Best Icebreakers for Zoom Meetings

We find ourselves spending more and more time on Zoom. Sometimes with people who don’t know one another very well.

Whether it’s a sales presentation, and educational session, or a webinar, how can we “warm up” a cold virtual room?

Paula, John and Mickey share our favorite icebreakers for Zoom meetings.

Transcript

Mickey Gamonal:

My name is Michael Gamonal, and this is the ABCI Book Club. Today we are discussing icebreakers on Zoom, and I am an ASVAB tutor. So if you’re looking for any help getting into the military with the ASVAB, check me out, Gamonal Tutors on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all over the place.

Paula Williams:

Fantastic. Paula Williams with ABCI. We help aviation companies sell more of their products and services, often using Zoom. Hence, today’s discussion.

John Williams:

John Williams, also with ABCI. I do the business consulting when and if they come in. They do happen occasionally, we don’t look for them. And I take care of the backend processes and things for ABCI.

Mickey Gamonal:

Excellent. So today we are talking about Zoom icebreakers. It can be very awkward to first talk to people on Zoom and other video hosting platforms. So it’s good to, especially with people who aren’t on here all that often, to try it out. I have an icebreaker that I’d like you guys to try it. If you’re willing, if not, we can just chalk it up as one of the icebreakers, but it is the first thing I do with my students.

And this icebreaker is called the app icebreaker. So it’s basically, they come up with an app, and I’m thinking about changing it to the Netflix one because of what we’ve found here today. But you think of an app, or a show, or whatever and you say three reasons why it’s a good app. And then you recap telling them they should download the app. And that’s it. And this is really good because apps are usually something that people find really easy to talk about. You know, they’ve heard from their friends that you should download this app, or they know that you should download this app and they explain why. So, that sort of thing.

So I’m going to go first. And then, if you guys are willing, you guys are more than welcome to go after this, but up to you. So my app is Words With Friends. I really, really like Words With Friends. If you guys get a chance, you should definitely download it. The three reasons why Words With Friends is a great app to have, one, it improves your lexicon, which means it can give you more vocabulary, more words to use when you’re speaking with other people. So you learn new words, which is great for the ASVAB as well.

Number two, you can play with friends. So you can compete against your buddies, which gives you a little more motivation to hop on, check it out, look at new words, and try to beat your buddies, which is kind of the whole point. And then, three, if you don’t have any friends online, you can play against computers. So there’s a little story mode that you can work through as well. So those are the three reasons that you should download Words With Friends.

Paula Williams:

Fantastic. Oh, go ahead.

Mickey Gamonal:

That’s it.

Paula Williams:

I love this because a lot of people are not used to participating in online discussions. They’re used to just watching webinars and just being this passive potato, you know, couch potato, but is not participating. And then, when they get put on the spot, they feel weird about it. So you give them something that they feel comfortable with, that’s just cool.

So sure, my favorite app is Canva. I love Canva because you can explain an idea really easily if it’s visual. A lot of us are visual learners and so on. And you can do just about anything in terms of building a diagram, or an infographic, or an ad, or something like that that conveys a simple idea in a graphical way. The second thing I love about it is it’s super simple, it doesn’t take a big learning curve. It’s not like Photoshop where it takes you three weeks to learn how to use the thing before you can actually do anything with it. You can open Canva and produce something in 15 minutes that’s pretty decent.

And then, the third reason I like Canva is because you can share designs and collaborate on designs with other people. As an example, we’re working on our posts for the book club for next year, we’ve got three people working on those posts. Then we can share that among the three of us. And we can try making copies and tweaking the design until we’re all happy with it. So that’s why I love Canva.

John Williams:

Well, I’m going to pass, but not because I’m afraid. Because, one, I don’t use apps on a phone very often. Secondly, on a Mac, which we have here, everything is an app. So I don’t really know which one I’d choose for that to be, even if I were to discuss it in length. Back to the facilitator.

Mickey Gamonal:

And that’s good too. I mean, that’s important. Like if you have someone who doesn’t want to do the activity, you’re a perfect example, you explained why you weren’t intimidated. So you just, you still get the desired effect, right? You still explain something using this platform. So I still think it’s a good icebreaker, even if not everybody uses it right away.

Paula Williams:

Yeah, and you get to know people a little bit better even if you get to know that they’re a person that is not likely to participate in icebreakers. At least they get to know the rest of the group a little bit better and you learn something about them as well. So that’s cool.

Mickey Gamonal:

True. All right, Mom, what do you got? What’s your icebreaker of choice?

Paula Williams:

There are several, there’s a lot of different lists, and I think we’re going to share some links to these lists because a lot of them are better or worse for particular situations, or whether you have a large group or a small group. You know, I love the app idea. I think that’s a great one, or the Netflix idea, “What is your favorite thing that you watch on Netflix and three reasons why.”

John Williams:

And wait until you get the response, “What’s Netflix?”

Paula Williams:

Nobody’s going to do that unless you’re talking to … And see, that’s another thing, if you’ve got an international audience, you kind of have to take that into account.

Mickey Gamonal:

Absolutely.

Paula Williams:

But a couple of things that I like from the list that I’ve read, one that I think is really kind of cool is to introduce your pets, kids, or partners, because a lot of us are working together a lot. And we don’t really have the chance to do the water cooler talk and things like that. We don’t really get a chance to get to know each other over Zoom the way we would if we were working in an office with people all the time.

John and I, with our clients, we spend a lot of time over the years and things like that. Every once in a while the doorbell will ring and Shari’s dog, Darth, who is a Yorkshire terrier will go crazy, because the doorbell rang. And it’s just something that happens in meetings, and it’s just cool. Now we’ve met Darth. Darth is part of the family, we feel like he’s part of our client group and everything else. It just makes everything more human, and more cool, and more fun. So I will share that one. And I guess we can just kind of go around the circle and share a favorite icebreaking activity. How’s that?

Mickey Gamonal:

Sounds good.

John Williams:

I’ve been thinking about this. And I tend to try to, rather than use the same one every time, get cues from whoever I’m looking at or listening to, because you can tell even on Zoom, if they … Well, Mickey’s kind of a hard one, because all he’s got a blank wall behind him, but that’s because it’s a new house. Most people have something back there.

Mickey Gamonal:

That’s true.

John Williams:

Gene’s got all kinds of fishing stuff, and you can see that and ask him how he’s doing with fishing up there. “When’s the best time to go get salmon around that area?” And that’s easy because then he can just start talking and does.

Paula Williams:

The conversation piece, I’ve got a dozen of them. And you’ve got your helicopter, your Huey back there.

John Williams:

Yeah.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. And Mickey’s got a new house, so that’s also a conversation piece.

John Williams:

And, in fact, this is nothing more than what you should be doing, if and when you ever … Well, not you, because you don’t do this thing anymore. But when people go for an interview, and they get into a guy’s office or a girl’s office, you walk in, you take a quick glance around, see what’s there. Because it’ll be obvious what their passion is away from work. All you got to do is say, “Oh, what’s your handicap?” See a golf bag in the corner or a golf trophy and get started. “And what courses do you play?” I mean, it’s just easy thing to do, and that’s a real good icebreaker is to figure out by looking at what people do.

Paula Williams:

Cool. That one’s nifty.

Mickey Gamonal:

Nice. I like that one a lot. I think it’s a lot more targeted. I feel like it’s a sales tactic, right?

John Williams:

It is.

Mickey Gamonal:

It’s like what you say when you walk into … Like if I’m a vacuum salesman and I walk into the little lady’s house and I’m like, “Oh, look, you got four kids. Wow. Which one plays football?” It kind of takes me to like that kind of mindset where you’re looking around to see what common ground you have, which is really more like about making friends, too. It’s not necessarily limited to just sales. So that’s cool.

Well, sweet. Nice. I like that one of these icebreakers wasn’t like a strict icebreaker in the sense of the word, but I feel like we should have some honorable mentions. I think Netflix is a really good one. Like anybody could talk about Netflix for hours. “Have you seen blank?” And even if they haven’t seen it, nine times out of 10, they’ll have an opinion on it. And that’s easy for the reverse reason of what John was talking about, because it explains about yourself, and then it gives them an opportunity to react to something that’s interesting to you. So it’s like saying, “Check out my golf trophy,” almost for the other side, I would think.

Paula Williams:

Another one that I like for honorable mentions if we were to do another round or two, the personality inventories. So like the Myers-Briggs, or the StrengthsFinder, or the DiSC, or those other kinds of things. And you do that ahead of the meeting I would think. And then just share the results at the meeting and just say, “What are you willing and able to share from your Myers-Briggs or your StrengthFinder?” Or whatever it is that we did this week. And this, I think, would be great with a class, or a team, or anything else where you’re going to have to be working together and you have to get to know each other.

So then you could have everybody take their Myers-Briggs and then share one thing that they agree with about that test, and one thing they disagree with about their results from that test. Because I think both of them are pretty revealing in, even if you don’t believe in these kinds of tests, you will learn something in the fact that everybody is taking it and then is discussing it. So, even if you take those with a grain of salt and a lot of psychiatrists, and psychologists, and people like that do, it’s still is just an opportunity to talk about what did you learn about yourself that you now know better? Or what did you learn about yourself that you totally disagree with? And that everybody else will learn that about you. And you’ll learn that about everybody else.

John Williams:

And then you can take the self-deprecating approach. You got to be talking to somebody about any topic that you think they’re uncomfortable with, and you say, “Well, I realize this may be a hassle to talk about, but don’t make me pull my hair out. I don’t have that much left.”

Paula Williams:

Exactly. Well, and that’s another thing if you’re asking them to share, they’re not sharing their whole results from their Myers-Briggs, they’re just picking one thing to share. So you’re not asking anybody to reveal anything that’s too personal or too … They’re cherry picking their results. That also tells you something too.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, nice. Cool. I think it’s important to go back to the reason for an icebreaker, right? You’re trying to break the ice. So the idea here is that you’re trying to have a discussion with someone. I think it’s good to go back to the humanity. And I mean, I think, that John does that well when he’s talking about like, “Don’t let me to pull my hair out.” Talking about how we’re all just humans is so important, right? Like the shortfalls and the difficulties of getting up in the morning or whatever. I feel like we might get swept up because a lot of the times, at least for me, I’m trying to run a class, right?

Paula Williams:

Yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

I’m trying to say like, “I am the authority here. This makes perfect sense. You should be keeping up with me,” and then being patient as they try to catch up, right? And so, I sometimes might pump the gas a little bit too hard, and I think that there’s a lot to be said for kind of slowing down. Even if you have something that you’re trying to get across, like you’re trying to teach them fractions, it’s important to go slower with that than you might expect.

John Williams:

And to that point, my first college algebra course, I sit in the front row. And I’d missed something in a book, which is why I harped on you to make sure if you missed something, go figure it out. So he wrote down, I don’t remember what it was. Either the sign, the integral of the sign, or the cosign, one of them, and he wrote down the answer. And I said, “How’d you get that?” And he turned around and wrote down a different form of the same answer. He did it three times, and then he said, “What are you, stupid?” Which really irritated me, because what I missed was the definition, what he wrote had a definition. If you knew the definition, you knew the answer.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right.

John Williams:

And I just missed the definition. And he could have said, “Well, by definition,” but he didn’t. That was messy, but I can tell you I learned how not to do things, by golly.

Paula Williams:

Right? Well, yeah, I think we all want to pack as much business into a meeting as possible. So there is that intention to, “Let’s get it done and get out of here,” because nobody really likes having more meetings or longer meetings. But I think we are missing a lot of the human element, as you say, if we don’t take the time at the beginning of the meeting to do an icebreaker. So, you can take five or 10 minutes if you’ve got a meeting of six people and do something like this. Another thing I loved, and we did this actually in our book club awhile back, is they call it theme days in this list that I’m reading, but everybody wore a hat. And this was actually Jeremy’s idea, “Everybody wear a hat next time.” And it really did humanize the whole meeting, and everybody had a story behind their hat, and everybody had a reason for choosing the hat that they did. It was just cool to get to know people on a different level.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, I agree. I remember that meeting and that meeting stands out for everybody. I’m sure everybody who showed up remembers that meeting. So that’s pretty cool. I think if you … Especially, if you’re going to have multiple meetings with the same group of people, doing something like that’s really, really smart as for just keeping people engaged. That’s great.

Paula Williams:

Maybe we should add an icebreaker to our discussion group, have an icebreaker before we launch into the topic.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah. No, I think that’s a good idea. I know a lot of corporate meetings, one of the things that they try to stress is like, “What surprised you this week?” Or, “What surprised you about the data this week?” And they do that in the beginning to increase serendipity, right? Because if something surprises one person about X, that could be related to a whole nother department about Y. If you don’t ask what surprised you, you would never hear that, you would only hear the business side of it. And it’s kind of crazy to think that you can create a habitat where those lucky coincidences are more likely to take off.

Paula Williams:

Yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

I didn’t believe it at first. I was like, “That doesn’t make sense, why … Some people are lucky and other people are unlucky, and that’s because of hard work,” but a lot of it just comes from intentionally creating these lucky atmospheres where you’re just water cooling or talking about something unrelated or seemingly unrelated.

Paula Williams:

Yeah, and being interested and curious in all of that enough to spend the time to listen to what surprised everyone else, and putting that together in your mind. I think devoting the mindspace to that, and the time to that is really important. It says a lot about the company, too.

John Williams:

You got to be careful here, you begin in this philosophy and we can be talking about that stuff for years.

Paula Williams:

Right. With some of our classes, anyway, and I didn’t do it in our main course, because we’re just trying to be so condensed, and I think it was a mistake. So in our longer courses what we’ve done is we start with, “What went really well for you this week, and what went really badly for you this week?” So that way I learn what people are struggling with and also, what’s going really well for them. Both of those questions, I think, give people an opportunity to brag if they want to, and to complain if they want to, and we don’t really give people enough space to do that in the world today. I did that in our long class, I didn’t do that in our mini course, but I think I may add that back in because it really changes the tone. I get a lot of good information from them about what’s bugging people about maybe these buttons are hard to see or some goofy little thing I would never find out unless I asked.

Mickey Gamonal:

Yeah, that’s a good point. I never …. Like for me, my classes, I think I’m going to have to start instituting that, “What did you struggle with?” Because I’m always … The beginning of every week is weekend wins. “What was your weekend win?

Paula Williams:

Oh, cool, yeah.

Mickey Gamonal:

But if you start focusing, I mean, really what went poorly, that’s what derails people, you know what I mean? That’s really what ruins everything. If all we did was focus on the good, we’d never get anything done because something bad would be in the way, something bad’s always going to be stopping you.

Paula Williams:

Yeah, but you can do both then, if you’ve got six people, you can do both in 10 minutes. “What went really well for you, what went really badly for you this week?” And usually it’s … Unless you get into a really long argument, and sometimes it’s worth it about whatever, something that leads to a longer discussion. But you always have an option to table that as an excellent facilitator such as yourself should know.

Mickey Gamonal:

True that, true that. Oh, cool. So what is your experience with icebreakers? As far as good, bad, and ugly? Speaking of a bad, let’s talk about some bad icebreakers. Have you guys seen any terrible ones?

Paula Williams:

I think if it’s your first meeting and you ask people something that is too much, “Tell me your life story.” They don’t know where to start, they don’t know how much time to take. Somebody’s going to take 20 minutes, somebody’s going to take a minute and a half. So I think the mistake people could make with an icebreaker is asking too much and not being specific enough about what kind of answers you’re looking for.

So if you can tell people, “We’re going to take 10 minutes to do an icebreaker, so I want everyone to spend two minutes telling me this.” So if you can be super specific, that puts a fence around it. It doesn’t take up your whole meeting and it doesn’t intimidate people to the point where they’re just paralyzed by, “Tell me the worst thing that happened to you as a child, and I don’t even know your middle name.” And then you get the deer in the headlights for solid seconds and you get that awkward silence. And that’s what everybody’s trying to avoid.

Mickey Gamonal:

Nice. How about you, John? Any troubling icebreakers?

John Williams:

You need to understand your audience, even if it’s just one person. Because in some people’s backgrounds, that didn’t grow up completely in the States, you say, “How are you doing?” Or “Where are you from?” And they think you want to know how they’ve done all day long. And, “Where are you from?” means god knows where. I mean, it’s not specific enough, but you don’t want to be so specific to become … I don’t know, it’s a fine line to walk, but you need to learn how to do that. Being too specific can be off-putting to some people.

Mickey Gamonal:

Absolutely, you can sound like an interrogator, right? If you’re like, “Ah, but where are you really from? Where’s your mom from? Where’s your dad from?” It can definitely turn into too much, too fast.

Paula Williams:

And I heard, actually recently, that there are times and places where that question is considered to be really offensive and intrusive. “Where are you really from? Because your accent doesn’t sound right, you’re not really from there.” It can be really, really off-putting and people don’t intend that. But I think some people can take it that way and some people … You can take any question and if your intention is bad, it’s going to show, you know? So icebreakers, I think, as long as they’re fun, and light, and not too serious, and you let people off the hook if they don’t want to participate. Just like you did with John, you want to make sure you’re making it a safe environment for everybody to participate. You don’t want to add to the anxiety, that’s exactly counter to what you’re trying to do, is to make people feel comfortable with each other.

Mickey Gamonal:

Right, cool. Well, to that end, what would be some opening statements? Like if you were just to meet your first class, is there something you usually say as far as safe space and no judgment. What are kind of the ground rules you lay out usually?

John Williams:

In your first class on Zoom, when what? You usually got three, or four people, or five, or 10, or 30 or what?

Mickey Gamonal:

We’ll say less than 20, less than 10 really. So about five, 10.

Paula Williams:

Okay. I try to lay that out before the first meeting usually, in an email so that people know, they come prepared, “Here’s the agenda.” If I’m going to do an icebreaker, I’ll let people know what the icebreaker’s going to be. So it won’t be sprung on them and so I try to do that in an agenda to make people feel comfortable. And also let them know, “Here’s some recordings of past classes like this that we’ve done or past meetings like this that we’ve done,” so they can kind of familiarize themselves, or a podcast, of course. Anybody who’s listened to our podcast kind of has a feel for the way we work and feel comfortable with us off the bat. So I think if you publish something and you can send them an example, “Here’s what we’re going to do and this is how it’s going to go,” they’ll feel a whole lot more comfortable if they’ve kind of pre-rehearsed it in their head.

John Williams:

His question sparks, do you remember when my business goal team couldn’t get along?

Paula Williams:

Yeah.

John Williams:

And we hired you to fix it.

Paula Williams:

Yeah, I remember that.

John Williams:

That process that you went through, if you could lay that out for him, because, I mean, what you did took a while, but you could probably explain it pretty quickly.

Paula Williams:

Right. But what we had-

John Williams:

Because when we got together with you, it was all fait accompli, because you did all the work behind the scenes.

Paula Williams:

Yes. So what we had was a group of six people, it was six to begin with, that had a lot of fear about working together. Because they all thought that everybody else was going to torpedo the project, or that things weren’t going to go the way they wanted to, or that they weren’t going to get the grade they wanted, or whatever. Because they had to work as a group and they all had bad experiences working as a group.

John Williams:

Because we all knew the only person you could rely on was yourself.

Paula Williams:

Right. So I actually interviewed each person individually and found out, you know, what are you afraid of? And what do you want to have happen? What would be the ideal way for this group to work together?” Those two questions, when I got into the room and wrote down the answers to those two questions it was pretty much synonymous for every single person, but they couldn’t talk to each other about, “What are you afraid of?” But they could talk to a mutual third party about what they were afraid of.

And I think sometimes if you have a group of people that runs into … I mean, right now we’re really, really polarized politically and things like that. So you can’t talk to a Republican, or you can’t talk to a Democrat, or you can’t talk to somebody who’s on the opposite side, but you could talk to a neutral third party, and say, “What are you afraid of?” “Well, I’m afraid the socialists are going to overrun the place. So I’m afraid that the …” whatever you’re afraid of, you can tell that to a third party that you couldn’t tell to the enemy.

John Williams:

It seems like if all these people are in your … If you got five people in a class, that means they’re all about the same place, and you’re going to start them all about the same level, and work them up. And if you’ve done this already, then one of them might see something the others don’t and be able to help you explain it.

Paula Williams:

Right. But the situation that John was talking about actually had a history of conflict. Which is different than just walking in plain off the street, and you don’t trust people because you don’t trust people in general. That’s different than, “I don’t trust these people because they’re going to try and take over this project and make it something I don’t want it to be.” If you’ve got that … It depends on where you’re starting from, and I think most of the meetings that we start with are the cold starts as opposed to the hostile start. So we don’t necessarily have to do a lot of pre-work, but it was really nice to have that ahead of time if you can set as much groundwork as you can, and set as much expectation, and everything else as you can.

John Williams:

Yeah, I would say that the preliminary to a first meeting on Zoom would be a good place to do some of that.

Paula Williams:

Yeah.

John Williams:

A phone call, or however you talk with them to start with. Do they call you? I mean, they probably call you or email you, right?

Paula Williams:

Oh, for your group?

John Williams:

Yeah, for me. He asked a question we’re trying to answer.

Paula Williams:

Oh, okay. I forgot the question entirely, I’m sorry.

Mickey Gamonal:

In my specific situation there’s not a ton of pre-frame. There really isn’t, I don’t really set them up. I just say, “Come on Tuesday at 9:00, be ready for a Zoom. Don’t worry, everything will be explained.”

Paula Williams:

Yeah, okay.

John Williams:

So do you talk to them, or is that an email transaction?

Mickey Gamonal:

It’s usually, yeah. It’s usually texts or Facebook Messenger. So it’s usually through messages.

Paula Williams:

I’m a huge fan of checklists. So I like to send a checklist before people come to the first meeting, just say, “Make sure your microphone works, make sure your … and everything else. Here’s the agenda of what we’re going to be talking about just so that you’re not spending the first 10 minutes trying to figure out how to use Zoom, and trying to figure out exactly what it is that we’re doing here.” But I’m more of an agenda person, I guess. And your people are probably culturally a little bit different. They want everything to be a little more spontaneous and fun.

Mickey Gamonal:

It’s hit or miss. I mean, I think, more fun and work would help. I think if I had a welcome email, I don’t think that would hurt. I do send out a welcome package that they hopefully get before the first Zoom meeting, but it doesn’t talk about what to do at the Zoom meeting. It does talk about the onboarding tasks. I lay those out during the first week. The first week I don’t expect them to study any math or English. The first week is all mindset and basically get your stuff together, right? Because you need a plan, that’s the biggest thing that my students need, and probably anybody who’s learning anything.

They need a plan to make sure they’re consistent, because consistency is what builds skills. It’s never going to be an instant effort that suddenly now you can play guitar. Like I played guitar all Sunday and now I’m a pro, it’s never going to work like that. It’s always going to be 20 minutes a day for the next eight years, right? And you’re going to be halfway decent. That’s not what anybody’s going to want to hear, everybody’s looking for that quick fix. But what you, I think, as a teacher, or an instructor, or someone who provides value to someone else, you have to make these tried and true things clear. It’s true, you have to put in effort, and that’s what I spend my first week doing.

I’m not so hung up on Zoom, because with my Zoom calls I can fill those with practice problems. I can do ASVAB questions all day long. I could probably do three hours, if they’re willing to sit through three hours of instruction. I could do that. But I try to keep it as an hour so that they gain the most possible skill and then I tell them to focus in on two or three things that were covered for the day. To see how it goes down.

Paula Williams:

Yeah. No, I like that. And I think in most cases the people that are listening to this podcast are going to be in a sales or a marketing situation where they are wanting to do a webinar to demonstrate their product or whatever and stuff. And I still think an icebreaker is fantastic because that changes the nature of the call from a sales presentation to a participatory event and gets everybody to get to know everybody else. It makes them feel comfortable asking questions, makes them feel comfortable expressing disbelief or doubt whenever it’s appropriate to do that and that kind of thing.

And getting through problem solving which is really what sales is in a business-to-business, or an aviation, or an education situation, this is really problem solving. Yeah, and I know you do some webinars and some consultations where you do groups of people to try and get them into your course. And I think a lot of us are in that situation. I think an icebreaker’s perfect for that scenario, even though everybody wants to launch into the material, it’s not the most efficient way to work.

John Williams:

Or you could even fake a problem with Zoom, you just start talking, say, “Oops.” And then click the microphone and say, “I asked you guys to be prepared, now here I am, forgot to click the microphone on.”

Mickey Gamonal:

Oh, yeah.

Paula Williams:

You don’t have to make it up. It’ll happen.

Mickey Gamonal:

Today I had gremlins in my internet, so I disappeared for like 80 seconds, right? And I’m like on my phone, getting ready to message everybody, and I look up and they’re all right there. And I’m like, “Oh my god. You guys are still here.”

Paula Williams:

There you are.

Mickey Gamonal:

They all just laughed and laughed. They were like, “This guy is ridiculous.” I was sure, you know, I figured 80 seconds, man, it’s math. It’s not something that you want to stick around and have a good time. I was over the moon when all of my students were still on the same Zoom call, which I didn’t think that was going to be the case. I thought I had [crosstalk 00:35:17]-

Paula Williams:

Wow.

Mickey Gamonal:

… but I didn’t.

Paula Williams:

Doing something right when they’ll stick around and do more math with you.

Mickey Gamonal:

Oh, yeah. Yesterday I had a phone call with my unit, right? All the leadership was on the line, and yeah, after the first, “All right guys. I think that wraps it up.” Boom, I was gone. That was it, because you don’t want to … If you’re not into what they’re talking about, you’ll escape the first opportunity you get.

So my name’s Mickey Gamonal with ASVAB Domination, and Gamonal Tutors on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, email. Anybody who’s going into the military, tell them to look me up. Gamonal Tutors.

Paula Williams:

Paula Williams, ABCI. We help aviation companies sell more of their products and services.

Mickey Gamonal:

John Williams, also ABCI. We help with business solutions when and if they decide they want assistance.