It’s Hard To Appreciate It Fully Until It’s You Doing It

For over 20 years I’ve been serving on the boards of numerous Universities. And each year, twice a year, the Universities hold board conferences for their board members to come together and hear updates on what is happening at the school, hear students and faculty present, have a dinner or lunch and often an event. As a participant of the boards I get to come and enjoy these events, but its only been the last two years where I was asked to be the Chairman of the business school board for UVU that I have really come to appreciate the amount of work that those putting on these conferences have to do. There is an incredible amount of time that is spent in planning these conferences. There is all of the scheduling of things that goes on, arranging the venues, selecting dinner menus and lunch menus and snacks, picking out table cloths and place settings, having flowers arrangements done, getting entertainment lined up, figuring out presenters and topics to cover, sending out invites and driving directions, having signs and parking blocked off, getting agendas printed and handouts all ready, and a million other things that go into these events…not to mention then creating powerpoint presentations to use throughout the program….its a TON of work!

As I sit here tonight, still at work, going through my list of every little detail to attend to for this weeks board conference I’m in charge of, I am struck by the thought of how many times over the years I’ve taken for granted all the hard work that has gone into every event I’ve been asked to attend. Whether it’s a board conference at a University, or a luncheon, or an evening gala, or a wedding reception, or a neighborhood gathering…all of those things took a tremendous amount of effort on the part of someone (an often a team of someones) who slaved away organizing them and making sure every little detail was handled. I can honestly say I will never, ever, take the amount of work that went into those things for granted again.

From now on I am going to do a much better job of making sure I express my appreciation to those people who host events and the team that helps them organize it because now I know just how hard they had to work their guts out to make it happen. So THANK YOU!

~Amy Rees Anderson (you can purchase a copy of my new book here: “What AWESOME Looks Like: How To Excel In Business & Life“)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.