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August 31, 2005
What Gets Ya Through the Day
Anyone who manages an HOA or practices law in this business knows that days can be trying; the job can be stressful, and anything you can do to relieve the stress is a plus. So I will share of few of my personal tips.
These are the little things:
I keep fresh flowers in the office - they are great relief for the eyes from all the paper, and if they smell good too - that's a bonus. I buy colored legal pads; yellow and white are dull and boring. I use sticky notes that come in various shapes and colors, none of the plain yellow variety. And I love the ones with sayings on them like "Don't ask me, I just work here." The funny thing is, the best I have seen are sold at my local car wash!
I use pens that light up when the point is out, in various colors. It brings a smile.
I keep a good, intriguing book on tape in the car at all times and listen to it most of the time while I am driving. I avoid talking on the phone as much as I can when in the car - I get enough of it in the office. The book takes my mind off stressful things, especially when I listen right up to parking and walking in the door of a meeting I believe could be stressful, and turning it on right after walking out of a stressful meeting. It keeps me from dwelling on what can happen or what just did. And I attend a lot of stressful meetings since I do a lot of dispute resolution and get involved in a lot of major reconstruction process meetings with Associations and their "team", presenting the "bad news" to owners.
I get up a lot and stretch in the office, and take a breath (and if the flowers smell, I take a whiff). I tackle the hardest things first thing in the morning when I am fresh, and save the best for the late afternoon when I start to fade. I run errands in my open jeep to get a breath of fresh air during the day - sometimes I just leave the office and go through the drive through Starbucks (yeah, I'm a fan), and get a nice cold drink.
Now for the hard part. Whenever I am dealing with a very difficult person, and they come in all varieties, I make it my challenge for the day to find a way to stay centered, and not react. I look for a way to make them see the good side of something, anything, work related or not. If they are making my job difficult, I look for a way to turn it around so they can get a taste of it. For example, I do many document update projects. I give an estimate for the costs based on a particular process. My process is pretty streamlined, but it can get derailed by someone who wants to wordsmith everything, change every sentence, change the order of things, etc. When I start talking about the increased costs that are generated by unnecessary rewrites and reproduction of the documents, ... well, you can imagine. So, when that happens, I just turn the electronic files over to the client and tell them they can make the changes themselves, and I will limit the time to reviewing the changes and commenting, that I will tell them if they have changed something in a manner that has legal ramifications, and I tell them the more changes they make, the more risk of having to change something back because I choose my words pretty carefully. This way, I get the project, which could otherwise become cumbersome, and the stress, caused by someone who just has too much time on their hands, off my desk.
I have other things woven into my daily practice, but I think the best and most powerful is that I love a challenge. And so I look at everything that comes in the door as if it were a challenge - to make the Board's job easier, to help the manager see the funny side, to help the board member put himself or herself in the homeowner's shoes or vice versa, to organize the pile, to catch the humor in some strange behavior, and best of all, at the end of the day to count up the number of people I helped, just because of what I know.
Give yourself a pat on the back once in a while - because others forget to do it. Most people are wrapped up in just gettin' through the day, and they come at you with "blinders" on, full steam ahead. When that happens to me - for the sake of lightheartedness -- I visualize a horse pulling an Amish buggy - have you ever seen one? That's a true case of having blinders on! It puts things in perspective.
Posted by Beth Grimm at August 31, 2005 11:28 PM