Fear of Mediocrity

I am good at my job.  I pride myself in delivering excellent training courses in an enjoyable fashion.  I work in areas that are highly emotive and that provoke many different levels of feeling in people.  When I deal with issues around prejudice and behaviour there are times when my work becomes very challenging and sometimes difficult.  I cope very well with the emotions and opinions raised in my courses.  I have learned to control my reactions and respond to the often underlying anxiety that people's emotional  reactions come from. 

I went off to deliver a day of training today having slept for about three hours.  I am still very jet-lagged and I find that the older I get the longer it takes for me to get over these quick trips to another continent. I've been home for three days now.  You would think I would be back to normal. This morning I dragged myself from my bed and immediately downed two ibuprofen for a throbbing sleep-deprived headache.  I went through the usual morning routine and set off for work. As luck would have it my course had no less than 15(!) participants - more than I would like, and all of them showed up.

I delivered my course in my usual breezy fashion and maybe that was the problem.  I think today I was just too relaxed.  I felt no sense of urgency or pressure to perform and just went through the motions of training people in an area of work which I have delivered hundreds of times before.  The feedback at the end of the day was very good, not all ten out of ten, but almost, and yet I felt that I had shortchanged the participants.  I did not have the 'edge' that keeps me on my toes and means that I pick up on changes in the group dynamics and the feel of the group.  I delivered a perfectly adequate course.  Other trainers might have been completely satisfied with the performance I turned in, but I was not.

Training is a bit like acting.  You are only as good as your last course and the critics reviewing my performance matter.  I know that I shouldn't get caught up in these subjective reviews.  I know that my style and manner do not appeal to everyone. My New York Jewish way of approaching things is still sometimes a bit  much for the reserved Brits, but usually I temper that more than today.  Having just returned from my Jewish homeland I think I am still a bit over the top in my expressiveness.  it takes a few days to adopt some of the 'cloak of invisibility' that the English like to adopt.

I hate to feel that I could have done better.  I could have made my course today a bit tighter, a bit less laid back and a bit more formal.  Some people 'get' me and that's delightful.  To others I will always be that foreign Semitic creature from another planet.  I'm sure I'll do better on Thursday.