The Great Quarterly Meeting

Today is the Great Quarterly Meeting.

I remember the first time I had to give one of these.  It was back in 2009, shortly after we had moved.  I had no idea what I was actually going to have to do.  Given guidance and a presentation, I sat and spoke quietly and sweated profusely and got through the meeting.  As I recall, I had a fairly high level of terror due to the other people who were present in the room with me - one does not often spend 1.5 hours with virtually all the senior management of a company.

That was 18 meetings ago.  Today will be meeting number 19.  Do I have the same sense of terror that I did?  Not the same sense of terror per se, but certainly a sense of terror as I approach this one as well.

Why?  Senior staff can make me nervous.  In a sense I am a consumer of their moods and the issues going on in their worlds.  For example, they can be very attentive - or very disengaged, depending on what is happening around them.  They can move past points that I thought would be critical to discuss - and then spend a great deal of time on something I would not have predicted.  And always in the back of my head is the primal fear of being called out for being wrong or incompetent.

Perhaps this is really the source of my fear for these meetings:  not that the meeting or information itself is wrong or without value but that I am perceived as being wrong or incorrect.  It is that sinking feeling that one gets when in the slide that flashed up on the screen one realizes the spelling error or data error that escaped notice every other time that this document was reviewed.  That every secret belief I have of my inability and my lack of knowledge will be put front and center for everyone to see.

I have tried to combat this.  I have reviewed and re-reviewed the presentation.  I know the data backwards and forwards.  And yet, every time I think of doing this, I get a little bit fearful.  Because buried beneath this collection of living is a small boy who, somewhere he cannot even fully remember, felt like he was unprepared and got attacked for it.

The meeting will come and go as they always do; the boy, however, remains in the center of my soul, waiting to be answered.