Voices@Athena--Kha Ngo Tan
Voices@Athena--Kha Ngo Tan

"The moment you understand your value, you ensure that you have the right to go away,"

Kha Ngo Tan 
Banking Manager
Saigon Thuong Tin Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Sacombank)
Vietnam

Executive MBA Batch 2021

 

THE RIGHT TO GO AWAY

Life seems very hard to many people. Some people do not understand why all the bad things happened to them. Maybe all the things that happened to their life come from a reason – they didn't have the right to go away.

Imagine that you have to negotiate with someone to achieve a very important contract. If you lose, your own company will be bankrupt. Let me illustrate more clearly this circumstance: you walk into the meeting room, tenser than your opponent. That is why you tend to accept  more negative covenants than usual. In the opposite circumstance, if you do not have any pressure and many suppliers want to cooperate with you, you can stand up and leave the meeting anytime you don’t wish to accept any unwanted covenant. That is the right to go away.

More examples: you are working with a toxic manager and you are not the best employee. So, he tends to despise you, making you suffer. In this case, you don’t have the right to go away since you don’t have the choice to change company, you have a family to feed and it is hard to find a new job. 

So, what is the right to go away? That is the right to stay away from anything, anyone bothering you. If you want that right, you must build yourself with knowledge, skills, experiences, money, and other resources. Lacking that right might lead you to bad things and these things will destroy you. If you are armed with the right to go away, people will respect you, or at least they won't despise you. 

But, how can we retake the right to go away? The answer seems very simple: you have to rebuild yourself. Begin with knowledge, ask yourself how long you have not learned or studied something new. Next, regarding relationships, how many friends or new people have you met recently? Do you expand your network of friends?  And ending with the skill, do you learn new skills in your job? It's very clear that when you upgrade yourself with knowledge, skills, and relationships, you will retake your right to go away. The moment you understand your value, you ensure that you have the right to go away, nobody can force you to do anything you don't like. 

However, I want to make clear that I don't persuade people to go away when something seems to be not their expectation.  I just want people to keep their right to go away if they cannot negotiate. 

In conclusion, if you don't want bad things happening to you, you have to have the right to refuse that - the right to go away. At least, when everything seems worse than you expected, you still have another option, and still, believe in yourself. Building ourselves with skills, experiences, relationships, and knowledge is not redundant, it is vital. Like the commander in the middle of combat, if you want the enemy to take a bow, you have to make a shout.

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