I’ve journaled extensively about my personal experiences at this year’s Austin Film Festival over at my Ordinary Life Unordinary blog. Feel free to take a look at that and enjoy!

Here, however, I wanted to take a moment to focus on something I learned as a result of bringing SagePresence with me to the AFF.  It came as I was called upon to moderate three panels over the course of the screenwriters conference.

This was my fourth years as a panelist at the AFF.  The panelist thing is really fun and pretty easy.  You show up, answer some questions, and try to be helpful and sound pithy doing it.  That’s about it.  And you’re the center of attention.  People are there to listen to you, and they hang on virtually every word.  For a hambone like yours truly, what’s not to love?

But participating in the AFF conference isn’t all about me.  Sure…I get plenty of value out of the networking inherent in the experience.  If I am practicing what I preach in our SagePresence networking training, though, that’s not my immediate goal, right?  It’s about the helping others write their happy endings with actions by my network helping them to accomplish that.

For me, the AFF is really about the “pay it forward”.

In a pre-AFF post on my OLU blog, I’d told readers that I one of the reasons I’d offered to be a moderator for this year’s conference was because “I think it’s a really good idea, having actual screenwriters moderating some of the panels.  Being that the participants are, you know, screenwriters, guys like me know the questions they’re burning to get answered.  Because they’re same ones I want answered.”

So I walked into the experience with a sense of heightened responsibility.  And more than a little anxiety…the “What the heck did I get myself into” variety.  Moderating panels was not going to be the cakewalk being a panelist was.  Yet, turns out this moderating thing was the ultimate “SagePresence” experience.

This is what I mean.  The way I saw it, my job as moderator was threefold:

1. Help audience members operationalize the information they received in the panel in their own situations.
2. Keep the conversation engaging and moving forward.
3. Make the panelists look good.

Here’s what I did to make this happen:

Applied Story Structure to Each Panel – If audience members were going to follow the conversation and understand how to apply it, they needed to understand how it related to them directly.  As I sat down to prepare for each panel, I asked myself the same story structure questions we teach our participants:

1. As it pertains to <<insert topic here>>, what does a screenwriter’s happy ending (situation and feeling) look like?
2. What is the most likely situation and feeling they have in common today (presumably not-so-happy)?
3. What are three steps—analyze the situation, act on it, report and verify results—they can take to facilitate the change from their not-so-happy beginning to the happier ending?

When I did this, suddenly, I knew how to introduce the panel.  I simply painted a picture of the beginning and end situations and feelings, then asked the question: “How do we get from where we are today to where we want to be?”  My questions to the panelists were all about things I had identified in my research as being pertinent to possible actions audience members could take to get to the end.

Used Appreciation – Something that was very apparent in the first panel (and carried through the rest of them, too) was that there was one person who was determined get his or her point across if it meant they needed to use the entire panel time to do it.  I quickly realized that I could use the same method we teach for networking conversations to help these panelists disengage and hand the floor over to someone else.

What did I do..?  I appreciated them.  I would look at them while honestly appreciating them and say something like, “Wow.  That’s interesting.  Great point.”  When they took a moment to thank me for the acknowledgement, I took the opportunity to then say, “Let’s take a moment and get <<name of other panelist>>’s take on that.”  It really worked!

The panelists whose tendency it was to take center stage and keep it, in fact, thanked me afterward.  Turns out all of them were nervous and appreciated back my helping them close our their points and look more collaborative alongside the other panelists.  How cool…I was simply trying to keep the conversation moving and keep it a little more balanced between the panelists.  But appreciation works in mysterious and unexpected ways.

Used Connection to Instill Connection – Remember when I said that some of the panelists were nervous?  Actually, most of them were that way.  And last year, I moderated a panel where one filmmaker, who was very shy, looked at the ground and mumbled every time a question was pointed at him.  I was determined to not repeat history this year.  I wanted my panelists to shine.

I had a theory that I wanted to put to the test.  I knew that if I tried to actively make connections with an audience, my presence was enhanced.  I wondered whether if I did the same with a fellow panelist then, once they got out of their own heads and got their presence feet under them, if it wouldn’t help them.

The idea was to make the connection, then look out into the audience and make a connection with someone there, then say, as I was connected to that audience member something like, “I wonder how that would apply to the folks in the audience.”  And it worked.  The panelist would look right at the person I was connected to, keep the connection going, and answer my question like they were talking to the person in the audience.  From there, the panelist, now feeling what it felt like to make a connection (not to mention being out of their own head) was more relaxed and real and fun.  Not to mention more inspiring.

So…that’s how I became a better moderator by bringing SagePresence to the panel experience.  One other thing I know, by the way…being a moderator was exhausting!  You’re on every second, managing the flow of information, the flow of the conversation, and the flow of the vibe in the room.  Yet, I can’t wait to try my hand at it again sometime very soon.