Not everybody can dominate the work scene as well as balance the home life, but Girley Agrawal makes it look entirely too easy. Apart from being a mother of two sons, she is also the head of the CG Education Foundation. The Week caught up with her to learn about her career and how she manages to balance both work and personal life with such finesse.
Learning on the job
“I joined the work force when I was 18, but I had no idea what I wanted to do back then,” she recalls. This indecision is what made her dip her foot in teaching and auditing before eventually deciding that neither option were for her. She had done a secretarial course, so when she came across a vacancy at Chaudhary Group for an executive secretary to Binod Chaudhary, she thought it was right up her alley. What she didn’t realize was how challenging it was going to be.
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“Even if you think you are prepared for a job, you really aren’t,” she says adding that there are skills that you only learn while on the job, and since they are all different, nobody can really teach you those. She was in her mid-twenties when she started and recalls how waking up every day and thinking about going to work was a chore in itself. She says that one of the main reasons for not wanting to go to work was the fact that she didn’t have any clear goals for herself. “I have always referred to myself as a rolling stone, and I figured I would roll on to the next job if things didn’t work out here, and in the beginning they weren’t really working out,” she recalls.
She didn’t realize that being the executive secretary of a busy man was going to be such a hard task. He was a perfectionist and she wasn’t meeting his expectations. In six months, although she claimed to be a fast learner, she still hadn’t been able to pick up pace and kept making lots of mistakes. Every morning as she left for work she used to think that there was someone out there who was better suited for the job, and one day when she felt like it was enough she handed in her resignation.
“I don’t know what he saw in me back then. Instead of approving my resignation, he decided to transfer me to another department,” she recalls. And this was one of the best things that ever happened to her. Her stress levels went down substantially and she finally found a place where she could learn at her own pace and still had room for errors. She slowly stared to learn from her mistakes and, within a year, she found herself handling a lot more than she could and discovered she had a knack for managing things as well.
She was later transferred back to the executive office and when her former boss saw that she was making fewer mistakes and was confident in her work, he steadily began increasing her responsibilities. At the manager’s position, she constantly found herself googling things she didn’t know how to do, and running around asking for help from other people, before she finally got a hang of things. She decided to never said no to anything that came her way and continued to impress the president of Chaudhary Group. Soon she found herself filling in for her boss at important meetings he couldn’t attend and people from other departments started coming to her for help, and since then there has been no looking back.
Family first
“Work can be stressful and you have to find time to spend with your family so that you stay sane and grounded,” she says. Agarwal is a hands-on mother who makes sure that she is there whenever her two sons have things they want to talk about. “It is important to strike a balance between both aspects of your life and to not let one suffer because of the other,” she adds.
She loves to cook and tries to prepare at least one meal at dinner to add a mothers’ touch to the food that has been prepared. It also gives her time to switch between her office persona and the person she needs to be at home. “We aren’t big fans of going out to eat and would rather spend quality time at home, where we don’t have to shout across the table to be heard. It’s not just a health thing,” she reveals. She also finds cooking to be very therapeutic. The practiced motions put her mind at ease and she often finds herself in the kitchen during holidays.
Apart from spending time with the family to wind down, she likes to start her day by tending to her garden and watching the flowers she planted bloom under her care. She also usually reads motivational books or listens to music during this time. One of her guilty pleasures is reading fiction. It helps transport her to a different world and makes her forget her worries. “But my ultimate guilty pleasure is food. I could eat nonstop, without regular exercise, and still not feel bad about the calories I consume,” she says.
