Zoom is easy when you’re a guest. You click a link, you show up, and somebody else handles it. Somebody lets you in. Somebody hits record. Somebody shares the screen and fixes it when the music doesn’t play.
The second you’re the host, you’re the somebody else.
Here’s what I think is actually going on with most of you. You have an offer, or at least the bones of one. You know what you would teach. The thing standing between you and a paid workshop is not the content, and it’s not the courage. It’s the host button.
Because every one of those hosting moments where you’re unsure, your room feels it. They can’t tell you why. They just feel a little less sure of you.
You are going to screw it up
By my estimation, I’ve run somewhere around 3,000 Zoom sessions. Not casual meetings. Client rooms where people had paid a lot of money, or were about to.
For the last four years of Bob Proctor’s life, I was his creative director. When COVID hit in 2020, everything at Bob’s company went virtual overnight. Before that, I knew about as much about Zoom as anybody, which is to say not much. Somebody had to figure it out fast, so I went down the rabbit hole and got obsessed. Every setting, every menu, every way it could go wrong. Within a few weeks I was running pretty much all of Bob’s big rooms.
So let me tell you about two of my screwups.
The Science of Getting Rich, Los Angeles, spring 2020. A three and a half day seminar that was supposed to happen in a ballroom and suddenly had to happen on the internet. Nobody in the company had ever run a virtual, multi-day live workshop like this before. I was handling a lot of it myself. And somewhere in those three and a half days, I delivered an entire transition between two major segments completely muted. The pre-recorded segment ended, and then. Nothing. Me, talking to no one.
Before that, Toronto. A five-day consultant training. Bob got one of his on-the-fly ideas, as he often did: a live webinar during the event, so a hundred consultants could invite their prospects and Bob would sell for them. Who doesn’t want Bob Proctor selling for them? Thousands of prospects registered. Right before we went live, we realized the stream would only hold a hundred. The IT guy was in another part of the country and had never asked how many were coming. I was the one on site, so the buck stopped with me.
And the thing about me under that kind of pressure is I get the “church giggles”. So I’m standing in a little green room, giggling, and Bob did not like that. “This is not a laughing matter!” He was a cool, calm, collected man, but he was not without the potential to react. 🤣
That was not the worst tech screwup of my career. Not even close. And I’m still standing here.
Here’s why I tell you those. Once you screw something up, you almost never do it again. One time you forget to hit record on your big workshop. You’ll never forget again. One time you forget to mute people on entry, and your recording gets ten minutes of somebody’s dog. Never again.
The mistakes are how this gets into your body. My mind knows a good deal about Zoom, but most of what I do in a room, my body does. I wouldn’t undo a single one of those mistakes, because every one of them sharpened the sword.
That’s the real reason to get relaxed on the hosting side. A relaxed host is a nimble host. A relaxed host can think and feel and move fast enough to fix it while it’s happening, and the room barely notices.
What November 6 is
Not learning every setting on Zoom. There are roughly seven thousand pages of those. The goal is knowing which buttons and levers to pull so you can feel the tech holding you, so you can hold the room. Relaxed enough that when your room opens, you’re thinking about your people and not the buttons.
I have been contemplating teaching the full, unabridged version of this since 2022. On September 8, I taught the essentials, about 10% of it, as a guest class in Julie Ciardi’s community, and the chat lit up. “Worth the whole workshop today.” “Pure gold.” “A relaxed host is a nimble host. Mic drop.”
So this is the year it finally happens.
Run the Room: The Zoom Hosting Tech Intensive. Friday, November 6, 1pm to 5pm Eastern, a half-day live on Zoom, with a full replay. (If you had October 23 on your calendar, it moved. November 6.)
Start to finish, every setting you need, from the app to the website. Registration pages. Polls. The end-of-meeting survey and tip jar. Co-hosts and breakouts. Screen sharing with music that comes through their speakers instead of your mic. The clean opening graphic and the countdown opening. The whole recording and replay workflow, end to end. I’ll be clicking on screen the entire time.
Everything about it, including how to get your seat, is here:
If you’re already in The Green Room, your seat is saved. It’s on your calendar. Nothing to do but show up. And come to the clinic this Friday, where I’ll tell you more.
You are the somebody else now.
And you’re going to screw it up, and you’re going to be fine.
📸 Tommy
Tommy, the webinar with thousands registered and room for only a hundred is a good reminder to check capacity before sending invitations. You can know how to run the session and still get caught by a limit nobody thought to check.
I'll be there. Very much looking forward to this.