Stream of Consciousness — 6.

Do you ever have those days where every social interaction ends with you saying to yourself “not my best work”?

Because today was one of those days.

I work a corporate gig and had to introduce two separate teams to each other to hopefully smooth over whats been a rocky dynamic in the organization for a long time. It was important that I made everyone feel comfortable. And boy did I do a terrible job.

Most of my jokes fell flat. There was a decent amount of awkward silence (gracefully broken up by myself and one other person) and a bunch of repetition. I celebrated clicking the “leave meeting” button to close it out 26 minutes after it started.

And then I went to my volunteer role as a coach, and it was just the same thing. My conversations with other coaches were forced, unecessarily complicated over one easy thing I was supposed to say, and I ended up complaining about something that was pointed out to me as not appropriate to complain about in the presence of clients.

I ended today a bit angry at myself for being so sloppy with how I carried myself today.

I mean, everyone has those days, sure. But I’ve always been a social guy, and connecting with people has been something that comes naturally to me. So why was today so difficult?

As I think back on it I think there are still remnants from my “self improvement” junkie days where I studied all sorts of stuff in some attempt to fix something that wasn’t really broken. And it turned all the little things I got right into problems I tried to solve. And ironically enough, by making a problem where a problem didn’t exist, I ended up getting it wrong.

But how do you just stop making a problem out of something when it’s what your brain tells you needs to happen?

I’m not too sure.

But hopefully tomorrow I’m a little bit less awkward.