, the truth is everyone has at one time or the other had a bout of panic attack. My point with the topic is that panic often paralyses us from dissecting and distilling issues properly. As such, we should be intentional about avoiding if even if we come up short once in a while.

I mention come up short because even I who tries to be intentional about not giving in to panic still had a panic attack of sorts a few days ago when my deliverable timeline was looming, yet my materials were not ready…But that’s not really the point of this post.

You see, about three years ago, a few of my colleagues and I enrolled for an international tax certification. I had my first shot at one of the courses and failed. Again, panic attack in retrospect. I had thought the questions to be so difficult that I got disorganised in my time planning. By the time I got to the last question which was to take about 45 mins to answer and discovered I could actually answer it relatively easily, I had just 5 mins to ‘pens up.’ Failed the course by 2 marks. Of course, I immediately gave myself a self-motivational speech on the power of 1 or 2 marks. *laughs.

Anyways, teeth gritted, I re-enrolled for that course and did my darn best to prepare, re-wrote the exam and it was a breeze or so I thought…

But when the results were released, I did not see my name in the pass list. Panic and depression mode set in. You see I did not even contemplate that there could have been some logistics issues. In my head, I had bungled the exam yet again and perhaps wasn’t any good after all.

I got talking to one of my colleagues who also took the exam and boy! I loved her spirit. She did not see her name in the pass list too but immediately said that she was sure that there was some mistake somewhere ‘cos she knew what she wrote in the exam. See confidence…! But, could she be right? I wondered. Well, being the oldest in the pack, I took it upon myself to reach out to the examiners. After all, s/he who is already down need fear no fall in’it?

Bingo! We found out our results were withheld without any notification to us on the mistaken belief that we had not paid our exam fees. Of course, we provided evidence of this and our results were released. My confident colleague and I both passed our exams.

You see, my panic mode had prevented me from seeing this glimmer of hope and but for my more confident younger colleague, I may have been shattered into thinking I was no good, either giving up the exams outright or perhaps re-enrolling for yet another retake.

Bottomline, don’t panic.

Oh by the way, I now have the international tax certification😍

Best,

Adefolake

*image credit: http://www.google.com