Happy Friday!

 

I arrived at my hotel around 8 pm. 

 

I ordered some dinner, unpacked my suitcase, ironed my outfit, and hung it in the closet. I reviewed my notes for the following day. 

 

After taking a couple of hours to eat dinner and prep for my upcoming exec offsite, I walked over to the bed to pull back the covers. My own version of turn-down service. 

 

As I did, I saw what I thought was a tick crawling across the pillow. 

 

“How did a tick get into this hotel bed?” was my first thought. 

 

After a bit of online research, I quickly learned that this was not a tick. 

 

It was a bed bug. 

 

I frantically captured the bed bug with a napkin,  flushed it down the toilet, and called the front desk, my heart racing. 

I proceeded to repack everything that I had just unpacked, including my ironed outfit, frantically tossed the remains of my dinner, and took the elevator 12 floors down to the lobby. 

 

Here, the woman at the front desk assigned me a new room and called the manager. 

 

She handed me a new key card —room 906. 

 

I took the elevator back up, this time to the 9th floor, and opened the door to my new room. 

 

Knowing what I now knew, I immediately walked over to the bed to assess the situation. 

 

To my horror, the sheets, pillow, and pillow case were covered in bed bug markings (something I had now unfortunately learned a tremendous amount about, within a very short period of time). 

 

Now, shaking slightly, I called back down to the front desk, asked for the manager, and told him I would like to check out of the hotel. I asked if there was another nearby Marriott that he could transfer me to and he essentially said, no idea —you're on your own.

 

I found a nearby hotel with 4.6 stars, called to confirm availability, and nearly cried with relief when Ryan at the front desk said “yes." I walked as quickly as possible out of room 906, simultaneously ordering an Uber and rolling my suitcase down the hallway. 

 

By the time I arrived at the new hotel, it was 10:26 pm. Still shaking slightly, I patiently waited while Ryan at the front desk trained his new team member via my reservation. I practiced deep breathing while they painfully made their way through each step of the process, redid several of them, and finally handed me my key card.

I made my way to the 4th floor of hotel #2. 

 

When traveling to see my clients, the most important thing to me is that I can show up at my best. How was I supposed to show up at my best when it was now 11 pm, and I had just spent the last two hours escaping bed bugs?! 

 

As leaders, we face similar questions all of the time. 

 

While, hopefully, there are no bed bugs involved, there are often unexpected obstacles, changes of plans, unforeseen issues, urgent personnel matters. Or maybe, one of our clients accidentally deletes their entire test system. 

 

Our opportunity is to return to our steady center, even in the face of challenges and stress, so that we can show up effectively for ourselves, and for each other. 

 

As the clock moved past 11 pm, I busted out all of the tricks I could think of. 

It took until 1:30 am for me to come down from the adrenaline spike of Operation Escape the Bed Bugs, which was not at all ideal for the important work I was doing the next day. 

 

But in that moment, all I could do was to focus on the next right thing, and to do the best with the situation I had to work with. 

 

As leaders, our opportunity is often the same. 

 

We can consider:

What are your favorite strategies for returning to center when you're thrown off course?

 

And, have you ever encountered bed bugs? 😳 

 

From here, we will move to our list of favorites below.

 

Thank you, as always, for being part of this community and for reading. 

Wishing you a wonderful September weekend ahead! 

One of the things we often work on within our CEO Coaching and Exec Coaching relationships is the idea of working at our “highest and best use.” How can we create more time and energy and capacity for our highest-impact work? Within this article, which I wrote for TBBW Magazine, there are some tactical strategies we can use. 

A lovely vibe to have on in the background during an extra-productive work session, or perhaps while making dinner. . . 

 

If anyone else uses Pocket to save articles that you want to come back to, it is going away. You can request an export of all of your saves anytime before October 8th. 

Possible alternative solutions: a good old fashioned Google Doc; Notion; Trello; Readwise. 

 

Partnering Together To Elevate Your Leadership

If you're interested in talking more about what it could look like to work together elevate the leadership capacity of your organization this fall, please feel free to drop me a note. Here's how we often work with organizations: