Today was a blast! I just finished recording my 6th Podcast episode about “When to Listen and When to Talk in Meetings” a Business Psychologist who helps people get rid of self-doubt, own their skillset, and feel confident about playing huge in life and work. Sounds wonderful?
Wait ‘til you hear her speak and you will be blown by the amount of information she shared during the recording session.
Her name is Fiona Kearns, a member of the Association for Business Psychology and author of ‘How to Increase your Confidence’ and currently helping leaders fulfill their potential in career and business.
Our discussion touched many things about achieving a win-win result in meetings, but you might want to get the gist, so let me enumerate the key questions and how she gave light to each of them. These are already translated in her words, though not on a word-for-word basis.
- How to build rapport yet take control of the conversation in the first few minutes?
Open the call by speaking with energy and set out the objective for the meeting from the beginning. Don’t forget the importance of listening, nodding, mirroring, and smiling as appropriate, whether the meeting is in-person or online.
- How to answer questions that you are not sure of the answers for?
Ask more questions to understand the reason for the question. You might get more clarity if you probe more but if you’re really unsure what to answer, you may give them parameters and let them know you’ll get back to them.
- How to drive the conversation to a win-win situation?
Be clear that’s how you operate, be helpful and useful to the person you’re meeting, speak about results and the cost of taking no action.
- When to listen and when to talk: best practices
The majority of the time should be spent listening but it’s essential that you speak up to present your position and to have an equal stake in the meeting. Aside from verbal confirmations, you should also watch over the non-verbal ones because they have equal weight in terms of predicting the meeting results.
This podcast episode truly gave away a lot of insights on handling meetings and in increasing its chance of success. If you are a starting entrepreneur, want to level up in your career, or close a sale that really matters, you might want to listen to our actual conversation in Spotify, and get more than what I enumerated above.
As a gift, Fiona is offering Free 30-minute Consultations for our listeners (limited number available) and also offers a 90-day CEO Confident Programme which you can find on her website kearnsconsultancy.com. You may also follow Fiona on her YouTube channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Catch me again next time on another special episode with another special guest! Ciao!
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