What To Do When You're Being Bashed During A Meeting

You cry.

Okay, no.

I still remember how nervous I was the first time I had to go to a meeting by myself, representing my boss who couldn't attend it. Maybe it was to everyone's understanding at that time, though I was lacking in information on certain issues, they didn't scold or bash me because they knew I was a new employee. But that's it, that one time only I was given the excuse.

Then the coming meetings after the first one felt like hell. Maybe not all the time I got scolded or bashed during a meeting but I still do sometimes. After the first experience of getting yelled in a meeting, I got this sick feeling in my stomach everytime my boss asked me to attend any meetings on his behalf. I was afraid I didn't have much information in hand and as I mentioned in a post here, speaking in public is my biggest fear. So as the days past, I started to learn a few tricks on how to excel in going to meetings so I could get less being scolded at.

Be friendly with the meeting's members
The first and foremost thing that I learned was I had to make friends with other members of the meeting as I know I can't get friendly with the one who was most likely being mad at me - the chairman. By making friends with others, somehow I got a lesser chance of being scolded at magically because my friends would help me to answer any questions I couldn't think of or giving add-ons information that I was lacking at. Even if I still being scolded at, these friends, especially the who sat beside me, would give comforting words afterward because we share the same situation - sometimes they got scolded at too teehee.

Pretend like you know the world

Just. Pretend. I might not have known most of the things discussed in a meeting but eventually, I could grasp on things so I usually pretended to have known. For example, the meeting discussed about who's the owner of a cat they found when I didn't even know that there's such case but throughout the meeting, I could grasp of what type of the cat was, its characteristics and stuff which led me to have an idea or two of who the owner was.

Twist the statements

Attending a meeting on behalf of my boss is the same as me being my company's representative. Thus, I must keep the good name of my company so I can't say anything that would show my company's mistake or weakness. This is the most important thing I had to keep in mind when attending a meeting so I learned how to twist any statement or information which becoming unfavourable to my side. For example, the client wanted to turn a blue stadium into a pink one but my company didn't even start to colour it pink. Only I knew that the actual problem was our staff's incompetence at delivering the project but I twist the information to "we're working on it, about 80% of the proposal is going to complete as we're to choose which supplier would be working for it and which pink we want the stadium to be" so there, I saved my company's name.

Well actually I first started to write this post when I was back from a meeting which I got scolded at and I was depressed for a moment. Having the tricks I learned over time like I mentioned above didn't make me free from such situation at meetings but sometimes these do help anyway.
Do you experience the same situation as being scolded at in a meeting before? How do you overcome it?

Till then,
Lya.