Meetings and Meetings

It's been one of those days, actually weeks, that I wish I could go back to the beginning and start all over. I've done nothing, nothing over the past four days other than go to meetings, eight in total, three of which I've called myself, five that I was summoned to attend. Four meetings lasted half a day or longer and only one was shorter than an hour.

Three meetings left me slightly traumatized because they involved me seriously confronting others or clarifying their roles, goals or general life direction. This latest meeting has me wanting to crawl into a hole.

I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. I went into the meeting under a certain premise, thinking that my co-leader and I would be saying a few things and promising not to say some other things. Well, the other things came out, much to my dismay because I didn't whole heartedly agree with what she was thinking... which is why we weren't supposed to bring it up.

Then it became one of those sticky situations that I didn't know how to get out of. She was going off about it and I didn't agree, but she felt it so dang strong about the whole thing that there was no way I could redirect her. And once she started there was no way to backtrack out of there; the cat was out of the bag so better deal with it.

Bottom line, I walked out of there feeling foolish and ill prepared. What ended up happening was that we pointed fingers at the obvious and tried to make a statement that had not only been made already, but had been practically engraved on a placard and hung over meeting room. We demanded for action knowing full well that everyone in the room was trying their very darnedest to take action.

I'm kicking myself that I went along with it. In supporting her, I betrayed myself.

Lesson in all of this: Only go into confrontational meetings if you really, fully agree with what is going to be brought to the table; including a covert agenda that the other person may have.