 |
|
|
|||||
In todays fast-paced, tech-driven world, commanding attention during meetings or presentations is an increasingly complex challenge. Attendees are often preoccupied with emails, notifications, or social media, turning valuable discussions into background noise. To overcome the issue, presenters must intentionally foster engagement that goes beyond just delivering information. The importance of engagement Engagement is the bridge between delivering information and fostering collaboration. When people feel actively involved in a conversation or presentation, they are more likely to pay attention, retain information, and contribute meaningfully. Think about meetings where youve been fully invested. What made those moments different? Often, it comes down to feeling connected to the material and the speaker. Engagement is built upon four key ingredients that must play together to bring about the collaborative benefits mentioned above: Focus your message Relevance Empathy Be present So, how can we combine these ingredients and infuse engagement into our organizations and teams? The answer lies in fostering interactions that are low stakes, yet purposeful. In other words, play. Purposeful play: A key to engagement One of the most effective ways to break down barriers and foster meaningful, engaged communication is through purposeful play. Playfulness in professional environments might seem counterintuitive, but it can unlock creativity, encourage participation, and lower defenses. When people feel at ease, they are more open to new ideas and solutions, creating an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. Below, we delineate each of the four engagement building blocks and provide a playful activity that helps build the skill. Focus your message Start with clarity. Boiling down complex ideas into digestible key points helps to sustain audience focus. An effective exercise for sharpening your messaging is to condense a pitch or concept into shorter versions repeatedly. Activity: Long Story Short Begin with a one-minute explanation of a project or challenge. Then, condense that explanation to 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and finally a single sentence. This practice not only sharpens clarity but also highlights the essence of your message. Tailor communication for relevance Connecting with your audience involves understanding their needs and perspectives. Personalizing messages to resonate with different stakeholders fosters interest and investment. Activity: Sell a BLANK to a BLANK This playful exercise involves creating pitches for random products to random personas. For example, try selling a plunger to a police officer or a piano to a circus clown. This encourages empathy and creativity, helping you frame messages in a way that resonates with diverse audiences. Build empathy through storytelling Stories humanize communication. Sharing personal anecdotes or inviting participants to share theirs deepens connections and builds mutual understanding. Activity: Memory Lanes Using a random word as a prompt, participants share true, short stories inspired by the word. Each story connects to a new prompt word drawn from the previous narrative, fostering relatability and camaraderie. Be present in the moment Presence is about fully engaging with your surroundings and audience. Practicing mindfulness and tuning into the physical space and its details can ground you and enhance your delivery. Activity: I Love My Spot Explore your surroundings, identify three elements you appreciate, and articulate why you value them. This practice helps center your focus and reinforces your connection to the environment, preparing you to connect with your audience authentically. Harnessing engagement True engagement requires collaboration born out of connection with and comfort around others. Play can catalyze this connection and comfort. By prioritizing concision, relevance, empathy, and attentiveness, you can create interactions that resonate. These are not stand-alone techniques; they are interconnected tools that work together to enhance engagement. When these methods are integrated into communication practices, people will focus and pay attention. Even mundane exchanges are transformed into opportunities for significant impact. Whether youre leading a team meeting, delivering a keynote, or facilitating a brainstorming session, small adjustments in how you engage can lead to major gains in understanding, remembering, and enjoying. Play is a powerful unlock for engaging communication.
Category:
E-Commerce
Los Angeles landlords are being named and shamed in an online effort to combat illegal price gouging following Southern Californias historic wildfires. A grassroots effort to track price gouging has emerged in the form of a Google Sheet thats now circulating on social media. Community members have reported Zillow listings of rental properties with substantial price increases upwards of thousands of dollars just as 150,000 California residents found themselves displaced.
Category:
E-Commerce
Art gallery, science exhibition and 21st century funhouse, Paradox Museum Miami takes guests on a tour through optical illusions and other enigmas geared for the age of Instagram.The 11,000 square-foot (1,000 square-meter) museum, housed in Miami’s trendy Wynwood arts and entertainment district, features more than 70 exhibits that challenge the imagination, executive director Samantha Impellizeri said.“It ebbs and flows between periods of highly tactile and interactive exhibit pieces and fully immersive photo opportunities where you yourself become the paradox and walk away with some really fun and unique social media content,” Impellizeri said.Paradox Museum has more than a dozen locations throughout North America, Europe and Asia. The Miami location, which opened in 2022, was the first in North America, followed by Las Vegas and New Jersey.“Each paradox is uniquely tied to its community,” Impellizeri said. “So as you walk throughout the experience, you’ll notice different themes and art installations that directly reflect not only Miami but the Wynwood community specifically.”Many of the exhibits at Paradox Museum harken back to old carnival funhouses, like the mirror maze, the spinning tunnel and the upside-down room. The difference is that Paradox Museum explains the math and science behind each illusion.“We’re a top field trip destination for pre-K all the way up through college students,” Impellizeri said. “We have a full curriculum of educational activities to do before, during and after the visit to expand upon that educational scope.”Like any museum, Paradox Museum plans to update its exhibits to keep visitors coming back.“We’re not going to be the same space in a year to three years from now,” Impellizeri said. “We’ll be engaging with new technology and layering additional discoveries on top of it.”Paradox Museum Miami introduced a new Zero Gravity Room this past fall. Guests step into a giant, slowly moving vertical wheel designed to look like the interior of a space station after placing their camera phones on a spinning mount. The spinning camera is synced to the spinning wheel, so the video appears to show the guests walking up the wall and ceiling, like something out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Paradox Museum is part of a large trend of immersive art experiences opening all over the world this past decade. Examples include a company called Meow Wolf with several locations in the western United States, as well as an immersive Van Gogh exhibit that has been touring North America, Europe and Asia since 2017. Superblue Miami opened in 2021, featuring interactive and experiential art.“Immersive experiences around the world are increasing in popularity and popping up more and more,” Impellizeri said. “And it’s exciting to see that this trend of interactive and immersive experiences taking off that allows guests to become part of the art, part of the installation itself.”Visitors generally take 60 to 90 minutes to make through way through Paradox Museum. Tickets normally cost $26 for adults and teens and $20 for children.Facundo Ildarraz, 17, and his family came to Miami from Argentina to catch a cruise and had a few days to check out the city. Ildarraz said his mom found Paradox Museum online, and it turned out to be a great chance to take fun photos with his family.“I’ve been laughing since I went inside,” Ildarraz said. “It’s really amazing.”Dennis Speigel, head of a consulting company called International Theme Park Services, Inc., said immersive experiences are a natural progression of location-based entertainment, like go-cart tracks, laser tag, paint ball, indoor skydiving, escape rooms and trampoline parks. They are smaller scale attractions that take visitors a few hours to go through, rather than an all-day activity like visiting an amusement park.“It’s a lot of little things that we’ve had in the industry for years, heightened by our new technology, like augmented reality and virtual reality, to make the experience new and something people haven’t seen,” Speigel said. “It’s kind of an evolution, everything that’s old is new again.” David Fischer, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||