Back to Back

I was in whole day meeting. My first meeting started at 10.30 A.M, I was energtic to complete my UAT and requirements gathering in this one hour meeting. At 11.30 A.M I had to rush to another conference room, I absolutely had no energy to listen anything as I was damn hungry, I was checking the clock every minute to see if it ticked 12.30 P.M for a break. At 12.35 P.M I reached my desk to take my lunch box and saw my voicemail flash on my phone, I checked if it was anything urgent and heard a messgage from helpdesk people that my machine was corrupted and wanted me to get in touch with them as early as possible. I dialed the helpdesk number and they instructed me to run few scans before I took off for my lunch. I patiently ran those scans and left for lunch at 12.45 P.M. I munched few slices of bread and rushed for my next meeting at 1 P.M. Meetings after lunch time generally makes me sleep, but this time as my stomach was half empty I could grasp much during the first half of the meeting but in the later half I felt groggy. This meeting was very critical to me and my colleague as any small mistake in price load would mess up discounts and sales estimate. I tried my best to pull my energy to focuss as much as I could. Only thing I love the most about my clients in such meetings is even if I pose the same question in different format any number of times, they reply back with the same enthusiasm and never ever use words such as "You Don't Understand" , "You Don't follow", "You are Wrong" etc.

Such things are a big learning to me, as I am very impatient and I can never explain anything beyond two times to anyone nor can listen anything more than two times.
I am very accustomed to saying "Don't you understand what I am trying to convey".
Meetings with clients have taught me several good things. Last year we had a meeting with Japanese user to explain a new logic for calculating the discounts, he was not convinced with the new calculation and was strongly opposing it without even knowing its benefits. My client manager had a cogent way of explaining things to him, still he didn't agree. Believe me the argument went on for more than 45 minutes just between both of them, We were only seeing their faces and were waiting for them to come to a conclusion. I found it very difficult to understand the Japanese English slang, but my manager paid close attention to each of his word and tried his best to understand how business could affect in Japan with the new implementation. There was a situation were my manager was almost about to utter the line " you don't understand..." but he controlled himself and said we understand your situtation.

Patience and putting yourself in other's shoe is very important while explaining anything in the meeting. These learnings are still on with such back to back meetings.