How to be Engaging and Disarming During Your Seminar, Clinic or Presentation.
1. Be alert, employ a wide attention range and be active.
2. Walk around. Talk to individuals and smile at your fellow officials. Ask them respectful questions to which they can give respectful answers. Do not be too obvious in your motives.
3. Cultivate and use your sense of humor – not the broad joke type, but the light-touch-laughter type. Do not force humor – be natural.
4. Treat each official as though he or she were your best friend.
5. Assess the group you are instructing: know names, hobbies, interests and domestic habits. Find out those things by talking to them informally.
6. Learn to act. At various times you will have to be stern, happy, firm, informal, kind, unrelenting, etc. To protect the integrity of your own emotional pattern, learn to act appropriately and sincerely. The most important word to remember is “sincerely.”
7. Be self-confident. Have courage – moral courage to face the situation. It may be hard to appear self-confident, but it is essential. Those things will help: prepared plans, sleep, recreation in non-officiating circles, asking officials to help with various phases of the seminar, etc. If you can’t “take it,” admit it and pass along the responsibility. Never fake it.
8. Keep a quiet and confident reserve of formality that the group knows is there. No playing for popularity, no siding with some officials against others. Be with the group, never of the group; no favorites, no exceptions, no disagreements.
9. Be just and fair. You were in a student’s (or general member’s) seat not so long ago. When you forget that, you are finished.
10. In disciplinary situations, suspend your judgment, often be impersonal, sometimes even coldly nonchalant. It is not necessary to settle every case. You are dealing with the psychology, not the logic of the situation. You may be logically correct, but psychologically wrong.
11. Say so when you are in error, even be ready to apologize (but not too often).
12. Be enthusiastic about your subject and it will kindle response in your fellow officials.
13. Don’t perform all the clinic tasks yourself; get members of the group to do them even though they do it less effectively. The seminar is for them, and they like to help.
14. Encourage – do not scold – when an official does poorly. There is usually something you can find to compliment.
15. Create a pressure learning situation in which you share with them. The group enjoys nothing better. For example, ask them, “What should we do about this situation?”
16. Never become angry. Anytime you lose your temper, you have lost control. In spite of all the challenges, all the confusion, in spite of each and every frustration, ask yourself: “Am I part of the solution, not part of the problem?”
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