The pause that refreshes

My grandpa was a fan of corporate slogans and often quoted the big brands as epic life advice, so my father tells me. (Maybe that’s why I spend far too much time analyzing slogans in my head. Oh, the marketing nerdiness…) At the office, last month, we had our annual global Week O’ Meetings. Our French, Chinese and Japanese colleagues joined us and we clustered together in a crowded conference room for fifty plus hours of meetings (on top of dinners and Sunday sightseeing).

Long week, folks, it was a very long week. When we neared the end of the six thousand PowerPoint slides on Friday morning, my frustration and stress level was at an all-time high. Hurtful words were thrown my way by a foreign colleague in front of the top management and my dear colleagues from around the world.

After about eight years in the corporate world, I’m used to maintaining my cool but tiredness and pressure depleted my patience batteries. I was seconds away from tears or yelling (or a messy combination of both) so I scooped up my laptop and whispered, “That’s it. I need to leave the room.” The door never seemed so far away as my boots skimmed the carpet. “Don’t trip, for the love of God, don’t trip right now” ran through my head. (Tripping would have been just my luck because when I fluster, my motor skills nose dive.) I sat in my office, bummer faced and fighting sniffles as I recounted all of the week’s and latest happenings to my American colleagues who tried their best to comfort me. They shook their heads like that is not right and told me jokes and I forced smiles. They shuffled away carrying with them a morsel of the hurt feelings (as the comments were directed to all of us), too, and surely, the weight of the tension and stress.

Later in the day, when I distracted myself with other things and shook off most of the anger/hurt, I regretted sharing my strong emotional response with my colleagues. The mature route would have been to take a walk around the warehouse or scavenge for chocolate until I could recharge my batteries. The emotional response was warranted, that’s for sure, but I shouldn’t have bummed out my colleagues in exchange for some reassurance from them.

If only I’d reminded myself of “The pause that refreshes,” the 1929 Coca-Cola slogan my grandpa loved. Great advice, it is, when you think about it. Pause for a moment or two before you react. Emotions are powerful and can drive you to say and do things that benefit no one. Does this really matter? Right now, in the giant scope of life, does this matter at all? Let it go. So I pushed it out of my head, focused on a plan to remedy the conflict with discussions with my boss next week and let it go. That’s not an easy thing to do sometimes, especially when you’d like nothing more than to chuck a notebook across the room. ;)