Winding Down
On the final evening of any multi-day trip, I sit down and recap and figure out if progress was made or not. On a business development trip, it’s very easy to determine if progress was made and relationships were advanced. It’s a lot more difficult when working on staff issues or trying to move forward corporate programs.
I find myself smiling a lot more on the last day of my business development trips, and I find myself scrutinizing my activities to a great extent on the final evening of my internally focused activities…it’s a lot harder to define and perceive success on the trips where I’m focused on staff work. I find my emotions mirror my activities too – I achieve incredible highs when I focus outward and upward and I experience some pretty significant lows when I focus inward. Since I recognize this now, I try and schedule my activities to (as much as possible) mix outward and upward facing activities in with my inward focused events. That way I can minimize any time I’m at an emotional low and pull myself back up to some level of emotional high through my scheduling of activities.
Nirvana for me is a full week of outward and upward facing events – client visits, relationship development, client team meetings, and operating company visits. These are invigorating. I end each day (typically) smiling.
Purgatory for me is a week of internal audits, internal reviews, back office transactions or board meetings. They wear me out. I’m mentally destroyed by the end of any such week and it takes me quite a bit of time to recover.
I was in the home office this week, but each day I mixed in an outward facing meeting with a full slate of inward focused discussions. The outward facing meetings were awesome this week, thus tremendously moderating the typical deep emotional dive that would come from the internal activities.
After more than 25 years of post college work, I’m still learning so much about how to optimize my excitement in business and how to schedule my activities to keep me at a peak level of engagement and involvement. We all perform at a much lower level when we’re deeply discouraged or mentally worn down…I’m definitely that way. I perform best (IMHO) when my optimism is overwhelming and my excitement about tomorrow’s slate of meetings far outweighs any burden from current business events.
Tonight I’m smiling…great meetings today; great excitement about the future; great optimism about the chance for change; and great hope for a multi-billion dollar decade ahead. Most importantly, I’m getting on a plane and going home…that sort of trumps anything else I may be feeling at this time!