Every strength has a back edge

I can operate quickly, but that also can make me impatient. I have a trick for mitigating being impatient in meetings.

Several years ago I realized about halfway through a meeting (e.g. 30 minutes into an hour long meeting), I would begin to speed up and try to rush the conversation. You can imagine that the output of this wasn’t always great. Rushing a conversation does not lead to great decision making.

After some negative impacts of this once or twice, I began to notice this at times. It came around times that I felt extra stress of workload assigned to me. Noticing is great, but what to do about it? This is how I found my secret trick.

At one point, I realized I was starting to feel pressure to rush a conversation in the middle of a meeting. I had enough awareness to look at the clock on my screen and that’s when I realized that there’s about 30 minutes left in the meeting. What was the point of rushing? We had the time. So I slowed down and the conversation proceeded to a good end result.

So that’s my trick for feeling rushed in meetings. There’s more to it than that, I’ve also had to figure out what to do when you are actually running up on time. More on that later. But in terms of rushing a conversation because you feel pressure while others aren’t, that’s not needed. To do this there are two things you need:

1) Enough awareness to know how you’re feeling in the moment.
2) A system to mitigate that is quick and helps reset.

Doesn’t have to be the same method as mine, but you do need one if you’re leading people. What do you do to mitigate your own unhelpful proclivities?