Capturing your meeting’s “golden nuggets”

While meetings give us the time to flush out ideas and listen to explanations that are longer than 30 seconds, sometimes it’s a sound bite – or what I call “golden nugget” – that sticks in our minds and eventually becomes that key lesson we take away. As we close out 2012, here are some of my favorite golden nuggets, some with accompanying graphics or information, which became a weekly tradition for me this year to post to my Esprit Productions’ Facebook page.

Actions follow intent. If you intend to be customer- or quality-driven, act that way.

Benefits are almost always more important than features.

Learn how to give first-rate presentations so that the message you are trying to deliver is the same one the audience receives.

Dress like the audience. Sit with the audience. Participate in the teamwork exercise.

Strive to be known as “rainmaker”, people developer, or decision maker.

Hope is a required ingredient for success.

Send thank you notes to people who help you.

I wanted to share this concept with all of you given the time of year and as we head into a new event planning year. I’ve found that tools like nuggets serve as both a learning tactic and a foundation for me to get inspired, evoke quality conversations, and better overall relationships with my clients and vendors. Creating ideas like this are easy to do and they start within each of us.

Golden nuggets carry with them a mix of professional and personal meaning and usage level. As a service provider, they may help me summarize a moment at a meeting after all of my event design efforts and post-production elements are complete. They’re my ability to identify a single lesson I can take away as an active participant and as a contributor to someone else’s event experience. They can help reinforce something I learned from a corporate mission and values, and how it translates into real-world conversations and actions. They’re micro ideas for discovering clarity – even revealing something new – within an event experience and for carrying that idea forward to make smart decisions for future events.

You, too, can prepare yourself to find your own teachable moments. It first requires you to stock up on your own ideas and learning process so that you’re inspired and prepared to think and work towards this. You may find these suggestions helpful to nudge you in the right direction.

• Identify your resources that help give you a new lens to think differently while enhancing your skills, knowledge and insights. You may find these resources onsite at your next event, or somewhere else at work or at home. It could be online, in person, or some completely offbeat activity with your team that’s clearly outside your comfort zone. (Paintballing, anyone?). Whatever you choose, it should be a combination of things to suit you, your organization, and your customer’s business and communication needs.
• Seek fierce conversations, since great inspiration starts with great dialogue. This could involve identifying a prominent or local figure to follow, or maybe finding a mentor with whom you can engage in regular conversations. Maybe you’ll seek great e-chats or an MPI networking event that offers an intriguing topic.
• Be attentive, patient because identifying teachable moments is a process happening everywhere, all the time. Your goal is to help to identify and grab those moments so that you can channel them into your meeting planning efforts.