Sales meetings can get derailed and weird in a heartbeat. Everyone brings their unspoken hopes and fears about how the meeting will go, how they will show up, and how they might be perceived. Meetings can be more fraught on zoom, because we have less access body language and other cues that help us understand how we’re doing. Here’s how to make your meetings more focused and less fraught.

It’s like we all need to give ourselves permission that it’s OK feel our hopes and fears, or that it’s OK to do great, or idiotic things, so we can get over ourselves and dig into the work. Dr. Brene Brown, author of Dare to Lead, offers up a great tool. It’s called permission slips.

Permission slips help identify what might get in our way of being totally engaged or present and helps to get it out of our way. Permission slips create trust and energy in a sales team. Here’s how you do it: at the beginning of each meeting, ask everyone to silently write down what they need to give themselves permission to do, or to not do, or to feel, for this meeting. Once everyone has something, have them write their answers in the zoom chat feature. The whole process takes about 2 – 5 minutes.

Here are some examples of permissions I’ve heard from others: Stay open minded. Be willing to change my mind. Ask for what I need. Pass during group sharing. Ask for more time. Be a learner, not a knower, and participate more. Not look at my phone and be present for the entire meeting.

Zoom meetings run so much better after people write and share their permission slips. (So do on site meetings.) And you’ll be seen as an effective leader and skilled meeting facilitator. So give yourself permission to try permission slips and see what happens. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.