One common theme to almost all meetings is the necessity to take some form of recording of the session and of any outcomes.

In some cases this may need to be a laborious and extremely accurate and comprehensive style of recording of every utterance and action during the meeting. This is most common in highly political discussions or those in the…[Read more]

Sometimes if this is a common condition, it may be helpful to try some assisted calming x such as ‘rescue remedy’ liquid drops or ‘calms’ tabs. Unlike formal drugs from the doctor, these are both gentle herbal remedies for reducing stress without interference with formal medicines and are freely available from most pharmacies (may be age…[Read more]

Two different situations

Firstly, you have a high level of personal anxiety which isn’t related to what is going on in the meeting, perhaps due to money worries or family issues. There are two helpful things if you have to participate in a meeting when in a highly-stressed state.

The first is to get control of your breathing. Before entering the…[Read more]

A note on facilitating a meeting:

People have different degrees of granularity regarding a facilitator capturing what they are saying – there isnt a “one size fits all ” approach.

Person A may say a paragraph’s worth of speech and be happy with you stripping out all the fluff and writing “Increase sales in Malaysia”

Person B may say virtually…[Read more]

Taking notes for yourself – style is your personal preference but useful to just make notes of key issues, actions allocated, queries relevant to you etc, rather than copious verbatim tomes; you are not Hansard. One more interesting way to capture notes, particularly in an active workshop style meeting is to use a technique called ‘Mind Mapping’ :…[Read more]

Offering a hard copy of your presentation is useful – but IF you have followed the  rules of presentation clarity (see topic ‘making a presentation’ in this group) you can ask that they DONT look at those during the session but take them away afterwards  as ‘aide memoir’ (maybe better give out at the end). As sure sign either your slides are not…[Read more]

Some good practices for presentations:

Make sure all equipment is working in advance: don’t be plugging in, checking switches, searching for flipchart pens etc in the meeting – all these will start you off with low credibility.

Have something clearly displaying the session purpose and time contract so attendees can be sure they are in the right…[Read more]

How easy or challenging an intervention will be will depend on the vibrancy of the meeting and the attendees: in a slow, low key session jumping in with an intervention (notice intervention, not interruption…in most cases just interrupting someone mid sentence will be seen as rude, out of order and poor etiquette…always wait for at least a…[Read more]

Nothing wastes time in a meeting like swerving off topic. Using the meeting to raise a pet subject or asking questions unrelated to the subject just to take advantage of the fact the right folk are here is not good etiquette and will probably be taking offline by the chair anyway. There may be times when it is appropriate to go off at a tangent…[Read more]

Make sure you are clear and concise . no waffling or hesitation so think first to be clear what you are going to say. Also make sure you are adding to or building on or even contradicting the last point or maybe asking a clarification…whatever…but do Not become  a ‘tail end echo’ i.e. if a point goes down well then adding ” I just want to say…[Read more]