Working Hard or Hardly Working

It's been about a month since my last post and even though life in my "event world" has been pretty exciting, it's also been just as exhausting. As much as I love doing site visits, checking out hotels/venues/destinations, I also thrive on planning and then executing the event on site. It's that stressful part of the job that we all go through to make sure every detail about our event is met, almost to perfection.

Over the past month, I had to deal with five events at once. It has been a juggling act in not only dealing with internal clients, but also attendees in providing customer service or guest speakers in making sure they've brought their presentations...or at the very least, show up. For a few days, the hours are incredibly long and I do get grumpy. But when I get through an event and I hear positive criticism (and even constructive criticism), I feel a sense of pride that I did a job well done. At other times, I do see where I could improve my skill set and I'll work on it. I've realized that in becoming an event manager, it helps to be a perfectionist when it comes to planning and a realist when it comes to executing. In planning, the details must be as precise as possible and done within a timeline. And when onsite, being a realist in executing an event means understanding that not everything will go according to plan and I should accommodate changes (hopefully without getting angry or hung up on what went wrong). I've come to realize that experience builds confidence when troubleshooting. And I enjoy being a troubleshooter. 

Now and then, I have conversations with friends where they see my travels on social media and think I'm living the life (and sometimes I do...I won't lie). They see the nice hotels or fancy restaurants and they think it's like that all the time when I go to run a conference. They don't see me packing up boxes with duct tape or staying up trying to figure out tech stuff with the AV team so that a speaker could do their presentation remotely or chasing after banquet staff for one more gallon of coffee. So I took a picture of my lunch room at one of my conferences. Nothing special, no fancy restaurant, no designer decor, not even a tablecloth. And I'm fine with that because it's all part of the job.