Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

It’s easier said than done sometimes to not sweat the small stuff. Because what is small? What’s small to one person may be huge to another. It’s all about perspective, right? Only you can decide what’s a small thing to you.

I do think it’s beneficial to have “small things” to sort of balance out life. Take what happened to me at a conference recently. I went out of town for a conference to a resort all expenses paid by my boss. I know, it sounds boring and at some points it was. But that just made other things in the room seem even more interesting. Unfortunately one interesting activity came from my inability to figure out how to open a pen.

See, the hosts of the conference had provided all attendees with a notebook and pen to take notes. I first tried to open the pen by pulling on what seemed like a cap. When that didn’t work, I thought maybe it’s a twisting pen. There was a stylus on the other end but it had a hole in the middle so I thought maybe it was some fancy new technology. I kept twisting the cap until eventually I unintentionally disassembled the pen on the table.

This was happening while a speaker was presenting something on stage and while my boss was seating directly next to me. Of course while I was working on the pen, I tried to play it off like I wasn’t really doing anything odd. Like I was just fidgeting with the pen. At least I hoped I was making it look that way. I won’t ever know for sure.

I calmly put the pen back together, which took way too much time, and resumed my attempts to open it. I finally figured it out when someone else went to write something and I saw them pull the cap off the end. Turns out it was just a very well-fit cap.

Now, when I was younger this would’ve sent me into a spiral. I would’ve been sweating, worrying what others might be thinking of me if they figured out what I was doing. I know in the past I would’ve worried about looking stupid. But if there’s anything I’ve learned as I’ve grown, it’s that no one knows everything and everyone will do things that could be considered embarrassing. Everyone.

The key is to shift your perspective. Instead of finding myself embarrassed during this situation, I found myself trying to contain my laughter. I could just picture myself as a character in a sitcom with this ridiculous situation I was in. Instead of trying to contain my anxiety like I had in the past, I was trying to contain my laughter so I wouldn’t interrupt the speaker.

I like the second option better. Especially because, now it’s a funny story to tell instead of an embarrassment that I hope no one noticed. In fact, I hope someone noticed. I hope someone went home from that conference and told their family/friends “Man, that conference was so long and somewhat boring. But this one woman was so determined to figure out how to open that pen without asking for help that she spent a good ten minutes pretending to fidget with it, even taking it apart at one point. It was the most entertaining part of the whole day.”