Yup, I know that I left you with a bit of a cliffhanger in last week's article. It was all about our societal challenge with busyness.

Why do members tell me they don’t engage? Time. They are too busy.

Well, that’s depressing, isn’t it? How do we have even a speck of a chance against something as big as time? If the people we want to engage are too busy, they are too busy. There’s not much we can do about it, right?

Nope!

There IS something we can do. And last week, I also said:

Don’t worry. There are solutions for engaging people even when they are super busy.

Is your curiosity piqued?

Okay, there’s no doubt about it. Almost everyone I know is busy. And probably almost everyone you know is busy. And everyone they know is busy. Busy, busy, busy! There’s an epidemic of busyness right now!

But here’s the thing: much of this busyness is routine. Answering emails, emptying the dishwasher, exercising- it’s routine stuff. So, to cut down on the cognitive load, our brains kind of go into autopilot mode. (Autopilot mode is great because it gives me more time to dream up my next article.☺️)

You’ve probably noticed this in your life. Can you remember what you did hour to hour last Thursday? If it was a regular workday, chances are you can’t. Or think about your first job. Do you remember doing all the day-to-day activities, or instead, do you mostly remember the highlights and lowlights? What about driving? Have you ever driven the usual route to a place you’ve been hundreds of times and gotten to your destination and couldn’t remember actually driving there? Yup. Me too. This is just the way we humans are wired. Often, a sort of autopilot mode flips on here and there, taking care of routine stuff as we plow through our daily to-do list.

So what flips our brains into engage mode?

Experiences! An experience that is something a little different from what we expect. It doesn’t have to be A LOT different (although it can be).

What kind of experiences?

Well, all sorts of experiences can flip the switch into engage mode. It doesn’t take much. For example, what do you expect when you log into a webinar? I’m going to guess at the statistic, but I’m willing to bet that 95% of the time, most webinars start one to two minutes late, with attendees waiting in the waiting room. Or maybe you’re let into the main room, but all you see are the panelists reading and typing, and all you hear is silence. Or perhaps someone announces that the webinar will start in a few minutes as we wait for more people to log on. This is “normal”; this is what we expect to happen.

But what if you logged into a webinar and it started 2-3 minutes early with an Unofficial Start? An Unofficial Start is a fun, easy, engaging activity that prepares participants for a great event—this idea came from my friend Mark Collard at Playmeo. *See below for a little gift from Mark.

Or what if you scanned the chat and saw someone welcomed you by name? I’ve seen Arianna Rehak and her team at Matchbox Virtual Media do this so well!

Or what if you logged in and heard upbeat, fun music playing? This idea comes from John Chen at Engaging Virtual Meetings.

Or what if you got to actually participate in the webinar, not just passively watch?

How would you feel about any one of these unexpected little extras? You would probably take notice. You might feel like this is a pleasant little surprise. It might encourage you to put your phone aside and close your email so you can pay more attention.

With one added little thoughtful experience, the webinar hosts helped attendees get into engage mode.

These are just some examples. There are all sorts of experiences that we can create that are just a bit different, a bit more positive, and a bit more engaging than people are expecting.

Would you like to engage super busy people? Develop some positive experiences, and they’ll notice.

*Playmeo is an excellent resource for group activities, icebreakers, and energizers, and Mark has generously offered 30% off; use promo code ENGAGE30.