This week:

• mental break on Monday
• recuperative conversations the rest of the week
• an affirmation of my skills, even if it doesn’t come with an offer
• and a secret fourth thing

On Monday I realised I had been doing too much. I will draw your attention, auto-therapeutically, to last week’s writing where I talked about doing too much. My subconscious won’t talk to me directly, it seems, but it’ll talk to you.

I realised I had taken on too much when I found myself almost in tears about a very minor confrontation I would have to take on. It was like –

the trolley is full
heart quickens. stomach growls. hand
finds pocket empty

– y’know? Like sometimes a thing is a thing and sometimes a thing is emblematic of many other things, and a small conflict is the tiny tear in the overstressed elastic band that is your ability to regulate your emotional state.

anyway, I spent the rest of the week having recuperative conversations with my team. And this has in a strange way brought us closer together, because sharing vulnerabilities means demonstrating trust. Like they say on my favourite radio show,

Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. This is what love is.

and although I don’t love my colleagues it’s still true that being vulnerable with people demonstrates trust, and engenders trust, unless they are psycopaths: in which case you are In Trouble.

I took the second interview last week and passed it but wasn’t offered the role; the vacancy holder has been absolutely brilliant and has the best kind of worst problem to have – so many good candidates that she has to tell many people that they met the bar but weren’t quite good enough. This is…good news for me, if not the best news, because it’s another datapoint that tells me I’m reaching a standard even if I’m not exceeding it to the extent that others are.

Secret fourth thing: most people are not great at public speaking. I am quite good at public speaking. Most of the people I know who read this are excellent at public speaking so this may well be a waste of all of our time, but: is there a market for helping people get better at public speaking? Would you like an hour of my time, totally free of charge, to prepare for a speech or get help with writing one?

I know I said this was the secret fourth thing, but do actually tell people about it. I want to see if there’s demand in the market.