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Aug. 14th, 2015 08:31 amI woke up this morning feeling cheerful and relaxed and generally as if a great weight of responsibility had been removed from my shoulders. This was because one had.
For each Toastmasters meeting, there's one person for running the meeting, and yesterday's meeting it was my turn. The actual meeting-running bit - introducing people, keeping the event flowing, that sort of thing - wasn't a problem, but the role also includes the preparation work - finding people to fill the meeting roles, finding out who's going to be there and who isn't, and so on - and although it turned out all right in the end this time, I always find that part painful and difficult.
Part of it is low-level stuff like the fact that involves a lot of telephoning people, which is something I always dread unless I'm phoning somebody I know really well. (One of the guys at Toastmasters says this is because I have a DISC C personality and C personalities always have trouble with phones because they depend on body language in conversations. He's a professional life coach, so he says stuff like that a lot.) In this case, that was exacerbated by the fact that this was a meeting of the new dinner-meeting club, so I really don't know most of the members yet.
But it's also because planning and arranging the meeting is the kind of large and complicated task that is best broken into bits and spread out over several weeks, and that's a skill set I've never really learned. When I was a kid, the world was divided into things I found easy to do and things I wasn't interested in doing, but I was a smart kid and the pool of things I found easy to do was large enough to get me most of the way through high school, in the advanced stream even, before I started running aground on things I didn't find easy but needed to do anyway. (Ugh, essays. In retrospect, I feel sorry for my English tutor; she was probably good at helping people learn English, but that wasn't actually the thing I needed help learning, and we never got on.)
I'm still getting a handle on the shape of the problem, never mind managing to figure out where I can learn to fix it, and in the mean time what I usually do is procrastinate wildly until the shadow of the deadline looms over me, and then panic and try to get the whole thing done in the last 24 or 48 hours. And, because I'm still quite smart, that often works. Or at least doesn't fall apart too badly. On anything that's really mattered. At least, anything that I wasn't able to convince myself afterward didn't really matter.
And it's probably best not to look too hard at what happens when there isn't a set deadline to give me that kickstart...
For each Toastmasters meeting, there's one person for running the meeting, and yesterday's meeting it was my turn. The actual meeting-running bit - introducing people, keeping the event flowing, that sort of thing - wasn't a problem, but the role also includes the preparation work - finding people to fill the meeting roles, finding out who's going to be there and who isn't, and so on - and although it turned out all right in the end this time, I always find that part painful and difficult.
Part of it is low-level stuff like the fact that involves a lot of telephoning people, which is something I always dread unless I'm phoning somebody I know really well. (One of the guys at Toastmasters says this is because I have a DISC C personality and C personalities always have trouble with phones because they depend on body language in conversations. He's a professional life coach, so he says stuff like that a lot.) In this case, that was exacerbated by the fact that this was a meeting of the new dinner-meeting club, so I really don't know most of the members yet.
But it's also because planning and arranging the meeting is the kind of large and complicated task that is best broken into bits and spread out over several weeks, and that's a skill set I've never really learned. When I was a kid, the world was divided into things I found easy to do and things I wasn't interested in doing, but I was a smart kid and the pool of things I found easy to do was large enough to get me most of the way through high school, in the advanced stream even, before I started running aground on things I didn't find easy but needed to do anyway. (Ugh, essays. In retrospect, I feel sorry for my English tutor; she was probably good at helping people learn English, but that wasn't actually the thing I needed help learning, and we never got on.)
I'm still getting a handle on the shape of the problem, never mind managing to figure out where I can learn to fix it, and in the mean time what I usually do is procrastinate wildly until the shadow of the deadline looms over me, and then panic and try to get the whole thing done in the last 24 or 48 hours. And, because I'm still quite smart, that often works. Or at least doesn't fall apart too badly. On anything that's really mattered. At least, anything that I wasn't able to convince myself afterward didn't really matter.
And it's probably best not to look too hard at what happens when there isn't a set deadline to give me that kickstart...
