In my post, "Practicing Patience," I wrote about some of the things I do to curb feelings of impatience. Here's an example of how practicing patience recently helped save me from looking like a dufus to my book designers.
This happened while finishing up my manuscript for my book, "Awakenings from the Light." A couple of weeks ago, I submitted my manuscript to the design team so that they could begin their cover and interior design work. I used their website's file uploader to send them my manuscript. A few days later they let me know that I had done something odd with the file, which means that I needed to fix and resubmit it.
It took me a couple of days to make the fix and resubmit the file, again on their website. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. The design team is usually pretty prompt, getting back to me within a couple of days. Five days later I still hadn't heard from them.
By now I'm pretty impatient. What's going on?
I should have heard from them already.
I thought that maybe they're super-busy, so I instituted my "wait 24 hours" policy before trying to contact them. Another day passed and I still didn't hear anything, so I made a plan. I decided to check the website that I used to upload the manuscript to see if they left me a message there. If I didn't see anything, I'd call them and politely ask for status.
Once on the website, I started poking around, looking for the messages screen, and realized I was the one who screwed up. Ugh! I felt pretty sheepish and was VERY glad I didn't make a phone call. It turns out that when I thought I was uploading my fixed-up file, I never actually clicked the "Submit Manuscript" button. Which means the design team never actually received the new file. Oops.
I realized that sometimes it pays to wait 24 hours, calm down, and try to approach the situation with a clearer head....and more patience!
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