Consultant David Julian Price says passionate people find a better way to do things
Are you dissatisfied because work meetings rarely solve something? Most meetings either don’t make any decisions or don’t implement any. Be passionate about making things happen and save time.
After 30 years of doing meetings, David Julian Price knows exactly all that’s wrong with them. His passion for meetings and seeing things work led him to train others to avoid wasting time by taking good decisions and implementing them.
It’s essential for a meeting to ‘have a very clear outcome’. At the end, the participants need to know exactly what has been decided and how they need to proceed.
This applies everywhere. Talking without ever doing anything is counterproductive not only for your work efficiency, but also for your overall career or life. Action gets you close to your goals.
‘It fascinates me’. Whatever you do, preserve passion in your career in order to excel.
Want to be efficient at work? Use tips from world-renowned experts. Don’t forget – share it with your friends and spread the passion.
Live Passionately
Moustafa Hamwi
Passionpreneur & Chief Energy Officer
Award Winning Author & Speaker
TRANSCRIPT:
Moustafa: Hello everyone and welcome back to Passion Sundays – the best way to end a week and start another! Our guest today has an interesting topic that he talks about. He talks about meetings and making decisions. Who does not want that? David Price! Thank you very much for being here today!
David: Thank you, it’s my pleasure!
Moustafa: How did you bring meetings and decisions as an area of expertise together?
David: I’ve done meetings for 30 years. I’ve started doing them back in the years when people used the old meeting procedure, the old rules of debate. ‘I move this and I second that’ and all of that actually. So I’m a bit of an expert in that area and I still do a bit of work there. But that led me into businesses where they don’t tend to use formal procedures like that. They just meet to make decisions. But the problem is most of them don’t make any. Or, if they do, they don’t implement them. The number of decisions that are made that are never implemented is huge. And the number of meetings that are held to make a decision but they either don’t make a decision or make a bad one or they revisit the decision they made the last time which indicates that it wasn’t the best decision in the first place. So I fell into it because the need was there.
Moustafa: Alright. And then the need was there but you must have had the passion for something to make you pursue that because otherwise you wouldn’t sustain in such an environment. It’s really frustrating to walk into meeting and never come out with anything.
David: That’s right. Yes, look, it’s really odd. How can someone be passionate about meetings? I don’t really know how that passion came about. All I know is that it fascinates me that people go into a setting, they call a meeting. Sometimes they don’t call it a meeting by the way, they have a discussion. But really it’s the discussion designed to make a decision. And I just like to see things work.
Moustafa: Amazing! I like to see things work… so you’ve got passion for seeing things work. Here’s the question though. When things are working it’s beautiful. When things aren’t working for a bit too long, that must get frustrating. How do you find passion in those situations?
David: Oh, look, when things… The passion, to answer your question ‘How do you find passion in those situations?… It’s the passion in those situations – there’s got to be a better way to do this. And if people are passionate, I think, about finding a better way then what’s their motivation to find a better way? So they perpetuate the situation when either very little happens or they perpetuate the situation when wrong things happen. So…
Moustafa: True. How do you face situations when sometimes you can walk in and walk the sense out to people, showing them how this is for their benefit but you’ve always got one who is at the end of the spectrum and, no matter what you do, they are always going to make your life difficult. How do you handle situations like these?
David: Look, these people are everywhere, as you and I know. And it’s perhaps not true that every meeting has one but every organization has one. I call them toxic people.
Moustafa: Yeah.
David: I think then it comes down to need. The need for those people, the toxic people, is for self-recognition and sometimes that recognition has to come through them making things hard or making life difficult for other people. If they make life difficult for other people, people talk about them and that’s their need fulfilled. They just need to be talked about.
Moustafa: Great deal of need for attention. I see. More of a seeking of attention.
David: I think so, yes. I think it’s a great deal of need for attention.
Moustafa: Great deal of need for attention. It’s a great need for attention… We all need attention especially when we are passionate about what we do. How do we tackle that other side of the story where we also want attention for what we do and we are passionate and we want to be recognized for it?
David: That comes back to your earlier question: How are you passionate about meetings and decisions? I think the way we all get attention is by making things happen (the people who are positive, not the toxic people) is by actually making things happen and doing things, rather than being a person who talks and talks and talks but never actually does anything. So, you know, we’ve all heard the old saying there is the people who make things happen and there is the people who watch things happen and the people who wonder what happened. I just think that’s a wonderful one… you can walk in and observe in a meeting and you can almost see the people in each category. Because they almost have a sign written on their forehead: this is the group that I’m in. You don’t have to be there for long to see which group they are in.
Moustafa: So then I’m gonna wrap up with one question: for meetings and decisions, how do you make things happen in that area?
David: How do you make things happen? I think it’s a commitment to make things happen and have a very clear outcome that everyone knows at the end. What it is that’s been decided? What action is necessary as a result of that decision? And in my experience, when I work with most people, when most people leave a meeting if you ask them a question like ‘What exactly did you decide?’ or ‘What exactly needs to be done now?’, most of them can’t answer the question.
Moustafa: ‘What exactly needs to happen? What exactly needs to be done now? So let’s make sure to stay passionate and know exactly what exactly needs to happen with our passion.
David: And what to do!
Moustafa: And what to do next!
David: Right now!
Moustafa: Alright, thank you very much for this amazing interview!
David: My pleasure!
Moustafa: I really appreciate it!
David: Thank you!
Moustafa and David: Passion!
Moustafa: What do you think? I hope you found this episode as useful as I did about making decisions and managing meetings. If you did, leave your comments on the blog below and share it with your friends. And if you’d like more tools, tips, techniques and exclusive videos that I only share on my website, go to Moustafa.com. And until next episode – live passionately!
