Do You Participate?

I had a wonderful opportunity today to speak to the Society of Human Resource Management group in Medina today.  Tomorrow I will be speaking to a group from the Akron Chamber on LinkedIn.  Last week I did a session with the Young Entrepreneurs Academy.  In each session, you could clearly see who came for a reason and who came because they had to do so.  And it got me thinking….

When you go to a meeting, why are you there?  Do you know?  Can you answer?  I’m on the programming committee for the Medina Chamber and we plan speakers for meetings.  There are those who believe the speaker topic is the reason people come out.  One person told me attendance is largely driven by the weather and in bad weather people stay home.  So does that mean a truly compelling topic would motivate them to come out?

I don’t think the topics are the driver.  After all, if you go to a meeting once a month and walk out with new business, you would never miss. (If you aren’t sure how to help make that happen, check out Networking 101)  So if that’s not happening, why are you attending the meetings you attend?

Right now I want you to look at your calendar.  Take a look at the next three months and what meetings you have scheduled.  Make a hash mark under the headings “get business”, “topic”, “have to”, “professional development” and “other”.  For me, get business means meeting new potential clients as well as new referral sources so I would group those together.  Now, how do you stack up?   If the majority are under “get business”, that’s great.  If you have a bunch under “have to”, really ask yourself why.  Who feels you need to attend?  Are they correct?  Is there anything you can do about that?

It is really important to attend meetings you want to attend and be a part of what is going on.  If you and the speaker are both willing to take the time to attend something, be involved.  It was great today that I had friends I could call on so people knew they could participate.  It made the presentation much better.  The same is true for any presentation.  An engaged audience feeds a presenter’s fire and helps keep the momentum.  A disengaged audience turns you into a bad comedian just waiting for the hook.

Plan to participate in every meeting you attend.  It will make them go by faster, make them more interesting and you will probably learn something.  So, do you participate?