Meeting with High Anxiety

My sister was probably not impressed.

When we were in Michigan, and I told her about my coming week, I told her I was very stressed about two meetings coming up, one with the Writer's Guild and one with the Flying Dragon Arts Center. As a legislative coordinator for the Secretary of Education of the State of Michigan, she has probably more meetings in a week than I have in a year.

With the type of accounting I do, there is just not a high demand for me to meet with a lot of people.  Sometimes there are conferences with individual clients, but a meeting of a larger group, especially where I would have to say anything, is extremely rare.What few meetings I have are mostly related to church and theater and other groups outside of work.

The OHC Writer's Guild group meeting concerned me because it was summer and I felt like our attendance might slip.  I also had some of my writings I wanted to read, and I felt nervous about that.  We did have a bit smaller crowd, but we also had two new members.  I am supposed to lead the meeting as President or Chairman or what ever it is that I am of the group.  It's a little dicey as I have others in the group who are more familiar with Robert's rules of order than I am, and I have to be corrected every now and then. I also lost my nerve on reading my stories, as I passed them out near the end of the meeting and read only one of three.  The one I picked had typos in it, and I felt the group's interest slipping away as I read it, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the mediocrity of my writing.  This may or may not have been true, but I always live with feelings of insecurity that sometimes bubble up to the surface.

But the Writer's Guild meeting ended with the group still intact and fired up, so my feelings will pass, at least until the second Tuesday of the month approaches again.

The second meeting, the Flying Dragon meeting, was a bit rougher.  Important decisions await in that group. It was my job to present the financial data in such a way that everyone understood the fiscal situation that we were in.  This worried me because often with accounting, it's not easy to shift and say things in a way that everybody understands.  Sometimes you fall into jargon and what seems abundantly clear to you may sound like gobbledygook to others.

But I marshaled my facts, taking hours of work time and many hours more of my personal time to get the information ready, and presented things as clearly as I could.  Some who heard it told me that I did a good job in conveying it.  Others whose opinion I greatly value were silent or vague.  And yet others seem unperturbed by anything I said.  Whether they understood it or not, I don't know. I didn't expect to change hearts and minds.  I just wanted people to be fully informed about the consequences of their decisions.

So my meeting experiences are over, at least for now.  I got through them, a little shaken, a little less confident about myself, but still riding the horse.  Even though I am shakily grabbing the reins, I ain't been bucked off yet.