How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

APPENDIX A
How to Be Good at Meetings
Meetings come in many guises—informal chats, routine check-ins, slow-paced
calls, fancy presentations. Our days are often peppered with them. But that’s not
usually seen as a good thing. “Meeting” has somehow become a dirty word;
when we hear someone say “I had a day full of meetings,” we feel pity rather
than envy. How have we let that happen? Meetings are a form of interaction, and
we’re social creatures. So why do we see them as so onerous?
The answer, I think, is that we often pay a lot of attention to 
what
we’re
discussing—the document we’re sharing, the decision we need to make, the
message we want to get across—and very little attention to 
how
we’re having the
conversation. Think about the last meeting you were in. How much time went
into thinking about the setup of the conversation and the right way to encourage
great contributions from everyone? Not much, I’d guess. I can’t count the
number of times I’ve seen smart people spend hard, long weeks putting together
a presentation, followed by just a few bare minutes—often on the way to the
meeting—on how to make the most of the interaction. It’s a huge missed
opportunity.
So this section is designed to help you apply the advice in 
How to Have a
Good Day
to each meeting you have. If you only try even one or two of these
ideas, it should enable you to start recapturing the love—whether you’re running
the meeting or just attending it.
PREPARING FOR THE MEETING
Some steps you can take to prepare yourself for a good meeting:
Set intentions, by answering these kinds of questions before you walk in:
• Aim: If you could achieve only one thing in the meeting, what would it be?
So what really matters most?
• Attitude: Acknowledge what’s top of mind for you as you go into the

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meeting. Recognize that this will shape your experience.
• Assumptions: Specifically, do you have any negative expectations about
the meeting? Can you challenge them?
• Attention: Given your actual aim, where do you want to focus your
attention in the meeting? What do you want to notice?
• (Think about the other attendees. What might be 
their
answers to these
intention-setting questions?)
Actions: What specific actions will help you make those intentions a reality?
Which “when-then” triggers will remind you to do these things?
Mental contrasting: What’s going to get in the way of things going as you
hope? What can you plan to do, to keep things on track?
Mind’s-eye rehearsal: Visualize the way you’d like this upcoming meeting to
go. What does success look like?
Mind-body loops: If you’re stressed about the meeting, use physical feedback
loops to encourage your brain to come off high alert: smile broadly and
breathe deeply; spread yourself out—shoulders back, head up, feet firmly
planted. Try it in a restroom or when greeting people (as well as during the
meeting).
If you have a hand in planning the meeting, also try these steps:
Make the meeting slightly shorter than a full hour or half hour, to give people
some mental recovery time afterward. (And don’t let it run longer than ninety
minutes without a proper break.) 
Try listing and introducing agenda items
as questions, not statements. (For example, “How can we improve team
communication?” rather than “Team communication.”) 
Choose the
location and set up the space to mirror what you want from the discussion.
Want informality? Push formal tables to the side, or at least sit on adjoining
sides of the table rather than opposite each other. Upbeat discussion? Make
sure the room is brightly lit. And so on.