Want to Be More Intentional at Meetings?
Consider starting with a mindful pause.
In a now ordinary schedule of back-to-back-to-back meetings, I try to make the best use of my time during each unique gathering. Hurrying to meetings can make work feel like a blur — and it’s easy to slip into a feeling of insufficient presence, of not bringing my best mind to my work. I don’t like this feeling of not performing at my best. Worse, I don’t like being stuck in a “Work is just so exhausting” mindset.
At The Ready, meetings begin with a ritual: a check-in practice. At the start of a meeting, the facilitator poses a question to the group (such as, “What has your attention?” or “If you were a color, what color would you be today?”) and each participant answers one at a time. Ideally, this practice primes a team to take turns and include all voices in all discussions.
This habit is, in part, designed to help increase presence and focus — but even with it in place, I can still find myself disconnected from my own intentions at the beginning of a meeting. Because how often do we take time to check in with ourselves before a meeting starts? How often do we pause and take stock of the intention we want to bring to a group?
Being able to arrive at a conversation with a clear head and clear presence is way easier said than done. Thanks to both our biological wiring and the technology that accompanies and enables so much of modern work, we have a few obstacles in the way. This article offers an actionable practice that can help address these feelings of overwhelm and transform your working experience for the better.
Scattered Minds, Agitated Nerves
When we show up to a meeting with a scattered mind and a flustered nervous system (guilty as charged), it’s harder to connect, be creative, and contribute meaningfully.
Let’s dive into our jumbled minds first.
Our workdays are packed with distracting information pulling us in thousands of different directions. Take a look at almost anyone’s computer at 10 am and you’ll most likely find 10+ tabs open on their browser. Email notifications are popping up, calendar alerts are dinging, and a task list is quickly multiplying. When we finally turn to a meeting, all the information absorbed in our last 10 minutes (and the 10 minutes before that) doesn’t just disappear.
When I open a new document to start preparing for a workshop, my mind opens its own folder (called a mental schema) that’s filled with all the knowledge associated with that context. But if I then hop onto a late-breaking Zoom with a confused client, my brain has to expend energy opening a new mental schema. It takes time for the brain to close its previous schema, and it doesn’t enjoy having two folders open at once. When we jump from task to task with little care for what our brain needs to catch up, our performance dips.
Plus, it’s easy for work from prior contexts to leak into new ones. Associate Professor of Management Sophie Leroy calls this “attention residue.” Leroy’s research demonstrates that when we quickly switch attention from an unfinished task, the next task’s performance suffers. The attention residue can stick to our minds and distract us from being present.
Let’s say I’m trying to declutter my inbox during an all-staff client meeting. I reply to an email, turn back to the client, rinse, repeat. Then, while my attention is on the client, they ask me a question. Even though I was listening, my mind is still partially in email-land. This scatteredness limits my creativity, presence, enjoyment, warmth, and performance.
Second, a typical workday’s hustle and bustle cues our nervous system to be alert for survival.
The nervous system is designed to help the body communicate with itself. If it feels like it’s being threatened, the sympathetic nervous system switches on to either defend itself against attack (fight) or run away (flight). To achieve this, the body contracts muscles, increases heart rate, narrows vision, and accelerates breathing. Not exactly a productive state for a creative work session.
This may sound strange to talk about in a work context. Our survival system was developed to endure lion-shaped threats, not email-shaped ones. However, today’s workplace stressors can easily set off the same survival alarm in our brains. And when we’re swimming around in both a physically and cognitively stressful soup (thanks to email notifications, lightning-fast turnarounds, and meeting marathons), we’re unable to perform at our best.
But if we feel safe, the brain activates the parasympathetic nervous system, telling our bodies to rest, relax, and build up resources; in essence, this state facilitates growth and connection. In this mode, we can feel at ease, take risks, and learn quicker. One of the best teams I’ve been on was my graduate school’s improv comedy troupe. In our weekly practices, we intentionally created trust between members. I knew I could fail and others wouldn’t look down on me. In fact, we celebrated failure en route to success. This feeling of team safety fostered and even accelerated our innovation .
Both states are natural and useful. Time-crunches can help us focus on essential tasks — and feeling calm and safe at work can encourage us to take creative leaps. But if survival mode becomes the default, then we lose the benefits of sensing into growth and connection. The key, then, is to maximize our ability to choose which state we want to spend time in and when.
Creating Space for Growth and Connection
Mindfulness, or the ability to gently focus your attention on the present moment, is a developable skill with beneficial consequences to work. Research supports that taking even just one minute to pause and re-orient one’s attention to the present moment has immense benefits for the workplace, helping us boost performance, energize innovation, and manage potential stressors.
How do we translate this knowledge into practical moves? Foremost, we can increase awareness. Notice how it feels to be in your body during a survival state opposed to a resting state. Notice how it feels to be with others during each state.
We can also take actions to reduce attention residue and increase presence. The more we tend to the state of our mind at work, the easier it will be to engage, make meaningful connections, and have maximal choice in how we want to show up.
How to Sense-In with Your Team
A mindfulness practice can be done on its own or in conjunction with a check-in question as a way to ground everyone into the same meeting space. On its face, this inner practice seems like an individual one — but practicing an intentional pause as a team can help unlock even greater growth. There are many ways to tap into the superpowers of a focused mind and relaxed nervous system. Here is one method you can try out at a future gathering.
The next time you’re facilitating a meeting, propose that your team experiment with a one-minute sense-in practice. Here are three steps to get you started:
- Pause (15 seconds): Before introducing the check-in question, the facilitator can request that all participants direct their attention inward and sense how it feels to be in their body. Without trying to change anyone’s mood or energy, ask participants to notice their feelings and acknowledge the state of their own minds.
- Reflect (30 seconds): Next, the facilitator can prompt everyone to spend a few seconds asking themselves two questions: “How do you want to bring your intention into this meeting?” and “What personal needs can this group help you meet?” There’s no need to have an exact answer to these questions; they’re guideposts to help orient one’s attention towards collaboration and presence.
- Re-center (15 seconds): Lastly, the facilitator can ask the team to let go of the practice and gently bring their attention back to the meeting space.
Practicing Mindfulness to Meet Team Needs
Whether you’re running from a lion or running from meeting to meeting, your body reacts similarly: in stressful and seemingly dangerous situations, it triggers an involuntary survival response. To activate both high performance and workplace wellbeing, consider starting meetings with a mindfulness pause.
One way to measure a meeting’s effectiveness is to assess whether a team’s needs were met to help unblock obstacles. In other words, were folks able to raise, address, talk through, and brainstorm solutions for issues that are keeping them from advancing strategic goals? But in order to articulate your needs, you’ve got to be able to sense into what they are in that moment.
That’s why baking mindfulness into the start of a meeting isn’t only about increasing wellbeing; it’s also about enabling better problem-solving, better collaboration, and better work overall.
The Ready is an organizational design and transformation partner that helps you discover a better way of working. We work with some of the world’s largest, oldest, and most inspiring organizations to help them remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we all live. Learn more by subscribing to our Brave New Work podcast and Brave New Work Weekly newsletter, checking out our book, or reaching out to have a conversation about how we can help your organization evolve ways of working better suited to your current reality.
This article was made a whole lot better thanks to editing by Zoe Donaldson.
