158 How to Sell Yourself
Make your meeting a success
Why should a meeting be different from any other speaking
situation? It isn’t. Someone talks and others listen. There are hun-
dreds of reasons for a meeting’s failure. But there’s only one rea-
son why a meeting is successful—something specific was accom-
plished and everyone in the room knew it and went away better
off because of it. Usually, the person in the front of the room, the
person in charge of the meeting, the chief speaker, is primarily
responsible for the outcome.
What it takes
Words alone do not a successful meeting make. Skillful, dy-
namic presentations do, whether you are the chairman, the chief
speaker, or a participant. The way you present yourself and your
ideas, the way you communicate, can make all the difference be-
tween just getting through a meeting and getting the results you
had hoped for.
You know the difference I’m talking about. We’ve all been
sorry we had to attend many of the meetings we’ve gone to, and
we’ve been to a few that really excited us.
The meetings we left feeling that something had really been
accomplished usually had an exciting, outstanding, dynamic chair-
person.
Compelling.
Spellbinding.
A person who reached us on a personal, intellectual, and emo-
tional level.
Was that person a natural?
Was there some special genius?
Maybe, but probably not.
Most of the really skilled communicators got where they are
by working at developing their speaking skills.
As with all speaking skills, meeting skills can be acquired. More
than that, they must be acquired. Today’s work environment as-
signs more and more of us the task of opening our mouths in front
of colleagues.