Meetings Are Terrific, If You Know What You’re Doing.

Human Nature, Sex, and Meeting Experiences

If you are good at having sex, you’re probably good at conducting meetings or participating in them.

If you are an experienced journalist or good at listening instead of talking and getting the story, you’re probably someone I want in a meeting.

I came to this flash of the obvious by studying human nature and by talking with my long-time colleague Liz. Both of us started in journalism and became in-demand consultants for meetings for more than 40 years. The reasons that national companies and international associations hired us go by many different labels such as strategic communications, facilitation, parliamentarian, storytelling, certification program builder, master neuroplastician, and culture consultant.

The main reason people recommended us and referred us to others, we found out, is that “We give good meetings.”

For the longest time, we thought it was about great outcomes, metrics, and enabling humans to overcome old fears and achieve, to the amazement of themselves and others. Here’s what else we have learned in a life of meetings.

Pick Your Path and Your Partners Carefully

If you know in your 20’s when you choose a profession as the path to travel for 50 or more years and that profession has lots of meetings every week, you soon experience how much of your life will happen in meetings. If you know in your 20’s that you desire a life partner or sexual companionship for the next 50 years or so, you soon get how important relationship skills and human nature are. These two life choices have a lot of common ground in meetings expectations and behaviors.

Let’s agree it’s time for a new conversation about meetings.

Let’s agree that consuming information about something and doing it are not the same.

It matters not if you can tell me about the more than 10,000 books and articles you found on how to have better meetings or productivity or team building, if the solution to your human need is not another meeting. Let’s agree that it matters little if you know about sex if the right person and right situation are not present.

Let’s take a fresh look at meetings through the stories of human behavior and wisdom Liz and Georgia have gained in 40 years of meetings, including more than 5,000 meetings with 10 or more people on boards of directors, committees, commissions, and task forces, plus more than 200,000 individual interviews and private meetings before or after the group sessions. Along the way, we’ve paid attention to the literature, books, and articles that run into millions for the past 100 years on meeting effectiveness, processes, leadership, management, and remote practices.

The most rewarding part of our work as meeting pros and storytellers has been the replication of the experience.

When we introduce someone to what a great meeting looks and feels like, they want more with us and others. When they replicate what happened with us and do it with others, without us, that’s deeply satisfying.

Again, it’s like experiencing great sex the first time or a memorable, high-energy meeting in that the participants often report back that they were able to repeat the meeting experience and meeting impact they learned with us and put that into their own systems for working with others.

We Probably Don’t Want to Meet With You

Are we asking you to meet with us? Nope. There is information at the end of this essay on how to get our attention, but only a few get through. This essay is for your benefit now and for you to take as much of our magic and lessons learned into your own systems.

The more you know about meetings, the fewer and better they get. Liz and Georgia push back on meetings. A lot. To be completely honest, we take only 10% of the meetings that are asked of us. If we don’t see a clear reason why a conversation needs to happen in real time, with individuals or with multiple people, on a fixed schedule, then you won’t see us in that meeting. We will politely, but firmly, decline.

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Meetings Myths Buster

We learn about meetings by living through them. If we knew at 25 what we learned about meetings 30 years later at 55, we would see that what we wanted all along always came to the meeting. People who have the money, opportunities, and resources you want are humans.

Make it a full-time job to study them. The more you learn, know, and experience human nature, the greater your value becomes to yourself and others. Grasp and hold on tight to human nature and call it your meta-skill. It’s the one skill that increases the power and value of all other skills you learn. Yes, more than AI skills, too.

Hundreds of other skills and things worth learning may come, go, or stay awhile. Human nature is the one that matters first and always. It’s what your brain wants and will always figure a way to get it, with or without your intense attention.

Studying and serving human nature has been my full-time job for more than 40 years. The titles and identities I took on helped others relate to me. Journalist. Association executive. Corporate officer. Advanced mentor. Editor. Credentials expert. The job that brought me meaning, money, and great relationships has always been studying and serving human nature.

If you understand how the human mind works, including what makes it tick, what makes it pay attention, what makes it take action, then you can make any meeting successful. The same goes for any business or life success. You can work your way into new opportunities. You can make friends and influence people. You can navigate through life with elegance and grace because you are the master of your mind and not someone else’s pawn.

If you understand human nature, you see why humans love to meet and keep trying every kind of meeting, from intimate to small group to larger groups, to get what they want. The quality of the meeting totally depends on your awareness of which of the human nature desires are at play. It’s always one and often a combination of 1) survival 2) safety of tribe 3) perceived status 4)clarity and comfort 5) freedom from fear 6) social acceptance 7) sexual companionship 8) life enjoyment.

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You Have Agency

Start with your mind and your brain to understand other humans. We humans have agency over our mind and brain. We can choose our behaviors. We recognize other humans do too and we want to support them too.

Your brain is rewiring, reprogramming itself all the time, no matter what. This is not a new idea. Humans gave it a name, and it’s neuroplasticity. It can work to your advantage or work against you. Your brain does not know which neural pathways work in your favor and which ones will destroy your life. Your brain automates whatever you repeat. All of your habits, learning, and behaviors run on those pathways that you repeat.

The brain is a pattern recognition machine. The brain is a story engine. Give it a pattern or a story, and you are totally in charge of the mind. Logic always comes in second place behind survival and identity. Every writer, speaker, business leader, effective meeting facilitator, or Rolls-Royce salesman understands this about the brain and human nature.

What Does Neuroplasticity Have to Do With Your Next Meeting?

Why did we ask a Liz, a Master Neuroplastician to make sense of human nature and give you immediate powers for better meetings? First of all, Liz is also a journalist, which means she’s trained to ask questions, listen, and get the story. Liz is also a certified professional parliamentarian and has spent most of the awake part of her life preparing for and facilitating meetings, all the while studying human nature. The other part of her life is sleeping, traveling, eating, and accompanying her therapy dogs as they work.

One way to quickly understand neuroplasticity and why it matters is to look at the flip side, which is chronic stress. That’s the human nature story that you know, without a lot of scientific explanation, because it shows up in our lives as a dysfunctional workplace culture, financial problems, caregiving, grief and loss, and family conflict.

Meetings mirror your life. People who seem to master meeting invitations and what they get out of meetings are the same ones who let go of what they cannot control and learn how to manage toxic stress. These are the lucky ones who live longer and smarter because they protect their brain by turning stress into lived experience, then rapidly converting that to their asset. While others are getting frustrated, bored, insulted, or angry during a crappy meeting, the mentality master is creating neurons and plasticity in their brain.

What does that look like? It shows up as extreme creativity.

True story. At a meeting where one board member was trying to express innovative thinking, the others shut him down and stopped calling on him. He went silent and started writing rapidly on the premium paper notepad provided to each participant. Page after page. Words. Drawings. Graphs. His pen moving so fast that eventually everyone noticed him after an hour. Finally, someone asked him, “What is going on? What is on those pages you are rapidly producing?”

He stopped writing and said to the whole board, “I’ve just created a business plan to put you out of business. If I can do this as one person in an hour, just think what another company–a new competitor with many people, can do to you in less than a week.”

“Would you like to see the plan?” he said. Suddenly, the meeting changed entirely, and the lived experience of one person became an enormous asset. He had, indeed, listened to the worst nightmare scenarios and chronic stress issues that made the meeting unproductive. He went fast and deep into the most creative region of his brain. He had the knowledge and ability to create a stunning, completely credible business plan in one hour. What he showed them was accurate and believable. He engaged the entire rest of the meeting in actionable ways to reprogram everyone’s brain.

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How Will This Meeting Make a Difference?

This one shift will change your life and it will make every meeting from now on work to your favor. The best strategy is to agree to meetings that need you and say no to everything else.

What do we say to the pushback cry that says “I must go to the meeting because it’s mandatory”? Let’s start with this: You are not a victim or hostage unless you choose to accept that role, which someone else made up.

Even if you accept for a minute that hostage status, your brain doesn’t agree. Your mind is always going to go to one or all eight of those human nature desires you saw at the beginning of this essay.

Your brain controls everything. It pays no attention to someone else’s desires or your goals, intentions, journaling, meditation, or self-improvement lists. Nope and never will.

Your brain asks itself one question repeatedly like a psycho: “What should I get better at?” And it answers based on your behavior, not your goals. Neuroplasticity is the discovery of the brain’s sketchbook that shows who you are. It is written in pencil, not ink, not keyboard, not digital anything. Pencil and eraser.

That one fact and understanding puts you 100% in charge of yourself, your changes, and what you do in the next meeting. Essentially, you can participate, learn, speak, stay silent, or misbehave. It’s totally between you and your brain.

What Will Engage Your Brain and Others In The Next Meeting?

Most of the time, you don’t need a meeting. Most of the time humans are looking for validation or cover for a decision they want others to support. More often than not, humans want to socialize and step away from deep work that is hard to do and hard to sustain, so they call a meeting for the sake of throwing stuff on the wall to see if it sticks.

It’s all well and good to discuss how to run better meetings, but it doesn’t matter how smoothly a meeting goes if it could have just been an email.

If you absolutely must meet, here’s how to take charge of your brain and any good that comes out of the meeting:

1. Start with who and get ruthless about asking people to participate. Start with the criteria that “If that person is not in the meeting, we might as well not have it.” Everyone in the meeting needs to be there and have a role. This applies to all sizes. If it is just you and one other or a Zoom group, every human there has a brain that is running faster than their mouth. Who is there and why they are needed is more important than everything else. Full stop.
2. Make the meeting shorter than you think you need.
3. Engage the brain or don’t bother.
4. Understand the introvert-extrovert dynamic. Where we get it wrong is thinking this is about behavior. It’s totally about how the brain receives, processes, then produces information. The introvert appears to be quiet or a deep thinker and the extrovert appears to run their mouth with no emergency brake for their brain.

5. Build in recovery time.

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How to avoid a crappy meeting.

The first sign of a good meeting is that the preparation time is the same as the meeting. Let that soak in. Call it foreplay or preparation. It’s necessary for a great meeting experience.

A one-hour meeting needs an hour of pre-work. A 30-minute meeting needs 30-minutes of pre-work. An all-day meeting needs at least 8 hours of pre-work. Often more. Preparation work includes developing the agenda, confirming the participants, selecting points for discussion and decisions required before moving to another point, and individual interviews in advance with all participants in order to research their interest, knowledge, and relevance to each agenda item.

There are hundreds of books on the mechanics of meetings, and that’s not going to help if you miss the human nature basics of meetings. Human nature includes universal traits like emotion, social bonding, and self-awareness. Human behavior is how we express human nature in real situations.

Why Do You Need To Say No to Back-to-Back Meetings?

Why recovery time? You need only one good meeting a day. It could be coffee with a colleague for 30 minutes. It could be a team meeting with three others. The value of the meeting depends on two measures: The human interaction during the meeting and the one thing you do within hours after the meeting. Did you immediately apply what you learned and take action, or did you only take notes?

Here’s why too much time in meetings ends up depleting your life instead of building something we both want. Some people think back-to-back meetings mean they are important, needed, and influential. Your brain disagrees. And guess which one is in charge of your health and life expectancy? Not those people in the meeting. It’s your brain trying to talk to you.

Every time you switch from one meeting to the next, the area of your brain that’s responsible for focus, decision-making, and complex reasoning (prefrontal cortex) has to disengage from one context and re-engage with another. This cognitive switching is extremely metabolically expensive. It takes time, depletes neural resources, and degrades the quality of your thinking with each successive switch.

The more decisions your brain makes, the lower the quality of each subsequent decision. Executives and other humans who spend their mornings stuck in back-to-back meetings are incapable of showing up for the rest of the day as their best selves.

The meaning of a situation is whatever meaning you give it.

The smart money says you will work with your brain to make every minute of life count and if you are really held hostage in a mandatory meeting, then let your brain go where it will to build your next business, plan a vacation, or become the change you want to see.

Turn Wishes Into Action. Put Legs On Anything Worth Learning.

Remember your human nature basic training. If humans have these eight wants, are they willing to grow or change? To find their tribe and safety? To gain social acceptance? To form relationships and companionships? Most people answer yes and then go to the default, bad habit setting in their brain, and take no action that gets the change they say they want.

As long as you are alive, your brain keeps running. Awake or asleep. If you notice that you are taking in a lot of information but not moving it to action or change, then the big decision is this: Do you want to take back control from the drunk driver that’s been programming your brain for too long? What are you training your brain to become?

Everyone, including Georgia and Liz experiences anxiety, limiting beliefs, disempowering thought patterns, and failure. It’s easy to treat these experiences as here to stay. Instead, realize you can change your brain. Reprogram it. Change and liberation happen. As soon as you understand your brain can change whenever you want, you put yourself in the driver’s seat of everything, instead of an unhappy passenger or hostage in the trunk.

Credit Pexels from Pixabay

Human Nature Basics. Lessons From 40 Years of Studying People.

Humans know what they want at a deep level, but are reliably wrong about what will satisfy those wants.

Pay attention to the two-level structure: Humans do know what they want at the level of basic psychological needs. The actual deep wants are simpler and more structural than “pleasure, money, admiration” — they are agency, mastery, and belonging. Unfortunately, humans are systematically wrong about which specific objects, outcomes, or achievements will satisfy those needs.

People adapt back to a baseline. This is the floor under the whole debate. What people think they want (money, big life events) doesn’t move their happiness set-point much or for long.

What we see every day is not the problem with knowing what humans want.The problem is too many choices, which makes you question your decisions before you even make them, sets you up for unrealistically high expectations, and makes you blame yourself for any failures. So what then? People can’t articulate a want clearly enough to act on it when the options open wide for them.

Here’s the short list of human behavior rules for meetings:

1. Humans are tribal. We need each other to get anything done. We’re going to keep meeting and the smarter we get about our needs and relationships, the more discerning we become about who gets our time, attention, and talents. The older you get, the better the meetings, because you say “no” more often and go only where the need for you is strong, compelling, and sounds like, “hell, yes!”
2. The only people necessary for a meeting are those with an active role. The entire reason for building an agenda is to search for something we both want to talk about. If you have not been included in forming the agenda, there’s no purpose for you in the meeting.
3. No clear roles for each person and no designated facilitator means drift and disconnects ahead. Always start with ownership and find out, Whose meeting is this? What happened to make this meeting necessary? Who is the timekeeper and who will be enforcing the rules of behavior for this meeting?
4. Nobody can force you to meet. If the only reason for you is passive, such as to receive information and say nothing or fill a seat, that’s not a meeting. Don’t go. There are many other ways to consume information, such as email, articles, and books.
5. All gatherings are not meetings. All requests for your presence are not meetings. It may be a sporting event or concert where you can sing along or shout to the players on the field, but that’s not a meeting. If you paid to get into the event, it’s someone else’s agenda, probably entertainment and not a meeting.

Start on the page, not on the phone

As much as we would love to have a phone conversation with you, we insist on an agenda in advance, and so should you.

Why does anyone ask for a meeting by phone before you both know if you are a good match for one another? Spend a little time with this article or our website blogs (here for Georgia and here for Liz) to get a NOW sense of what calls to you.

If you think we should meet, we’ll build the agenda, together, with this Meetings Expectations form. Go here for our Five-Question Agenda Creator.