Counselling

I was born into a normal family with Dad, Mum, 3 sisters and younger brother. Life was normal and ordinary until my Dad met with an accident at his workplace, resulted in his left leg being amputated at the knee. I was eleven years old then and in Primary 5.

Thereafter, life was hard. With the condition running into my teenage life, I chose to study in the Polytechnic instead of the junior college as I felt that my industrial and economical worth would be better even if I could not make it to the university.

Being introvert during the secondary school days, I began to open up when I entered the Polytechnic and participated as a member of the Engineering Society. The society was managed all by students in the Polytechnic. I was well recognized for my effort and contributions towards the society and was sponsored by the society for a leadership course at the National Youth Leadership Institute.

During that 25 days’ course, my whole life began to open up. Not only I was trained on self confident, leadership and motivation, counseling was also part of course.

After the course, I started to apply what I had learned to organize activities for members of the Engineering Society. One of the activities organized was a hike in Pulau Tekong over the weekend for 200 freshmen in 1977. The knowledge of leadership and counseling came into play as I started to motivate, encourage and support my fellow schoolmates to join us in our self believed goals and direction. It was very fun thing to do then and I was very pleased, contended and satisfied when all the freshmen gave good feedbacks about how they had enjoyed the trip.

During my national service, I was posted as an instructor to the School of Basic Military Training. Even though in the military, discipline is the key factor to drive whatever needs to be done, occasionally, motivation techniques came in very handy when situations demanded.

One of the most recent encountered of counselling was with my final year students at the Polytechnic doing their final year project. Students with underlining problems exhibit behavioural pattern namely apathy, lateness, ill discipline, no respect for authority etc

Motivating them was a bigger task than the project itself. I could safely state that I saw their motivation came back after 17 weeks of hard work and counselling. Currently, they have the highest respect for me not because I am their supervisor or lecturer but I have earned them.

Real cases but students’ names were changed to keep confidentiality:

Student Ken was appointed the project leader by the team. As usual, he did not performed well in the first few weeks. He even acknowledged that he had been slacking given the fact that all his team members were slacking.

Being the first student in my target for motivation, he began to confide to me about his problems after weeks of small talks with him to gain his confidence. He had problems communicate with his parents and was very bothered. We spent hours together talking about his problems and develop solutions together for him using some of my previous experiences. Combining his effort, he had since been able to communicate well with his mother and will be working on his father. He also displayed a very positive attitude after that.

Another student, Levin was totally not interested in his work in the beginning and would come for the weekly project meetings, treating it as a pastime. I noticed that he was very quiet, kept to himself and had not been socializing with his team mates. He always had no confident in his work and always need confirmation to affirm his decisions. He had been behaving in this way until his group members started to protest against him after 16 weeks together.

From then, he was assigned to set up the Programmable Logic Control (PLC) circuits but he did not know how to do it and had no initiative to seek help. I had given him countless times of verbal warning and two email warning letters. My last stroke of patient ran out and I gave him an official warning.

At that time, I realised from his Care Person that he was actually a reinstated student and his bad academic performance had been related to his mother’s passing on due to cancer in 2005. He had been wondering why these things had to happen to him and had always in denial and depression.

Upon realizing, I immediately talked to him to try to get him out the situation and he was crying during our discussion. I knew that after my emotional talk to him, he had come to terms with his mother’s death and he will continue to move on in life positively. He had even promised me to tell his mother that he will start his life anew at her grave.

The next day, when he came to the Polytechnic, I knew that he was a change man with his cheerful expression and positive attitude. What a relief!

I want to give thanks to the opportunities given to me to be able to use my acquired counselling skills to help others having problems or in distress.

Discipline

Discipline is always needed in a successful life.

Discipline drives the way you live your life, directs your emotions, regulate your relationship with others and maintain your mental and physical health.

If you are discipline enough to wake up an hour early every morning, then this extra one hour can be used for many gains in your life eg exercising to improve your health, execute planning for the day etc. Similarly, you must be disciplined enough to do the right requirement of physical exercise and not to over do it.

In financial aspect of your life, one must be disciplined enough to spend within one’s means. You can always be disciplined enough to encourage yourself to be happy with just simple things around you without letting envy of high value products disturb your simple taste.

Good discipline also involves regular fixed time for food, sleep, relaxation and enjoyment.

It is well known that an average person needs 8 hours of sleep per night. It is also known that the liver starts to recuperate and release toxin between 11pm to 2am and so our body should be disciplined and scheduled to sleep 2 hours before that. Of cause, those with health problems should be disciplined enough to have a good and longer rest to allow the body to recuperate. Allowing the body to rest is a basic discipline everyone must adopt daily so that the body can perform well for the day and the rest of our lives.

Plain water serves the best liquid to quench our thirst. Every body should drink an average of 8 glasses daily and the volume of water can included other forms of liquid intake eg soup, juice from fruits like water melon, beverages etc.

For food, I have recently discovered that fruits should be eaten 1/2 hour prior to soup and the main meals ie rice and dishes. In such practice, fruits will dissolve first as solid food take longer to dissolve.

Although discipline do wonder for everyone, over discipline can result in self damaging, destruction and lead to poor stage of health. When over disciplined, it may lead to deprivation, restriction and pushing too hard on ourselves. One should maintain balance on discipline and enjoy to live life to the fullest.