SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — You go through life being placed in different situations.
Some situations are not as friendly or as straightforward as others.
You get moments when your beliefs and values are tested.
Before I left for Australia, I worked in a high-pressure job for a TV station for several years.
I was placed in several situations, ones that make you question your integrity and values. Ones that make you think that maybe it’s okay to just disregard whatever values you learned in your life — because it is for work, for your career, for your future.
There were several moments when I had to turn my humanity off so I can go through the job and what was expected of me.
But at the end of the day, you do have that nagging feeling inside of you, questioning why you weren’t being authentic with yourself.
What I think I should have done is stay true to what I believe in, in any industry, in any country.
It is much easier said than done.
You move into a different country, and again you question yourself, your skills, your strength. You question if you’re good enough in the country’s standards. Do you change your beliefs, your values to adapt to the country?
It hasn’t been that easy trying to adapt to the changes of a different culture.
In my line of work, I have witnessed other journalists being loose with their rules and values — in the Philippines and in other countries.
There’s that joke about a person going out to buy vinegar, and bumped into a microphone, and decided to be a broadcaster.
I don’t have control over other journalists but I do have control over what I do, and how I deal with things.
A great example of this is during my first serious job here in Sydney. I got accepted as an IT journalist — the focus is on stories related to information technology. Topics I had no knowledge of. I was clueless. But it was a job so I accepted it.
I struggled for a couple of months trying to get to know the topics, the technology, the people and more.
Eventually, after several months, I got the hang of it, and I was given a huge task. For two months, I was covering an international story in the courthouse. I went in there every day, listened during the court proceedings, and filed my story at the end of the day.
In those two months, my stories were followed and published in the New York Times. I was commended by the IT journalist media watch as the only unbiased piece of news gathering for that topic.
I was ecstatic but also, I was amused.
Why?
Because they commended me for sticking to the basics of the job.
Other journalists put their opinions into their work even if it was a news story. I just placed the facts from both sides and nothing else. What was so mind-boggling about that?
I found out that I gave out the impression of being stand offish, of not wanting to share my trade “secrets”.
You see, I sat opposite every other journalist who was covering the court case. I was always on my own, typing away on my laptop, focusing on the proceedings.
They probably thought I was a snob, or I didn’t want to share information. The reality was that I separated myself because I needed to concentrate even more than the other journalists who were there.
For one, it was harder for me to understand the Aussie accent.
Second, unlike the other journalists there, I had no IT background so I always had to double-check the meaning of everything.
Third, I didn’t want to share any of my work because I wasn’t sure that I understood what they were talking about.
So I had to go back to the basics — only write what actually happened with no opinion injected because I wasn’t sure I had an opinion about the very complex legalities of the case.
In the end, going back to the basics and trusting what I’ve learned in the past about my job is what gave me the outstanding results that I got.
Now I do freelance work and professional blogging, and even if I am not in a high-pressured environment anymore, I still need to remember to keep my integrity in everything that I do.
That means going back to my values, my beliefs, my honest assessment of what I’m doing. If you keep going back to that, you can’t go wrong.
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Author’s email: kmlevis@gmail.com
