The Positive Energy Workplace

5 Meeting & Mindset Hacks -- For you and your team's health, productivity, and clarity.

Are you spending a lot of time in meetings? How about in your head? Both have value. Both overdone are exhausting. So this week, try one or all of these five ways to make your meetings and mindset better. 

  1. Turn 60's into 50's or even 40's. You likely do not need a full 60 minutes for your meeting, so hone it back. You'll work with what you've got. I love turning 60's into 50's and using those 10 minutes for reboots, self-care, and prep for whatever I'm moving into next. Play with it with your team. 
  2. Create agreements that support presence, honesty, and collaboration with your team. Design agreements as a team that will set you up and put you "in front" of conflict and misunderstandings. Examples? Assume good, get curious, time integrity, direct engagement, manage your own energetic hygiene, etc. Any complaints you have as a team are usually pointing towards requests and therefore awesome agreements that can be made. 
  3. Set your intentions for what you want to create with this meeting. Do this individually before you go to your meeting and then do it as a team. Make sure you know what you want to get out of the meeting, how you want people to experience you, set an intention for how you want to show up, get clear on what you have to believe in order to show up and lead well, and proactively map out the actions you'll have to take to have the impact and results you want. (Yes, these are from the "5 Steps to Intentional Impact" in the IEP Method®.)
  4. Do an IEP Energy Check and a Presence Reboot. With everyone present, check in. How's our energy? How present are we? What kind of contagious are we bringing? How do we want people to experience us? What's the experience we want to create? What do we need to do to reboot? Even becoming present IN THIS MOMENT will be enough to up-level the energy in the room. Pose these questions for even greater shifts and to accelerate what's possible. I go way deeper into team dynamics, meetings, and contagiousness and how to use Energy Checks and Reboots to address it all in the next book. (Yep, you're going to start seeing me seeding the book more and more because I want you to have the new content.) 
  5. Shift the mental and emotional energy in the room. Are things feeling tense, challenging, downright impossible? Do you feel stuck? Are you completely agitated with "that guy/gal"? Shift it. There are several ways to do this (yep, in the book), and for now, here are three. Use whichever feels most congruent for you in the moment:
    1. Name it. Name the energy or issue in the room, you don't have to be right, just "notice" that something feels off and put it on the table. Done with the right IEP (intentions, energy, and presence), this can open up a wildly fruitful conversation. The minute you name the "dark," the light can come in.
    2. Bubble Up and don't "become it." Don't match the lowest vibration in the room, hold your space. Remember you have your space, hold it, and then decide how you want to interact with the energy in the room. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Now see what's here. New info will come in.
    3. Take a time out. Give yourself a break. Five minutes can be magic. With the five minutes, have everyone get up, walk around, take a dance break, use the bathroom, get water, etc. Extra credit if you offer them these 3 questions to reflect upon and discuss when they come back: "What most needs attention here is..." "What I would love to have happen next is..." "How I'm willing to contribute to things going better is..."

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