Happy Easter! I hope you’ve got restful or fun plans for the long weekend. Is it possible to be fun *and* restful? I’m not sure. Perhaps I will try both at the same time. To keep you company this weekend, this week’s episode of How to Own the Room podcast is… How To Prepare (For Stressful Things). And you will be pleased to know that the main message of this episode is very simple. DO LESS. STOP PREPARING SO MUCH. Definitely do not over-prepare. Prepare to be amazed at how little you need to prepare. We are not in the Brownies anymore. (Or was it the Guides?) So my message is this: Do. Not. Be. Prepared. Unless you are preparing to eat a lot of chocolate. In which case, please continue.
This is a real obsession of mine. (“But, Viv, you have so many obsessions!” I know, I know. It is my burden and my joy.) I see women MASSIVELY over-preparing and over-obsessing in completely unnecessary ways. I know the opposite of this is something we all hate: people who wing it and bullshit and phone it in and make everyone else shoulder the real work and hog the limelight and take the credit… BUT.… There is a huge vast empty space between the two polar opposites of paranoid over-preparation and lazy arrogance. We would do ourselves a great favour if we would (a) explore that space and (b) have the guts to stray occasionally into the territory of lazy arrogance. Believe me, when good people do take a little trip into that territory, interesting things happen.
Listen to me, Bryony Gordon, Debbie Wosskow and Jess Phillips talk about all this here.
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