How To Have A Great Meeting At Starbucks or Anywhere

So I'm headed out today to a meeting at a coffee house here in about 10 minutes, so I'm gonna have to make this quick. But as I thought about doing it, I thought about the book that a friend of mine, Ben Turpin, and I wrote back in 2007 called Meet Me at Starbucks. And I thought it'd be kind of fun to pull out the book and come up with an idea or a tip that maybe I could focus on for this meeting. I realized pretty quickly as I looked through what we had written back then that this book was definitely written from the perspective of the person who is going to initiate most of the meetings and be in control of most of the meetings. Sometimes you're invited to a meeting and the rules change a little bit, but the, the ideas are still pretty solid. Now, as far as the book goes, every time I mention this book, people ask me about it, and there's a great video that I did about writing a book. I'm going to put a link to that below so you can link to that video. I don't recommend writing a book for everybody, but that's topic for a different day. But you can take a look at that video and see what you In this book, I just thought I'd pull out a tip, and today's tip that I pulled out was Success Sip. We call them sips. Wasn't that clever? Success Sip number 43, and it's lean forward. And that's really a good suggestion no matter who you're meeting with, who you're talking with. If you lean in, chances are people are going to feel you're more attentive, that you're going to be listening more carefully to what they have to say. So leaning forward is a great tip when you meet people, when you're talking with people, when you're presenting. No matter what you're doing, leaning forward is always a good idea. And so I'm gonna read this little chapter here, it's about a page long, and try to incorporate it in my meeting today. And then when we're done today, I'll come back and give you a report. On my way over to this meeting, I was just thinking about some of the things that are important to me when it comes to meetings. I don't know about you, but meetings just seem to be those things that a lot of times just take up a lot of time and don't really accomplish anything. One of the most important things you can do for a meeting, any kind of meeting, whether you're the one who initiates it or not, is make sure you have an agenda for the meeting. What do you want the outcome to be? You also want to make sure that you know the outcome that the person you're meeting with is and that you share your outcome and you hear their outcome so that you both can work together to effectively make the meeting a win for both of you. One last additional tip that you want to think about when you are headed to a meeting: you never know who's going to be in front of you, like the person in front of me who's decided to stop in the middle of the road before the light turns red so that the light can turn red so that she can wait for the light to turn green and then not move. She'll move along now, but you want to be early like I wasn't today, so I'm gonna have to get in here and make up for it. I wrapped up my meeting at the coffee house and I would have filmed this outside the coffee house, but unfortunately it started to drizzle on me, so got in the car and I just wanted to recap some of the things that I think are important about these meetings. Because as I was sitting there and meeting with this gentleman, a lot of new ideas came into my head, a lot of things that I had forgotten about. Number one is, is of course make sure you have a time limit on any meeting that you're going to go into. I already mentioned, uh, make sure you have an agenda. I had a time limit today and, and actually stayed under it. I allotted a lot more time than I wanted to today. Gave it an hour and a half. I started to wrap things up after about an hour knowing that it would probably be 15 minutes from the time you start wrapping things up to the time you actually are finished. And so that worked out nicely for me, but a time limit's really important for you. The other thing is that you almost always get something out of one of these meetings that you didn't expect. I revisited a couple of thoughts that I've done in other videos, and I'll link that below. Just ideas about being really specific about what you're looking for. But that's, uh, important, and that kind of came to light today. Just deciding what you want. A decision is, is just so important. Those Those are some of the ancillary things I got. As far as other things about meeting in coffee houses, they're always louder than you want them to be. Today was no different. A lot of noise. If you're choosing the seat, make sure you choose the seats that are furthest away from the counter, furthest away from production areas, and furthest away from the traffic area to the restrooms. That way you'll have a little more privacy and a little more ability to carry on a conversation without feeling like you're being listened to or listening to everybody else. Inadvertently. The other thing is that if you're at a coffee house or at a meeting place and someone you know is there, you can always acknowledge them. Had that happen today. Two of my good friends were at the coffee house. Actually, more than two, three were, but two of them got up right when we were meeting and I made sure that I introduced my guests to them. And you always want to do that. I always want to make sure that you acknowledge people that are important to you. Say hello, make sure that you introduce them to the person you're meeting with. And those were kind of the things that popped up in the meeting today that just kind of made me remember some of the things that we had written in the book. Coffeehouse meetings are great as long as you know what you want to accomplish and you accomplish them. I think that we both got what we looked for today and maybe even a little bit more. And we're going to carry on the relationship that we started today, hopefully impact each other's lives for the better. I'd like to know what you do to prepare for meetings and what you think are important about having meetings, whether it's at a coffeehouse or elsewhere. If you love meetings, hate them, put it in the comment section below. Give us some of your best tips on how to have productive meetings when you are meeting with somebody new or somebody that you meet with on a regular basis. Love to have your comments and ideas there and share those with the group. If you like this kind of content, please subscribe. We try to produce videos on a regular basis, but always on Wednesday we'll have a new video. So just hit that subscribe button and we look forward to seeing you again soon. So I had one last thought that I wanted to add to wrap up this idea about meetings and meetings at coffee houses in particular, and that is you want to make sure that you send a thank you note or a thank you email, whatever's appropriate, depends on the meeting. But to the person that you met with, or the people you meet with, just telling them that you appreciate their time and you appreciate what you gained from the meeting. It's always appropriate to do that. It'll make you stand out. If you do that, I think you'll find out that a lot of people will remember you. You'll be more memorable. And that's really what it's all about.