Spend 3 minutes at the beginning of your meeting to help everyone park anything that’s preventing them from focusing on their time together, so that everyone is fully present.
How to do it
Meetings can sometimes become pretty useless if people come in being stressed about something, or mentally distracted by stuff from previous meetings. The tension they’re carrying can inhibit productive thinking and discussion, and get in the way of focusing on the topic at hand, and on each other.
You can help reduce this tension with this opening mindfulness activity. Ask everyone to take a 3 minutes to mentally check in with themselves, and write down any worries or thoughts that they’re carrying in their heads onto a sticky note, or piece of office paper. Make sure they know that they don’t have to share anything they write down.
After everyone is done, they should rip up their answers and discard them. Having everyone take a deep breath in and slowly out can also help!
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