In a previous article, we looked at identifying your activators and depleters across your career: the situations, environments, and ways of working that bring you to life or wear you down.
That is a good place to start, but you do not need a completed list to try this exercise. Here, we are taking one familiar experience at work and looking more closely at why it affects you the way it does.
What is it about the meeting that exhausts me?
It is absolutely okay to dislike a meeting, a task, project, or really anything at work. Those feelings are real and valid to have, nothing about this article should be taken to mean anything less than that.
And while valid, we can get stuck at “I hate this” without stopping to ask: What is it about this thing that I actually hate?
We may have come to associate a particular meeting with feeling drained so quickly that seeing it on the calendar is enough to bring that feeling slamming right back. Next thing we know we’re dreading the feeling of dreading the meeting, and then we’re really caught in a loop.
See, the word “meeting” gives us very little detail. There are people, expectations, ways of participating, and decisions happening within it. There are also pressures surrounding it: what happened beforehand, what is at stake, why are you even in it to begin with, and what you will have to deal with afterward.
In that sense, a meeting is a small system inside a larger one (hello systems theory!). When someone tells me they leave a meeting completely depleted, I want to understand what is happening within the meeting and around it as well.
Exploring that does not invalidate the feeling. It just gives us somewhere to look so that enduring it is not the only option we can see.
Which two meetings should I compare?
Think about a recent meeting you left feeling exceptionally defeated. The kind where you did not want to do one more thing afterward if it didn’t involve crawling up into a little ball somewhere.
Then think about a meeting from the past several weeks that left you feeling energized, interested, or motivated to continue. You felt yourself being drawn to the next step and glad to take it.
You might still have felt challenged or tired afterward. But you wanted to take the next step. You had some sense of direction, meaning, or possibility.
That is the difference we are exploring. A meeting can be useful and exhausting at the same time. For this exercise, focus on how it left you feeling.
Take a piece of paper and draw two columns. Put the draining meeting on one side and the energizing meeting on the other. (yes, if you’ve read my other resources, you’ll see this common technique of externalizing what’s going on!)
Under each, write two or three things that stand out. What did you dislike about the draining meeting? What did you like about the energizing one?
You can add more, but this does not need to become an exhaustive analysis. Getting a few observations out of your head and onto paper gives you something concrete to examine.
Why did those particular things matter to me?
Now comes the part I would spend more time on.
For each observation, write down why it affected you that way.
Suppose you wrote, “I did not feel heard.”
That is a meaningful observation. But why was it such a negative experience for you?
Maybe you felt disrespected. Maybe you were responsible for the outcome but had no room to influence the decision. Maybe you saw a problem coming, tried to raise it, and left knowing you would be expected to deal with the consequences. Maybe you’ve been dismissed so many times before, you couldn’t even begin to try and raise your opinion this time.
Those experiences may all get summarized as “I was not heard,” but the reasons they hurt are different.
There are also two different questions here: What prevented me from being heard? And why did that matter so much to me? Both are worth exploring. The second helps you understand your own response.
Do the same thing with the positive meeting. If you wrote, “I had everybody’s attention,” ask why that felt good. Was it the opportunity to contribute? Feeling that your expertise was respected? Being able to help people understand something difficult?
Try to include different observations across the two columns. If every positive is simply the reverse of a negative—“I was heard” and “I was not heard”—look for another feature that adds something to the picture.
What actually happened still matters and is worth looking at too, but the underlying why can help you recognize a pattern across experiences that look completely different on the surface. Feeling dismissed might show up in a meeting, a project review, feedback about a task, all hands meetings, or a conversation about your career.
So while the settings and “what happens” changes across different aspects of your jobs, the underlying thing that matters to you may be the thread connecting them.
What if the difference is who attends?
Sometimes a particular person is the first thing you notice. People often are the source of many issues in a company.
That is worth examining, too. What happens when they are there? Do they interrupt, dismiss concerns, or make it difficult to disagree? Why does that affect you so strongly?
And what about the person whose presence makes a meeting feel better? Do they make room for your contribution, ask thoughtful questions, or help the group move forward?
You do not have to explain someone’s personality or guess their motives. Describe what they do and what that experience means to you.
Sometimes this reflection alone makes the difference between the two meetings much clearer. You can see what you were reacting to and why.
What can I do with that understanding?
The next step is to look for small ways to put boundaries around the experiences that deplete you and create more room for the ones that support you.
That can be harder than identifying the pattern. It is also where working with someone individually (like a mentor, a coach, or coworker you can trust) can help, because your options depend on your role, your manager, and the environment you are in.
If you feel repeatedly dismissed, an option might be asking the person leading the meeting to make space for your input. You might seek support from a manager or colleague. You might also protect time with people who treat your contribution with respect, so that one difficult interaction does not become the only message you receive about your work.
Sometimes just knowing why you’re going to feel the way you will in a particular meeting, even if we make no changes about it, can be enough to disarm the intensity and give you back agency.
You do not have to earn respectful treatment by finding the perfect way to behave. If someone mistreats you, their behavior is their responsibility. A manager or meeting leader may also have a responsibility to address what is happening.
You cannot control another person’s behavior. Sometimes, though, you can influence the conditions around an interaction or choose a response that reduces its impact on you. Making that choice does not mean you caused the problem or accept the treatment.
This is the balance I work through with people: navigating the reality of their workplace while staying connected to who they are, without asking them to suffer indefinitely.
Sometimes the next step is a small adjustment that helps you get through the week. Sometimes it is recognizing that the situation requires support or a change beyond your individual control. Understanding the why helps you see that distinction more clearly.
