Tears and Meetings

I had an important meeting this morning.

I usually don’t work on Mondays but this issue had been bothering me for quite some time and I knew that the Managing Director only had a few available hours in the week and I knew the matter could not be put off another week.

Or I might have blown up.

For someone as emotional as I, conversations about a discomfort with current project setup tend to be complicated. Most often, by the time I get to make the appointment, I’ve been obsessing about the problem for quite a long while. Since I tend to involve my emotions and make a mountain of small issues, I always need to step back and disengage my feelings. I need to make sure there is a real problem before I start asking people to notice it. Not to undermine myself, I am pretty observant and intuitive, so I do often notice real issues before they become major disasters.

The problem is, I have a real hard time turning off my feelings. I remember how my emotions totally spiraled out of control by the last year in my previous job. There were so many unfair, unprofessional and unacceptable situations that I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the problems. The lack of prevention and resolution was mind-boggling.

A most common scenario would be my walking into my manager’s office to professionally bring up an issue that needed his help. My manager was so dense and so incredibly bad at understanding people that he would choose the worst possible way to handle the situation and within minutes I would either be extremely frustrated or in tears.

The thing is, no one will take you seriously if you’re crying. People tend to take crying as a sign of weakness. While I agree that crying is not professional and should not necessarily be done in a manager’s office, often times tears don’t mean that there isn’t a real issue beneath all the strong emotion. But crying isn’t going to get you the results. And it all comes down to resolution. If you’re not in your manager’s office to get the issue resolved, you should be talking to friend, who’s going to listen to you and offer words of consolation.

I’ve learned that the best way for me to control my emotions and ensure that I stick to the problem at hand is to write things down. Now, before I go to a meeting, I make a list of points and valid complaints. I walk in with suggestions on possible tracks of resolution. I try to come up with examples to back up my arguments and recommendations. And I keep telling myself that it’s not personal. It’s not about me. It’s about the project.

So today, I walked into the office, stated my case and we had a productive and professional conversation about it.

And I didn’t shed a tear.

Previously? Unconventional.