Poker Face

I see emotion all over their face, and with the words they use it's clear that they're intent on making their point. The person it's directed towards visibly rocks backwards, their eyes widening and colour appearing in patches across their neck and then their face. They've said what they have to say

Silence.

The air crackles with tension.

Someone else murmurs something and tries to shift the meeting on.

A thin veneer of ice starts to form.

Nothing has really been resolved, it won't take much to crack the ice.

Internally I take a deep breath. I try to ease the knots running across and down my back, without it being noticed. Eventually the meeting ends. There's a sense of relief as we rise from our seats and escape through the now open doorway.

But for the two people involved in the exchange, it looks from their expressions that this hasn't yet been forgotten or resolved.

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I'm talking to the person who was visibly emotional and intent on making their point. It's still clearly caught them in an ever-constricting circle of thoughts. It's black and white - the other person was wrong and they knew it. They talk it through and let go of some of the emotion that erupted in the meeting. But it feels like this will happen again. And there hasn't been resolution to what happened in the meeting before. It's still an open wound.

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My mask. My poker face. Or is that my professional face? Perhaps I've never been good and displaying emotions to others, and feel particularly inhibited to do so in a work environment.

I've just listened to whole load of work my team and I have done, torn apart by others. It's only after the meeting I realise I'm incensed by what just happened.

After releasing some of my anger through a rant, it strikes me that perhaps my anger would be best served to those who tore the work apart, rather than to someone I felt able to confide in.

Yet what I came out of the meeting with, was much clearer and more defined guidance as to what the group wanted.

So what would it have achieved, showing my anger?  Would I have resolved the issues that had arisen, during the meeting as we eventually did?

My anger sprung from a sense of injustice - All the work we undertook was to their specification in the first place | We'd used the information that they had given us for the basis of the work we'd done | Now they were changing their minds on what felt like a whim simply because the information we provided in return, wasn't to their liking.

But coming out of the meeting were decisions that went on to shape a successful outcome. And perhaps that was part of the process - iterations of work, changing of minds and refinement of thoughts to reach that successful outcome.

And the one thing I realise with hindsight is that the mask I hid behind in that meeting, my poker face, my professional face, enabled me to resolve the issues in the meeting there and then. Keeping outwardly calm meant the meeting wasn’t hijacked by my emotion, so discussion prevailed, ways forward agreed upon and little time lost.

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Yet I needed to let the mask fall, and I was lucky enough to have someone I felt able to express my full range of emotions to in confidence.

Perhaps it's no bad thing to have a poker face at times, I just know I have to remember to release that emotion at some point later when perhaps it’s more appropriate...