It’s the meeting you dread every week. It’s the meeting that seems to drag on and on and on. It’s the meeting where you notice Bob the sales guy nodding off, but then he expertly catches himself before his head hits the conference table.
But there’s good news if you’re in charge of this meeting. You can change the entire dynamic by injecting a little enthusiasm and performance into how you deliver the information.
It’s likely that those attending the meeting are feeding off of your energy. And if you think the subject matter is boring, they will, too. But take a minute to step back from how you’ve organized this meeting for the past 32 weeks. What can you do to make it more engaging?
Try to think of running the meeting like a performance. Can you involve other people in the room in your presentation? Can you use props — preferably outside of the standard dry erase board — to better illustrate your points? Can you be 10 times more enthusiastic in the way in which you deliver your main points? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re already halfway to delivering a more effective, more engaging presentation.
Dale Carnegie tells us that we can win people to our way of thinking if we dramatize our ideas, and there’s no better place to do that than in a weekly meeting that has become stuffy and yawn-inducing.
Another idea: Send out the agenda for the meeting in advance. This gives attendees time to mull over the topics at hand and be better prepared to come to the meeting with ideas and action plans.
We all know that it can be all too easy to fall into a rut and just go through the motions when it comes to weekly or monthly meetings that we’d all probably rather not attend at all. But by having a little fun with it and showing your co-workers that you care, you just might find they take a little more interest in what you have to say.
This post is brought to you by the good folks at Dale Carnegie Training of Michigan. We would love to connect with you on Facebook and Twitter.
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