Coping Tools for Non-verbal Aspects of a Business Meeting in a Cafe

Non-verbal aspects of a meeting, revisited.

This post focuses on the non-verbal aspects of Yesterday’s meeting and follows up on Non-verbal communication in a business meeting.

 

 
Meetings are hard, but Yesterday’s* meeting went well and didn’t leave me totally drained. This is a recall of was different from usual, as I am analysing and adding the factors to my mind’s toolbox of coping strategies.

 
The context for Yesterday’s meeting

Yesterday*, the last thing in the world I wanted was the meeting. Tired, mildly depressed, and feeling so very unready for talk, interaction and the role as professional service provider.

The math circuits of my brain don’t have a fail-safe mode and tend to freeze when I feel stressed, nervous, tired or overloaded with impacts. I knew I had to suggest and guide about how to set the shipping calculations so it would work for all products (I had calculated some suggestions from home, but they were likely to be adjusted). So I worried whether I was able to operate my calculator in an IQ>70 manner.

Mind freeze was a problem in the meeting, but it was mild and (hopefully) invisible. My notebook where I wrote the numbers down to handle them reminded of an anthill – every number was on the move and relentlessly crossed path with other numbers. However after a while, after realising that I in any case seemed to understand the logic better than the client, I relaxed and the details came into place.

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Freelance Project Support – Fixing Issues

Project Daisy: Part VI.

Fixing issues with shopping cart and shipping cost calculations.

Project Daisy is over: I have received the final payment and feedback, and the client says that she is happy with the final result.

That’s what I wrote in my last post.

However, it turned out that the project wasn’t over. There were shortcomings in the shopping cart’s settings and its correspondence with the client’s PayPal account that required re-setting and guidance.

Daisy preferred to meet and ‘walk through’ the issues and new settings together, so we met Yesterday in a cafe in the city.

I’ll take it as an opportunity to cover one more aspect of freelance project work: after-service/support – the extra work that comes on (unpaid, usually) to make adjustments, fix issues and provide guidance.

Freelance Project Wrap-up

Project Daisy: Part V.

Good and bad project management (at once).

Project Daisy is over: I have received the final payment and feedback, and the client says that she is happy with the final result. This is a brief self-evaluation of what went well and not so well with the project.

 

 
Good

What I think I did best was the quality of the outcome, and the professional communication.

The original website content was verbose, looked messy, was heavy loading (lots of photos loading on each page), poorly written, and had no e-commerce function.

The new website content is concise, visually neat*, consistent and orderly. There is much less text and fewer photos, and the size and resolution of the new photos is browser -friendly. There is no duplicate text, no grammar mistakes or clumsy English (I hope;-), and the spelling is all-Australian. The website now has a shopping cart implemented and tested.

The meetings went well (albeit stressing for me – but I think not for the client). They were well organised and had clear, actionable outputs. The quality of the email correspondence was good: well organised and concise with some extras, e.g. print screens and well organised how-to instructions following-up on some questions. The communication also included SMS and phone calls, which went OK, except I was a bit slow to reply to some SMS.

The work organisation was good too. I converted the (quite detailed) quote into the contract, and the contract into my to-do list for the project to structure the work and make sure to meet all the requirements.

 
Bad

The weak point was my time management. Daisy did not give me a deadline so I didn’t technically deliver too late, but the project took much longer than I expected.