The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard

Taking notes in long hand might sound a bit old school, in fact some of us were probably pretty good at it when we were in school. These days we probably go into a meeting with our tablet or laptop booted up and type away a summary of a meeting or update bullet points on a spreadsheet or email. If we have been put through a barrage of PowerPoint we may just request a copy of the presentation and use that as our notes. Scribbling notes on a foolscap page is literally a lifetime ago. That is not a good thing.

Several studies have looked at how note taking impacts on how we understand and retain information. One recent study by Princeton University looked specifically at how note taking using a laptop compared with long hand. The laptop note takers scored poorly and were associated with impaired learning and a reduced grasp of conceptual issues, when compared to their long hand counterparts. The shallower processing involved when we just retype what we hear compared to the more complex processing it takes to physically sketch and write notes is suspected to be at play here, or as psychologists call it, Levels of Processing Theory.

If you are hiring someone who will be customer facing, a business analyst or integration specialist, ask about how they take notes. A good note taker will be able to describe their own style, be that their own methods they have developed over the years, mind maps or something more formal (the Cornell Method).

Good note taking requires someone who can identify key words, is organised and can get into the flow of what is being discussed. These are all key skills if you are hiring someone to capture customer requirements, understand a business process or detail what was committed to in meetings.

If you do hire an analyst and are wondering how they are getting on, take a look at their notes. It could be a window into how organised and up to speed they are in their project work. As part of staff induction, splash out on a good pen and fancy jotter. It is not just a perk, it also reinforces the importance of note taking, by hand. If someone asks you for a copy of the presentation you just gave, you can assume they will recall very little of what was discussed. That may or may not be a good thing.

The Smart Look - Eye Contact

We go to great lengths to put our best foot forward in meetings and demos. We get the agenda right, have all the props in place, make sure the environment is up to scratch and we are quick to remind our audience of our capabilities and track record.

This however may not be enough. A study at Northeastern University looked at how people rate our intelligence and capabilities. They found that making eye contact with the audience is key. The researchers had people watch short videos of strangers talking to each other. They were then asked to rate the intelligence of the strangers in the video. People in the video who made more eye contact while chatting were perceived as more intelligent.

This ties in with research from the University of Michigan which found that people who avoided eye contact were rated as socially awkward, deceptive and insincere. Interestingly though this was for men rather than women. Women who avoided eye contact were seen as unattractive and disagreeable. Not good results for either gender.

So even if you get the presentation right, the pricing right, making good eye contact is an important part of sealing the deal. You need to get the intelligence and sincerity message across.

While on the subject of perceived intelligence, being well dressed and looking good is a perquisite. Research by Zebrowitz and colleagues is one of many studies to establish a link between attractiveness and how smart people think we are. People who are seen as attractive are also seen as more intelligent. Scrub up, wear the good suit and make eye contact, you can’t lose.

Surface Acting, a silent meeting killer

Ever been in a meeting and felt one way but acted another? Most of us have. This behaviour is also quite common in the medical profession when a doctor fakes empathic behaviours toward a patient. They act concerned because that is expected, deep down they might be more worried about their waiting list or getting home on time.

Psychologists call this ‘surface acting’. I recently read an interesting BPS article on how surface acting affects meetings and employee burn out.

It referenced a study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology which focused on how masking our real feelings could negatively affect our contribution to meetings and our long term well-being.

The central idea is that surface acting requires significant self-control and this puts a strain on our mental resources. This can prove distracting and restrict the attention we give to what is really going on in the meeting.

The study collected online data from 178 participants from a variety of roles with a range of meeting regularity (from just over 2 per week to less than once per week). Participants rated items like 'I tend to fake a good mood when interacting with others in the meeting’ to produce a surface acting score. This score was negatively associated with their rating of typical meeting effectiveness, in terms of networking, achieving work goals, or learning useful information. The more they surface acted, the less effective they found the meeting.

It gets worse, the long term consequences of surface acting were also measured. Participants who indicated higher surface acting felt emotionally exhausted and were prone to burnout. Acting one way and feeling another was emotionally draining, both in the meeting and afterwards. Habitual surface actors were more likely to have an intention to quit their job at short notice. That is not good for anyone.

Guess the point here is that masking how you really feel in work, while required every now and again, it not a good idea in the long term. If you chair meetings try and make it possible for people to express how they really feel. They may be a little more attentive and focus better on the agenda items or discussions.

Aside from meetings, if your organisational culture requires people to surface act or hide their feeling on a regular basis e.g. when dealing with customers, superiors, other departments, be aware that burn out and sudden departures may follow. If this is hard to avoid and the ‘customer is always right’, then give staff some recovery time and let them vent a little. Everyone might feel better and get more done.

Use a Pen to get the Point

So you can picture the scene, people gather in a room for a meeting, the laptops open up and as the agenda is worked through, the hum of the keyboard is heard as people take notes of the major points, tasks and agreements. We can often type faster than we can write, so using a laptop for note taking allows a more complete record of what was said and more detail to be recorded. Using the laptops in meeting would appear a great idea. Hence it is a familiar sight. 

 

It turns out that the story may be a little bit more complicated than that. Research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer from Princeton University and University of California, Los Angeles suggests that hand writing notes may be more effective than the laptop option.

 

They conducted a number of experiments where they had students take notes in a classroom setting and then do a test which checked for recall of factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students took notes with a laptop and the other half wrote out the notes out by hand.

The students on the laptops took more notes and recorded more detail. However, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those wielding the laptops.

The improved understanding among the pen and paper users could be a function of ‘Levels of Processing Theory’. The idea is that the physical act of writing involves more cognitive effort and thinking about what to write is a more deliberate act. As we cannot write as fast as we can type, we need to think about the key points, be more discerning about what to write and more accurate in our summary of events. We need to understand what we are listening to. 

While a fast typist can record everything that they hear, they are not thinking about the content as much, they are merely producing a written record.

If you want to trap all the detail, crank open the laptop and work away. If you want to understand and recall the points made, use the pen and paper. Laptops are optional and don’t feel corporately under-dressed if you show up with just a refill pad and Biro at your next meeting.

On a separate point, this may have implications for the increased use of laptops and tablets in the lecture theatre or training room . While the volume of notes may increase, the level of understanding may not. If you do give a class or provide training where you are trying to get key conceptual points across, insist on the pen as the weapon of choice. 

People still buy from people

We have all heard the cliché ‘People buy from people’, in other words, being able to personally connect with your client really matters. Yet many organisations send sales people into the market with this personal connection way down their list of priorities.

An example of this would include meeting time wasted on overly complex power point presentations that quite frankly bore people (even if it is all true). There is too much thought put into the pitch not not enough into the people you will be interacting with. Other examples are tactics employed by ‘inside sales’ teams where social media or other on-line tools are used to inform and connect with clients or prospects. These include tweets, special offer emails, circulating white papers, hosting webinars. While they may convey a very credible sales pitch or business case, these channels lack real personal context. 

I recently read a paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology which looked at interview candidates seeking employment. When candidates completed an interview they answered a series of questions on how they behaved, if they made eye contact, if they had demonstrated a keen interest in the company or job. The interviewers also answered a number of questions on what they thought of the candidate, their skills, if they would be hired.

For those that did get hired, the interviewers did not necessarily go for the best skilled or prepared. They went for ‘pleasant people’. They hired people they liked. People they connected with. Answers to complex technical questions or specific skills mattered less than how the candidates came across.

This is in line with the ‘People buy from people’ school of thought and no great surprise. What struck me however is that the paper was 10 years old (2004) and rather than that making the findings less relevant, the opposite is perhaps the case.

It is not unusual to do sales meeting on-line, via Skype or via a webinar. When we are not physically meeting there is less ad hoc personal interaction than there would be in a ‘real’ meeting, the handshake, the small talk when taking seats, chatting when waiting for someone else to join.

So if you do meet or sell on-line, still try to fit in some of the small talk rather than sticking to the webinar script. Perhaps make it your business to phone someone up with the meeting confirmation or check if they got the log in details. While technically this may be unnecessary, it could be your opportunity to kick off some small talk, be nice and come across as a pleasant person. Technology aside people still buy from people. Don’t let the on-line line omni-channel world get in the way of that, it’s not an either or scenario. Make that connection. 

Memory and open doors

After a meeting or sales demo do you sometimes gather people for a review and get them to recall what happened? If you are trying to get people to recall events or key points you might be better off doing this in the room where the meeting or demo happened.

Research by Gabriel Radvansky at Notre Dame University suggests that memories are stored as a series of successive events. You could almost think of them as chapters in a book. It is easier for us to recall events (or chapters) which just happened. This is fair enough.

However what is interesting in Radvanskys research is that walking through doorways seems to create a new memory episode (or chapter) and therefore making it more difficult to recall details that we literally have left behind in the room (previous chapters).

His research used a virtual reality environment with several rooms containing various objects. When participants entered a room they saw a table and picked up an object, once an object was picked up, they could no longer see it. At the next table (sometimes in the same room) they put down the object and picked up another one. Memory tests were carried out (on what people were carrying) when they entered, left or had been in a room for a while

The research found that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. The authors said "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]".

So if you have ever walked into a room and forgot something, this may explain it. There is another aspect which suggests that we recall information better in the context in which we experienced it. There is a long list or research in this area including the famous Godden and Baddeley study on divers superior recall under water, if they were trained under water.

This could have implications for how we train staff. You may be better for example, training staff at a desk or in the room where they will actually be working. When we study we may be better studying at a desk with the pens and instruments we will have on our desk when we do an exam. If you are rehearsing a demo, do it in the boardroom where you will be presenting, you may recall your lines a bit better.

To get back to where we started, if you have just had an important meeting, interview or conference call, no one leaves the room until they write down the key points and better still have the review there and then in the room. Keep the door closed. If you have another review later, use the same room. 

The weather is not just small talk

So, are you one for checking the weather forecast on a regular basis? We all like good weather at weekends so we can get out doors and blow off some steam. During the week we like to make sure that we wear the right clothes going to work and have our raincoat or umbrella if we need it.

It turns out however, the weather also affects how we think. It does not have to be as extreme as Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) It can affect us in far more subtle ways. 

I recently came across a 2009 study which showed that in something as specific as job interview performance it can have a real impact. The study analyzed the results of  medical-school interviews at the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2009. People interviewed on rainy days received a one per cent lower score than those interviewed on sunny days. While it seems small, the difference in scores was equivalent to a ten per cent lower total mark on the Medical College Admission Test for the university.  

The paper suggests that the mood of those conducting the interviews is lowered by the poor weather. This literally dampens their thinking when they score their candidates. If this is the case then the same cognitive influence could be at play when you have a salary review, when you try to close a big sale with a customer or when you gather some marketing material such as customer surveys. It may also play a role in performance of focus groups or any other setting where people subjectively score performance based on how they feel about it.

Try to pick a nice day for your review or that important sales meeting. If things don't work out and you are fresh out of other excuses, dodge the bullet by blaming the weather.

Make the first move

When it comes to negotiating, many people believe that it's usually best not to make the first offer. They wait for the other guy to say how much he is willing to give or ask for. A lot of people assume that by encouraging the other person to make the first offer, they gain an information advantage.

This assumption however isn't quite right. Adam Galinsky, at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management has looked at the research and found that: “more often than not, negotiators who make first offers come out ahead.”

One explanation for this is ‘anchoring’, which we have discussed in previous posts. The first offer act as an 'anchor'.  Once the first offer is made, that becomes the focal point and it gets more difficult to get it off the table and discuss a completely new number. We end up spending the negotiation trying to adjust the opening offer.

This was well demonstrated in an experiment by Greg Northcraft and Maggie Neale at the University of Arizona.  They got experienced real estate agents to inspect and estimate the independent value of a house. In what appeared to be accidental, the estate agents saw one of two different price lists for the house in question. The price list was done up by someone else. Half of the agents saw a listing price of $119,900. These agents then estimated that the house would sell for just over $114,000. The other half of the agents saw a listing price of $149,900, and they came in at a figure of $128,000. The list price should have been irrelevant but it anchored their appraisal and valuation.

So when it comes to negotiation, don't be afraid to ‘play your card first’ and put a number on the table. You don't want to spend the negotiation process counteracting the other sides opening offer and not get the chance to explain your number and its worth.

Avoid being a softie in negotiations

I recently read a very good post on the TipTapLab where it discussed haptic experience and how the way items feel influences our behavior. It highlighted a study by Ackerman, Nocera, Bargh from 2010  which showed how the weight texture and hardness of objects we come into contact with or hold, affect our decision making.

For example, the study found that heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, so maybe walk in holding brief case rather than a notepad to your next meeting or interview. It also found that hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations, so perhaps use flexible plastic glasses for drinks in your meeting rooms if you need to cut a deal. 

Interestingly on this hard/soft influence, the study found that potential car buyers were more inflexible in their price negotiations when sitting in hard rather than soft chairs. It might be worth investing in a few luxury seats and few cushions in your meeting/show rooms or sitting on a wooden chair at home when bidding on eBay.

Guess the point here is that we have impressions of hard, rigid, soft that follow into our subconscious when we physically experience them. Beware of the car salesman with the comfy chairs.

Bitter Tastes makes us harsher judges

So what do you drink when sitting at your desk, do you go for a plain stilled water or something a little more flavoured?

If you go for the latter, you may need to think about your choice of flavours. Research by Kendall Eskine at the City University of New York found that bitter flavours make us more judgemental. Eskine and colleagues asked 57 volunteers to rate how morally questionable a set of scenarios were on a scale of 1 to 100. Some of the scenarios included a man eating his already-dead dog, cousins engaging in consensual sex.

At the start and again midway through the scenarios, participants were given a bitter drink or water.

Participants given bitter drinks were much tougher in their judgements than those who drank water, giving scenarios a score that was on average 27 per cent higher. It seemed that taste perception significantly affected their moral judgments and the physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) produced feelings of moral disgust

Participants were also asked if they were political conservatives or liberals. Interestingly, the politically conservative individuals were more strongly affected by bitter tastes than liberals

So if you are taking a client or the boss out for a drink or dinner, try and stay clear of the bitter drinks or food if you are looking to get the OK for some radical proposal. If you want them to judge a rivals proposal harshly, recommend the fish with extra lemon juice, washed down with a glass of Aperol.

Be Centre Stage

Have you wandered into a meeting room, made small talk with whoever is already there  and took a seat without thinking about it that much? Does it actually matter where we sit? Maybe it does.

Most people make the unconscious assumption that people in the centre are most important and therefore don’t tend to notice their mistakes as much or interrogate their contributions. This is known as the ‘Centre Stage Effect’.

It is covered in a 2005 paper from Berkeley which looks at a number of studies.  It tested the centre-stage effect using observational data from a real television show, The Weakest Link. Results show that players assigned at random to central positions are more likely to win the game than those in extreme positions.

There are a number of other similar lab based studies which come to the same conclusion, we fail to consciously look at and accurately assess the 'important' person in the centre. This leads to a biased (although favourable) assessment of whoever is in that central position.

Moral of the story? Want to get away with it? Get to the meeting early and grab the centre seat. The guys on either side will take brunt of any criticism flying about.

If something happens, then you need a plan

We all do a bit of project planning every now and again. This can be for a formal large project with multiple goals and participants or a plan just to get an email put together and sent off.

Research by Gollwitzer etc al, 2006 suggests that we need to anticipate problems and set a series of ‘if then’ actions. This would be if the new piece of software is not live by an agreed date, then, we have a paper based system to use in the short term. In other words we look at what can go wrong, what can be outside of our control and develop contingency plans that are worked out in detail and ready to go.

When the inevitable does occur and some original deadline or action does not materialise, we are not left floundering, wondering what we can do about it or who do we call. Your ‘if then’ is ready to swing into action, you continue to feel in control. You stay in business.

This sounds like really basic advice and a really obvious thing to do. You would however be surprised by the number of people out there who are happy to wing it and not do this extra level of planning.

Once they come up with a plan they let it at that and treat the ‘if thens’ with a touch of ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’. That type of head in the sand thinking can be a serious threat to your business.

While you can't have an 'if then' for every project milestone, you could have them for the milestones that are an operational threat. I have seen clients unable to issue monthly invoices with devastating implications for cash flow because a data load into a new billing system hit a technical snag. This is particularly important for projects with several suppliers. When something does go wrong, each will point the finger at the other and cooperation to resolve the issue could be in short supply.

So review your project plan. Identify the junctures where failure will seriously jeopardise your organisation and put in your 'if then' plans for these. You will keep a degree of control and not be left at the mercy of suppliers and project managers. Always have an option open, if the worst then happens, you will be ok.

Mind Doodling?

Doodling, sounds like the actions of a distracted or idle mind. If you see a colleague doodling in a meeting you might think that they have switched off and won’t be much use when it comes to recalling who said what.

A 2009 study suggests different. In the study, 40 participants monitored a monotonous mock telephone message for the names of people coming to a party. Half of the group was randomly assigned to a ‘doodling’ condition where they shaded printed shapes while listening to the telephone call. The doodling group performed better on the monitoring task and recalled 29% more information on a surprise memory test.

This could be because learning may be improved when we use our hands, activating the hands helps activating the brain. It may also involve levels of processing theory. A lesson we can draw from this is that doodling may help if we are trying to remember information or be creative. Have you ever found yourself reaching for something to play with when you are trying to think a problem through or come up with some creative solution?

Next  time you see the guy in the meeting doodle, don’t despair, he could be recalling more than you are and even be a bit more creative. Try a bit more doodling yourself this week and see if it works for you.

Dress like it matters

If you want to stamp your authority at a meeting, how you dress could be important. Several studies over the years have shown how people in formal dress get quicker service in shops, have a better time asking for donations and find it easier to get the attention of strangers. They are also judged to be more intelligent and better academically qualified.

This also works the other way around, you walk into a shop, you might form an opinion about the cashier who checks you out, based on their dress, hair style, jewellery etc, though you know very little about this person.

This could be due to a mental shortcut we use called Social Categorization. In the social categorization process, we mentally categorize people into different groups based on common characteristics such as dress. Sometimes this process occurs consciously, but for the most part social categorizations happens automatically and unconsciously. We tend to think of leaders or ‘the boss’ wearing a suit, the professor with their tweed jacket or the successful stockbroker with their Armani attire.

So if you have a big interview or meeting coming up, get out the good suit and sharp shoes. A study that looked specifically at female applicants going for a management job found that those who dressed in a smart masculine style were perceived as more potent and aggressive and were more likely to land the job.

A similar dynamic can also occur for groups. A survey in 2009 found that business students rated companies with a formal dress code as more authoritative and competent. Organisations that had a relaxed dress code were seen as more friendly and creative.

So if you are going for a key meeting or interview choose your clothes carefully. If you want to sell your organisation to employees or clients as a hub of creativity or a bastion of authority, get you staff to dress accordingly.

Sorry I've forgotten your name

We have all been in meetings or at social events where we got introduced to a bunch of people. Afterwards when we try to recall the encounter, the names can be hard to remember. Quite often someone will say, ‘That guy from sales, what was he called?’. It is easier to remember all types of information about someone, than their name. We are better at remembering what they do, where they come from, what they specialise in, what their hobbies are. This is backed up by a number of studies.

One such study gave people fake names and biographies to remember. In recall tests, only 30% could recall surnames, compared to 68% and 69% for hobbies and jobs respectively.

In another study, participants found it easier to remember that a person is a potter, i.e. maker of pots, than if their surname is actually Potter.

The bad news is that the jury is out on why this occurs. Some theories are that lots of similar names (lots of Johns, Marys, Smiths) interfere with each other and this inhibits our ability to form durable memories about someone’s specific name.

However others would suggest that familiar names are easier to recall and it should be easier to remember someone called John or Mary, rather than a name we have never heard of before.

The good news is that research has shown that the semantic meaning we attach to names, or the different levels at which we process them, helps our ability to recall.

For example, we meet John Smith, we use his initials JS, he happened to be a nice guy so we associate ‘Just Super’ with his name. If he wasn’t that nice, maybe ‘Just Stupid’ would have been more appropriate. We have now given his name greater semantic significance and done some additional processing to come up with ‘Just Super’.

It is now much more memorable and we have different cues and levels of processing to assist recall. Next time we meet ‘JS’ ‘Just Super’ nice John, we won’t be stuck for a name or get caught trying to read his name badge. This might be why nick names tend to stick and are easily remembered.

The moral of the story is not to get too frustrated or embarrassed if you can’t recall a name, it happens to most of us. If you want to remember names better, associate them with some other information about the meeting or characteristics of the person involved. Don’t get too upset either if someone you meet can’t remember your name, it’s not personal. Just point them in the direction of this blog. Hopefully they will think you are closer to the 'Super' than the 'Stupid' end of the scale.

Breaking Bad News

You are entering a meeting. It’s an annual review with a key client. You have some good news, they now qualify for a loyalty discount and some bad news, you are closing the local office they would normally have dealt with.

How should you break the news? Research suggests that when we are up front about problems or short comings, people like us more, i.e. we bring the bad news up at the start of a meeting, rather than at the end. Mentioning it at the start is seen as refreshing honesty, keeping it to the end is seen as concealment, and we don’t like that.

The reverse is true for good news or achievements. Coming out with these at the start is seen as boastful, it’s almost as if you are trying to make an impression and get a favourable response. If the good news is left to the end, people may feel that you didn’t try to use it to manipulate them or get anything in return.

There could also be a memory effect at play here where we finish on a good note and that is the context in which our meeting is remembered.

Have a think about this, have you been in meetings where someone gave you bad news as they wrapped up, how did that come across to you?. I have had that happen and it’s not a good feeling.

When being Right is all that matters

We have all been in meetings where our position is challenged, someone contradicts our reasoning or opinion. The atmosphere gets a little heated. We come to a point where we go all out, drop any empathetic feelings and make our stand. We don’t care who we annoy or upset, along as we are proved to be right it doesn’t matter. This can be in the board room discussing some major project or among workmates discussing last nights football game.

If we reach the point in an argument where we feel we are going to get labelled as ‘wrong’ or somehow derided, the body makes a neurochemical choice about how best to protect itself. You are in fight or flight territory now.

If we fight and win, the brain releases hormones including  adrenaline and dopamine, which make us feel good, even dominant. It's the  type of sensation any of us would want to feel again and again. So the next time we're in a tense situation, we will fight, flight is less appealing.  We get addicted to being right.

You become a regular fighter in those cantankerous meetings, getting your adrenaline & dopamine hit. This has downsides for management style. If we always go into fight mode and want to win at the expense of someone else, it can make collaboration more difficult and damage relationships.

As a negotiator you become predictable, and as long as you think you have got your way (perhaps on a minor point), you are happy. As a communicator you become confrontational  and spend too much time arguing your perspective at the expense of exploring alternatives.

Learn to put winning an argument in context, if you get addicted to winning arguments, you have a blind spot in your decision making process. If you think I am wrong lets argue it and see how you feel if you win.

PowerPoints Powerful Enemy

We have all had our run ins with PowerPoint, either been asked to put a presentation together at the last minute or had to sit through a relentless set of coma inducing slides presented by someone else.

If you have an aversion to PowerPoint, turns out you are in good, or rather strong company.

US Marine General James N. Mattis declared that “PowerPoint makes us stupid” at a military conference in North Carolina in April 2010. A subsequent New York Times article (worth a read) went into more detail on how that particular presentation method was embedded in the US military.

The then head of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, went so far as to suggest that PowerPoint  had become the U.S. Army’s principal enemy, and they have a few enemies. It was felt that such was its confusing and ineffective display of important information, serious errors could result.

The nature of PowerPoint layout led to condensing  of evidence and clarifications, a singular hierarchical explanation structure and a tendency to spend too much effort on logos and branding.

The next time you are doing your best to figure out a ream of slides or trying to avoid nodding off, think it could be worse, you could be in Kabul. On a more serious point, maybe it is time to think of other ways of doing presentations, if nothing else, just to be different and perhaps a little bit more effective

Give yourself a Confidence Boost

You are in a meeting, it may not be going well, you are under pressure and your confidence in yourself or your point of view is starting to dip.

What can you do to improve the situation? Well first thing you could address is a timely boost to your confidence.

In Sian Beilocks book 'Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To' it seems that reminding yourself of your credentials can remind you how talented you are and give a confidence boost.

This can also include thinking about any aspect of yourself that helped to make you successful, be that how hard you have worked, an academic qualification or otherwise.

On the inside of your diary or work journal, have a mini bio of your talents and success. Before you decide to fight your corner in that tough meeting, glance down at your bio and you will do so with a little more confidence.

We all have enough difficult meetings where our confidence can dip or even be deliberately undermined.Try this out and see how you get on

Don't Meet to Browse

In meetings you attend, how often do you look up and down the table and see people listening but also coming and going to their laptop or smart phone?

They could be checking their email, doing a bit of surfing or checking some facts as they come up. A part from being occasionally irritating, is this doing any real harm?

Some research by Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay suggests that it may. They gave college students laptops and asked them to attend a lecture. They asked half the students to use their laptops during the lecture (not unlike in a meeting) and the other half to keep their laptops closed (don't see that in meetings very often). The lecture was followed up by a test based on the lecture.

The participants that browsed with their laptops did considerably worse than those that left their laptops closed. Hembrooke and Gay also analysed the results and browsing style using Lang’s Limited Process Capacity model. The moral of the story is that browsing in a lecture is not a good idea. Your ability to take in information is impaired.

It is not unreasonable that the same would hold true in meetings. We have a limited cognitive capacity for processing information and if we are browsing something that interests us more than what we are hearing or seeing in the meeting, then we will allocate more cognitive resources to our browsing and take in less of what is happening in the meeting.

With smart phones, tablets, laptops all cable of allowing our scarce cognitive resources to wander you might consider asking attendees to turn off their devices . You have probably even seen this at home where your partner is having a conversation with you while browsing on their iphone. After a few minutes you figure out they have probably only heard half of what you've said.

So if the meeting you run needs full input from all attendees, if you need them devoting all their cognitive resources to the matters in hand, then a device ban may be in order. I sincerely hope you are not in a meeting reading this. If you are then make sure to read the minutes.