Check in to meetings with joy
Take delight in your humanity with a small ritual at the beginning of meetings.
An old team mate and fellow facilitator would often remind me before starting a workshop to ‘prime the room’. What she meant was that it’s possible to set the tone of a meeting to enable everyone to feel safe, comfortable and ready to explore topics. One way to do this is through a check-in.
A check-in can provide a moment that prepares the ground before the group gets into discussion. They function in many ways: they signal that the meeting is a separate space from daily work; they allow people to leave non-meeting-related worries at the door; they help the group to gauge the energy in the room; and they allow everyone to be heard early on in the meeting in a safe and respectful way.
Check-ins can often be left off the agenda for all sorts of reasons - time is tight, empathy is already low in the group, the group anticipates a challenging discussion - but take courage and include them, knowing that meetings need hearts as well as heads to unlock the magic of collective thinking.
How can you incorporate check-ins? Here are some approaches you can try in your next meeting…
Two-word check-in - a great one if you’re time constrained. Favoured by Brené Brown and her team, ask each person to share two words to the question ‘How are you feeling coming into the session today?’. I sometimes pair this question with Marc Brackett’s mood meter if people are struggling to find the right words.
Blob Tree - sometimes pictures, rather than words, are better at conveying where you’re at. A team mate at Elliptic invited us to use this version of the Blob Tree at the beginning of a series of workshops and it went down really well. It’s a quick and powerful way to enable people to express themselves with others.
Successes and challenges - this is a firm favourite of mine when running leadership workshops with clients. Each person shares a success and a challenge they’ve faced since the last workshop, which leaves a glow across the group when we hear about each others’ success, and builds trust through our sharing of our more vulnerable moments from the previous week.
What if someone shares that they’re struggling? This is bound to happen at some point. Life is rich in the great, the good and the difficult, and there will be times when any given person in your group will be experiencing hard feelings. In those moments, I’ve returned again and again to these questions:
What do you need from the group?
What does good support look like from me today?
What do you need from the group in order to be present in our meeting?
Checking in with the group offers a quick, simple way to acknowledge our own and others’ humanity. When we facilitate these moments of sharing and connection we set up everyone to successfully discuss, create, prioritise and decide together, and create meetings that are a bit more joyful.
