Before You Call the Meeting, Do This

David Stamation, Executive Life Coach

Most meetings go sideways before anyone speaks a word, not because the agenda is weak, but because no one decided what "good" actually feels like when it's over. Here's a simple shift that changes that: pairing your meeting's outcome with a specific emotional intention. When intentions are tied to emotion, and when you're emotionally invested in a goal, you're significantly more likely to achieve it.

The idea is to complement the agenda and enhance the possibility of it being a success that resonates with the team members at the meeting. Typically, you want them to buy-in, initiate change and at times to co-create a solution. To do this you’ll be incorporating emotional fluency to guide you. Adding this technique to your current meetings helps ensure focus and higher likelihood of achieving the result you want.

The Two Key Elements

Once your agenda is in place, the next step is to define the intention for the meeting: What result do you want?

The second is your emotional state. How do you want to feel as you conclude the meeting and walk away?

Key Considerations

Take a moment to articulate a concise and clear "result" for your meeting. This contributes to maintaining focused discussions. Examples: “I want the team to participate in co-creating a solution.” Or “I want full buy-in deploying a new system they’ve been reluctant to embrace.”

Next, Specify your desired emotional state at the meeting's conclusion. Choose genuine emotions like Trustful, Hopeful, Optimistic, or Confident. Avoid vague terms; for instance, anxiety is not a feeling, and powerful is not an emotion. Take an instant to slow down, pause, and connect with the chosen emotion. Feel it in your body as a sensation such as a lightness or energetic. Anchoring the named emotion in your body is a crucial step in this process.

A Before and After Client Story

An endodontist was prone to infrequent team meetings because he didn’t enjoy organizing them and lacked confidence running a group meeting even though he knew it was an important feature of keeping the team connected with each other.

After he adopted the concepts in this article where he named the result he wanted and identified how he wanted to feel at the end of the meeting, it helped him overcome his low confidence. Now he holds regular meetings because he feels more comfortable running the meeting and experiences higher levels of fulfillment. Thinking about planning and scheduling a meeting no longer drains him of energy and the office runs noticeably smoother.

Where My Clients Use It

• Endodontic practice meetings

• Difficult conversations

• High stake meetings

• With children and family members

Try This

At your next meeting, experiment with this technique by taking time before and an honest assessment after the meeting of how it worked. Name what you noticed with the participants. And especially take note of how you felt both during the meeting and after it conclusion.

Action!

Feeling stuck running meetings, or unsure how to get real buy-in from your team? Endo Executive Coaching can help you build confidence and emotional fluency to lead meetings that move people, not just fill a calendar slot. Whether you're working toward smoother team dynamics or a practice that runs with less friction, this coaching can be the catalyst for change.

Reach out directly or visit Endo Executive Coaching to begin.