Running Great Meetings and Workshops For Dummies

Chapter 5

Handling the Start of Your Session

In This Chapter

Managing yourself

Kicking the session off

Making decisions

Understanding who’s in your room

The day of your meeting or workshop has dawned.

By meeting day, you’ll have put in so much thought and preparation that you should be looking forward to getting going, even if you are feeling a little nervous.

What really matters in the hour or two before you start is that you manage yourself as well as you can in the moments leading up to your kick-off. That’s because a great start is much more likely to lead to your overall success. A shambolic beginning is much harder to overcome and means you have to work more than twice as hard to overcome any negative impressions.

Now research differs in how long you have to make that great first impression, but it’s anywhere between three seconds to three minutes. So as soon as they see you in your room, your participants will be thinking, ‘Is she in control?’ ‘Does he know what he’s doing?’ ‘Do I like her?’ ‘Do I trust him to lead this process?’

Getting off to a great start means you have ...