Meetings can feel like the bane of our life. “I have too many meetings, to do my job”. They can cause burn out, or the team are always in meetings and not doing their work. Just restructuring your diary, reorganising the meetings and making them more effective can clear your diary, and make the whole team deliver more. Here’s 5 tips to take yourself on the way. 
I recently spent the morning with Bryan McCrae from Sales Motivations looking at how cognitive behavioural psychology can apply well with meetings and sales teams. There are 10 types of automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) that hold us back in thinking clearly in meetings. If you can catch yourself or notice others using them, it can help uncover assumptions, and life rules that are being made – and might hold back form making clear decisions
Without a good impression, or good rapport, people will not listen to you, or value you. We judge people on 2 dimensions (Susan Fiske) and decide within second whether they are competent and warm. This will affect what parties you are invited to and how people will treat you.
Quite often when we talk, we make assumptions in the language we use. The meta-model allows us to see patterns in the language, and phrases to test those assumptions. If these patterns are used deliberately then they can be used to influence – so knowing how to challenge them allows the receiver the ability to reduce that influence.