Cathy's blog

When things go wrong — and they will go wrong (hi Murphy) — what do you do?

Resilience is such an important skill, but we really shouldn’t need it nearly as often as we do.

How often have you said afterwards: “I KNEW that was gonna be a bad meeting!” (or dinner party, or Zoom call, or... fill in the blank)

What if you would have listened to that inner voice warning you? What could YOU have done differently?

And yes – I knoooow.

THEY should have done something different too.

But they didn’t, right?

But what if, instead of waiting for the drama (that you predicted!!) to unfold, you would have taken action yourself?

Who could you have talked to? What actions could you have taken?
How could you have made it a great meeting?
How could you make the next meeting interesting, energizing, enjoyable?
 

“The best things in life are on the other side of a difficult conversation.”

— Kwame Christian


At the start of the pandemic, when no one had any clue what the best way was to do things, we were still doing some in-person training sessions for small groups.

For one specific session, I noticed that I had the same thoughts on repeat in my head. “I hope they’ve booked that big meeting room, and not the small one. Surely they’ve thought of that...”, “I’m gonna be so pissed if they didn’t book that big room.”

On and on and on and on...

As soon as I noticed just how much energy this endless chatter was causing me, I picked up the phone and called the team assistant to ask.

They booked the small room 😒

But of course, she could make the change for me.

This small action (even though I felt like *I shouldn’t be the one taking care of all these little details* ) spared me an afternoon of discomfort and frustration.

And a lot of circular thinking beforehand 😉

If you want to increase your impact, then you need to have the *difficult* conversations.
Including the ones you believe shouldn’t be necessary anyway.

You’d be surprised just how often a small initiative from your side can prevent you from having to clean things up afterwards.

You got this!