You don’t influence change by starting with furious activity.

You start by observing what is.

Here’s something to get you started.

This experiment is best done in a small meeting that you are not chairing. (It can be virtual or face to face). Ideally it would be a meeting that you attend regularly.
Your role in this meeting is to watch and observe AND as we coaches like to say a lot… ‘to be curious without judgement’. The purpose is simply to tune your antennae and to practise reading the room – so that you start to notice things that would normally pass you by.

The 80/20 rule applies here.

You need to listen for 80% of the time and speak only for 20%. Here are ten things to pay attention to:

• Imagine you are looking down at the meeting in your helicopter. What do you notice? Is everyone there on time? Are people prepared? Who is quietly texting or sending emails (they think we don’t notice – but we do!)

• Look at each person in turn....

Last week I shared an experiment with you. We looked at ways to read the room and tune your antennae – with a view to effective positive change in your meetings or interactions with others. I shared an experiment to help you do just that.

The article is here if you missed it.

Here are the kind of things you might notice now that you hadn’t really noticed before (or if you had – you’d not done anything about it).

People committing to things and then not doing them. As one person said ‘When I did the Reading the Room experiment it became obvious to me that commitment was lacklustre at best. I realised we need to understand why we’d got into this pattern and what we need to do with it. It’s almost become accepted that people won’t deliver on time’.

‘It made me realise how much people talk for the sake of it and don’t add anything new to the conversation. This is seriously adding to overwhelm and time wasting for...

Think about the meetings you attend.

How many people do you know who waffle on, fill the silence, finish people’s sentences, feel the need to tell everyone how smart they are (in a round-about way, of course –all that humblebragging on LinkedIn and elsewhere!)…. What about the people who stay silent, play ‘victim’ and blame others for everything?

If there’s a hint of self- recognition there, there’s an experiment I’d love you to try. It’s all about OBSERVATION (This is your FIRST STEP).

This experiment is best done in a small meeting that you are not chairing. Ideally it would be a meeting that you attend fairly regularly.

Your role in this meeting is to watch and observe AND as we coaches like to say a lot… ‘to be curious without judgement’. The purpose is simply to tune your antennae and to practise reading the room – so that you start to notice things that would normally pass you by.

The 80/20 rule applies...

Do you spend ages in pointless meetings?

Back-to- back talking shops that serve no purpose and waste our time are a BIG contributor to overwhelm.

You need tactics – for ‘meeting mastery.’

AND - an elegant way to say ‘no’ to those time-wasting talking shops that ruin your day. 

This video will show you how.

No more mind-numbing collective procrastination where nothing gets done. 

One of the biggest time wasters in organisations is meetings. So much of them are simply collective procrastination with people pretending that stuff is actually getting done.

When it isn’t.

Who are we kidding here?

I often lay down a challenge for my coaching clients to slash their meeting times by half over the next three months (and to STOP the back to back meeting hell that means you’re always late, never ‘present’ and often on the back foot).

Here’s how you can do this too:

Firstly, ask: ‘How important is this meeting to achieving my personal and organisational goals?’ If it isn’t then find a way to say ‘no’ to the meeting without offending. The ‘without offending’ bit is key. Here’s how to nail this:

• Offer to attend part of the meeting. ‘I’m on a deadline with project x but I can join you for half an hour between 10 and 10.30.’
• Schedule a phone call instead...