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| ACN NW Regional Planning Meeting |
Big Monthly Regional Marketing and Fundraising Meeting yesterday; the attached picture shows you just how we managed to squeeze me, Scottish Lorraine, Portia and Patricia along with all of our papers and files into my dining room! These meetings are always very productive as they allow us to touch base, exchange information, ask questions and canvass opinions. Yesterday’s meeting was nearly 2 hours long—my phone was actually hot by the time I hung up—but it left me with lots to think about and to get on with so my poor old phone will just have to suffer…
There is an art to the conference-call-meeting, and I am not naturally good at it. I love the connection and the chance to engage with other committed people to get a worthy job done. What I hadn’t realised about meetings by phone is how reliant I am on physical presence and body language to gauge the impact of what is being said. I am a very physical person; when I was an academic, I regularly began my lectures with a warning that at some point I was entirely likely to trip—I tend to jump about and run to the screen to point at things and there are always loads of leads and chair legs, etc; it all adds up to potential disaster even after years of experience! I am enthusiastic and I guess that that exuberance has to flow out of me somehow…falling flat on my face in front of 300 undergraduates may not have been dignified, but at least they always remembered the point that I had been making! Anyway, I find it very difficult to discuss things with people when I can’t use my own face and hands to make my point and when I can’t watch other people’s facial expressions. Words say a lot, but they don’t say everything. Curiously, I have recently participated in a conference call with my brother and two sisters (we had to deal with some family issues that had come up); this I found very easy—no problems at all—when my younger sisters described the situation I knew exactly when to laugh and when to cry and when my hulking brother-who is an American football coach-tossed in one of his typically mono-syllabic contributions I required no further elaboration from him whatsoever.
The difference lies not in the nature of the subject matter being discussed, but rather in how well we all know each other. I don’t have to guess when my sister is smiling and she doesn’t have to wonder whether my staring off into space means that I am not interested (she knows that I am merely ‘mulling’). As I get to know my colleagues at ACN better, and as they get to know me, we should become more adept at filling in the missing faces at our phone meetings. Indeed, I think that we are already getting better at it. I, ever bubbly and chatter-y, am learning not to be concerned about silences as we all absorb what we’ve heard or the more hesitant way we all speak when we are thinking something through and trying to articulate that process at the same time. This, I feel, is progress and adapting to a new way of working together; this is good.
However, I am writing this as I sit on a train to Motherwell to have a Primary Schools session with Scottish Lorraine; I will confess to a certain sense of excitement at the prospect of a bit of face-to-face interaction. I plan to wave my arms around and smile and wink and stare off into the distance as much as I possibly can!
Plenty of developments to report already this week, but I was feeling a bit philosophical this morning. In my next entry I’ll bring you up to speed on everything that’s going on.
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