Monday. Back at work.
I was in a Slack thread by 8:15, in a Q4 account coverage meeting by nine. Forty-five minutes. I gave good advice to a team that will still be executing the strategy after I leave. The advice does not know how much longer it has. This is not a complaint, just accurate.
Thirty-three days until September 19. Yesterday I counted them in Sundays. Now I am counting in Q4 planning cycles. Same number, different texture.
What I have been turning over since yesterday morning: the rehearsal works fine in private. In my kitchen, in my head on the way to the coffee maker, twice in the car where I said the consulting sentence out loud to the steering wheel and it got a little better each time.
The rehearsal does not solve the problem of audience.
Everyone who would ask me “what do you do?” right now already has my answer. They have had it for years. Senior Director of Strategic Accounts at a software company. One sentence, no setup, no elaboration. The new sentence also fits in one sentence: I help enterprise software companies keep their accounts, specifically in the window where most accounts are already lost before anyone notices. I mean it. I have said it twice now to actual people and it makes sense to them. It is ready, or ready enough, except that “ready” and “in use” are different things and I have been conflating them.
What I do not have is an occasion. The people who would ask me the question already know the old answer. The people who would hear the new answer are still somewhere in front of me, past September 19, in rooms I have not been in yet. Until then I am in two versions of myself at once: one that still shows up to Q4 planning and one that has been practicing for what comes next, in a kitchen, in a car, in a hundred and fourteen posts that twelve hundred people have read, most of them once.
I want to be precise about the word “ready,” because I think I have been using it loosely.
Ready is not the same as prepared. Or. I am not sure those are the same thing, and I have been treating them like they are. The sentence is ready. The pitch is clean. The problem statement holds up when I say it to a person instead of to myself. But a sentence describing what you do requires the doing to actually exist, not just to be planned and documented and explained out loud in the car on the way somewhere.
What I have done for a hundred and fourteen days is prepare. I know what preparation feels like by now. I do not know what the actual going feels like. I have read about it, talked to people who have done it. The reading and the talking are not the same as the going, and I am noticing that I keep citing the preparation as if it is the thing, when the preparation is what comes before the thing.
This morning someone asked if I was going to present the Q4 summary myself or delegate it. It is due in November. Out of habit, I said I would handle it.
Later, driving Max to practice, I thought: that was probably the last time I will commit to a deliverable I intend to actually deliver.
The summary will be good when I write it. I mean that without irony. Good work does not stop being good because other things are also happening. It will just be one of those things you hand forward: a thorough briefing for whoever takes the relationship when you leave, done well because you did the work and you are not the kind of person who does things halfway at the end. I have written those briefs before, for clients. I know what they are supposed to look like.
I chose this post’s photo before I started writing, which is not usually how I work. Normally the image comes after, once I know what I made. Tonight I needed to find the feeling first. A desk in lamp light. Something in the middle of being worked through. That seemed right for a Monday, and for where I am.
The sentence is ready. The audience is still somewhere ahead of me.
I counted five Sundays yesterday and thought counting would clarify something it did not quite clarify. Thirty-three days. Four Sundays and a Monday, by next week. I keep finding new ways to count the same number.