Remember that dreaded finance meeting I mentioned a few weeks back? The one I said I was going to have with my friend?
Well, it finally happened.
The meeting was on Thursday, so Wednesday morning I spent hours in a panic trying to gather as much information as possible into a spreadsheet. Initially I thought my only monthly expenses were my office rent and electricity, but lo and behold there were so many more… software subscriptions, shipping supplies, merchant fees, marketing. The list kept growing.
The exercise alone was eye-opening.
Then Thursday morning came. I drank a very strong cup of Colombian coffee picked up pastries as a gesture of gratitude, and went to meet my friend. I was so nervous… nervous to shed light on what I imagined was the “financial disaster” part of me.
Turns out, I'm not a walking disaster.
With all the numbers finally laid out in front of me, everything made sense for the first time. I had clarity. And my friend said something that I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear:
“You’re doing well. You aren’t too far off from what you want to achieve. You just need to test and tweak a few things.”
He has no idea how much those words meant to me.
The rest of the week, I felt proud of myself. I had finally done something I had labeled in my head as “too difficult” and “not my strength”: numbers. It was something I knew needed to be done for a long time, but had avoided. Whatever hard thing you’re trying to do, it’s only difficult until it’s done. And afterward, you realize the hard part wasn't the numbers. It was the avoiding.
I’ll leave you with a moment from this morning with my five-year-old son.
We were doing a Minecraft sticker activity book, and there was a section where he needed to decipher a code to reveal a secret message for Alex and Steve (the main characters). The thing was, he is just starting to learn to write. He can write his name and copy some letters, but that’s about it, and I haven’t been pushing him to practice his letters at home or anything.
So there we were, going slowly, trying to decipher the code, and he needed to write the letter S. But he was really struggling. It started with a whiney “I can’t do it… can you write it?” and then built into a crescendo of screaming, kicking, and crying: “I can’t do this!”
So I sat there thinking... what do I do here?
Do I give up and say, let’s try again tomorrow?
Do I take the pen and do it for him?
Or do I help him through it and sit with him until he figures it out, even though he looks distressed?
I really had to buckle down for this one. I chose the latter. I felt like if I had given up at that moment, I would be sending the message that this was too much for him, that I didn’t believe he could do it. I told him, “I’m not going to let you give up until we figure out the first word.” I sat with him through all the frustrated crying and screaming, and eventually he did it. He practiced his S again and again and finally was able to write it down.
The cracked code spelled: HASTE.
I wish you could have seen the look of triumph on his face. The sparkle in his eyes and the corners of his mouth doing a tiny curl upwards, realizing he could do something he thought he couldn’t just minutes earlier.
After we finished spelling haste, there were four more words we needed to crack the secret message. I said, “You finished the first word, let’s take a break.”
And this time, now with more confidence, he said,
“No Mom, I want to finish.”
Turns out a five-year-old and a forty-year-old were both learning the same lesson this week.
With love,
Maria