Being Present For Peace

Being present fully. Who is? Zen masters who have done years of training in meditation and deliberate consciousness? Athletes and performers who have done years of practise, endless hours of rehearsal and perhaps hundreds of hours on stage or before a camera?

In one of her fascinating mystery novels, Patricia Cornwell’s lead character Kay Scarpetta reflects on the consciousness of a murderer. A consciousness that works the environment – notices every person around himself, the awareness levels of the individuals he is studying – who could help him, who could hinder him, in his quest for the next kill, or his quest in manipulating and using anyone to forward his goals. Scarpetta muses how unaware most folks are in comparison. How we don’t notice people around us, or the details of the setting we’re in. How much more present a serial murderer is, than us plain folks.

That’s scary, huh? Do any of us enter a public place or a workplace on the leading edge of awareness – scouting for someone to exchange a positive communication with, someone to help, or ask for help? Do we scan the crowd for persons of peaceful or cheerful demeanors with which to resonate, enjoy, and move on? Do we notice? Are we ever fully open to the scenario we are in, drinking in every tiny vibe of “Yes!” from the movements, mannersims, expressions of individuals in our immediate landscape, be it the mall, the bus stop, the parking lot, the office tower lobby?

So do we have to be a murderous predator to even contemplate that degree of awareness?

It strikes me that the opposite – serenity – might be an equivalent presence. I’ve experienced serenity after meditating, after exercising, after performing especially. There were moments of a real high, of extended perceptions, a sense of seeing every face in an audience. Also a sense of hearing every individual in an audience breathing individually from the stage. (No, I was not on some chemical or herb.) An open, receptive consciousness, taking in astounding detail.

Not so much extending perceptually out into the environment scouting for certain things, but BEING the whole area of perception, wrapping around it in a way. And therefore knowing what was there.

So my train of thought kept going with the idea that if we non-predatory individuals walked through life via a presence, our presence, opened and extended in this way, that we would notice more of a like consciousness anywhere we go. Or just look at. And we, being in this frame of mind, would be Being more.

In most busy, crowded, public places I tend to shut down. I know where I need to go, what I need to do, and then I want to get home, or to my next quieter place, or next commitment. So it’s like the goal is to NOT be there!

Now the thought hangs – what have I missed? Who have I missed? I will never know – but possibly now I will remember, once or twice a month, to wake up in my environment, really Be There and take it all in, look for what I think of as good in the environment, anything good. Not as in a delusion or fantasy – but with bold, sharp-edged awareness.

Different Types of Webinar Presentations

If you’re a presenter who wants to deliver your material by webinar, the secret is to forget you’re doing a webinar, and structure it just like any other program. There’s nothing magical about the webinar format. It’s just another medium for delivering your presentation. You prepare the content just the way you would any other presentation, and you deliver it in (broadly) the same way.

Let’s look at some of these options.

Keynote presentation

If you give keynote presentations, design your webinar as a keynote-style presentation, with the aim of changing their attitudes or shifting their beliefs. It will probably run for 45-60 minutes, with you doing most of the talking, and perhaps a brief Q&A session towards the end.

Be careful with trying to adapt a keynote presentation to the webinar format. Webinar audiences expect high content. Some keynote presentations are very light on content, which can be acceptable in a conference room. But on a webinar, your audience can’t see you, can’t see each other, won’t speak up as readily, and won’t do interactive exercises unless there’s a very clear point to them. In general, you can’t rely on the energy and “showiness” of a face-to-face presentation.

Training session

If you’re a trainer, your job is much easier. The webinar format is ideally suited for transferring skills and knowledge through education and instruction, provided the teaching doesn’t depend on the participants actually being in the same room.

If you offer your webinar as a training session, you’ll be teaching them skills. It might be about an hour long, with a handout they download in advance, and exercises they complete during the session. You’ll still do most of the talking, but you might have more than one opportunity for them to ask you questions, and you’ll allow more time for questions.

Broadly speaking, you take the material you typically deliver in a face-to-face training session and adapt it for delivering by webinar. You can still use slides, handouts, workbooks, asking questions, asking for a show of hands, and even initiate group discussion.

Training course

The next logical step is to present a multi-stage training course. If you can do one webinar well, it’s only a small step to present material as a series of webinars. Rather than a one-off event, you present the training in smaller chunks, perhaps with “homework” between each session.

Even if you’re not doing training this way in your face-to-face presentations, consider how you could do that using webinars. Webinars lend themselves well to this sequence, because they have such a low overhead. Some of your material might be better delivered as a course, but it might have been too difficult to run a face-to-face event each time.

Interview experts

Webinars allow you to bring in other experts for your audience. Although you can do this in face-to-face presentations as well, that is rare – perhaps because presenters think they themselves need to be the only expert in the room, and their credibility would be diminished if somebody else was also delivering material! For some reason, interviewing experts by webinar doesn’t have the same stigma. In fact, if some people attend your webinars regularly, they will appreciate hearing from your guest presenters as well.

If your guest is already a skilled presenter, they can simply treat the webinar just like any other training webinar. However, you might also have the situation where your guest is an expert, but not a skilled presenter. In that case, you don’t want to force them to make a presentation. Instead, run it as a one-to-one interview, with the audience silently “eavesdropping” on your conversation.

Panel Interview

The next logical step is to interview a panel of experts. If you have experience in this area already, again a webinar is an effective medium for conducting your interviews.

Even with a panel of experts, you can add visuals to enhance the experience for the audience. Of course, the larger the panel the more difficult it is to manage this, so plan it carefully. For example, you might decide only you show visuals – a particular Web page or document, for example – and then call on the panel to comment on it.

Facilitation

If you’re a facilitator rather than a trainer, you can still use a webinar to host your presentation. The key difference here is it’s your job to create the right environment for discussion among the participants, rather than being the expert with the presentation. So you set the scene, and then open the webinar for the audience to do most of the talking (with your guidance, of course).

Coaching and mentoring

So far we’ve talked about webinars as being for group presentations. But there’s no reason you can’t use them for one-on-one presentations as well – in particular, coaching, mentoring or consulting. If you run a webinar as a coaching session, you’ll be asking lots of questions and giving the client more time to answer them. So you might ask a question, and then give the client time to answer it.

If you’re conducting mentoring sessions by webinar, you’ll combine the training and coaching modes – that is, a mix of teaching and asking, with some time for you to speak and some time for them to interact with you and with each other.

Presenting remotely

Finally, one other use of webinar technology is for you to make a presentation remotely (in other words, when you’re not physically present). The audience might be gathered in a room, but you make your presentation from elsewhere.

You might have seen this already in the form of videoconferencing, where a speaker is “beamed in” to a conference or meeting. That is still an option, of course, but it has some drawbacks: It can be expensive, it might require special equipment at both ends, it needs a fast Internet connection, and the audio and visuals don’t always synchronise correctly.

Doing it by webinar is far easier, and often more effective. It doesn’t require as much Internet bandwidth, it doesn’t need any special equipment at your end, and you can show a slide presentation as well.

New Way of Negotiation

Think back to a recent negotiation that you were involved in. Were you apprehensive that your counterpart in the negotiation would be better prepared or more skillful? Perhaps you were hopeful that the facts favored you and that your alternatives were much better than those of your counterpart. Were you nervous because your processional possibilities were tied to the outcome? During the negotiation, were you surprised by some new facts you didn’t know or made angry by the patronizing attitude of the other negotiator? And at the end, were you thrilled at the outcome.

Don’t let them get to you, good advice for negotiating? But what is the way to become the expert negotiator? I have experienced the new way of negotiation, which is very intrinsic, primary and fundamental part of human experience. We often negotiate under the influence of emotions, it plays many important roles: it motivates us to act; it provides us with important information about ourselves, the other party, and the negotiation; it helps organize and sharpen our cognitive processes; and it enhances the process and outcome of a negotiation when used strategically. While the emotion we experience provides us with information, the emotion we display provides information to others that can be an incentive or deterrent to their behavior. 

Initially, emotion was considered to be an obstacle to a good negotiated outcome and a foe to an effective bargaining process. Emotion in negotiation is a very common thing. Yet, many people suggest that being emotional is a sign of a weakness or is the behavior of an unsophisticated negotiator; some say that emotions must be repressed. 

There are many advantages to being an emotionally intelligent negotiator. For example, an emotionally intelligent negotiator is able to gather more and richer information about the other side’s underlying interests and reservation points; can more accurately evaluate risk, which leads to better decision making; can better perceive opportunities to use negotiation strategies and tactics that involve emotions; and can more successfully induce desired emotions in negotiation opponents. 

Negotiations often suggest a variety of emotions, especially anger and excitement. Angry negotiators plan to use more competitive strategies and to cooperate less, even before the negotiation starts. However, expression of negative emotions during negotiation can beneficial: legitimately expressed anger can be an effective way to show one’s commitment, sincerity, and needs. Excitement provides the high charge of negotiation.