Meetings about meetings

Last year I wrote a post on How often do you retreat? I mused upon how we all needed opportunity to recharge our personal batteries, but how we don’t do it enough time. Sometimes are heads are so full of stuff that we never have opportunity to debrief, to relax and I am sure that this affects our performance at work and in our personal lives.

There have been several well-publicised videos of people losing it completely in open offices and no-one attempting to stop them as they wreck their office space and often the cubicle next to them. How did their frustrations get to the point where they just explode? How often do we count to ten rather than say something we later regret – not often enough?

As I have said before on this blog we often need to look inside ourselves when communication doesn’t go according to plan. A friend of mine recalled a conversation last week that we had over a year ago – she remembered every word we had said and had taken an inference from the comments that I made in the conversation – I both at the time and now much later had not realised the impression that I had given – food for thought. Discussions and meetings have their benefits but all too often we get into the vicious circle of meetings about meetings about meetings with no effective action ever taking place. We talk and talk round and round issues but never resolve them. Someone has to take the first step to make the whole team change direction. As the old Chinese proverb says  "It is not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing”.