Greetings Fellow Facilitators!

New Book Idea to share with you!

This Meeting Sucks, I'm Taking Over...
25 Acts of Conscious Leadership

This Meeting Sucks; I’m Taking Over is a book inspired by the Random Acts of Facilitation (RAF) concept I've been sharing with you for the past couple of years. The core of the RAF material is based on the premise that anyone in a group, leader or participant alike, can positively impact the direction, focus, and consciousness of the group at any time with a spontaneous act of facilitation. As it turns out, more professional facilitators (you!) were attracted to this class than those who attend meetings as participants. In retrospect, that’s not a big surprise since my audience is primarily facilitators.

Still, I have this burning desire and compelling need to craft a meaningful message to the world at large--group participants to be exact--to help them be more leader-like in groups that aren't working. Here are several pieces of solid evidence for this need:

There are an average of 8 times more participants in any meeting or group than there are leaders.

Meeting participants are an underserved audience. Dozens of books are available about being a better group leader, meeting conductor, etc., I've not seen a single book out there totally devoted to the those “around the table” yearning for a better use of their time and energy.

People are waking up to the fact that corporations won’t take care of them for life anymore. Hence more people are deciding to take personal responsibility for how things turn out for them in their lives and in their work. This supports a need for immediately useful ideas to effectively assert oneself in a meeting situation, whether of two or twenty!

Countless numbers (including many of you!) agree that most of the meetings they've attended absolutely sucked. Recent research confirms that there are at least 50 million meetings held each year around the world, with at least 80% of them poorly conducted, providing only marginal if any positive outcome. This represents an enormous productivity hole that can be corrected. Meeting participants simply need valuable and useful information that they can immediately apply.

So my title inspires me to move forward.

This Meeting Sucks, I'm Taking Over...
With 25 Conscious Acts of Leadership

An invitation with benefits...

I want this book to be fun, easy to read, entertaining, enlightening and inspiring. One of the best ways I know to do this is to invite real life stories from people who've experienced “lousy meetings”.
Here’s your invitation. Please take just five minutes to do a mental and emotional speed review of your meeting experiences over the past few years. What meetings come to mind where you or someone else in the meeting (who wasn't the leader), did something that really turned a bad meeting into a good one? Or, if this action didn't turn the meeting around, perhaps it created the greatest value that occurred in the meeting. What was that value?

Please send your stories to contact@FacilitatorU.com by 28 February. If your story is selected for the book, I'll provide your credit with your name, title, email address and/or website. And, of course, you’ll receive a free copy of This Meeting Sucks: I’m Taking Over. If you are uncomfortable writing this story out and would rather speak about it, please call me with it at 800-216-3854. Simply leave the story with my voicemail if I don't answer. If you use this approach, I encourage you to jot down a few notes to clarify your thinking before making the call.

Further, if you have other ideas as to how to acquire stories or experiences that might contribute to this concept, I would love to hear them.

Thanks very much for your support!

Warmest regards,

Removal Instructions Below.

Steve Davis 1.760.375.7384 1.877.768.9016 (fax) contact@FacilitatorU.com; www.FacilitatorU.com Virtual Facilitation Training and Resources......Just in Time, situation-based tools, providing what you need, when you need it.