As we come to the festive season at the end of another eventful year and indeed decade, I look back over what has happened in the professional world over this time one thought strikes me in particular. In your personal, professional or even political life there will inevitably be ups and downs. Times when a way forward on a transaction or a job is hard to see, and the challenges seem to outweigh the solutions. That is the time when it really pays to hang in and wait for the tide to turn in your favour – which it eventually will.
 
Hanging in there means not to give up on something even if it is difficult. See this short but to the point blog from Psychology Today How To Hang In There When Times Get Tough which suggests that Looking beyond yourself may be an answer. It also cites a great quote from the American abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe:  “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”
 
That for me is the key. Often just when a negotiation seems absolutely moribund or a job seems to have no future is exactly the time to look for the change or opportunity to fix matters that is just around the corner. As Bob Dylan and others have sung The darkest hour is just before the dawn.
 
It’s all about persistence and not giving up. See this Forbes piece about the challenges entrepreneurs setting up a business face From Idea to Business: Persistence is Critical. It has some good suggestions to help you when the going gets tough including:
 
1) Don’t panic. Don’t give up. Be at peace. Have faith. Know you will develop an answer.
 
2) Take time to ponder and understand the situation. Obtain all the facts. Find out what happened and why.
 
3) Consider every option and every possibility to solve the problem.
 
It concludes Great leaders are survivors. They have weathered life’s stormy seas. They have moved heaven and earth to accomplish their business goals. They will never give up.
 
See also this Harvard Business Review article Giving Up Is the Enemy of Creativity which suggests that we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistenceand observesConsider that Sir James Dyson developed over 5,000 prototypes before he patented his best-selling Dyson vacuum cleaner. Or that Walt Disney animated cartoons for nearly two decades before his first big hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
 
As Winston Churchill said Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
 
The English actor, film producer, and musician Tom Hiddleston commented You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.
 
So, as we look forward and back at the turn of the year let’s do so with optimism and enthusiasm, looking for the answers and hanging in there when necessary.
 
All the best for Xmas and the New Year.

Civility comes from the Latin word civilis meaning citizen and can be defined as civilised conduct (especially courtesy or politeness) or a polite act or expression.
 
Letters, the main form of business communication before emails, are structured by convention in such a way as to encourage politeness in correspondence. You start with “Dear Sir or Madam” and conclude with “Yours sincerely” or “Yours faithfully” and most people organise their thoughts into a structure with paragraphs and sometimes numbering. Even litigation letters from the most aggressive law firms had a modicum of good manners, though you sort of got the professional message when they suggested that “with respect” you are “completely in the wrong”.
 
Nowadays emails, IM and texts positively encourage terseness to the point where some would say they are positively rude. The lack of structure or any formal rules or even established conventions tends to result in brevity and shorthand, which can be good but also can be seen by the recipient as aggressive or dismissive. Often in contract negotiations one side can come across as positively unpleasant and obstructive to deal with because of the nature of their online communications. In person they can then be surprisingly pleasant though some damage to the professional relationship may have been irretrievably done before you meet them.
 
The thing is when writing an email and even more so a text or IM getting the message across quickly tends to always trump thinking about how it may be perceived by the reader and what effect it may have on a fellow professional.
 
Here is a blog Ten Tips to Avoid Being Rude in Your Emails which comments In your emails, do you sound like a soulless sociopath? You’re not alone. You may be a warm and friendly person in real life, but there’s something about composing an email that makes the message sound sterile – or downright rude.And observes thatThe problem is that emails just aren’t a natural form of communication. They’re not like face to face interactions, where you rely heavily on body language to understand context.
 
One of the challenges is that whilst you might have received 10 or 20 letters a day as an individual in a professional practice you may well be receiving and sending 200 plus emails. As a result it is much harder to pay attention to the effect you might be making. See this Harvard Business Review article How to Make Sure Your Emails Give the Right Impression which comments Given the avalanche of email we receive each year — 121 messages per day, on average — it’s no wonder that we have become somewhat desensitized to its impact on our professional brand. We’ll spend hours polishing our LinkedIn profiles and revising our résumés, but hastily hit send on an unintelligible missive simply because we’re in a rush.
 
This Forbes blog from 2013 5 Ways Email Makes Your Employees Miserable comments We use email for everything related to communication and collaboration at work even though it's no longer the most effective way to do either.In my view despite some predictions of the demise of email things have not got better over the last 7 years.
 
There is according to this Daily Telegraph article even a tool to help you "write in a more polite, friendly tone" in your emails. There must be a problem here if someone is writing apps to solve it!
 
The other problem is that unlike letters which are generally sent to one person and maybe copied to a few others, email communication proliferates which means any mistake or offence caused is magnified many times over - see another Harvard Business Review Article Email Etiquette and the Perils of “Reply All”.
 
Nowhere are the risks of creating the wrong impression in emails more likely than in using this form of communication to manage your team. This is fraught with peril and scope for misunderstanding. See this article The Dangers of Using E-mail to Manage Employees which commences Communication is the foundation of a strong employment relationship. Ongoing, open, and effective communications with employees are fundamental ingredients for creating relationships that are based on respect. And employees who feel respected are more productive, more loyal, and have longer tenure. And then came e-mail!
 
I think personally that email and other forms of instant communication are great and enable different and more collaborative ways of working. However, we should consider more about how we use them and the effect they can have.  As the English composer John Powell said “Communication works for those who work at it.”
 
And above all we should seek to be civil and polite and remember that as Theodore Roosevelt sagely observed “Politeness is a sign of dignity, not subservience.”
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I saw the American rock band Tom Petty (sadly since deceased) and the Heartbreakers perform and bring a sense of warmth and good feeling to a rain sodden Isle of Wight Festival a few years ago in 2012. They sang in one of their standout songs “Learning to Fly” that “Coming down is the hardest thing.” They probably weren’t thinking of the professional working world when they composed these words in 1991, but it does remind me of one of the challenges we face that is not always recognised.
 
This is the sense of anti-climax or even let down that always seems to come after the conclusion of a big deal or major transaction. You work flat out for long hours over many months and occasionally years with a close tight knit team creating, negotiation and closing the deal. It is complex and tough. But you have a sense of purpose and of achievement concluding with the euphoria of signing and the immediate celebrations, often with the other side now the tension of being on the other side of the table has gone. 
 
But then you come back down to earth. Tiredness kept at bay by adrenalin kicks in. The team you have worked so closely with week after week month after month disperses almost overnight, and all the mundane work and admin put off for a long time suddenly surfaces. There is even a term for it – post project depression or PPD if you like acronyms. 
 
Here is an interesting article right on topic 5 Ways to Battle Post-Event Depression: Life After An Event which discusses the issue in the context of major event planning commenting After the extreme “high” and adrenaline rush of finishing a major project that has been an obsession, comes a low or sadness of lacking that sense of purpose. It could be a writer completing a novel, a runner after completing a marathon, but whatever the task, the project owner is left feeling empty after the storm has passed.
 
Whilst this one Getting Past Done: What to Do After You’ve Finished a Big Project sums the challenge up well: There’s no feeling in the world quite like the mixture of triumph and sadness that comes after finishing a project you’ve been working on for months or even years. On one hand, you’re done and can finally release your finished product, whatever it is, into the world. On the other hand, though, completing a big goal leaves a little emptiness in your life, like sending your kids off to college — one of the major driving forces in your life is gone.
 
There is even a good Harvard Business Review article on the topic Staying Motivated After a Major Achievement commenting  When we think about achieving a major goal, we picture the exhilaration of reaching new heights. What we often fail to anticipate, however, is that once we’ve scaled that mountain, it can be surprisingly chilly on the other side. After a period of massive productivity we have to revert back to life as usual and settle back into an established workplace routine.
 
It articulates the issue well In many cases, reverting back to a predictable routine also means the work is no longer as stimulatingand suggests finding time to recover and restock your energy and taking time out to refocus and reprioritise concluding Ultimately, how you approach your work in the days and weeks following a big win can be just as critical to your long-term success as the achievement itself. By anticipating and proactively addressing a depleted mental and physical state, you’re more apt to turn an isolated victory into a consistent winning streak.
 
I think this is really about recognise and anticipating the inevitable let down after the conclusion of a major deal and finding ways to manage which can include working out lessons learned and communicating these to colleagues. 
 
And rushing lemming like into another project without pause to think, which happens in some professional practices, may cure the post project blues for sure but is not good for stress levels and negates any learning opportunity. 
 
As the American philosopher John Dewy said “We do not learn from experience – we learn from reflecting on experience.”