Bring your toolkit with you, but be ready to use any of your tools or none of them.
Recently I carried my backpack with me to a meeting with a client, my toolkit if you will. Inside I was carrying my laptop with all my documents, as well as printouts and written notes.
You see, I thought the meeting would be about preparing for an upcoming full-day event with their leadership team, so I came prepared with all the prior notes and various documents showing options we could use to complete the design for the day. As it turned out though, they wanted to use all the time to talk about something completely different that was on their mind, so the toolkit quite literally remained unopened.
As a sounding board and coach, my agenda is always the agenda that the client chooses, whether a context they wish to focus on over time or sometimes something that comes up in the moment at a meeting, as was the case here.
The learning I wish you to consider is to ask yourself “Whose agenda am I serving?” if you come with a toolkit ready for one thing and insist on using those tools, no matter what is happening in the conversation at the meeting?
Perhaps you can choose to listen for Context first before deciding on what Content to focus on?