Words. My mom always told me to choose my words carefully. Replacing one word can change the context from a positive to a negative. These word choices can also affect our attitude. Michael Hyatt wrote a wonderful blog post (here) detailing this further.
These words can also affect our meetings. When evaluating your events, I believe it’s important to put this into effect. For instance, asking positive questions. Here’s three positive questions that will help you guide your evaluation discussion:
- What did we do right? My pastor detailed how our church starts each evaluation of an event with this question in this blog post (here). This is a great question to start the discussion. The natural tendency is to discuss what we did wrong. This question gets us off to a positive discussion.
- What do we do the same? We always want to go with what we need to do differently. Maybe something worked really well and should be included next year.
- What went better than expected? Events are always going to have those pieces that failed. What about the parts that went better than you thought coming in? You know what I’m talking about, because in your planning you wondered if that part would be successful.
These questions should be included in your overall evaluation with attendees. Besides your evaluation, feedback from them could help drive the positive conversation.
Have you included positive questions in your feedback? Which ones did you ask? Did they effect your discussion?