Hey everyone, welcome to this very special, quick episode of Developer Tea. Today we're going to have a particularly fast episode because today's episode is actually not sponsored. But if you are interested in sponsoring Developer Teaor another show on the spec network, head over to spec.fm slash sponsors. You can find out a lot of information about sponsored episodes and they are filling up very quickly. So this is one few and far between episodes are not sponsored. So make sure you go and check it out. Spec.fm slash sponsors if you are interested in getting your message in front of thousands of developers and designers around the world. In today's episode, I want to give you one simple challenge for your meetings. In the next week, I want you to conduct your meetings regardless of your position. You could be a junior developer, you could be an intern, you could be a senior developer, you could be the CEO of your company. It doesn't really matter. I want you to walk into the meeting with one simple challenge in mind. And that is simply how can I make the people who are walking away from this meeting feel like they have just experienced a victory. You see a lot of the time when we prepare for a meeting with other people, we prepare with two basic concepts in mind. The first one is how can I make this meeting successful for me? How can I make this meeting successful for me? How can I get the information that I need or how can I impress this particular person? And the second thing that we have in our minds is that the other people at the meeting are there to quiz us, right? Or to test us and that we need to have all of the right answers. That's how we prepare for the meeting. We get all of our stuff together and we have all of our details in line and we're ready to answer questions as they're thrown at us. That is how a lot of people tend to prepare for meetings. And the reality is, if everyone prepares for a meeting like that, right? If everyone prepares for a meeting in that way, then the potential for value being delivered at the meeting goes through the floor. And the reason for that is because we're basically scared. We're basically acting out of fear when we walk into a meeting, being ready for all of those punches to be thrown our direction. A lot of people end up being defensive in meetings and a lot of people end up trying to lay out a plan or get a bunch of information from other people that they need for themselves instead of focusing on how they can help another person. There's a drastic change in the tone of the room when you are focused on helping someone else achieve their goal instead of begging other people to focus on you. So I want you to experiment with this. Think about the people who are going to be in your meeting. And in fact, you can even reach out to them in advance and ask them what their goals are for that meeting or what their goals are on that particular project. And then prepare for the meeting with the concept of empowering those people rather than being able to defend yourself. The amazing thing is when you solve other people's problems, they are far less likely to try to attack you. If you are helping them, they're far less likely to try to figure out if you know your stuff, if you are able to answer all of their questions. For example, if you have a client meeting, if they ask you a bunch of technical questions, well, if you're already in the process of helping them out, you are showing your expertise, but you're also solving their problems, you're giving them what they came there for. You're giving them the victory that they are seeking. So I want you to walk into these meetings with the full confidence that you have what it takes to help the people in that meeting achieve their goals. Don't walk into meetings this week thinking that everyone is there to either quiz you or to help you achieve your personal goals. You're there to help other people. And the amazing thing is when you help other people achieve their goals, you are empowering yourself. You are generating authority. You are generating positive relationships with those people that you could have never accomplished with the other strategy of being defensive and being afraid. Walk into the meeting with full confidence that you are able to be their helper. And that you can guide them to the victory that they came there looking for. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. I hope this episode is challenging and inspiring. And I hope you will try this simple experiment in the next week. Let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me on Twitter at Developer Tea. You can email me Developer Tea. At gmail.com. You can always find me on the spec slack community that's spec.fm slash slack. You can join that for free, of course. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. If you don't want to miss out on episodes next week, make sure you subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. And until next time, enjoy your tea.