I signed up for a zoom call with an organization whose name I will not mention here; the idea was to form a spiritual group to discuss aspects of the particular field. This was led by two ladies both of whom had considerable experience in the field. There was a representative from the organization in attendance.

It became clear that the leading lady, the first speaker, was very keen on saying what she did to earn a professional living at her particular types of therapies.  She went on for about 10 minutes about this or that aspect and how important it was. She talked about how good she was and how much she enjoyed her work

I was becoming restless as I was very interested in the statement in the invitation letter that said ‘both of us are looking forward to meeting you all and hearing if you have any ideas and suggestions of how you may like to see this group moving forward’.

The first speaker then asked briefly what we would like to see in the group but then decided to hand over to the other speaker who gave a prepared slide talk on aspects of energy. The second speaker spoke as if the first one did not exist and just went off on her own track.  I could see that this meeting was going seriously wrong.

If you’re going to start a new group you commence by getting participants to introduce themselves however briefly and also encourage them to say what they are interested in. The problem is that if your motivation for becoming a speaker is to announce your own skill set this is incompatible with a genuine interest in what other people are doing for their own sake.

I eventually piped up and said that the meeting had gone off track and I was more interested in hearing about the individuals – all 55 of them, who attended the zoom meeting. When this led to nothing I suggested the formation of a group to discuss dowsing and anyone who was interested please put their emails in the chat box .

This I did, and 16 people responded which is a great result. The same evening, Thursday evening, I harvested the emails and wrote round to everyone saying that we were going to have a group and I was looking forward to hearing more about them .