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IGTV: How to Empower Yourself and Others in Meetings

Last week, Lorraine and Tom hosted a Live chat on Instagram about ways to empower yourself and others in meetings.

Watch the full chat on YouTube.

You can read the transcript of the video below.

Don’t forget to make note of any new vocabulary to share with your teacher during your next lesson.

Resources mentioned:

Meetings Blog Post
Kamala Harris – “I’m speaking.”
Minimising Language
7 Tips for Men Who Want to Support Equality
Let her finish: interruptions of female justices led to new supreme court rules


Transcript

Lorraine Venables 

Hi, everyone. Just getting started now. I’m just inviting Thomas to join us. So for those of you who don’t know, we’re live today to talk about empowering yourself and empowering other people in meetings. So, at Intrepid English, we help English learners to, yeah, to feel more confident speaking English, especially at work, or in a variety of different situations really.

So today’s meeting is designed for English learners, but it’s also for anyone who really needs some help empowering themselves and other people. So specifically for those who are a little bit underconfident, maybe have trouble speaking English as a second language, have trouble speaking up and contributing. Okay. Great. Thomas is joining us now. Hopefully, this is always a little bit tricky getting set up. Here he is. Hey! Are you there?

Thomas Stewart  01:51

I’m here. From my, from my internet. So, as in my laptop, so maybe that helps the situation.

Lorraine Venables  01:58

Okay, cool. Awesome. Yeah, I was just giving a bit of an intro while we were waiting for you to join us. So, I just mentioned that we’re, we’re doing this live to help English learners, but generally people who have meetings in English and struggle to contribute. Maybe because they feel shy, or that they often don’t get a chance to jump in. Maybe there are people talking all the time, and they don’t really get a chance to speak. So yeah, we wanted to focus on this, partly because we’re just launching a Meetings course in the Academy. But also, because inclusivity is really important to us in general. Thomas is a teacher at Intrepid English, and you’ve just written the course, haven’t you, Tom. So would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the course?

Thomas Stewart 02:49

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yep. I’m Tom. And I’ve been teaching, I think I realised the other day, I’ve been teaching for Intrepid English for over four years now. Long time. And over that time, I’ve written a few courses. And this one is about meetings.

Typically, with our courses, we try and do a mix of creativity and things that will be useful for students. We focus a lot on business because that’s what our students need it for. But in addition to that, as Lorraine was saying, inclusivity, growing as a person, expanding one’s mind is really important to us here. And part of that leads to the fact that we want to empower our students, we want our students to develop personally and professionally. And that’s what happens both in our courses and in our private lessons.

All of the teachers at Intrepid English teach individual students, and we all have our own way of doing things. My personal way of doing things is to be quite creative, that’s why I’m the Head of Content and that’s why I write quite a few of the courses and the blogs, and the new audio courses that have launched a couple of weeks ago, I think.

Lorraine Venables  04:00

Yeah. Brand new! Yeah.

Thomas Stewart   04:03

So Season One is out. And Season Two will be out at some point in the future. But yeah, so that’s kind of my focus here in the business. But I think all of us agree that we don’t just want to teach our students, you know, about grammar or where to put a comma or these kinds of things; we really just want to use language to equip our students to thrive and to really expand their comfort really, I think it’s a big part for us. And that, as I said, it comes… it helps that we’re such a good team and such a diverse team.

But anyway, to give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about in the next half an hour or so. We’re going to cover quite a few things. Mainly we’re going to talk about the Meetings course and meetings in general. We’re going to talk about our personal experiences, our own thoughts about meetings and we’ll give you some tips. Tips to empower yourself to empower others. Perhaps tips to know when to speak up and when to be quiet when to give someone else a chance to speak. Which all kind of circles into inclusivity to include people and to include yourself. So yeah, I think that wraps up what we’re going to do.

Lorraine Venables  05:18

Yeah, just a bit of housekeeping though, as well. So just to mention if anyone has a question for us or a comment, or maybe they want to share their own experience of being in a meeting and maybe struggling to contribute, or anything really related to the topic, then please just write your message in the comments. I’ll get to them later on in the live. But be warned, this is my second live ever. So I may be prodding around on the screen a little bit looking for things.

So yeah, Tom. That’s a little bit of housekeeping there. So if you want to just tell people about the course itself, and then we can get into why we think it’s so important to notice, if you are struggling, or someone else is struggling to contribute in a meeting.

Thomas Stewart 06:09

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, the course is broken up into five parts. And they’re all kind of ‘how-to’ parts. So the first one is, how to be prepared: it’s how to prepare yourself for a meeting. And things like that, I think we started with what I started writing in the course, just the types of meetings because that’s a way of being prepared. If you know what kind of meeting you’re walking into, then you’ve already got some kind of solid ground, basically, I think that’s what the main part of trying to be prepared, how to be prepared, is just so a student feels confident when they walk in.

And that’s the first step in order to speak, to do anything, really. So yeah, the first part is all about being prepared, then we move into trying to make yourself heard, as I was saying before, like how to know when to speak, when not to speak, perhaps, and to know when you really need to stand your ground and say what you need to say. So there are sections talking about interrupting people, and nice ways to do that. How you can disagree with someone how you can give an opinion or even ask for an opinion. So that’s why it goes both ways.

Then we kind of go into TED Talks. This course is quite heavily based around three TED Talks. We’re big fans of TED Talks here at Intrepid English! They’re such a wonderful resource for students. So we’ve got ‘How to Be an Active Member’ and that’s Adam Galinsky. I apologise for butchering that name: Adam Galinsky’s TED Talk, where he talks about how you can be active in meetings.

Then we go on to how to make meetings work, and that’s the name of one of the TED Talks, actually. And that’s Stephen Rogelberg’s TED Talk. And he just talks about how a lot of people don’t like meetings. And meetings can actually be quite toxic things when they go wrong. So he talks about how you can make them really nontoxic and why they can be really productive. Because part of my research, when I was doing this course, was discovering how much time is wasted with meetings, which is quite shocking because in our, at Intrepid English, we don’t really waste time with meetings. We have one a week. That’s it. So it was quite shocking to me to read that. And then the final bit, which is more kind of what we’ve all been through, as in the world, the past two years is where there’s been a drastic change where our meetings are set.

So our meetings are predominantly online, which is why the last part of the course talks specifically about meetings online, and things like, you know, etiquette. Maddox did a really great discussion of this in one of his courses where he was talking about how you, you know, like, where to look, what kind of internet setup, all these kind of basic things that actually, we all thought we knew, but we don’t know. So it’s good to have like, a good, there’s a lot of material out there, basically, is what I’m saying, so.

Lorraine Venables  09:02

Yeah, actually, a lot of the course and our content in general often feeds into other areas that we’ve written about as well. So, this Meetings course there’s elements of it, you might want to just hop over into Maddox’s Learning Online course. But there’s also things about, presentations that you might want to take a look at as well. So that’s why we create all of the courses in a way that you can study a lesson as a standalone thing. You don’t have to do the whole course in one go, right? So yeah, I like the way that they link to one another because you’re always building your knowledge base as you work through all of them. That’s great.

Yeah, we don’t waste that much time on meetings, do we? I appreciate that. I mean, we talk a lot though, don’t we online, but we don’t, we don’t really have to, you know, waste time when we’ve, when we’re done with the meeting, we can move on and do other things. But I’ve certainly worked in jobs where it’s like, why, what is this meeting even about? Do I need to go to this? Like, why did you invite me? You know, and then you turn up and you realise after five minutes. I don’t need to be here really. This could have been an email. I think we’ve all been there.

So, yeah, that’s a whole different subject and there are quite a few TED Talks on that as well really, aren’t there? So, but yeah, I’m really glad that you touched on that. They can be quite toxic, not only for English learners, but for people who, yeah, struggle to contribute, people who feel a little bit shy, or maybe, you know, depending on their teammates, that can also make a big impact on them.

And as you said earlier, yes, we have had a big shift from in-person meetings to online meetings. And that’s good for some people. Some people prefer that, but others don’t. So yeah, I’m glad that you focus on both of those in the course. So it’s suited for everyone really.

Thomas Stewart   10:55

Well, yeah, ’cause I think this change is kind of here to stay from a lot of conversations I’ve had where a lot of businesses are just sticking to working at home. And then some are trying to phase their staff to go back in. So it seems that we’ve got both now. Both will be quite common in terms of meetings, both in-person and online.

Lorraine Venables  11:13

Yeah, and that’s, yeah, I mean, in person some people feel a little bit stressed, you know, in the room, and they struggle in that regard. And they feel better online because of technical tools that will help them. For example, raising your hand and things online. You can, you can do that in a lot of programmes.

So let’s talk about empowering ourselves in a meeting first, and then we can talk about empowering others. Because obviously, inclusivity, it’s not just our responsibility to include ourselves, it’s the responsibility of everyone to help others feel included. So talking about empowering yourself. When we were talking about what we’re going to cover in this live, I said to Tom, I need to talk about Kamala Harris. Because I found this moment to be so, so impactful to me.

For those of you who didn’t see it, during the 2016, I wanna say 2016 might have been 2020 presidential campaign. 2020. Kamala Harris and Mike Pence were having a debate as the current vice president and the hopefully new one, which he or she was in the future. And obviously, these presidential debates get really heated and people talk over each other. But there was this moment, which will go down in history, I think, where Mike Pence started to talk over Kamala Harris, and she stopped him. She was like, “I’m speaking”. And it was shocking for people, like you could hear the air gets sucked out of the room, like the audience were like, “She didn’t!” And I remember just applauding when I saw that, I just thought to myself, that’s fantastic. And she did say, you know, “Mr. Vice President, if you don’t mind, “I’m speaking”. So she did, she said it again later, in a very sort of polite and diplomatic way. But I think every single, I don’t want to say ‘female’, but every single person who has been talked over in a meeting by quite, you know, powerful people, they felt that need to stand up for themselves.

And they’ve probably been very frustrated, where, when they thought to themselves, ‘I don’t want to be rude. I don’t want to seem like I’m being difficult. But this person keeps talking over me’. It is quite a thing. Well, I would say it’s something that most females deal with in the workplace at one time or another. But if that happens, what do you do? It’s hard enough for a lot of English learners in a meeting to know what to say, at exactly the right moment. People are speaking quickly, and maybe there’s overlapping chatter. Maybe, you know, there are people who are joining from a video conference, and people speaking in a language which is not your native language. There’s a lot to take on board.

And if you’re struggling to understand native English speakers, or non-native English speakers, speaking quite quickly, it can take you a second to process what they’ve said. And by the time you’ve thought about what to say in response, it’s already moved on to another topic or somebody else has talked about something different and then you want to respond to that.

So it’s really important that you have a few foundational phrases to show that you actually want to contribute in that moment. So, when that happens, you are entitled to do that, you know, you have an opinion. You are just as entitled to contribute as anyone in that meeting. And there will naturally be people who dominate. But over time, if you practice this, you’ll get more comfortable doing it.

And yeah, you will hopefully just show that I do actually want to contribute. So a lot of quiet people in meetings, others may assume that they don’t want to contribute as such, you know. They might assume that this person doesn’t really like to say things in meetings, right, this quiet person. But if you can show, actually, I do want to say something, that will just give you a valuable moment of pause, to then actually talk about what you want to contribute.

So phrases such as:

“May I come in here?” or “Actually, I’ve got something to say”, or something like that will just inform people that you need to speak.

Then if someone’s interrupting you, you know, okay, if you say, “I’m speaking” – that might be a little bit abrupt. Although, you might get a little round of applause from some people in the room.

But phrases, for example:
“I’d appreciate a chance to finish” or, “Could you just wait a second, please?” or, “I’m really interested in hearing your point of view, but just let me finish this point.” And this one works really well, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to interrupt me, but I haven’t quite finished.”

So I noticed you nodding there, yeah. You’ll notice at the end, I said, ‘quite finished’. Now that’s all right to say it at the end there. But I would say that it’s quite important to avoid using words like ‘quite’ or ‘just’ or ‘a little bit’.

We’ve got a lot of ???? coming up on the screen now, everyone’s like, “Yes! I know that!” Very common for people who struggle to contribute to use words like ‘quite’, ‘a little bit’, ‘just’, you know. “I’d just like to say…” or “I think…” or “Maybe I could just…” And while it’s totally natural to say that, it’s better to avoid that if possible.

Okay, so this is called minimising language, and there’s some really, really good resources on minimising language. It’s best to avoid it. So yeah, we’ll leave links in the comment section after the live for all of the resources that we’ve mentioned today. And we recommend having a look at them. All of them, apart from the Meetings course are accessible for free to everyone, not just members of the Intrepid English Academy. But the Meetings course you have to be a member of the Academy to take a look at that.

Okay, so there are some phrases you can use and some to avoid there as well. Tom, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience of meetings in English?

Thomas Stewart 18:10

Yeah, yeah. Well, the one thing I’d say to add to your thing is such a major difference watching Kamala Harris and Mike Pence’s debates versus Trump and Biden. Massive. But anyway, that’s another topic.

Lorraine Venables  18:28

Very, very big one.

Thomas Stewart   18:30

That’s another live we’ll do one day. My experience of meetings, I mean, I’ve had quite a variety of jobs since I had my first job when I was sixteen. Like, you know, some retail jobs and some hospitality jobs. And meetings weren’t a crucial part, but, I mean, to their own detriment, because I hate to say it, but those fields, those industries, communication is terrible. So it kind of, those industries would really benefit from bringing their teams together and having these meetings, but they don’t.

And I remember one meeting that I had in a job that I shall not say, where someone just basically shoved their power around and it completely, like just ruined the atmosphere. The atmosphere was actually quite good, quite buzzing, people were sharing ideas. There was no power structure. And then this one person who was in a kind of position of power, decided to just flaunt it and it just ruined it. It just completely ruined the atmosphere.

So I guess that’s my experience of like a bad meeting, which transcends into the meetings that we have which it doesn’t have you know, a hierarchy at all. Yes, you run the meetings, but we don’t see it as the, you know, you’re there, the Queen with her crown, or whatever. You conduct the meetings, and that’s actually something I talk about in the course. The person who runs the meetings, that’s a responsibility, and you have to be doing quite a lot of things to bring people in and to not waste people’s time.

So like we, Intrepid English, we have two meetings. We split, divide them up where there’s the social media one, and there’s the teacher one. So we know we’re not wasting everyone’s time. And some of the, some teachers show up once a month, because they know that’s the most important meeting so they don’t have to be there for the others. So there’s that flexibility, when a lot of the stuff I was reading, were people getting their time wasted. As you said earlier, sitting in a meeting thinking, ‘why am I here?’ and then dropping your head, and immediately you’ve switched off. I think, moving away from my bad experience coming into an actual… well, as Sevgi said, long live the queen indeed!

Lorraine Venables  20:38

I noticed the little queen emojis coming up there. And I am not like that, haha!

Thomas Stewart   20:43

Like, Sevgi, you know, like very, very prim and proper about it. But I think like with our meetings, like as I said, we come together once a week, and it’s basically just a time for us to all catch up, especially in this world, we all live in where we’re all living, we’re all working at home. We’re isolated. We don’t… we aren’t with our colleagues. So a simple chat, that would take five minutes by the coffee machine takes about an hour because you’re waiting for someone to reply. So that’s why it’s quite crucial to have these once a week meetings where we see each other’s faces, we know what we sound like, we can just say like, oh, by the way, that thing, that thing. So that’s been my experience of the meetings that we have,

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