Happy(?) Spring!

Here it was. The first morning of the first day of Spring, my favorite season, and was I ready for it! Or so I thought. In preparation for the new season, I committed to attend a new networking group I had heard about. It started at 7:45am so I got to bed early so I could be well rested and arrive on time, making a good impression on everyone I would meet. That was the first flaw in the plan. Being in bed doesn't always mean sleeping (in many ways!). This particular night my brain must have been in overdrive because I had dream after dream, waking in between each and having more and more difficulty going back to sleep after each. The alarm finally sounded and I got up to get dressed and have a bite to eat before leaving. Absolutely everything about me was off balance from my sleep-deprived night so it took longer to get ready than normal. I finally left home only to run into heavier than usual traffic heading to the Interstate. That burned up another 5 minutes. By now I knew I would never be on time and considered just giving up and going back home. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very low tolerance for lateness in others and here I was going to be "the rude one" who walked in late. I made the decision that I would go ahead with my plan to attend and just sneak in and sit in the back. Right about now you may be thinking I will say that miraculously, I got every light green, the traffic parted for me to breeze through and I arrived with time to spare. No. Didn't happen. All the lights were red, I went in the wrong door and had to ask for directions and I finally arrived a good 10 minutes late. My only consolation was that another woman was arriving just as I was. Much to my surprise, the informal networking part of the meeting was still going on so I actually had a chance to catch my breath before I had to do my 30 second pitch. Why am I sharing all of this trivia? Because at the meeting I met a dozen new business people and had a really good one-on-one chat with one woman who gave me a great promotional idea for my business. If I had given up on my plan to attend because of the minor setback of my lateness, I would have missed a great opportunity to meet new people and promote my travel business. Many times we give up on plans for such small reasons and never even give them a chance to succeed. I'm glad I stuck to my plan and didn't give up on my goal. Will this mean that I forego my ethic of arriving on time in the future? Not a chance! But it WILL make me more forgiving of that "flaw" in others from now on. Who knows, maybe they had a bad night's sleep, as well?