The Friend Who Saw My Potential Before I Did

I had been drifting in Coimbatore for two years after a career start that had gone sideways - in a role that was functional and beneath my capability and that I had been staying in partly from inertia and partly from a lack of confidence in my ability to do anything that would be more suitable.

Kavitha and I had been friends since university and she had, across those two years, maintained a position about my professional potential that I had been receiving with the polite skepticism of someone who suspects they are being flattered. She was not flattering me.

I understand this now in a way that took some time to reach. She had a specific and grounded belief in what I was capable of that was based on her actual observations of me over four years of close friendship, and she expressed it not in the vague encouraging language of someone who wants to be supportive but in the specific and operational language of someone who has thought carefully about what she is saying.

She said, at a dinner when I was 26: you are not doing anything that uses the part of you that is actually interesting. She then named that part specifically. She then told me about a role she had seen that she thought was closer to it.

I applied, with significantly less confidence than the application required and considerably more confidence than I had possessed before the dinner. I got the role. At 29, three years into work that is genuinely mine, I think about Kavitha's belief with a gratitude I am not sure I have adequately expressed.

The belief was not the thing that got me the job. My capability got me the job. The belief was what got me to apply.