Dominic quietly took me to the underground car park in the afternoon and told me that a meeting has been planned with Tom. The exact date is yet to be finalized. But it should be in the next couple of days. He told me not to email or text him anything about this anymore. He also told me to make sure I had the entire meeting planned out in my head.

Actually I had not thought about this at all Diary. I really need to do some scenario building before I go head to head with Tom. Anything could happen in that room. So far I was under the impression that I would be able to dynamically adapt to the situation at hand though a combination of spontaneous problem-solving and on-feet-thinking.

But Dominic has a point. This is not some client presentation you can go for without any planning or presentation. This is much more serious than that. If something goes wrong, people could lose jobs, reputations could be destroyed, careers could be lost and my pound salary could be finished.

In any case I have started to mentally, physically and spiritually prepare for the challenge.

Mental preparation: After a long time I have once again started saying self-reinforcing statements to myself when I wake up first thing in the morning. I had stopped doing this after placements and the seduction of Gouri happened.

But now once again when I wake up in the morning I say to myself ten times in a loud volume: ‘Robin you are FULLY capable of this undertaking. You WILL go into that room. You WILL stand up to Tom. You WILL convince him of the benefits of your exciting new front-loaded client leadership profit-sharing mechanism. You WILL convince him to extend the Dufresne partnership. You WILL come back from that room with nothing but complete success. In case there is any problem you WILL immediately touch base with your friends in other consulting firms. And you WILL convince them to look at your CV. Meanwhile you WILL negotiate with Dominic and try to convince him to not fire you. And you WILL also beg him to not inform Boris in Vietnam. GO ROBIN GO ROBIN GO ROBIN GO!’

Physical preparation: I am now paying special attention to my diet as well. There are tremendous stresses running through my body and mind right now. So I have now added energy drinks, assorted nuts and dried fruits, and at least one granola bar with every meal.

This gives me a high sense of energy the whole day. And also a little bit of gas. But that is a compromise I am prepared for.