![]() Before going in a call, do a quick box breathing exercise you can look up this practice, it is a very quick and effective means of physically relaxing your body and clearing your mind. "Practice what you want to say have a couple of relevant points you can add, once you know the agenda, and make sure you say at least one of them in each interaction. "Remember most people need training and practice to feel comfortable talking to a group, no matter what size," says Adrienne. Shorter meetings with less people may help ensure all persons have the opportunity to air their thoughts." "A lot of people is a lot of voices and there are only ever a finite number of minutes available. "Consider the size of the meeting," says Neil. Even though managers themselves will be feeling the effects of prolonged isolation, it is imperative that they have consistent and effective interactions with their reports." Right, so what to do? First, for employers: Adrienne suggests: "Management need to be aware that we all need regular and supportive messages from our fellow humans. This is more difficult on a video conference. We have been conditioned to interact face-to-face and to use both verbal and non-verbal cues to shape our responses. Neil O'Brien, Chartered Psychologist and Managing Director of People Performance Ltd (peopleperformance.ie), makes the point that "people can feel exposed during meetings as it is an 'abnormal' way to interact. "While Zoom and other 'face-to-face' tools do allow us to see and hear others, there is still a significant amount of information not available to us and this can leave us with a sense of unease," says Adrienne, "or of things not being said or clearly understood." It's a by-product of the new world in which we are learning to operate. This is actually very reassuring: the sense of dislocation isn't personal, and it isn't unreasonable. After four months, our sense of our professional relationships can begin to feel less firm, steady and grounded." "The prolonged lack of this type of interaction is going to cause anxiety, stress, even depression. We need to physically be in the same space as others in order to clarify our sense of ourselves. Being able to work from home is something many of us wanted more flexibility with, but it has meant four months of not having any real, tangible engagement with our colleagues, friends and even bosses. "This helps us to define who we are, and develop good social and interpersonal skills. "From birth, as social animals, even those of us who are more introverted by nature, we use our senses to check how we are interacting with the world in particular, how other people respond our communication and behaviour," explains Adrienne Davitt, corporate psychologist and managing director of Davitt Corporate Partners (). The uneasiness isn't imagined, and it isn't unreasonable. There is an entire psychological component to the new world order, and it's starting to catch up with us. Because the limitations of online interaction are not confined to bad image quality or freezing audio. But there is an emerging feeling of insecurity around remote working in general. We all know the side-texting is happening - some of us have even done it a quick eye-roll emoji at a particularly pompous colleague. No wonder we feel self-conscious, even a little paranoid (not to be confused with genuine paranoia, which can be as a result of more serious mental illness). Now, we sit, squashed into a box room or attic space, highly conscious of the stain on the wall behind us, dressed from the waist up, with our children squabbling downstairs as we try and come up with a contribution that won't feel as if it's falling 40,000 feet into dead air when we un-mute the microphone.
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