Today was a good day for both Lily, Lydia, Mary and myself and I believe we all experience a relatively full range of emotions. Lily and I both got 8 hours of sleep last night which we were so happy about. My day started off perfect as I kept pace with my daily goals and even scheduled a meeting with a prospect. When I called Lily to check in, we didn’t really get to talk because of all the screaming and crying in the background so I knew my day had started a little more smoothly than hers. Lydia has been struggling a bit lately and I guess Lily was having to deal with a lot of her behavior issues. My day continued to go really well until towards the end of the day when I had two meetings that drastically changed my mood.
First, I had a presentation from Finance that explained our compensation structure, and promotion schedule and it hit me that I need to be a lot more special than I previously thought in order to promote as fast as I would like to.
Then I had a training that got on my nerves a little. A lot of the training was truly great, but the personality of the trainer was a little extreme. He says he will only hang out with successful people because he is not willing to let other people’s lack of ambition bring him down. He said that when his wife wants to hang out with him and another couple, he ensures that couples they are hanging out with are appropriately successful (and push their childrend to be successful) so that he is benefiting from the association. He took it a step further when he said that at work, he only goes to lunch with people who have hit their quota and he will never in his life go to lunch with anyone who ever uses the Qualtrics Ping Pong Table, because (I infer) those people are clearly slackers.
If it weren’t for the fact that some of the other parts of his training were really quite good, I would have just felt irritated. I can’t pick out what rubs me wrong about that kind of talk, but I think it has to do with valuing people only by their level of ambition, and viewing life merely as a vehicle for career acheivement and material success. On the other hand, I do want to succeed, just like anyone else. I guess that’s what I should expect from a sales-training. The thing that was scariest was thinking about how much I may have to step things up in order to really excel. I don’t feel like I need to be the number one salesman. I do have a goal, however, to keep my family moving in the right direction, and even that will take some pretty hard-core dedication. During the car ride home I felt great assurance from God about two things. 1) I am on track for success and 2) Succeeding will not require me to have the type of extreme personality as the trainer. I felt calm and assured that God will bring me success if I work hard and look to Him for my support and direction.
By the time my day got tougher, Lily’s had gotten better. When I called later in the day to check in, she was perky and happy and said things were going better. I later met her for school, picked up the girls and went home. At home, both girls cried like crazy for a long time. Then we all danced in the kitchen, endured more crying by Lydia, had a great bath session, endured more crying by Lydia, and then we all had tons of giggles about Lydia and Mary taking their arms out of their pajamas (see below). I then put them to bed. In Lydia’s defense about all the crying, she did wake up from a late nap today.
Pictures!
