Something You Should Know - Harnessing the Voice Inside Your Head & How to Shape a Perfect Meeting

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

When you see a construction site where there is sandblasting going on, you probably shouldn’t hang around. This episode begins with an explanation of the problem sandblasting poses to anyone nearby. Source: Dr. Paul Blanc author of “How Everyday Products Make People Sick” (https://amzn.to/3iug5Me) You have a voice inside your head. It talks to you all the time and tells you good things and bad things. It can be a positive coach or a negative critic. Where does that voice come from? How can you use that voice to your advantage? Find out by listening to my guest Ethan Kross. He is an award-winning psychologist, professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It (https://amzn.to/38XXEwa) While meetings can be good and are often necessary, it does seem that a lot of meetings are a big waste of time. Wouldn’t it be great if you could make meetings better? You absolutely can according to my guest Mamie Kanfer Stewart. She is founder of a company called Meeteor (www.meeteor.com) which helps businesses improve the quality of meetings. Marnie is coauthor of the book Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings (https://amzn.to/2XXL2yT). Listen as she offers some easy ways to make your meeting more productive and engaging. When was the last time you checked your tires – REALLY checked them? You may not realize it, but your tires can lose half of the air in them before they even start to look flat. Having underinflated tires can cause all kinds of problems and cost a lot of money. Listen as I explain those problems and how to prevent them. Source: https://bit.ly/3oYpjmj PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! To match with a licensed therapist today, go to https://TalkSpace.com and use the promo code SYSK to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show! TurboTax experts can relieve you from the stress of taxes and file for you so you can do… not taxes! Come to TurboTax and don’t do your taxes. Visit https://TurboTax.com to learn more. Intuit TurboTax.  Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls & emails with Online Privacy Protection from Discover? - And it's FREE! Just activate it in the Discover App. See terms & learn more at https://Discover.com/Online Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why you should never stop and watch construction workers sandblasting. Then, that voice you hear in your head when you talk to yourself has a lot of power if you know how to use it. So the inner voice isn't good or bad. It can take different forms. Your inner voice can inspire confidence and help you perform well, just as it can undermine your performance and lead you to feel crummy. Also, if you use a kitchen teaspoon when you take your medicine, you need to hear something.

And meetings. A lot of people dread going to meetings. But meetings can actually be a good thing. Part of it is, how are you designing the meeting? And when I plan and design meetings, I spend a lot of time thinking about, what are we going to accomplish? Who are the right people to be here? How can I make this more than just people talking, but actually people engaging? All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations.

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With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. It is time for another episode of Something You Should Know. And we start today with something I remember reading a long time ago, and I remember it to this day every time I see a construction site.

And I went back and did some digging and found an article about this. When you see a crew of workers at a construction site and they're sandblasting, hopefully they're all wearing protective breathing gear. You see, sandblasting creates a very fine silica dust that can cause serious lung damage. Here's the problem, though. Although the workers are protected, you're not if you happen to be in that area. And it turns out that the most dangerous dust is so fine you can't even see it, but you are breathing it. Dr. Paul Blank, who is a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at UC San Francisco, says you should stay far, far away from sandblasting and tell everyone else to do the same thing. In fact, in many countries, it is illegal to use sand for sandblasting for this exact reason. Those countries require some other

material that does not create that dangerous dust. And that is something you should know. Who do you talk to more than anyone else? Well, the answer, of course, is you. You talk to yourself a lot. You talk yourself into things. You talk yourself out of things. You tell yourself how great you are. And there are times when you tell yourself you're not so great. You tell yourself a lot of things. Those conversations you have with yourself are really important.

They steer your life. They help you decide what you're going to do or not do. And here to talk about those conversations with that inner voice is Ethan Cross. Ethan is an expert on controlling the conscious mind. He's a professor at the University of Michigan and Ross School of Business, and he is author of the book, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. Hi, Ethan, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

So this voice in my head that I have conversations with every day and have all my life, that voice I hear in my head, what is it? The voice in our head, I like to think of it as a Swiss army knife of the mind. It's a tool that helps us do lots of different things. Everything from keeping a nugget of information active in our heads. If I were to ask you, for example, to repeat a phone number right now silently in your head. So you've just used the voice in your head. So the voice in our head helps us. It's part of our verbal working memory. And everyone uses the voice in their head for that purpose. But the voice in our head can also do lots of other things for us. It can help us control ourselves, like when we coach ourselves through a problem.

The voice in our head can help us plan and simulate future activities. So before I give a talk to an audience, I'll often rehearse what I'm going to say silently in my head. That's my inner voice too. So those are just a sample of the different things that the voice in our head does for us. It's an incredible tool. Often when you hear discussions about the voice in your head, when you hear about self-talk, very often the word negative is put in front of it. It's negative self-talk,

that the voice in our head tends to be very critical. Well, it definitely takes that form for lots of people a lot of the time, but it doesn't have to take that form. It can also be supportive and coach-like. And so one of the questions that I've spent my career trying to answer is when we find the voice in our head becoming overly critical and negative, what are the tools that exist to help us change the nature of those internal conversations that we have with ourselves? Because as I'm guessing you know, if you've grappled with your critical inner voice, sometimes it can lead you to feel or think or maybe act in ways that you don't like. But you know, there's that saying that if you had a friend who talked to you the way you talk to yourself, they wouldn't be your friend because we're just, we're so hard on ourselves. We're constantly telling ourselves

these negative things. Yeah. Well, I think we have these two sides to our inner voice as to why the inner critic might, might, um, stand out a little bit more than the inner coach. There's a great finding in psychology. It's summed up as follows. Bad is stronger than good. We're much more sensitive to negative experiences than we are to positive ones. I can give a presentation to 300 people and 298 people give glowing recommendations and two say they didn't like it. I'm going to think about those two. The bad stuff really stands out more strongly, more prominently. And so how do we shut that part of it up as best we can? And how do we use our inner voice to our advantage better than we perhaps do? Well, the good news is that there are lots of

science-based tools for managing these internal conversations. I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the things that we've learned is that asking people to talk to themselves like they were giving advice to a friend and actually use your name as you try to coach yourself along, that can be really useful for getting you to advise yourself in a more functional, adaptive, coach-like way. So we call this distance self-talk. So if it were me, I'd silently think to myself, all right, Ethan, what do you got to do? Here's how we're going to do this, as opposed to thinking in the first person. Using your name gives people some distance from their experience. It helps them think about themselves like we think about others. And, you know, to go back to your observation before, Mike, about how we don't talk to friends the way we talk to ourselves, that's exactly

what we're capitalizing on here. And we're using language to help change the way we relate to ourself. What's another tool we can use to manage that inner voice? Oftentimes when we're experiencing what I call chatter, so when our inner voice is running amok, if you will, when we're getting stuck in negative thought loops, we can often feel like we're just not in control of what's happening in our minds. And one of the things we've learned is that you can compensate for that experience of a lack of control by trying to create order around you. And there are simple ways to do that, like organizing your spaces. I'm not the most organized, neat guy under normal circumstances. If you came into my office, you'd see stacks of papers and books and pens all over the place and very free.

But when I was writing Chatter, I found myself doing something really odd for me. Every time I got stuck on a paragraph or a thought, I'd find myself walking into the kitchen, doing the dishes and neatly putting them away and scrubbing down the island, which I've never done before. What I was essentially doing is I was trying to organize the spaces around me to regain control of the order I was hoping to find in my head. And you see people doing this quite a bit. When they experience anxiety and other forms of chatter, they naturally start organizing. And science shows that as long as you don't take this to an extreme, it can serve a benefit. Another place you can look for help when it comes to your inner critic run rampant are other people, talking to other people.

When you go to other people for help, for support, they're in an ideal position to give us perspective. When we're stuck ruminating and worrying about things, when the inner critic is running wild, we're often so zoomed in on the problem. We can't think of alternative ways of explaining it or thinking through it. And other people can be helpful for breaking us out of that problem if they ask us the right kinds of questions. So ideally, you go to someone else who can both be empathic with you. So you go to them to talk about your problem and they ask you about what happened and what you're feeling. But they don't just stop there.

They don't just let you vent, which in and of itself doesn't provide solutions. They additionally help you think about the bigger picture. They nudge you to do it. Maybe they ask you certain kinds of questions that lead you to think about your experience from a different perspective. So Mike, well, you've dealt with something like that in the past, have you? How'd you figure it out last time? Or maybe they say something that draws on their own experiences. Well, you know, I actually dealt with something similar and here's what I did. So they're both being empathic, but they're also really nudging you to go broad, to zoom out, to get perspective.

We're talking about that inner voice inside your head and how it influences your life, good and bad. And my guest is Ethan Cross. He's a professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Ethan, when I think about my inner voice, I think that's the voice that shows up to help me get psyched up for doing something, or it talks me out of doing something I shouldn't do, or it's that voice that maybe sabotages me when I really wish it wouldn't. Absolutely. And I think that's the personification of the

inner critic at work. And, you know, what we've done experiments where we look at people's inner monologues when they have to do stressful tasks. And we often find that it's very easy to slip into an inner monologue where, oh, I can't do this. I can't prepare to give a presentation without having enough time to prepare. I'm going to fail. This is going to be awful. And their performance is influenced by that inner critical stream. But that's one instance where I think the distance self-talk can be really useful. So coaching yourself through a problem, like you're talking to a friend, come on, Ethan, you got this, you can do this. And that linguistic shift can be really helpful for promoting a coach-like experience.

There's a great anecdote of Fred Rogers, the TV personality, who he was coming out of retirement and he was really insecure about whether he'd be able to return to glory in his productions. And he was feeling insecure, which I think is a little, from my perspective, as someone who grew up watching this guy, he was all coach from afar for a kid watching him. But he was rough on himself. And he wrote a letter in which he really voiced these insecurities. How am I going to do this? I don't know if I could come back in the way I was before. But then at a critical moment in the letter, it's almost like he verbally slaps himself across the face and says, the time has come.

Get to it, Fred. Get to it. And he coaches himself along, and then he came back back and he did another set of amazing shows for years. So that's another way that you can manage those internal conversations. It does seem that when you're faced with a stressful something to do, it's much more likely that you'll start saying negative things to yourself than, oh, piece of cake, I can do this. Oh, psych yourself up. This is going to go well. That seems to be much more effortful than, oh, crap, this is hard. I don't know what I'm going to do. People vary in terms of how they reflexively think about stressors. Some are naturally more challenge-oriented than others.

But the most important thing, the thing that gives me most hope and what we've seen in the lab and lots of people have seen is that how we frame these experiences is malleable. We have the ability to change the way we think about them. And shifting from thinking about a stressor as a threat and thinking about it instead as a challenge can be really empowering. I, like the best of them, can think of stressors as threats, but I do work to shift. And when I shift, I do experience relief. So for example, so when a tennis player

or a golfer is talking to themselves and you can see them kind of crumbling under the pressure of they just can't handle it, that's their inner voice, probably, partly anyway, that's their inner voice screwing things up. There's no question that the inner voice can screw us up. So the inner voice isn't good or bad. It can take different forms. And I think that's a really important point for listeners to take away from this conversation, right? It's your inner voice can inspire confidence and help you perform well, just as it can undermine your performance and lead you to feel crummy. And so the challenge I think that we all face is figuring out how do we harness this voice inside our head, which can be quite powerful in terms of shaping how we live our lives.

I think that's the real question, the big challenge. It's not one or the other. It's not all good or all bad. It can take different forms. And so when I'm playing tennis and I'm feeling that pressure and I'm feeling like it's crumbling and I can't go wash the dishes and stack them neatly, I've got to do something right now to snap myself out of it because it's kind of a downward spiral. What do you do? Yeah. Well, I think coach yourself through it. Imagine you are the tennis instructor and you've got to coach a player, your student who's in this situation,

right? They've got to rise to the occasion. Talk to yourself like you would talk to that student of yours. That's what distance self-talk is helping you do. Talk to yourself like you would talk to that student of yours. That's what distance self-talk is helping you do. So that's something you could do in the heat of the moment. If we're talking about tennis, I talk in chatter about Rafael Nadal, who, as you know, is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. And he said something really interesting during an interview, which really caught me off guard. He said, you know, the hardest thing I do during a tennis match is try to battle the voices inside my head. This guy is competing against the world's greatest athletes.

And the hardest thing for him is not endurance or strength or, you know, the right kind of return. It's the voices inside his head. And so what does he do? He engages in rituals. So he tries to order sequences of behavior that help him provide him with a sense of order. So if you watch Nadal play, you'll see when he walks onto the court, he always walks on in a particular way. And then he puts his water bottles down in a very precise sequence, sipping from one, then another, putting them back down in the exact same spot where he lifted them. And then during the match between serves, he makes sure to pull on his shorts three times,

then scratch his temple. I'm making that up. But he engages in these elaborate rituals. And what we know from science is that what rituals can do is they provide us with a sense of order because they're so structured. These are structured sequences of behaviors that we engage in. And when we do something really structured and ordered, that makes us feel like we have more control. And that can be empowering when the voices in our head are running wild. So talk about the connection between that voice in your head and your level of self-confidence. It would seem that there's got to be a connection there. Yeah. When the voice is going negative, it can undermine your self-confidence.

But just as easily, when you change the nature of the conversations you're having with yourself, that can promote more self-efficacy, the sense, the feeling that you can do it. You know, in an experiment that we did several years ago, we had some people before having to deliver a public speech, we had them engage in different types of self-talk. So in one case, they tried to work through a problem in the first person using the way we would naturally do, thinking in terms of like, how am I going to do this? And then another condition, we had them use distant self-talk. So use your name, coach yourself through the problem. And what we found is when you looked at what people reported thinking about, when they were stuck in the first person mode, it was much more disparaging. I'm not going to be able to do this. I can't

possibly perform this task. I haven't had enough time to prepare. When they were in the distance self-talk mode, when they were using their name, it was much more uplifting. It was, you've given public speeches before. You could do it again. You're going to nail this. And even if you don't, it's an experiment and it'll be over in a few minutes and then you can go about the rest of your day. So the conversations had a very different feel, which again speaks to this idea that the inner voice isn't good or bad. It can take very different forms. We can talk to others in ways that are uplifting or in ways that are disparaging. We can likewise talk to ourselves in those different ways. But when you look at somebody who's just generally considered to be a very self-confident guy or woman, just one of those people that just exudes self-confidence,

my guess is that that's because a lot of the chatter in their head is very positive, as opposed to somebody who's shrinking in the corner and hopes nobody notices them, who's probably got a lot going on in their head that's very negative. Completely agree. Totally agree. The good news is, again, and I keep harping on this, but because I think it's really important, people possess the capacity to change. You can change the kinds of conversations you have with yourselves. Just because you're used to talking to yourself in a disparaging way doesn't mean that that's your destiny. And so I think there's hope for people who reflexively have these more disparaging conversations with themselves.

Well, I think that's really key and really important because there's a tendency, I imagine, at least speaking for myself, that when I hear that voice, that that's the voice of reason, that I can't control it. I can't make it more positive or negative. It just is what it is. And it's very easy to just accept it as the truth when I actually have a lot of control over it, if I would do what the things you're talking about and step back and say, no, no, I don't, just because the voice in my head said that doesn't make it so. I think this is such an, I think you described it very well. And I think that the insight, the understanding that your thoughts aren't reality, your thoughts true. Because we have lots of evidence showing that you can change the way you think to change the way you feel. And it can have important implications for people's lives. Yeah, well, that inner voice, you know, it can be your friend, it can be your

foe, it can sometimes be both. And I think it's important to understand exactly what it is and why it's saying what it's saying. Ethan Cross has been my guest. He is a professor at the University of Michigan, and his book is called Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It, and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Ethan. All right, this was a lot of fun.

Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast, All right. This is a lot of fun. podcasts or conversations with guests. But Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our

listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You know, I've never been a big meeting guy. I guess because my experience in meetings has generally been that, for the most part anyway, they waste a lot of people's time. They don't accomplish a whole lot. And then there's always those people who try to dominate the meeting. And it also seems like the more people in a meeting, the less gets done. And so often, it seems to me anyway, that what takes an hour to discuss

in a meeting with a bunch of people could be resolved in five minutes in a quick phone call or an email or an informal chat, rather than get a bunch of people in a room for a big formal meeting. But that's just me. There are probably meetings that are very productive and where people accomplish many great things. And to discuss how those meetings work and how we can all have better meetings, I introduce to you Mamie Canfor Stewart, founder of a company called Meteor, which helps companies improve their meetings.

And she is co-author of the book Momentum, Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings. Hi, Mamie. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. So I suspect I'm not alone as someone who doesn't really relish attending big formal meetings. Yeah, you are definitely not alone in your dislike of meetings. And as someone who actually loves meetings, I think the problem is really that the meetings we're attending are not very good. Because when you go to a good meeting, a really productive and engaging meeting,

at least if you're an extrovert, you walk out often feeling on an energy high. And if you're an introvert, you might be exhausted because there was a lot to be done in that meeting, but you feel really good about what you did with your time. And so what is a good meeting? Well, there's really two kind of underlying principles that make for good meetings. The first is whether or not work moves forward. So did you have a goal you were trying to accomplish in the meeting? And did you achieve that goal? And was that goal moving work forward? And then the second part was, did your participants enjoy and feel engaged

during that meeting? Do they walk out feeling, yes, not only did we get something done, but my voice mattered? When I think about meetings, I think, well, okay, so we're going to be here for a long time. Somebody's going to get up and talk a lot. And I have very low expectations. So maybe I'm the problem. Maybe because I'm expecting not much to happen, I don't get much out of it. But sometimes it seems that meetings are held for the sake of having a meeting. You know, there's the Monday morning sales meeting. And it's not that there's anything specific to discuss. We're just going to go around the room and talk about things. And it just seems like such a waste of time. Completely. We use meetings for things we don't

need to be using them for. And we create recurring meetings because we're trying to plan ahead, or we think that's what we should do, or it's how we've always done it, or we're just land grabbing because people's calendars are crazy. But oftentimes, we don't actually need to have a meeting. And whether that's a previously scheduled meeting that's part of a recurring service, like a Monday morning meetings, if we don't need to have it, don't have it. But also, even just in the regular meetings that we're scheduling randomly, oftentimes, those don't need to be a meeting either. So it's almost like we see meetings as the main form of collaboration when in actuality they are just one of our many tools for how we collaborate.

And so if you're going to schedule the perfect meeting, what does it look like in terms of how many people show up? How many people do you need? When does it become too many people? How many things should be on the agenda? Who runs the meeting? Give me some of the nuts and bolts of a good meeting. All right, but I'm going to prepare you that you're probably not going to like my answer because I don't think about meetings in those terms. The way that I think about meetings is, what do you need to achieve in this meeting? What is your desired outcome?

And to be very specific, desired outcome is the result the meeting is going to achieve, not the activities the meeting is going to do. So many times we get stuck in this, we're going to brainstorm, we're going to review a document, we're going to reflect on last quarter's numbers. Those are all great activities, but they don't tell you what the meeting is going to achieve. So you have to start with that desired outcome. At the end of the meeting, what are you going to have that will have moved your work forward? And from there, you can then think about who needs to be here.

What kind of activities do we need to do in this meeting? So how long do we need to get through all of those activities? But so often it seems that people don't think of what is the outcome because there is no outcome. We're getting together to review and go over what's happened in the last week. So there's no big outcome. It's just like we're going to keep in touch and make sure everybody knows what's going on. Is that worth a meeting? It kind of depends, but I would generally say no, that's not worth the meeting. There could be a reason to meet just to have relationship time with your team, especially when people are working at a distance. It is helpful to have time on the phone or on video to just see people and connect with them. But that

doesn't mean that the things you're going to do in that meeting need to be going over all your work. It could simply be that's going to be your time where you're just going to check in and see how people are doing, how they're feeling, how their weekend was. Or if you need to stay aligned on your work, that's a different kind of engagement. Maybe you've got a lot of moving pieces and things are moving really quickly. And so getting together to go over what happened and what's coming up really is important and really does need to be done real time on the phone. But if it doesn't, oftentimes something like a dashboard or a stand up that you can do via a tool like Slack where people just check in online and tell you what they're up to. Those things will suffice and you don't actually need a meeting. So you say you like meetings.

Do you think you're rare or am I rare? I think I am rare in that I tend to participate and go to very good meetings. And I say that because part of it is how are you designing the meeting and are you making it engaging? Are you using technology when you can, whether that's in person or virtually? And when I plan and design meetings, I spend a lot of time thinking about those things. What are we going to accomplish? Who are the right people to be here? How are we going to use our time effectively? How can I make this more than just people talking, but actually people engaging or contributing in ways that doesn't just require us to speak, but also can be things like writing on sticky notes or writing into a polling tool or writing into a mind map.

And as a participant, we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook. We have a role to play in keeping meetings on track, in asking the meeting leader, what are we going to accomplish today? If you're not sure, it's not just a, oh, well, I have to sit through this terrible meeting. We can actually help the meeting leader figure out why have we gathered? What do we need to achieve? And making sure that the conversation doesn't spin off in some tangent that's irrelevant. And what about meeting length? It does seem there is a point of diminishing returns that if we're sitting here for hours going over and over,

I mean, it just seems to be pointless. Absolutely. And we start talking about the same things over and over again. When we are spinning our wheels and the conversation's not moving forward, it's time to move on, put a pin in that, come back to it later. And usually when teams face that, the questions I tell them to ask or the questions I will ask if I'm in that meeting are, what are we stuck on? Let's get really clear here about the point that we can't move past. What information are we missing that would help us be able to move forward? Or what people are missing that we need their voices or their perspective to be able to

move forward? Because usually when you get stuck, either we're not always clear about what actually is happening. My dad calls this, we're in violent agreement where we're just keep talking at each other, even though we've already come to the same conclusion, we just aren't using the same language. Or something's missing from the room that's not allowing you to go forward. So getting clear on those two things first can help make sure that your meeting doesn't run on. But the second part of it is that there's no ideal length because sometimes you do need a lot of time to dig into something and to move through content and to have the rich discussions and to come to those conclusions. And arbitrarily saying,

well, we only have a 45-minute attention span, so we should stop after 45 minutes, kind of cuts off the opportunity to get through the whole cycle. So when you're planning your meeting, you want to think about those activities and how long they're going to take so that you can design it accordingly and then build in breaks if you need to have a two-hour meeting. So you're not making people just sit in front of their computer for that long. But also, there's re-entry fatigue or there's re-entry time. So if we end our meeting without having gotten through everything and we have to have another

meeting, that means we have to plan another agenda. People have to then remember what this is all about. We have to start up again at the beginning of the meeting and we always waste time people getting onto the line or walking into the room. So there are all these other costs that come in when you have to have meeting after meeting. So sometimes a longer meeting is actually better. What about preparing for a meeting? What needs to be ready when the meeting starts?

Should everybody know what the agenda is and know what we're going to talk about? Or is it okay to just show up for the Monday morning sales meeting knowing that somebody will have something to talk about? Well, usually you want to know what the meeting is about. So what's the desired outcome? If you have an agenda that has a set of activities, that's great. If there's pre-work that people can gather. For example, if you're going to do a brainstorm, you don't actually need to be in a meeting to do a brainstorm. You can invite people to brainstorm online ahead of time using different kinds of tools and then present the results in the meeting. So you're diving right into the time of let's sense make what we came up with. So those are some of the things that people can do before. But then at the start of the meeting, you want to repeat what is the desired outcome. This is why we've gathered today.

This is what we're going to accomplish. This is what we're focused on. But sometimes if the agenda is we're going to get aligned around what happened last week, you may not know exactly what people need to share. You could ask them to send things ahead of time. You can put together a dashboard. But if there's a lot of messy stuff happening, it may not be as easy to do that. And you may just want to have a more emergent agenda once you've gathered. Same thing if you're talking about problems looking forward. Where are people getting stuck? So it is okay to

create the agenda at the start of the meeting. But what you shouldn't do is start your meeting without knowing what it is you want to accomplish and what are the topics at hand that you're going to get through. Because you don't want a conversation that just wanders here and there and people are popping things up and you just take up the time

because we do grow to be the size of our fishbowl. If you have an hour, you'll almost always spend that whole hour talking, even if you have nothing to talk about. So in a lot of meetings, there's that one guy and he'll get up and start talking and go on and on and dominate the meeting and really doesn't have much to contribute but likes to talk. And what do we do about that guy? Oh, I love that guy.

He's so much fun. Now, there are a couple different ways that we can approach people who tend to be long-winded. And the first is understanding why are they talking so much? Some people, I will say like myself, are extroverts. And so we talk to process what we're thinking. And sometimes that means I have to say a bunch of stuff before I get to my point, or I don't even know exactly what I'm trying to say, but I have to just talk it out. And that is a skill that can be refined so that people who are extroverts who kind of use language, verbal language like this to process can get better and faster at doing that. So that's one reason. Another reason why is people

feel like they need to participate. And so they will just jump in and start talking. If they don't like silence, they'll jump in and start talking. Some people are very long-winded, just that's how they talk. And so it's another, it's a skill that they have to practice. But there are many, many different reasons why. And most of the time, we don't realize that we're doing it. We're not doing it intentionally. We're not trying to dominate the meeting. At least very few in my experience have tried to interrupt or really dominate and not make space for others. So one thing you can do is when you are facilitating

to ask for people who haven't yet spoken to contribute first. So this will just keep people who tend to kind of jump in regularly and kind of hog the mic from taking over too much airtime. The second thing you can do is you can talk to this person outside of the meeting and say, hey, I don't know if you noticed this, but you tend to be very long-winded or you tend to take up a lot of the airtime. And I would love for you to figure out ways, and I'm happy to brainstorm with you about how to make sure that you're giving equal airtime to other people. And you might brainstorm with them things like, we'll have a signal where I'll do this

little elbow shake, and that means wrap up your comments. Or maybe you are asking them to prepare their thoughts ahead of time. And so when they come in, they've already had time to think, and they're ready to share more concisely. The other way you can tackle it is to use your desired outcome to really focus the conversation because sometimes the people who are going on and on tend to take the conversation in all kinds of directions. So you can interrupt them in a more gentle way by saying, oh, Mamie, that's a really interesting point you're making, but I'm trying to figure out how that gets us

back to our desired outcome for the day because I want to make sure that we have time to get to what we really need to, what we've gathered here for. And maybe we can take your topic and put a pin in it. And sometimes that will help people just realize that they've kind of been going on and on and it's not actually moving the conversation forward. inherent problems with department meetings, meetings with multiple people in them, is that there are people who don't like that, that they'll talk one-on-one, but when somebody says at the end of the meeting, any questions, they'll have questions, but they don't want to speak up in front of a group, so they don't get heard? Yes, this is a big problem with teams and it's rooted in psychological safety. It's rooted in whether or not we feel like we can speak what we're really thinking and share what we're really feeling and whether that will be accepted or will be judged

for it or there will be repercussions for it. So there are different ways to approach this, right? On a macro level, you need to work on building psychological safety, not just with your direct reports, but across the team so that when you're in those group settings, everyone does truly feel comfortable sharing whatever it is, whether it's questions or perspectives or ideas. The other thing though, though, inside of meetings is sometimes we need to use tools to allow people to share without being recognized. So these are where online polls or Google Docs, where everybody joins as those crazy

little animals. And so where everybody's anonymous. Those are great ways to get people to share, whether it's questions or ideas or dissenting perspectives. You can get people to contribute in those because no one will know who they came from. And so if you really want to hear what people are thinking, ask them in a way that they can't be identified for it. We've been talking mostly about group meetings, team meetings, and problems with those. But a lot of meetings people have are just the boss wants to talk to you,

and it's just the two of you. What about those kind of meetings and the problems that we face with those? Yeah, these are different kind of meetings. We call them emergent meetings, and emergent meetings have a little bit of a different kind of flavor to them, right? If someone taps you on the shoulder and says, do you have a minute to talk? Or your boss calls you into the office. And these meetings, we don't often think of as meetings because they're not planned for, but some of the techniques that we use to make our planned meetings really effective, we can use in these as well. So for example, the first thing that you can do when somebody asks you, hey, can I talk? Is say, sure. What's the topic of the conversation? What are you hoping I can add value on? Or what does success look like here if we're going to talk for 10 minutes?

So you want to get clear again on what's that desired outcome. You don't just want to have a conversation that you don't know where it's headed. So getting them to tell you, I need feedback on this. I'm hoping you can help enhance this draft. Or I just got a call from the vendor and I'm concerned about X and I need to know what you think about this. So whatever it is, you want to make sure that the framing is really clear. Then try and time box it. So if you know what this conversation is going to be about, you can figure out, OK, do I need 10 minutes for this or 15 so you can ask them again?

Sure, you think we can get this done in 10 minutes. And then hold yourself to that. Don't let an emergent conversation become an hour-long conversation when it doesn't really need to be. So try to set a time to it the same way you would if you had a calendar invite that you were sending. And then lastly, if now is not a good time because you have other priorities, ask the person, is this

really urgent? Do we need to get to this right now? Or can we talk in whatever, 45 minutes when I'm done with whatever I'm working on? It's almost unfair when we allow people to interrupt our focus to deal with their issues that they need help with when we're in the middle of something else. So before you automatically say yes, find out if this needs to happen now or if it can happen on a schedule that's more comfortable for you. Since you work with organizations and people all the time in terms of making meetings better, what is it that you find, what else besides what we've

talked about do you find people really struggle with or need help with or what would make their meetings better? So I would say the second most common thing I hear teams need to do that they're not doing is ending with a wrap up. So we talked about the first one, the number one thing is writing a desired outcome and know what the meeting is going to achieve. The second one, though, is how you end your meetings. So too often, we have meetings that run right up to the deadline, and then the clock strikes 12, and people rush out of the room, and the conversation wasn't even ended, or whoever stays keeps talking. And when we do that, one, we don't create any sense of closure.

So it doesn't feel like we accomplished anything because the conversation just kept rolling. Two, we may or may not have clarity on what it is that we actually accomplished. So you end up with the he said, she said, they said kind of situation where everybody's going off thinking they know what we did, but not actually having alignment on what was done. And that can cause lots of other kinds of problems as people go back and do their work and tell other people what they need to know. So when you end your meetings, you want to make sure that you bring that closure by using a wrap-up, which can take three to five minutes. And during this time,

you're going to ask, what did we decide? What are the next steps? What are the key action items? And what do we want to document that we think other people would need to know? Or if we were looking back at this conversation, we would say our kind of key takeaways or learnings or highlights. And during that time, you go around the room and each person gets to pop up and say like, this is what I think we decided. This is the next action item I wrote down for myself. So you can build these notes together as a team. And whoever is the note taker, it could be you as the meeting leader, or you could assign someone else, can actually document these takeaways in real time.

So there's no extra work to be done. And immediately, you can save them wherever you save them. You can email them out to whoever needs to know. And now you've created a sense of accomplishment because people all know this is what we got done. You've created alignment because everybody has agreed, yes, this is the decision that we made. These are the next steps that I'm responsible for.

And you've documented it so that you can refer to these notes in the future or anyone who wasn't in the meeting but who needs to be informed can be informed accurately. Well, this is great because meetings aren't going away anytime soon, whether they're online or on the phone or maybe hopefully someday back in a room together. And it's important to understand the workings of a good meeting and how to get more out of them. Mamie Cantor-Stewart's been my guest. She's founder of a company called Meteor, and she's author of the book Momentum, Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings. And you'll find a link to her book and to her company's website in the show notes.

Thanks, Mamie. Absolutely. Thank you so much. This was super fun. I loved your questions. Your car's tires are easy to forget about, particularly if you're not driving a lot. But they actually do require you pay at least a little bit of attention. And here's why.

Tires lose air at the rate of about a pound a month. And under-inflated tires just, it causes the engine to work harder. It's like riding a bike with low tires. It's harder to pedal because of the increased rolling resistance. A tire can actually lose up to half of its pressure before it starts to look flat. A good sign that your tires are low is if your tires squeal when you go around a corner. And you should inflate your tires to the pressure recommended by your car's manufacturer,

it's usually on the inside of the driver's side door, more than you should go by what's listed on the tire. Underinflated tires are the leading cause for tire failure, which can result in loss of control and accidents. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast and would like to show your support, that's really easy to do. Just tell one person, help get us one more listener, and that's all we ask. I'm Micah Ruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.

Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned travelling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God

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