Sunday, February 21, 2010

High/Low Week 7 2010

This was a pressured week at work. I was committed to another round of multiple meetings to review employee performance, ran a monthly staff meeting for 15 people, and helped negotiate a settlement in a legal case involving a $5 million policy. The kicker was racing against a deadline to design the tax features of a new product that's fairly unlike anything we've done before. And sad to say, I lost my focus during one of the more controversial meetings and got a bit snippy with a co-worker, no doubt in part because I'd made an error or two along the way. It's so easy to place exaggerated significance on tiny things. Everything human is tiny in this universe. What matters isn't the result of yes or no, right or wrong, but the way we treat others en route. For some cockamamie reason, even though I saw the intensity of this week coming in advance, I got lost in myself. How much better would things have been had I just smiled from the learning, and found comfort in the bigger picture? We'll give it a fresh try this week!

This week's highlight may have been seeing one of our ballplayers who'd been struggling throughout the year, suddenly explode with a 26-point outburst that practically doubled his season's output. The ills of impatience, self-centeredness and victimized thinking that we all have (see above) can be triumphed over by a "head up, mouth shut" philosophy and determination to improve. Using the ears more than the mouth, he's grown. And he finally struck paydirt. I'm looking forward to his next step.

I was also glad that, despite the difficulties of the work week, my co-workers seemed to be in excellent spirits on Friday. So we must have made some measure of satisfactory progress through it all.

No comments: