Stress Management For Meeting Professionals:
Balancing Acts And Perfectly Partnered Meetings
By Dianna Booher, CSP A few years ago, I finished a typical work day around nine o’clock and drove home from the office after another hectic week of managing a business, giving author interviews, delivering speeches, and leading day-long communication seminars.
Having just fallen asleep around midnight, a stabbing pain struck me in the back of the head, and I began to experience violent jerks that sent my whole body into spastic whiplash, as though I’d just stuck my finger in a light socket. The spasms continued every two to three minutes until I fell asleep into the wee hours.
The next morning I dismissed the incident and had no problem during the day, but the jerking returned at night when I lay down and relaxed.
Within a week, I had begun to jerk randomly several times during the workday. Within the month, the jerking started mid-morning and continued every few minutes throughout the day and night.
Four months, three specialists, and many tests later, the diagnosis was severe myclonic jerking-due to fatigue and stress. Prescription: Get plenty of rest and get rid of the stress. That was medicine I would have to learn to swallow.
Meeting professionals who work in high-stress, high-profile, high-energy environments where perfection is expected on time, every time, often struggle with the same lesson.
Clocks get wound up too tight. Societies get wound up too tight. People get wound up too tight. Clocks break and societies fall, but people have to adapt or they’ll suffer similar fates.
Meeting planners are notorious for battling too many deadlines, too many decisions, and too many complaints with too little time and too few resources. Add to that the stress of partnering with new associates and maintaining the old, and working with people in general, and you have the makings for headaches, heartburn, and heart attack.
The secret to well-planned meetings is a well-planned and well-executed business strategy and trusted meeting partners. Like the expert juggler, one must to keep your eyes on your subjects, keep a steady rhythm, and never get distracted.
Define Success In Your Own Terms
Before the first step, one needs to head in the right direction or you’re merely wandering. One way to ensure you’re on course is to label the pot of gold at the end of your rainbow. That means knowing what success means to you. Success, of course, means different things to different people.
Here are some definitions I’ve collected through the years: - “Success is having your name in the gossip columns and out of the phonebook.”
- “You’re not successful ‘till someone brags they sat beside you in grade school.”
- “Some men succeed by what they know, some by what they do, and a few by what they are.”
- “He has achieved success who has lived long, laughed often, and loved much.”
- “Any man who is honest, fair, tolerant, charitable, and well-behaved is a success.”
- “The good life is a journey, not a destination.”
- “Success is being the best in your chosen field.”
You personally have to select the way you measure your own success, the axiom you want to live by. Your personal definition of success, if you have a firm grasp on it, will make many seemingly difficult decisions much easier through the years.
Write it out as your personal mission statement. Repeat it to yourself often. That’ll help you translate success into everyday decisions.
Too many of us measure our success by what we have or haven’t done or have too vague an idea of what we ultimately want in our work or personal lives.
Is your definition of success having the most cost- effective meeting? The best attended? The most memorable? The most smoothly run? Is success for you measured in dollars, promotions, position, performance? What about those with whom you partner? Do you know what motivates them?
Knowing their definitions of success can not only help you understand them better, but it can also give you the very best information for your negotiation discussion. Use this knowledge as a motivator to develop outcomes you both can feel successful about.
Reevaluate The Way You Think About Time
To the meeting planner, time is everything. Your effective handling of it will determine the depth, breadth, and length of your success. Handle time wisely and you ensure long and lasting success; handle it poorly and you’re left hurried, frustrated, and exhausted.
When you’re partnering, remember that what you do with your time affects what others can do with theirs. Use it efficiently and they’ll thank you for it. Be the meeting planner who is ahead of the game and not always rushing to catch up.
Stop Being So Impatient, Right Now! Everything doesn’t have to be done at this instant. With one-hour photos, one-hour eyeglasses, and mufflers while-you-wait, hurry has become a cultural habit.
Francis Bacon put it well, “Whoever is out of patience is out of possession of his soul.”
Will Rogers agreed, “Half an hour is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”
We’re too impatient too often on too many unimportant things.
Impatient people don’t get work done any better or quicker, and they probably annoy those around them with their overly anxious attitude.
Impatience clouds your thinking on important issues.
Determine the Long-term Payoffs: For You and Your Organization.
When you buy stocks, you expect to see a return on your investment in a reasonable time period. When you spend hours of time and energy planning a large meeting, you want to see results. And though you don’t always see the by-product of your work immediately, you must know you are making an investment in the future.
For example, when allocating budget, which has the highest long-term payoff, another hour of an open bar or an extra speaker fee for a session on marketing strategy?
Long-term, high-priority activities and character traits don’t always get done because they are often vaguely defined. How does one develop integrity? But the difficulty in developing them doesn’t lessen the necessity to do so.
Long-term rewards require short-term investments.
Make as Few Trivial Decisions as Possible. Alvin Toffler suggested it first. We’re moving toward over-choice as we’re inundated with daily decisions.
There are plenty of major decisions you need to make yourself, such as: Whom will we get for our keynote? Where will we hold the convention? What are innovative ways to market the meeting and generate higher attendance? What will we do about travel arrangements?
Certainly, much of the job description of meeting planner includes making decisions, but you don’t have to make all of them. Determine which decisions you need to make and leave the minor ones to someone else or someone who has more expertise in that area. The point is this: The more you let decisions weigh you down, the more frustration and stress.
Partner with people you can trust and depend on for the little how-to’s.
Get A Grip On Your Emotions
Planning meetings means dealing with people, and people are emotional. That is a wonderful, but challenging fact. The key is to control your emotions, not be victims of them.
Melt Anger to Release the Extra Energy. Even a boiling pot can only take so much before it blows its lid. People are no different.
When you are angry or tense, stress-related hormones are discharge into your body. This discharge triggers the production of blood fats that cling to the artery walls, reduces oxygen flow through the heart, and raises your blood pressure. If you relive incidents of anger over and over, your nervous system stays on red alert. The effects are toxic to your system and cause your energy to wane.
Get things off your chest and get on with your business.
Resolve Ongoing Conflicts with Others. When we find yourselves in conflict with another person, we have four choices. The issue is deciding on the most expedient choice for any particular situation.
Accommodation means giving in to the other person. Compromise involves giving up some of your goals or wants. Overpowering means insisting on your way, often at the expense of others. Resolving the issue includes developing new alternatives so both reach their goals and feel good about the situation.
On occasion, any of these actions or reactions are appropriate.
What creates emotional chaos is feeling that we have no choice in a matter or are getting “taken” in the process. Over a period of time, ongoing conflicts wear you down emotionally.
If you have one particular meeting partner that constantly makes you feel drained, consider your four choices to handle the situation. Choose the best action or reaction, and remind yourself that you can choose how to handle conflict. Maybe it’s time to change supplier partners before the next dance.
Get Rid of the Grumps. Not only do negative situations sap our energy and break our focus, so do negative people. You can teach someone skills, but you can’t teach them attitude and disposition. And negative people have a way of drenching the whole scene in a downpour. They drain your energy and your time, and break your concentration on the important things.
On the other hand, pleasant people uplift everybody’s spirit.
Wouldn’t you rather work for, with, beside, manage, or lead someone with that kind of attitude?
Persistent pressure from negative people is like a simmering pot of water. They’re ready to boil over at the slightest provocation. In a bubbling state, you will never experience calmness and peace within yourself.
Give and Get Emotional Support. We all need emotional connection and appreciation. Mark Twain once said, “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” Our own emotions affect our productivity drastically.
Many people’s daily lives are like hectic travel schedules in the fast lane: a series of missed connections with jobs, frustrations with family, and disappointments with duty. But as long as you have emotional support, you can endure a lot.
Cultivate those relationships on and off the job. Those are what make time fly or creep along. Those are what make the two days on a grueling project feel like two hours on a meaningful mission.
Emotional support is vital to a balanced life. Expand and deepen your personal relationships to create intimacy. We really do need each other.
Plan Worry Time. When you catch your mind wandering into worry, postpone the thoughts until later. Schedule yourself a time to think about that worry and jot it down if you must, with titles like: “What to do about....”
Sort your worries into those that are real and those that may never happen. For those that never happen, promise to worry about them only when and if they happen. To lessen the anxiety during the waiting time, use the old principle: “What’s the worst thing that can happen to me?” “Will I survive?” “How will I cope?”
For real worries, outline steps to prevent the situation, correct the problem, or minimize the impact. Then take action toward a resolution.
Develop Patterns/Principles For Effective Work Habits
Someone has said, “Two things worry me these days: one, that things may never get back to normal, and two, that they already have.” Sound familiar?
This is definitely the information age, not only in speed and sophistication but also in amount. Each year between 50-55,000 books are published in the U.S. Office managers and mail clerks send 49 faxes a day at five pages each in length. For some, it’s not unusual to get 50-60 e-mails and 30-40 voice mails per day. Be selective about your intake.
Complete Things. Incomplete tasks leave you feeling disorganized, defeated, and depressed while finishing things give you confidence, energy, and order.
Remember, you’re compensated and rewarded for things done, not attempted.
Have you ever saved leftover pizza, intending to warm it in the microwave the next day for lunch? It tastes pretty good warmed over. But have you noticed how your appetite fades when you open that refrigerator and see that slice in there four days later? Two weeks later? The same is true with leftover projects. They get stale and uninviting. You can’t throw them out, but neither do you feel eager to tackle them again.
Problems, whether paper or people, rarely go away. In fact, they often tend to gain momentum and mass when not handled. Sooner or later, you’ll have to resolve things. If you don’t do it now, you’ll end up doing it and more later.
Refuse to Overcommit. According to William Dean Howells: “You’ll find as you grow older that you weren’t born such a very great while ago after all.
The time shortens up. And I can assure you, it’s too short to create stress for yourself.
Dump unrealistic expectations and myths about what you should be or do in a day or in a lifetime. And be aware of the assignments and obligations you perform because you thought you should. Too many these distractions turn into detours, leaving you far off your original path. Be realistic with your workload and time commitments. There’s only one Superman, and you’re not him.
Handle Less Paperwork. You’ve seen the staggering statistics.
Paperwork is burying even the most efficient worker as we’ve become a nation of paper propagators and pushers. Most people have a full plate now and can’t imagine what they’ll do with the extra load.
Realize that you can minimize your current paperwork or even eliminate much of it altogether. Use response cards and lines make it easy for others to answer your memos or e-mail. Eliminate most cover letters.
Make your responses informal instead. Prepare boilerplate documents instead of creating new ones. Learn when it is preferable to handle something in person or on the phone rather than in writing: giving mild reprimands, sending trial balloons, negotiating small details, and conveying tone.
The more paper you can move off your desk, the better.
Build a Mental Oasis for Your Creative Work. Use another table, surface, direction, window, room. Just get away from the routine scene.
When I want all my energy flowing for something creative, I break the routine by changing my “office” to a hotel room between speaking engagements, a seat on the airplane, my backyard patio, the conference room down the hall, a friend’s office, the neighborhood park, or the library.
Anywhere but the usual. The idea is to see different scenery so that routine tasks and paperwork can’t nag at you from the corner of your eye.
You cannot complete the Great American Novel, the great American meeting, or the great American anything without thinking space. Gaze at different walls or skies, relax in a different chair, hear different voices, hold a different coffee cup, feel a different breeze. Sitting or standing out of the box helps you to think out of the box.
Meeting planning is not unlike a rocket launch, where one hundred little things have to fall into place at one time as the whole world watches. One mishap and it’s not, “Houston, we have a problem,” it’s “Ms. Houston, you have a problem.”
Determine your definition of success, reevaluate the way you handle time, get a grip on your emotions, and develop patterns and strategies for effective work habits. You’ll find you will not only put your life in balance, but you’ll also be creating productive and unforgettable meetings and enjoying them more.
Dianna Booher, CPS, is CEO of Booher Consultants, a Dallas-based communications consulting firm that offers training in effective writing, oral presentations, interpersonal skills and customer service communications. She is a keynote speaker and has written 37 books, including "Communicate with Confidence!" www.booher.com
