Long post alert! 🙂

I am comfortably seated on my sofa after having had my Saturday morning coffee and mini pastry treats and finished watching the F1 Sprint Shootout in Baku. I made sure I woke up just in time to catch it live! But that’s a topic for a future post.

I don’t even know where to start… there is just so much to share! What a week! I cannot remember the last time I worked from the office three consecutive days!

In case you have not read my previous post “Going Back to the Office”, as part of my wellness journey, I challenged myself to work from the office three consecutive days this week, i.e. Tue – Thu.

I loved this experiment. I missed the curiosity and challenge of discovering what I can do and push my limits. I was both looking forward to this and nervous at the same time. I have set myself targets like this before but have not been able to reach them. Therefore, this week, I made sure I had arranged in-person catch ups, attended meetings in person and took up networking opportunities, too.

Tuesday morning, I woke up at 6:00 am to make sure I had enough time to get ready. I surprised myself that it took me less to get ready than I expected ha ha ha The night before, I prepared the backpack with the laptop and all the things I needed in the office and set it out next to the entrance ready to grab on my way out. I also prepped my outfit so that I would not be wasting time in the morning trying to figure out what to wear 🙂 I was too nervous to prep any food at home so I would just grab something on my lunch break. Next week, I would like to be more organised with prepping food and taking home made lunch into the office.

School is back which made the bus ride to the train station longer than expected. The area I live in gets quite busy in the morning around school start / drop off times. I missed two trains and the third one was super busy as there were some issues on the network. I arrived at the office around 9:00 am which, in hindsight, was not that bad.

I had a few calls in the morning, met some new colleagues for F2F catch ups. When I say new colleagues, I don’t mean new colleagues to the company, but I mean new colleagues I have been working with for, say, the past two years but never had the opportunity to meet in person, only virtually. I find it fascinating how I formed an opinion of people over virtual calls but when I met some of them, they looked so different, like a completely different person 🙂

In the afternoon, I had to do a presentation at a meeting attended by a mix of people, in the room and attending via a Teams call. I was super nervous before the presentation, got a bit flustered when I started, I couldn’t really find the right words to introduce the topic I was presenting on. I do this sometimes; I don’t understand why… I don’t really have an issue speaking in front of an audience. I used to be an English teacher and I am comfortable speaking in public. For some reason, before a presentation, I talk myself into being nervous when I am not. I sometimes downplay my confidence. I am still working on understanding why… however, I think that only my referencing this here is already a big step towards working out why and getting past this. I feel that I have this duty to others to say that I am nervous, even though I am not…

The presentation went well, I took some questions, I even asked myself a question I thought people should have asked! 🙂 After the meeting, there was the opportunity to do some networking and then some of us also went for a drink to a nearby pub. Good chat, good to catch up with people and met new people and saw F2F people I already knew. It was a long day, got home around 22:00 pm. I went straight to bed after my evening routine.

The next day, I felt a little bit tired even though I had a good night sleep. I think it was more the reaction to the sensory overload experienced the day before. Wednesday was another busy day with early morning meetings. My Wednesdays are usually packed with reoccurring meetings with little time between them to catch up on things. The day went by super quickly. My last meeting finished at 17:00 pm after which I headed to a work event in Aldgate attended by more than 100 people. It was a great opportunity to meet some of my project stakeholders in person, as well as some more senior stakeholders within the company I work for.

I am an introvert which means that I usually must make an effort at networking events. I sometimes find it difficult to be spontaneous and make small talk. From a Discovery Insights point of view, I lead with Green and Blue energy which means I like having the time and space to process things. On my train ride home, I was thinking about the events of the day and concluded I had done pretty well at the event considering…. I was a true social butterfly and worked that floor like there was no tomorrow! 🙂 Again, I got home around 22:00 pm.

Waking up Thursday morning I felt the effects of the first two days. I can sincerely say I was shuttered and wished I had not left my laptop at work the previous day so I could work from home. However, I mustered all my energy and made it in. I was looking forward to the day to be over as I had taken Friday off to enjoy an extended weekend due to the bank holiday. I finished a little bit earlier that day as I wasn’t feeling well… I don’t know if it was my body’s way of saying “slow down” or because my lunch didn’t go down as well as I thought…I got home around 16:00 pm and took some time to rest up.

Looking back on the week, I am very pleased I made it in three times a week but that also made me think about my tendency to do too much at once. This was a reminder to take things slow, do them at my own pace (even if some might think it’s too slow) and enjoy the process. It is a reminder to set ourselves targets which ensure we are kind to ourselves and that all we can do is our best and that is enough.

Right! Challenge completed, lessons learnt and now I am off to the next one! I’ll keep you posted on what that is 🙂

Miss B