Kate Murphy

Is it that I'm worried about my kids and I'm bringing that anxiety into this work meeting?

It's kind of like essentially erasing your emotional whiteboard before you go into the next interaction and really doing a survey of how am I feeling?

How am I presenting?

What is going on in my body right now?

And how am I going to release that, refresh, reboot, whether it's a few moments of meditation, going for a walk, trying to just get in a different rhythm because you're still carrying the rhythm of the encounter that you just had.

Yeah, absolutely.

And actually, I stole that idea or gave him credit in the book.

But this was someone in senior management in the C-suite.

And he was telling me that that was one of his hacks to maintain his emotional hygiene.

Because he was in back-to-back meetings all day long.

And he was realizing he was bringing the emotions from the previous meeting to the next meeting.

And he really felt people deserved to have him fresh.

Wow.

Another thing that he said that he did that I think is a good idea myself that I don't think people take advantage of is those first few minutes of a call, just that opener, that icebreaker where people are just not diving right into the agenda, where there's just a little bit of social talk in the beginning, to really lean into that to reset yourself, to reboot.

To ease into the next interaction and get rid of the residue of the one that was before.

And I think, you know, a lot of people feel like, okay, I'm on a schedule here.

Let's just dive right in and let's just start.

And that's a temptation.

I mean, I'm, you know, I'm as guilty as anybody else.

You know, I got other things to do.