Post-It Notes to the Rescue
I started at HomeRoots at the onset of the pandemic with the mandate to add new suppliers and products to our pipeline. With furniture shows and markets canceled, and with all of us working from home, it became a daily juggle of Zoom, Google Meeting, Microsoft Teams, and sometimes just a blessed “screen-free” phone call.
As someone who had been attending trade shows to build and nurture a book of business for my entire career, I secretly loved this. I had a captive audience and could schedule many meetings in a day. The 18 months before actually going to High Point or Atlanta were fruitful.
There were many articles about Zoom fatigue, which made sense because you don’t look at your own face during in-person meetings. On a screen, you look at your own face. I don’t know what the science behind that is, why do we look at our own faces? And that was the funny thing, everyone on screen actually looks at themselves on screen.
But in a spiral of negativity, I would catch myself thinking:
“I need better under-eye concealer.”
“Are those jowls?”
“OMG my hair needs to be colored”
“I talk with my hands sooooo much.”
And I am a pretty positive person, not short on self-esteem, but watching myself was brutal. It was affecting my ability to be natural on the call.
My solution was a stack of post-it notes in a variety of sizes to stick over my face on the screen. I had post-it notes in a range of sizes for different on-screen scenarios. There was a larger rectangle to cover up my side of a two-person meeting with the side-by-side image configuration. The normal square sticky notes worked for a multi-box meeting and the small rectangle sufficed when my image was in a small box in the lower right corner of the screen.
This continues to be my go-to strategy for meetings. In a hybrid environment, there are work from home days with more relaxed makeup and hair care regimens if I am not in client meetings, but if I need to speak with a colleague with the camera on, I really don’t want to see my face. I love the enhanced image effects of a Zoom just for my colleagues' sake, but I pop that post-it note over my face to spare myself the personal scrutiny!
I made so many connections during the never leave home year and a half. When we got back out into shows, it was wonderful to meet a lot of these people in person. Because we all had nowhere to go, calls typically took longer and got a little deeper into non-business topics, which is a really nice way to strengthen business relationships.
I still have stacks of post-it notes to stick over my face on screen, because I still talk way too much with my hands and prefer to look at someone else’s face.
Posted on Medium: https://medium.com/@Kendall_K_Egan/post-it-notes-to-the-rescue-cc368046db8
