Episode 166: Creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun" with Dana the Trainer #bestof
Energy is the most important thing when it comes to your workshops, and I discovered this nice and early when I geeked out on an energetic conversation with today’s guest, Dana Jane-Edwards.
This is a #bestof episode - I spoke to Dana back in 2018, when she called herself “Dana the Trainer”. Through a series of pivots and discovering her passion, she is now known as “Diversity Dana”.
Energy is the most important thing when it comes to your workshops, and I discovered this nice and early when I geeked out on an energetic conversation with today’s guest, Dana James-Edwards.
This is a #bestof episode - I spoke to Dana back in 2018, when she called herself “Dana the Trainer”. Through a series of pivots and discovering her passion, she is now known as “Diversity Dana”.
Today’s conversation is as relevant as ever - you’ll learn
Ways to make facilitation more fun, colourful and engaging
How to balance or lift your energy levels when required
What to do when things don't go to plan (hint: prevention is better than cure)
How to create content for new workshops
I want to share her website copy on her About page as a way of introducing her.
Here we go:
My favourite word is the F-Word – FUN
(Wait a minute … what F word were you thinking about?). Seriously!
As you can tell I take an unconventional approach to learning focusing on fun, colour, enjoyment and making things as practical and relevant as possible to make sure that key learnings make it back to the workplace.
What is it that I facilitate? Great question!
I have my fingers in many pies, but my 3 core areas are *drumroll please*
Diversity & Inclusion, Train-The-Trainer (or Coach) and Agile
And if that sounds like an eclectic mix of things that shouldn’t go together and make no sense you’re going to have to read the rest of my bio to find out why and how it all came about. To confuse you even further I sometimes even dabble in some Management & Leadership bits … but that’s a story for another day.
Read the rest of Dana’s story.
What’s new with Leanne and First Time Facilitator?
So excited to share that I’m partnering with Slido on their Online Meetings Revolution trend report. Come along to the launch and hear the interesting data + predictions to make your online meetings as engaging and relevant as possible. It’s on 14 April 2021, here’s the link to sign up.
Join the conversation when the show is over with 1300 facilitators from all over the world in our free group called The Flipchart
Support the show (and my ideas) by buying me a coffee
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Like this show?
Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally.
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode!
Quotes of the show:
"There are so many things that you can do to bring learning, to bring a classroom alive to make things not so painful for people".
Even when you know the content and you're familiar with it, you’re still thinking, 'Who's going to be there tomorrow?', 'What if this exercise doesn't work?', 'What do I have as a backup for this?', 'Did I pack this thing?'
'You cannot be rigid, sticking to your lesson plan. The classroom is a place of surprise. The best facilitators pull the learning out of what is happening in the room, instead of sticking to the script'.
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Dana the Trainer.
Episode 36: 7 attributes of a superhero facilitator (and how to rescue a workshop from a fate worse than death) with Leanne Hughes
What does it take to get to get to superhero status in the facilitation game?In this solo episode, Leanne Hughes explores and explains the 7 key attributes she thinks are critical to becoming a superhero facilitator.So, how does a facilitator carry out the responsibilities of a facilitator like a superhero (Lycra optional)? Listen in!
What does it take to get to get to superhero status in the facilitation game?In this solo episode, Leanne Hughes explores and explains the 7 key attributes she thinks are critical to becoming a superhero facilitator.So, how does a facilitator carry out the responsibilities of a facilitator like a superhero (Lycra optional)? Listen in!
In this episode you'll learn
The seven key attributes that First Time Facilitators should consider when wanting to level up their game
Key questions/statements facilitators can use in their next workshop
The APPLE technique, and how you can employ this the next time you're in front of a group
About your host
Leanne Hughes is the host of the First Time Facilitator podcast and is based in Brisbane, Australia. She works in the field of Organisational Development. She loves to shake up expectations and create unpredictable experiences and brings over 12 years’ of experience across a variety of industries including mining, tourism, and vocational education and training and believes anyone can develop the skills to deliver engaging group workshops.
Like this show?
Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!Let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode! (or, leave a comment below)
Episode transcript
View the transcript of Episode 36 with Leanne Hughes.
Your thoughts
What do you think? Did Leanne miss any? Do you think any of these attributes are more important than others? Let us know! Comment below.
Episode 25; Split brain workshop facilitation: How to balance the now with the ‘What’s next?' with Mark McKeon
In today’s episode, I talk to Mark McKeon about the parallels between creating high performance on the footy pitch; and high stake situations in a group workshop facilitation environment.
In today’s episode, I talk to Mark McKeon about the parallels between creating high performance on the footy pitch; and high stake situations in a group workshop facilitation environment.
Need some inspiration and motivation? Mark provides that in this episode, along with some extremely practical tips which you can start implementing in your facilitation game. We talk about the practicalities of workshop room setup, how to balance being in the moment with forecasting ahead to drive your workshop outcomes, maintaining energy levels and the key question he asks from client's to determine workshop outcomes.
Listen in to him when he talks about ways you can structure your day to be more productive using his Go Zone methodology.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How Mark pivoted from professional footballer, to high performance coach and facilitation/speaking
Parallels between playing and coaching in high performing footy matches/game day and preparing for a big workshop/stage
His requirements in terms of rooms setup and audiovisual setup (including practical takeaways for keeping your voice in check over a day’s workshop)
Why it’s important to be a little selfish during the day to maintain peak performance
The key question he asks clients to clarify the outcomes of a workshop (and why this is critical)
How to structure your day to get the most sustainable performance (and how we under-estimate the importance of recovery)
Why he channelled his inner James Bond to create a memorable message
What you need to know about using gimmicks and props in your workshops
About our guest
Mark McKeon is one of Australia’s leading experts on leadership, efficiency, productivity, work life balance and team cohesion. His latest book "Go Zone" reinforces all these factors.
He spent 16 years as the high performance coach at Collingwood, with the team also outsourcing their entire fitness and training function to Mark’s team. He was also Club Runner for more than 250 games, an AFL record, and worked with Victoria’s State of Origin Team on five occasions.
Mark previously played football in the VFL with the Melbourne team, and represented Victoria in the VFA. He presents keynotes and tailored sessions, and along with his team, conducts workshops and conference programs in lifestyle, team building and leadership. Mark consistently rates as, ‘exceedingly funny with a great message’ or ‘best conference speaker’. He spends time with delegates, and can MC or facilitate as well as present keynotes and workshops.
Mark has an insightful and engaging style and his uplifting presentations have been a conference highlight with lasting impacts for many years.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Like this show?
Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode! (or, leave a comment below)
Quotes of the show:
“You don’t have to be a prisoner to the structure you’ve set for your workshop…I’m forever swapping slides around and stopping, accelerating and changing the times, all hopefully to the benefit of the audience”
“The best clues are always in the audience”
“The best facilitators approach their workshops with an audience-centric mindset’
“Start with the end in mind. One of the great dangers is that your outcomes are vague and you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.
“Work on your craft. Look for every opportunity to speak in front of a room”
Video: Mark channelling his inner 007
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Sean D'Souza (Episode 22)
Here is the episode transcript from my interview with Sean D'Souza on Episode 22 of the podcast.
You can listen to my interview with Sean D'Souza on the First Time Facilitator podcast.
Leanne: Welcome to the show from across the ditch, Sean D'Souza.
Sean: Hello. Hi, Leanne.
Leanne: Hi Sean. Sean, I really want to get into it because I've given you a really fantastic introduction to who you are and what you do. But I want to talk about the time and a lot of these days when we run workshops and organizations or you know even outside. We're really limited with the amount of time that we have so in the two days we try and cram as much information into our participants heads as we can. But when I went to Singapore and went to your workshop it was a three-day workshop and in that you spent I think it was the first five minutes of the workshop explaining that “Hey we can cover all this content in half a day.” So I really like to hear your philosophy around embedding information in people's heads and guaranteeing a skill by using time a bit more differently to everyone else.
Sean: Yeah. First of all the reason why I say that at the start of a workshop is because of the objection that comes up you know it's like we seem to be loitering around a lot we have lots of breaks but the point is “Why do you go to a workshop?” and it depends on why you go to a workshop. If you're with a corporate you go there to waste time, right? But if you're a small business for instance, the chances are that you're looking for a skill. But even if you're in a corporate, there is a pretty good chance that you're looking for a skill and what the person needs to do, the person conducting the workshop is they need to understand that whatever they understand is not easily assimilated by the participant and then once they assimilate that they still have to practice it and so there's lots of this breaking down that goes on. So the formula that I have is like one-fifth or one-sixth of the time needs to be spent by me you know with slides and stuff like but the rest of the time is for them to work on the assignments that I give them and the group assignments and individual assignments in you know breaking it down to the point where they walk away with the elk notes and they know what to do. That is very crucial because if you need to go back and read a whole bunch of notes just to get something done that's like you know having to drive a car and going, “Oh, where are my notes?”
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. So on that, how do you confidently say then that you do guaranteed this skill and why do you think time giving people a space to reflect and talk about it? Why is that more effective than just saying than just throwing that information at someone? Why is that sort of group engagement giving them the space so effective?
Sean: Because information is very tiring. So what we do is we look at 4:00 p.m. and you look at 4:00 p.m. on day 1, 4:00 p.m. on day 2, 4 p.m. on day 3. You look at people's faces and they get very tired and if at 4 p.m. they are all bubbly and stuff and they're not exhausted that tells you that the volume of information is not too great and that means that they're able to assimilate it. Just like you would on a normal day, you have tasks to do and 4 p.m. doesn't necessarily tire you out but when you're at a workshop people just give you more and more information thinking that is the most important thing but it's not it's. What you really want from the workshop is you go in there not to get more information. You could sit at home, you go there specifically to come back after 3:00 so if I go to say a Photoshop workshop, when I come back from the Photoshop workshop I can have a 200 page book, I can have all of these slides I can have the notes and videos and stuff but can I do masking in Photoshop? - That’s the goal. So as a presenter, you have to go “Wait! How am I going to design this stuff?” so that everyone and this is without exception, everyone can do masking in Photoshop and it might well be that masking involves seven days. So in that case you go, “Okay, we won't do everything in masking, we'll do something that we can manage in five days.” and then maybe you can't do in five days and so you have to almost break it down to the point where you go, “Okay, if we do A, B and C then in three days it's guaranteed that everyone in the room will be able to do it.”
Leanne: I like how you said talked about A B and C and chunking it down because I've noticed something very similar in your podcasts you really talk about three things in every episode over the space of say 20 to 30 minutes. It is the number three something special to you or am I just reading too much into that?
Sean: The first thing is what I tend to do is I tend to say “Okay, I'll tell you three things about why you need to make workshops really safe.” and then I usually can think of one thing or the second thing and then ask to force myself to put the tether third thing in so from my perspective it's good because it forces me to elaborate on a specific point. But from a client's point of view as well, it's not that hard to focus or to work on three things you know if I do A B and C, they can kind of remember that. I don't think there's any science to it. We seem to like three things but I'm at the moment you go to 4 and 5 and 6, it's much harder because you have to remember these are not things these are concepts so when I say “Okay, safety in workshops.” Well, that's not a thing that looks like a bullet point but it's really, it could be a whole workshop in itself. That's what you know facilitators and presenters don't understand that one little bullet point that you just made. If you could just go deeper into that, that would be so much, I mean that would be useful to me rather than you jumping to point two and point three and point four and onwards.
Leanne: Yeah and you brought up a really good point about all those notes from a Photoshop workshop, we could take away a 200 page guide but how often do we really go back to our desks and refer to it? I think you know, let's put it on the shelf and think “Yeah. One day I'll read that but five years later it's still gathering dust.” So it's a very good point.
Sean: Yeah, because that should be the purpose of the workshop. The purpose of a workshop is to get people out of their house, out of their office space and you know give them time to travel because the travel to the workshop gets you to think, the travel after the workshop gets you to think. So those are very crucial but also in the workshop, because we give them so many breaks so you say, well, people often ask me, well, “How do you know that people aren't checking their email during the workshop?” Well, if you have like 12 breaks or 6 breaks and they have enough time to do all that stuff. So they're not going to do it in the workshop, in the workshop they're participating so this design of something is very crucial.
Leanne: And I think, if you're an external consultant going into a company I think you really want to guarantee that output but at the same time if it may be difficult extremely explaining to your client “Hey, I do need to give these people frequent breaks.” The first the client may be thinking, “What the hell are you doing?” you know it actually earning your hourly rate. So I guess it's important to convince that these kind of concepts are really important to guarantee that skill.
You've brought up the concept of creating a safe environment for your workshop. Is that something that you, I know you have Renuka in the corner there that helps you and with preparing and setting all of that up? How do you create a safe space with people that aren't really confident in asking questions or speaking out? How do you ensure that you guarantee them the skill by creating a safe place where they do feel safe to raise issues and questions?
Sean: Yes, so one of the things that people don't realize is that people don't care about your content. They don't care about your slides and they don't care about anything.
Leanne: Okay.
Sean: Yeah, they don’t. They only care until they feel safe. So they're not going to do anything if they end up looking like a fool or they end up, whatever! You have to think of them almost like five-year-old kids like you know, the five-year-old kid in the house is bouncing around laughing and stuff and then you take her out and then she's wiggling between the father's toes trying to stay away from your gaze because the father just said “Sing a song, come on Emily. Sing a song!” No, not going to sing a song, right? But you give Emily enough space and enough time and she will do that. So what we do is we set it up so that people are safe. Now, one of the things now, I don't know people have you know multiple questions to this and this becomes a whole workshop in itself but essentially what we do is for most workshops and not the one you did but for most workshops, what we do is we create the notes and we send it to them a month in advance. You’ll say “Well, if you're going to send them all a notes a month in advance then why are you going to show up to the workshop, as in the presenter, what's the point?” and the point is that I feel safe as a person reading the notes. Now there's no shock and awe, there's no “Oh, I have to come and I have to see all these slides for the first time.” and after you assimilate all the stuff- No! You're there, you’ve read the notes, you understand it, and so what's the job of the presenter? Well, the presenter has to show up there and now explain the same concept with different examples. So now you're getting a much deeper understanding of the same thing, different angles- same concept!
So if I say safety and I send you a book with several examples of how you create safety in workshops or how you create a safe zone then when you come to the workshop I show you different examples. How does it work in a corporate environment? How does it work if you're having a course online and you can't see anybody? So now you're getting depth in it. Now that creates one level of safety, the second level of safety and it depends on who's having the workshop. But what we do is we get people to show up before the workshop as in the day before. Now, in Singapore you know the workshop you attended, we landed just the night before. It doesn't usually happen but we tend to have a meet and greet the previous night. In Brussels, we went to the Tintin Museum.
Leanne: Oh, great.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah I know you missed out.
Leanne: I know. I got all the photos, thanks for that while I was sitting in my cubicle.
Sean: So all of this stuff is done as a preparation then we have soft toys that people chuck around. We have sometimes when you come to the workshop you'll get maybe a little postcard with your name written on it. These are all these little things that enable people to go “Oh, this is a fun environment. This is not a place where I'm going to be put down and made a fool of.” and this takes a long time. When you get to a Psychotactics workshop you don't realize it but until about 11 o'clock you're doing nothing.
Leanne: Ah yeah.
Sean: Yeah absolutely nothing. You just had a bunch of introductions which are also engineered for you not to introduce yourself but to introduce somebody else. You’re doing a whole bunch of stuff until you finish the first coffee break which is at 10:30 and then at 11 o'clock that's when you're actually doing the first assignment.
Leanne: Yeah, you're right. I'm actually just sort of reflecting on our days in Singapore and yeah there is a bit of a science behind it, good to hear.
Sean: Yeah. So this just goes on through the days and then as people you know they get to know so we put them in groups but of course we've had really bad examples in groups. So the point is how do you make that safe as well which is you know on Day 1, we'll have a group and it's random it's not even like necessarily the same groups and then sometimes if we find that we need to change the groups the next day we change the groups and what that does is now you say, “Well, that's uncomfortable.” but it is safe at some level because you feel “Okay, I don't have to be with this person all the time.”
Leanne: Yeah, absolutely.
Sean: And so, there are lots of very small things but essentially if you start thinking of it as an adult workshop and going, “I've got a whole bunch of 10-year-olds. How do I keep them comfortable and happy?” then yeah, lots of breaks, stuff toys. Think of it as a ten-year-old party and I think you'll have a formula out there.
Leanne: That it sounds really fun. Interesting point that you said that “No one really cares about the presenter, all the slides until you make them feel safe.” It's the first time I've heard anyone say that. A lot of people talk about the importance of getting everyone to know each other and feel comfortable but no one's said it like in those words which is really great.
You talked about the levels of safety so giving up the notes in advance again that's another new concept I've never heard and a lot of people would think “Hang on! Well yeah, what is the point of me showing up here?” and I think that challenge on the facilitator to start figuring out more examples or then putting more emphasis on how we're going to make this more relevant for the people in the room at the time especially if they've read their notes prior. And then I like the idea of the meet and greet beforehand, it takes that mystery away of who's in the room because like you said when you're rocking up to a workshop you could be pretty apprehensive of who's going to be in there, how I even get there, all these thoughts going through your head before you even see the first slide.
Now, I want to talk about the way that you introduce topics as well and you always start from a high level overview. So in Singapore you spoke about the Manhattan Skyline and then you're really just teaching us the importance of foundations. Sorry, is that the way that you introduce the concepts a lot of the time, is it through using stories and looking at things that are going out in the world and then trying to make that relevant to the concept you're exploring?
Sean: Yep, because that's what you remember. So information again is very tiring and most of us thinking that that's what the clients want. The clients don't actually want that, if you know, we know how, what clients really want in a workshop and that is they want to leave the room and you say, “That's not possible!” Well, do this the next time you're having a workshop tell them, “Look, all of you are here for the information, right? And they'll all say “Yes!” and you go “Okay, so we're going to do this workshop until 9:00 p.m. tonight.” and then watch their faces. Yeah, it's the same thing as school, right? So you know, if you tell a bunch of 10-year-olds “Hey, school ends at 4 o'clock every day but if we do all stuff really well, we can all go at 3 o'clock.” and they go “Okay, yes!” and if you take 30-year-olds in a room or 50-year-olds in the room and you do that it's exactly the same. I've gone away from your question but the point is that people are looking for the exit sign and so if you design your workshop around an exit sign which is, “How can I get people moving all the time?” then that's the way they learn because they don't really learn sitting down there while you're droning on forever. That's not when they're learning. That's when they're just hearing not even listening to you, that's when they're checking their email. But once you've given them stuff to do, once they're starting to move, once they're starting to discuss stuff, once they're going to the cafe and back and you know how many trips we did to the cafe and back. I mean, we pretty much spent an hour and a half just going back and forth.
Leanne: And I don't think anyone was looking at their watch thinking “We need to get back, we're enjoying all of our time away.” as well.
Sean: Right.
Leanne: I think what we're talking about, what we were learning as part of that drinking great coffee.
Sean: Yeah, but in that section, that's where you're doing all your learning where you're doing all your assimilating and your question was “the concepts”. So if you give people like a whole bunch of bullet points, it's very hard to remember but if I tell you a story like for instance, we have this book called “The Brain Audit” and in that I talked about how you land at an airport and you have seven red bags and stuff and then if I meet that person six years later and they go “Hey, you know I still remember that story.” So finding that story at the top of your presentation and then in the different sections of your presentation that makes a big difference because I can remember the stories and yeah after that and like for instance, you did the Sales Page Workshop and now you know that to build the Sales Page, you don't start, see, tell me, I'm putting you on the spot now. How do you build a Sales Page?
Leanne: Well, we started by writing all the bullet points.
Sean: Yeah, but where do you start from the headline?
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yeah, exactly!
Leanne: The benefits and features and you bullet points.
Sean: So what effectively, what are you saying is you're starting at the bottom?
Leanne: We are.
Sean: And that's where the Manhattan example comes in. You build a building a skyscraper from the bottom up not from the top down. So the concept stays in your head and then you don't have to refer, you don't even have notes until now but if I gave you that assignment to do, you could do it, right?
Leanne: Yep, absolutely.
Sean: And it needs to be something that you can fit on the back of a postcard. If you can do that then you've said too much.
Leanne: I have to upload an image of the postcard to the show notes for this episode because they're beautiful. So Sean hand drawn these- the postcards, which had all the important points and the process for writing a sales page and yeah I could look at that right now and write a sales page just from looking at the artwork on that.
Sean: And this is the interesting part that you know anyone listening to this will go, “Okay, I got the whole workshop. I don't have to go to the workshop.” See? That's the beauty of it. That all those three days are encapsulated in their postcard and in your head you can expand all of it.
Leanne: Yep.
Sean: But the person looking at it has no idea, I mean they have some idea but they don't have the same idea that you have.
Leanne: Yeah like the real substance and experience, yeah that's right.
Sean: Right and it's important to note that you still don't have notes or slides or anything and you can still do it, that's important!
Leanne: Hmm yeah, that is important. Yeah. So, do you use the same concept? I'm trying to, I'm trying to draw parallels now, so you put your DaVinci course out for sale, so what is Sean and his team can teach anyone how to cartoon which is just a skill that everyone thinks that they can't do. Everyone I know is, “Oh, I can't draw!” so cartooning is a bit of a stretch. You teach this to all system made, it create a structure so you can teach people around the world that are online not even in the same room or in the same time zone. How do you take to school like cartooning to an audience that's all around the world?
Sean: Okay, so one of the things that you went through and most people go through is what we call a “layering system”. So a layer consists of A then AB then AB and C then AB and C and D. So every time you're doing, you're always still doing A and then you're always adding B and then you're always adding, so what most training does is they go A B C D E and that's overload. But if you do A, AB, AC, AD, ABCD sorry then every time you're going back to the original, you're going back and practicing that and you're getting better at A, getting better at A, getting better at A and that's what we call tiny increments. So we increased it but all the time you're repeating it and I'm repeating myself here. So that is one of the things that we do.
The second thing that is even more crucial is this whole factor of getting people in the safe zone. So almost everyone who joins a course like we teach different skills like writing or presentations or whatever. And cartooning is so from left field because people say “I could never do that.” So the first point is to get them to the point where they're not making fools of themselves because everyone who draws like a six-year-old stop drawing when they were six years old which is why they draw like six-year-old. But having now been you know and now they're 35 or 55 or 75, it doesn't mean that they have to do 69 years more of drawing to get to a 75-year-old. Because a very fluent artist is like a very fluent speaker of a language. It takes about six to nine months to get very fluent in any language and what we do is instead of going “Okay, you have to practice every day you have to…” You just build this in tiny increments and then that builds a huge amount of confidence.
In fact, the first assignment for the cartooning course is to draw circles just random circle what we call “circly circles”. So it's just it's like a two-year-old could do so you get your first gold star as it were for doing stuff that any two-year-old could do very easily. And you know what? A lot of people struggle on that one, they try to draw a perfect circles and then we have to break that to the point where you go, “I want you to take a crayon with your thumb with your fist or whatever and how you draw it on the wall.” So you have to break those patterns and then very quickly within a few weeks they're drawing Snoopy, within a few weeks they're drawing complex stuff like stuff from Ice Age and they go, “Wait a second, this is what animators do. How am I doing this in five weeks?” So the confidence is what we're working on. We're now working on the skill because they don't have the skill and they don't have the practice. The main thing is they don't have that volume of cartoons in their head. They don't know how the finger goes, how the hand goes, how the legs go and then we get them to another level of practice which is copying.
Now, in almost every age, copying was the way to go about stuff. So Van Gogh, he copied all of Hokusai’s work from Japan. All of the Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, all, they're not sitting there and going, “Oh, what's in my brain?” –No! They have this model in front of them and they're copying and in our age we have confused copying with plagiarism. Like taking credit for somebody else's work but this is not taking credit and this is copying, as a kid you trace. So anyway, to answer the question in a briefer manner, what do you have to really work on when you're teaching people is you have to get their confidence up. Because when you get their confidence up then they use less energy thinking, “Oh, am I doing the wrong thing? Am I doing the, you know, am I a fool?” Because they burn up all of this energy trying to be so smart and you're giving them tasks that don't require so much energy and that boosts the skill level because now they go, “Okay I can do this.”
Leanne: Yeah. I mean because you taught us how to draw the whale as part of the workshop and when you said that “Draw a whale.” and I just draw any whale. Yeah mine looked like a of six-year-old’s whale and then you broke it down and said “Draw a rectangle and do this.” and the confidence I guess of all of us was we thought it was excellent because you broke it down into those layered steps and made it really easy and yeah while all the whale is just a combination of all different strokes.
Sean: Yeah and this is the problem that a lot of facilitators do. So the facilitator is also not in the safe zone. They're also feeling like they're being judged, right? So they're always in that safe zone themselves and so they try to be smarter than the audience and that kind of comes across. The audience figures it out that you're smarter, you're standing there on this pedestal as it were. So when you bring the audience, so often a client will tell you, “Oh, it's so easy for you to do that.” So now if you go, “Okay, wait a second, how do we get rid of this objection? It's so easy for you to do that and how do we get you to do it? Now you go, “Wow! If I can do this, what else can I do?” All the time you're working between these factors of: “How am I going to increase their confidence? How are they going to feel more safe? How are they going to use less energy?” Puff! We get skill. So skill is really…What people think, skill is “I'll just practice and practice.” but practice, it gets you there but it takes very long.
Leanne: Yeah. Would you say it's like a transfer of confidence?
Sean: The first thing is, it's a factor of energy so if it takes you a long time or it's a complex thing to do then you're going to use up a lot of energy and if you lose up a lot of energy, you lose confidence and then you never acquire the skill.
Essentially it's an equation, which is an equation is “this plus this equals to this”, right? So energy plus confidence is equal to skill. That's what it is! It's not “I will practice, practice, practice, practice and get skilled.” No! If you have continuously difficult tasks like “Okay, now go build a computer. Okay, now go destroy the building.” It’s like “This is really hard!” But if you say “Okay, go get me a glass of water.” Then you say, “Okay, go and make some noodles.” as in you know, the two-minute noodles. You can accomplish all of those things and now this is again you go back to a 10-year-old and the 10-year-old goes, “I'm so smart. I brought water today. You know at home I don't get to bring water but in school I did bring water today.” - Okay fine! So now they're excited about that activity because it requires a little energy and then you can say “Okay now we're going to chop onions with a chef's knife.” right? And you go “How am I going to give a nine-year-old to chop onions with a chef's knife.”
This is all the task of energy. The reason why people grow up and go “I can't cook. I can't draw.” it's because the first time they're given a recipe, it's like, “Okay, here are 30 ingredients go make a great Indian dish.” Sure! I mean it doesn't work like that.
So the facilitation process is the same thing which is if you give me tiny increments I don't have to burn up so much energy to learn it. I don't have to burn up so much energy to wonder if I'm a fool or whatever and I know that you're not trying to show off as a facilitator. So now because I have that energy, I can put it to use and gain more confidence and then as I gain more confidence I get more skill and in that whole formula you have all these brakes so you're like, you're confused you speak with someone else, you speak to the presenter. You have space to get rid of all the objections and the problems and stuff which otherwise it's like, “Ah I got stuck at five, at 10:30 and now it's 12 o'clock and now it's 2 o'clock.” and you know the biggest problem is that clients will not stop you, they will say, “I'm sure, he'll cover this on Day 2.”
Leanne: Yes.
Sean: And you never covered that on Day 2 because you have no idea that they have that problem and they're waiting for Day 2 by which point they're completely confused. So there are all of this and I'm not saying our system is perfect. In fact, we have to keep tweaking it for this very reason which is we want people to have that skill and they still have all of these obstructions that they put in their way and so we have to keep tweaking that, it's just how it is.
Leanne: Yeah, so you're actually writing a book on talent, aren’t you?
Sean: Yes.
Leanne: I know you've been talking about it for a while but I think you're getting momentum which is really great.
Sean: Yeah, we have to pre-sell it. Yeah that’s the only one I’m going to write.
Leanne: Oh, this a great podcast to talk about talent man. This can over-the-line build up momentum even more. So do you believe that you can teach anyone anything? Or do you think the person coming in to learn the skill has to have some degree of motivation to want to learn the skill depending on the complexity of that skill?
Sean: I'll give you an example of my niece, Marsha and I'll give you an example of the other niece Cara. So one was 8 in the other was 13 when we started this exercise. Now both of them were not motivated, as in Cara point-blank told me. We said we're going to have these Friday sessions and both of you can draw and paint like with real watercolours and in real watercolour books and stuff. Cara point-blank at 8 has decided, “I can't draw.” and “Okay, I come to paint because I can just throw colour on the paper.” right? – So, I can't draw. Then we have Marsha and Marsha is like “Okay, I'll do whatever you want but swimming, I rated it as a ten and painting or drawing is five.” So there's really no motivation on the part of both of these kids and what we decided was “Look! It's not about the content, it's about the energy.” and so we got them there and we give them Cola and they have you know they dance, they run around, they eat chips, they listen to music and stuff and in the last half an hour that's when they're drawing and painting.
Leanne: Ah.
Sean: If you see their work, you will be astounded. So what's really driving their stuff is first of all, its “Oh, this is so much fun!” So they would put up with the pain of drawing because 70% of it is fun. So okay, I'll humour you. But what happens is in the process that we teach them in tiny increments so it's like “Let's draw a snowman today.” or “Tomorrow, let's draw something.” We're starting to build it up and then you only figure out what it is right at the end, right? So it's still all this fun, fun, fun, fun and their drawings are superb. So now Marsha looks at her paintings and goes “Wow, that's so good.” and she's a teenager and you know pretty much like a teenager looks in front of a mirror and goes “Oh, I look so great.” or whatever they spend time in front of the mirror. Marsha does that with her paintings and Cara's like “What are you looking at your painting for so long?”
But Cara, if her parents say “Oh, do you want to go for painting class?” and she's like “Yeah.” and what she did was she said “I have these photos on my iPad.” and I let her draw on the iPad as well and she said “Where's my work?” because she did like three or four drawings and I said it's in this folder and she says “That folders called I can’t draw.” and I said “Yeah, because you said you couldn't draw so I put them in the ‘I can’t draw’ folder and she said “But that was two months ago.” So this is the level, this is how you start to get into this factor of talent which is you have to understand what causes people to be motivated in the first place and it's not your stupid bullet points, it's not your content, it's not all of that stuff. They are motivated by fun, if you want to teach spelling get the kids out on the playground and you say, “How do we spell appetizer? You’re A, your P, your P, your E.” and then move them around and then you say ,“Okay, now can we break up appetizer, so you’re the letter T, right? so you go and find other kids and you make a letter so you make a letter like taser, T, A, S, E, R or a sitter and now the kids are running around they're learning spellings but they're having fun. If you say “Tomorrow, who wants to learn spellings?” Well, everyone is like, “Yay, spelling time, what is wrong with this school?”
Leanne: That sounds really fun.
Sean: I know but that's the whole point. The point is that if I'm having fun, I'm not burning up energy. If I'm not burning up energy, I'm getting confident and I know that I'm learning. It's not like I'm saying “Oh, I'm just having fun I'm not learning anything.” So it’s a fun designed in a way that gets people to understand or to learn it. That builds the confidence all the time and then that leads to skill, well that's how we do it.
Leanne: Yeah, so that's how you do it and that's something that you've refined say over the last what 15 to 20 years, so it didn't start out this way?
Sean: Yep.
Leanne: I'd love to hear about a time where, was there a time that you can think, reflect on where things didn't go so well in a workshop or some of your Peterson's participants were still scratching their heads afterwards? Like we're going back quite a few years, I'd imagine and then when you started to think, “Hey, I actually really need to start thinking about how I deliver this now.” or have you always been this good as a teacher?
Sean: No one's, I mean, one of the things that we do is we always ask for feedback like not praise. We interview everyone for testimonials that's for sure but we also ask for specific feedback. So when I left Singapore after your workshop, I had like 25 points. 25 things that I had to fix from that workshop to the next workshop.
Leanne: Really? 25?
Sean: Yes, I can send you the list.
Leanne: Okay.
Sean: And you know, you thought, “Oh, that was a pretty good workshop.” but there are 25 and then the Brussels workshop, there are 25 and then when we do the same workshop. So we've been doing the article writing course for instance online since 2006 and at the end of the course people are expected to write a thousand words on what was wrong with the course. So now, say let's say 250 people have written what was wrong with the course, we have 250,000 words of feedback. This is how you fix things. It's not helpful, you need a stiff drink at the end of the day because they all sound very ungrateful.
Leanne: Yes. So you need to get yourself into a safe space before you rave in. Wow! 250,000 words.
Sean: Yeah but the good thing is what we do is we have that mix. So we have, “Okay, you give us your feedback, what you can…?” and it's not just feedback is like, “What do you suggest? How do we go about it?” and I have this conversation with them. “How do we fix it? What do we do? But what if I have this problem?” and then the clients come up with the solution.
The next stage is the testimonials where they talk about how much. So the client looks at feedback as, “Look. I really am giving you feedback not because I hate you but because I love your stuff and I want to see.” So they're trying to fix something that they see is broken. But you see it as, “Oh goodness, I gave everything and they want all of this more.” So that is a definite problem, you have to get yourself into loving feedback and if you can't do that, then do the feedback first and the very next thing you do is the testimonials. Because the energy that comes from the testimonial will kind of reduce the impact or the brutality of that feedback.
The problems that we've had in the past have really stemmed from me getting exhausted. So when I used to do any workshops or presentations before, I had to literally rest for a week. And I thought “Why am I having to rest for a week? I already know this stuff, I'm so exhausted. These guys must be really exhausted.” So started to think about this whole topic about what people want and it's to do with marketing rather than, because people, they say one thing and then they mean something else but it's not like they know what they mean. A good example of this is Weight Watchers and if you say, “What is Weight Watchers slogan?” Well, when they started out it was eat all the food you want and you think, “That doesn't make any sense?”
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yes, it does! It makes perfect sense. The people that get in trouble and go to Weight Watchers are people who eat all the food they want.
Leanne: Yes.
Sean: The people who don't have the problem don't have to go to Weight Watchers. So Weight Watchers is effectively saying is, “You can eat all the food you want, we'll show you how to eat it.” right?
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: So that's the one factor, that is. I can't express that, I can't express that I want to eat everything in sight. I can't express that, I don't want to admit that. But when I see the slogan, I just go “Oh yeah, that's the right place.” So we had to look at our workshops and go “What do people really want?” and the answer is they want to have fun. Whether you look at a corporate event or you look at a small business event or any event. Everybody who comes there says, “I want to have fun.” So then you know you speak to your partner, you speak to your accountant and they say, “You're going to a three day workshop, you're going to spend all this money what are you going to do?” and you go, “I'm going to have fun!” No! That's not going to work, it's not going to work for you, it’s not going to work for them, and they aren't fun. You can have fun here, why spending all this money? So I can't admit that to myself but that doesn't mean as a facilitator that you can't teach while letting them have a blast.
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: That's what I'm finding. I find the most effective facilitators are the ones that bring in the most fun and then learning is kind of like the side effect of having a great time.
Sean: Yes and the worst facilitators always said at the start they say, “Okay, are you guys ready to have fun?” and then you sit through three days of complete agony.
Leanne: It's like, yeah my husband says if he meets anyone that ever says that introduces themselves as easy going but you've got to watch out!
Sean: Yeah, it's overcompensation.
Leanne: It is overcompensation.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: So what is some advice that you could give to people that are starting their journey in facilitating and leading workshops in their own context? What would you tell them Sean?
Sean: Well, I think the main thing is that they have to get very comfortable with themselves and that's quite a journey. It's got nothing to do with the audience, it's got everything to do with how much authority you have in that space. And so if you look at say Photoshop, well, no one has the authority in everything in Photoshop but maybe in masking and then maybe in the sub subset of masking. So what you want to do is you want to be comfortable, you feel like you're in a safe space and any questions that come within that space you can talk about it.
Then the second thing that you want to do is you want to take that little subset or sub subset and then expand that so that say, you could cover that material I don't know half a day. Well, you don't have to go for three days, you have to be really confident to take a half day material for three days but let's say you said, “Okay, we'll do this in one day or one and a half days.” Well, now what you have to do is you have to go, “Okay, I have to explain in one third of the space. I have to get them to work in half one third of the space and then I have to get them to build exercises or do something like that in one third of the space.” and then the clients go, “Yeah. So I learnt it, I practiced it, I made mistakes and I fixed it.” and now you have one and a half days. When you get more proficient at it, well, now you can go “Okay, we've got three days I've got more examples for you. I've got more activity for you.” and I don't feel any fear that our tea break is going for 45 minutes.
Leanne: Yeah. That's a black belt status for facilitators being that comfortable and confident to do that.
Sean: Right. Because you also have to know like when we went to Brussels for instance. The stuff that you guys covered in the first day, they hadn't covered in the first day but they were a much larger group and it seems like, “Oh damn, I haven't covered. I'm going to get into trouble.” And you have to be I think as a facilitator, you have to be comfortable in your own skin. So you have to be comfortable that you're going to goof up 50 to 60 percent of your early days before you start getting to do the comfort level. But breaking it up is always a good way because once you're confident then you don't have to overcompensate and you don't have to be “I'm the boss here and you're just minions.”
Leanne: Yeah, that's right and just “Respect me because I'm the one that's standing up in front of the room.” It's actually the respects coming from what you're giving them in terms of the skill and your authority.
Sean: The best way to do that is to get them to tell you what you've already told them and if they can do that, well, now you've given them slides.
Leanne: Yeah. That's an excellent point to finish on. Sean, thank you so much for your time and I know that you're known as “the online marketing” kind of Guru. We've spoken about a topic though that I think you're going to grow through in terms of bringing out your book and you're going to be another expert on talent as well. So you've got three hats. Yeah, I talked about your Singapore workshop in a previous podcast and told everyone I'd bring you one so I'm sure they're all looking forward to this. Where can people find you if they want to sort of follow up and see what else that you do?
Sean: Well, we're at PsychoTactics, I don't know if you can spell it but Google can so look up PsychoTactics and that PsychoTactics outcome, that's where we are.
Leanne: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sean. It’s been great having you on the show.
Sean: You're welcome.
Episode 20: Turn up early and read the room with Tyson Young
Tyson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, a digital application that allows your mechanic to provide you with your cars visual service history. In this episode, we talk about using humour in your deliver, adapting to your audience and using different tools and strategies to be a better facilitator. Tyson provides practical tips on calming those nerves before a big presentation and also shares a neat challenge he's been pursuing for the last 400+ days!
Tyson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, a digital application that allows your mechanic to provide you with your cars visual service history. In this episode, we talk about using humour in your deliver, adapting to your audience and using different tools and strategies to be a better facilitator. Tyson provides practical tips on calming those nerves before a big presentation and also shares a neat challenge he's been pursuing for the last 400+ days!
What you'll learn in this episode:
What Tyson learned from his first pitch
Things you should avoid right before a presentation
Why it’s important to read and understand your audience prior talking to them
Tools and strategies Tyson uses
Why Tyson is mindful of time keeping and respecting people’s time
Advice for a first-time facilitator
Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Reach out to Tyson on LinkedIn.
About our guest
Tyson is not only the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, he is an accomplished MC, speaker and facilitator who incorporates humour into his presentations and adapts his style by effectively reading his audience.
In his teens, Tyson joined the Army Reserve, he then graduated from the Queensland University of Technology, where he studied business and creative industries, advertising and communication design. Tyson claims that each opportunity leads to the next.
His start-up, Carisma is on a mission to become the leading authority in a new, transparent automotive industry. This application allows you to see exactly where your hard-earned dollars are going.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotes of the episode:
"Turn up early and read the room, walk the stage, do whatever you can to feel comfortable in the environment. A big part of that for me is actually speaking with the audience".
"People have this misconception that if it's corporate, it's like, 'Oh, it has to be serious'. At the end of the day, people are still people. People still want to laugh and engage with you".
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator transcript with Tyson Young.
Episode 19: Creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun" with Dana the Trainer
In today's episode I talk to Dana the Trainer. Dana promises bright ideas and electric training, and likes to do things a little differently in her training environment. Her philosophy is really about ensuring that people learn the skills they need to learn, while having a really great time.
In today's episode I talk to Dana the Trainer. Dana promises bright ideas and electric training, and likes to do things a little differently in her training environment. Her philosophy is really about ensuring that people learn the skills they need to learn, while having a really great time.
In the show you’ll hear about how she prepares for her workshops and how she creates a fun training environment. Listen in to her response when I ask her to reflect on a time where things didn’t go so well in one of her workshops and what she learnt from that experience.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Ways to make facilitation more fun, colourful and engaging
How to balance or lift your energy levels when required
What to do when things don't go to plan (hint: prevention is better than cure)
How to create content for new workshops
Key skills that take you from being just a normal training facilitator to being a next level one
Facilitation tips for first-time facilitators
About our guest
Dana James-Edwards is a dynamic professional in Corporate Training, Coaching, & Development. She provides technical and professional training with colour and enthusiasm, creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun.” She develops training that moves from the practical to the theoretical — translating to learners’ day-to-day lives, and making business processes more effective and productive to propel work environments that are healthy and motivating.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Like this show?
Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally.
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode!
Click here to tweet your thanks to Dana.
Quotes of the show:
"There are so many things that you can do to bring learning, to bring a classroom alive to make things not so painful for people".
Even when you know the content and you're familiar with it, you’re still thinking, 'Who's going to be there tomorrow?', 'What if this exercise doesn't work?', 'What do I have as a backup for this?', 'Did I pack this thing?'
'You cannot be rigid, sticking to your lesson plan. The classroom is a place of surprise. The best facilitators pull the learning out of what is happening in the room, instead of sticking to the script'.
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Dana the Trainer.
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Dana the Trainer (Episode 19)
Here's the transcript with Dana the Trainer, released on 18 June 2018.
Leanne: Our guest today promises bright ideas and electric training. Whether it’s technical or professional skills you need she brings her brand- that is of energy, passion and enthusiasm to every session. She remains convinced that learning can be made engaging, colourful and even fun. And it's her life's mission to make that true. Step away from sameness and say goodbye to generic courses, she's on the line in London. Welcome to the show Dana James-Edwards otherwise known as Dana the Trainer.
Dana: Hello, thanks for having me.
Leanne: It's a pleasure to have you on the show. I really wanted to just jump right in and talk about an excerpt I read on your website which I loved and probably the reason why I invited you on the show and it's this:
“One day, there was a call for internal facilitators for technical courses and I answered the call. The second I held my first box of scented markers and stood in front of a blank flipchart I fell in love.”
That’s just so beautiful. Can you tell us about that moment what was made you fall in love with facilitation?
Dana: So, I had actually done some facilitation before but very briefly like my first job out of university and then got swept up in other things so when I was offered the opportunity after working in sort of a very technical and technology focused background for several years. It was almost like I had forgotten that I loved this and the second that I got back in front of there again I felt at home. You know how people feel nervous in front of a classroom I didn't feel that I felt like “Oh my God, this is amazing when can I do it again and I also really love scented markers, it’s true I love them!
Leanne: Wait, what type do you use? Do you use the Mr. Sketch scented markers and are they are over in the UK?
Dana: I have loads of Mr. Sketch but to be honest these days I'm going for the environmentally conscious option and using Neulands the refillable ones. Yeah, but they're not as fun as the scented one so I do keep those for the learners in the classroom.
Leanne: It is funny, the scented markers for whatever kind of response you get from people but just want to try every colour and sniff the piece of paper.
Dana: All the time! It's like they forget they're grownups and they go straight back into being kids and I love it!
Leanne: A lot of people ask me how I find my guess and it's all through different things. It could be recommendations or books that I've read but you're the first person I've interviewed who I found off Instagram. Yeah, that’s how I found you I was looking through all the hashtags like hashtag learning and development, hashtag whatever public speaking. I don't know what the tag was but something about that your brand online really enticed me because it was full of colour and this is why I was talking about Sketch markers and the scents and everything and you just have that really fun brand so I'm wondering…
Dana: …My social media strategies are working!
Leanne: And you got that recorded, so you know I'm not making it up. It is just straight there absolutely. So there's only a couple weeks ago, I was like, “Who is this Dana the Trainer?” I was curious! So tell us a bit about your brand and what is it about the energy and how do you bring that into a classroom kind of setting?
Dana: So, that really is my brand, it's about energy, and it’s about passion. I feel especially in a technical setting lots of times people come in and they're dreading the day or the two days they think it's going to be really boring they're picturing like old school learning where you get a big fat manual and you have to learn off all of this theory or there's an exam some of the courses I do have an exam at the end and you can see people coming in they're already stressed out and you haven't even started and I just think “Gosh it doesn't have to be this way!” I think that's the point and really it doesn't. There are so many things that you can do to bring learning, to bring a classroom alive to make things not be so painful for people. I think that is my aim and I'm so glad that that comes across I love colour, I love things that are engaging, I love drawing people in and if you're on a training course where you're just looking at a manual for two days and it's really just intense and intensive. You want learning for the exam, I don't want people to learn for the exam or for the now I want them to actually live with stuff that they'll remember for a long time, how do you do that by making things memorable and that means by mixing things up by doing things in a different way.
Leanne: Fantastic! This is for the audience, what type of courses do you run more of the technical course as well, what of those professional skills that you can also deliver?
Dana: Okay, so you know everyone says to specialise and when I was starting out I had lots of advice which is like, you need to pick a specialism, you need to pick either soft skills or pick a soft skill that you're really good at or pick technical skills. I can't do that, I spent so much of my life working in a technical arena those are skills that I have and I don't want to lose and then at the same time when I became a facilitator for Big4, all of the soft skills courses are wrapped up into that I kind of see them going hand in hand. So from a technical perspective, I facilitate things that I learned how to do in my life when I was technical so Project management, Agile, Software Testing, right, that's my background that's the kind of thing that I do from a technical perspective but you cannot really do all of those things unless you know how to talk to people, how to interact with them or how to communicate. They go together, right? Okay, so I don't want to choose, right? and I do both and I think it's great because I never get bored there's always stuff that's interesting me and pulling me and I'm sorry but I don't want to do the one thing okay I want to do many things!
Leanne: You can have everything they're not mutually exclusive and I like that!
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah, especially when you're talking about things like Project Management and Agile and you obviously some of your audience will be technically focused people and it would be very tempting to try and like meld in without style but I love that you're exploring and saying “No! We can make this one, we don't have to be serious”.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah, so I'd love to hear a bit about, I mean you've got this. I can tell over our Skype conversation a very bubbly outgoing personality. Growing up, were you always this way where you're always very confident in front of a classroom?
Dana: So I was a bookworm, my sister makes fun of me. When I was in Secondary School I was a library prefect. I was that quiet. On a lunchtime, I'd like to go to the library and read so I was of hot about books, about reading, I wasn't like an outdoor “Miss Popularity” kind of person. However, I have to say I was really good at debate so like from sixth form there were debate and public speaking competitions and I really excel there. I'm a bubbly person but I can't actually pinpoint maybe when this all happened, maybe it's in University when I was a little bit more free I'm not sure but if I look back through a childhood I was definitely a lot quieter and maybe more reserved, very studious and one of those exam people who loved exams as an achievement and that kind of thing so maybe it was that I was wrapped up in all of that achievement at the time and then “Dana the Trainer”, this bubbly person came a little bit later.
Leanne: Yeah I love how you talked about Dana the Trainer as a kind of another person or personality. I was looking at your website and it's again the first website I've seen where you have your own cartoon series. I mean, that's incredible! How did you get that idea? Where did that come from?
Dana: That was, what I like to call a “shower thought”. So my best ideas come to me when I’m in the shower and I thought, they always do right?
Leanne: Like always. Yeah!
Dana: I thought how fun would it be to have this and I spent a long time looking for graphic designers, etc. to be able to help me with the idea and it's just something unique and fun that you don't see very often. It just popped into my head and I did it.
Leanne: I think I was looking through a cartoon series and the ones that really well, the one that really popped out for me because it's something that I do as well is one where you're in bed and it's like 9 o'clock in the evening and it's the night before a workshop and I really need a good night's sleep because I need to be on my game tomorrow and then three till about 12:30 in the morning you're still thinking about how the session go and who's in the room.
Dana: That is my life in a cartoon.
Leanne: Yeah, that's exactly what I do and I thought I was probably, maybe I may be thinking things too much and maybe like the more that I do this the easier it will get but I find that I'm still over preparing. Is that what you're finding as well, you're still kind of overthinking it because you want it to be great?
Dana: You do. This is yourself, it's you're brand, you've invested, you want things to go really well and I did tell myself at the beginning, you know what, “the more practice you have, this is going to be great, you'll be going to sleep earlier” but still even when you know the content and you're familiar with it. You're still thinking about “Who's going to be there tomorrow? What if this exercise doesn't work? What do I have as a backup for this? Did I pack this thing? I have a packing list. You just get so wrapped up and everything I think.
Leanne: Yeah, so what kind of things are on your packing list?
Dana: So, it depends on the type of session but I will always have sharpies or Mr. Sketch markers depending on what I’m doing. I always have my trusty speaker, I do love some music in the classroom so I'm a big fan of that. Whatever exercises we are using for the day would be packed in there and that sort of varies between. I love doing paper airplanes at the end of the day to recap key learning points. I always have some coloured paper and I also lately have been super into getting delegates to use pipe cleaners to create their key learning points and so I take some of those with me. I also have something that I called a magical treat bag when groups are really competitive and someone says something really amazing in the session or they win a game or an activity or something it's always good to have a reward so I have this massive bag of Kathy that I take everywhere with me so that learners can pull from the bag also people that are feeling a little bit low-energy they can have some treats and stuff in the classroom. For those of you who are listening and saying “Oh my God that's super not healthy!” It doesn't matter, it's one day of training its fine. Yeah that kind of stuff but I'm trying to think is there any. Oh! I always have those kinesthetic learning toys: A. because they're fun and B. because it gives some people something to fiddle with and also when they come into the room it sets the expectation from the outset that things are going to be a little bit different and gives people a bit of a talking point before they even come into the room so I quite like that as well.
Leanne: Yeah, nice!
Dana: Pens, pencils, and notepads everything that's branded and says Dana the Trainer on it is there as well.
Leanne: It's like you were born to do this like your name just rhymed “the Trainer” it's perfect I love.
I really do admire your brand.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: With these, I would like to talk about when people come into your room and they say this environment. So you set it up, you got pens it's very colourful especially for the technical people they aren't expecting it. How then that create that mood?
Dana: That is actually my favourite moment of the day when people start arriving and they're like okay this is totally not what I was expecting especially when it's the first time that I've been to a particular company and you could see it on their faces and so they exclaim and plodded like “This looks fun, this looks colourful.” and I think it sets the tone and the mood for the day but especially for technical courses I love it because no one's really expecting it so it's great.
Leanne: Do you get some people that are a little bit awkward and don't know how to really react to it or get into the kind of being back being a kid and having fun, would that take a bit of time?
Dana: It is rare when that happens usually the opposite happens which is they get super into it and they choose their seat based on the toy that they want to play with most. There might be some people who start off being more reserved but by the first break of the morning especially if the rest of the group is swept up, they are into it as well, so it might take some a little longer but usually by the end of the day they’re embraced.
Leanne: Yeah that's beautiful. So we're talking about the participants entering room at the beginning. How are you feeling about you know fifteen minutes, ten minutes to go to the workshop, what do you do to prepare or you'd already in the room greeting participants? Are you doing your power pose? What is Dana the Trainer do?
Dana: I am in the room and I am greeting the delegates for 10 to 15 minutes before. I am there, I'm talking to people, and I’m reviewing, taking minutes in between to just review what's coming up. I am NOT power posing, the power posing would happen maybe before that 50 minutes when no one is there and I'm going to say something that is completely crazy. [Leanne maybe you want to edit this out after I'm done saying it]. What really gets me hyped up and in the mood right before section is hardcore gangster rap, I love it!
Leanne: I love it too!
Dana: We go to songs. There on my iPod and sometimes I excuse myself to the loo and I just go in there have a little listen if the energy levels are feeling low sometimes I can manage to do it with one side of a headphone just in the classroom but like hike music I love it I have my game face on and ready to go for the day.
Leanne: Yeah, I love that because it's something that I do as well. You know, I've got a mixer sort of rock and a bit of rap and hip-hop and stuff like that so I've created a Spotify playlist called First-Time Facilitator and it's just all my favourite like even some ballads are on there that you can just croon along to in the car put right up because you've got a lot of nervous energy that's flailing around.
Dana: You do it, it has to come out somehow, right?
Leanne: It has to come out, you can't like just go in the boxing ring or anything you just got to unleash it somehow so isn't that nice to know that we're on opposite hemispheres and we both print the same way.
Dana: Aligned!
Leanne: We’re aligned! I want to talk about energy as well so it's very easy I mean, yeah the worst thing sometimes is that you don't get that good night's sleep because you are overthinking in and then it gets to 12:01, I really need to sleep now and but naturally you've got that adrenaline that gets you through in the morning but days you know one, two or three day workshops can be quite exhausting.
Dana: They are!
Leanne: How do you sort of balance the level of energy you're giving out to the participants and how do you make sure that you're in there for the long the long haul?
Dana: So, I saw this question on your lesson I thought, “Oh my God I'm going to answer this and everyone's going to hate me when I say this.”
Leanne: I don't think so.
Dana: I wake up this way!
Leanne: Tell us.
Dana: I know. What's really interesting is when I met my now husband, there was one day when I came home and he was like “We need to talk.” and I was like “Oh my goodness he's going to break up with me.” but actually the talk was you wake up in the morning and it's like you open your eyes and in that one second you go from zero to a hundred and I don’t want to like that can you please stop being so high energy in the morning and so we've worked out a strategy where I don't talk to him for the first thirty minutes of every day cause he's not a morning person but I just naturally have high reserves of energy and I always find that after the first day of a workshop I can sleep better so like all that angst and staying up until 12:30 a.m. by the end of the first day: A. you’re exhausted and B. you've eliminated all of those things that you were really worried about the night before the first workshop, so getting a good night's rest on the first night kind of sets you up for the remaining days, I think.
Leanne: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. It's because it's more about, it's not even about your preparation or your content or anything like that, it's more about how I anticipate what's going on.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: And by known audience, knowing the dynamic on that first day you can rest easier plus absolutely you've been on your feet all day, you've been using your voice, yeah you're pretty naked.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Okay, so I'd like to on that note of preparing for the unexpected. Have you ever had a time where things didn't go to plan in one of your training sessions and could you share that story?
Dana: Of course my favourite one is where I walked into a room being me ready to start the day. So the first you know that 15 minutes when everyone's coming in started greeting people and realising that they were super grouchy like unhappy, angry even is what I would say and then listening to the discussion in the room. I realised, okay they think that this training session is some kind of punishment for an incident that had happened in the company now I was aware that something had happened but maybe not aware that people were not looking forward to the training and actually were quite resentful that the session had been put on.
So I walked into a room of 15 people mean-mugging being really angry at me with lots on their chest to get off before I even had a chance to say Good morning, I had a question from the room which was “Do you think it's fair that we have to sit in this session while senior leadership isn't there?” I didn't even get to say “Hi, I'm Dana the Trainer” and there was just this wall of anger and I realised, okay people are not going to be able to take in anything or learn anything in the session unless we get some of this emotion out so the time that I would have used for intros I had to modify that to be a kind of a “let's get it out, bring it home” kind of session so that we could talk about what precipitated the session and how they were feeling etc. so that we could get into the learning. I always think about that session because actually it has changed the way that I prepare with clients as part of the planning process now I have added in a question which goes something like “How are the learners is feeling about this session? Are they looking forward to it? Are they interested?” like I asked even more questions that I normally would to get all the background because for that scenario I thought I had asked all of the relevant and pertinent questions so I did know that something had happened that precipitated the learning but I don't think I had grasped to what was going to be happening in the room and so now I always make sure to dot the I's and cross the T's with that extra question before I go in.
Leanne: Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. That's a great sort of prevention is better than cure. I think I mean, I'm listening to that and I'm sure with some of our listeners that listening going that's probably our worst nightmare, like that you haven't even started and it's already railroaded.
Dana: It was pretty bad.
Leanne: Yeah, but I also love that you've created this question that can just cover that off when you're working with clients.
Dana: I need to know in advance, I mean if you know that's what you're going into, you can at least be a little bit more prepared. When it's a shock those are the kinds of things that keep you up until 12:50 in the morning what if it's going to happen or not.
Leanne: It's a good survival story, absolutely!
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: So, when you're talking to clients so you got this question, you know what the learners thinking about this training and that's a really great question. What if you get a client that comes to you and they're asking you to deliver a session that you don't have the content on ready. It's something that's a bit new, you know that you can deliver it. How do you approach that process?
Dana: So firstly, I want as much information from the client as humanly possible, right? Why are they running the session and why right now? What’s precipitated this? What are the learning outcomes they want? What are the behaviours and attitudes they want to see changed? If this learning intervention was successful how would they know it was successful so I really want to be clear with them on what it is that they're trying to get out of the session.
Now, I'm not one of those people who can block and say “Okay today, I'm going to spend thirty minutes on the session.” I'm more of an “it needs to marinate” girl, so I'm thinking about it and it's in my mind all the time. I'm thinking about it in the shower, I go for a walk. I'm thinking about it I get some of my best ideas outdoors. I'm constantly jotting things down. I have an app when things come to my mind that I might want to use and I want to give myself some time to come up with my own ideas before I jump into any research because for me research can skew you and kind of limit your own ideas so I want to have the bulk of my own ideas first before I go into any research and see what's out there but I'm also a big fan of utilising my Personal Learning Network so other facilitators who I know I want to reach out to them find out if they've done something similar, what kinds of things they've done in the space. I have a group of people or I've come up through the business with we're always happy to bounce ideas off of each other if I was really struggling and I needed a design assistant can also draw from that network as well to help me.
And another thing, I do which I think that people maybe don't use so much is search for the hashtag on social media and see what comes up. Why do people not do this right because people are posting so much exciting content out there and if you just type into Google you will probably never find it but if you type into Instagram or to Twitter that particular hashtag sometimes really amazing stuff comes up that can really help you with your idea generation and with the design process.
Leanne: Yeah, I mean that's how I found you but also I found some really cool Icebreakers on YouTube.
Dana: Oh my gosh, Youtube!
Leanne: Yeah, you save a bit of time like in here, you lost, you know what YouTube's like, you're looking at Icebreakers and then you're looking at like climbing Mount Everest.
Dana: And cats, there’s always cats.
Leanne: Yeah there's always cats. Hey, what app do you use to capture all of your ideas?
Dana: So, I'm a Trello girl. I do love Trello and I just like taking, it helps me keep myself on track but then it just gives me somewhere to record things if I'm in a pinch as well just the Notes app, it's good for a brain dump, you can put as many things in there but I almost live my life powered by Trello.
Leanne: Yeah and for those listening that don't know what Trello is we'll link to those in the show notes. Trello is an amazing like project tool but it's very visual it's like a visual board where you, it's kind of like virtual post-it notes almost.
Dana: Exactly and I love post-it notes in real life but being able to have them wherever I go because I travel a lot is very useful and I think that's my project management I have a background coming to the floor as well because it's a tool that we used in work that I also use for myself as well.
Leanne: Yeah and that's right you can use it. You don't have to use it only for work, I was booking up an upcoming holiday and all those ideas about what to do when in hotels and activities and just Trelloed it!
Dana: That's so true, one of my friends so I would quite closely with, did whole wedding on Trello. It was amazing!
Leanne: Well, that’s not simple. I can imagine they would be in so many different columns and deadlines.
Dana: It was next level.
Leanne: She should sell that template, I think it could be very popular. I'm interested in knowing so now you know you've worked in the one, the Big4 consulting firm and now you're a facilitator. What do you think are the key skills of not only a good facilitator but a next level facilitator? What do you think that the skills are of someone the ones to attain that kind of status?
Dana: So I think preparedness is important, right? There is a lot of work that maybe people don't see that goes into being an excellent facilitator but in the same breath of that you have to be prepared to be flexible. Like you cannot be rigid, sticking to your lesson plan or your time plan. The classroom is a place of surprise and I think the best facilitators can pull the learning out of what is happening in the room instead of sticking really strictly to a script. Sometimes you think something's going to be a big aha moment but actually the group is picking up on something else and it's having a bit of discussion around it. I think an excellent facilitator knows to let that discussion go especially if it's useful for the group, knows how to ask pertinent questions, knows how to pivot in the moment to get the best that they can out of the learners who they're with and for them so that you're still getting the learning objectives across but being prepared to do it maybe in a different way than the way that you plan. I think that is one of the skill that takes you from being just a normal training facilitator to being an amazing trainer facilitator.
Leanne: And it really does take a lot of your active listening, a lot of seeing what's going on in the room, you never really relaxed.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah you always sort of like that night out just watching what's going on, even more doing great learning activities like what I need to observe out of these.
Dana: You’re frustrated, you wanted to hear all the groups. Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah. I want to hover but I don't want to seem like I'm listening in and it's just constant. I think there's a lot of overthinking and I think maybe over experienced you do to develop those like having at numerous things in your back pocket that you can go through but I think...
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah, that's what sort of as a first-time facilitator, the only way that you can get better at it is just by continuing to do it.
Dana: Practice!
Leanne: That's right. Now, do you have a go-to icebreaker like do favourite thing that energises people that gets everyone in the room like really…
Dana: So it depends, right? Now, if it's a public course where people don't know each other I am very conscious that the first few moments of the day can be really intimidating especially for people who maybe aren't as extroverted as the rest of the people in the group so I always about Icebreakers. I don't want to push it too far but I still want people to be able to have fun and embrace the moment.
So in a mixed group what I like to do is start off with some one-on-ones like greet as many people in the room as you can in ten minutes but I would include a fun question that you have to ask each person that you miss or a way that you have to start off greeting each person like top of the morning to you and isn't it a wonderful day good says you have to say before you get into the introduction and then a silly question that you have to ask them as part of the greeting. I think things that start off maybe a bit more one-on-one or small group instead of “Please stand and introduce yourself and say some quickly facts to the room!” puts a lot less pressure on people and gives them a bit of a chance to relaxed. So for me that is something that I'm conscious about I get that you have limited time and it's easier for everyone to stand and just introduce themselves but I guarantee there is a person or people sitting there thinking “Oh God, please no, not me.” And I don’t want that kind. I avoid that.
Leanne: Oh absolutely. I mean yeah, I mean I'm sort of, it's funny because I'm one of those people. I am a niche extrovert. I get up in front of workshops, I do lots of speeches and things like that but even in that scenario where you’re in a new group and it's going around one by one. I'm not even listening what the other people are saying.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: So I'm thinking what am I going to say in my introduction and so you don't really in the moment yourself because you just want everyone's worried about their own introduction.
Dana: Exactly and you miss it, so I love more one-on-one small group stuff where you really get a chance to get to know the people who you're going to be learning with and more involved and I would totally advocate that for anyone who is listening.
Leanne: Yes me too, absolutely! Now, before we hit the record button on this we're talking about you know me reaching out to you and you saying yes and then that got us on to the topic of the themes for our year and I think it's nice to share something like that with our audience. So what is your theme for the year and why did you decide to choose that?
Dana: My theme for this year is say YES, sometimes opportunities are fall into my lap and I think “Oh no, I’m not sure about this.” You know there's that element of self-doubt still even though I am an experienced facilitator. At the end of last year, I went to a session that was helping us reflect on the year that had gone by and we created you know our vision for our new year and something that really popped out of me was this idea of saying yes and embracing things and seeing where they go and so that really has been what my year has been about so far opportunities and have come into my lap. I have been actively trying to say yes more, you reached out to me, I said yes! And look here we are on a podcast. I've also done another interview already for the year. I'm just saying yes to things, so anyone who's listening and wants to ask me something asked me because chances are this year is the year I'm going to say YES!
Leanne: I love it and again we've completely aligned on this, we love the same music but I am sorry my year this year was the year of action and that's kind of like saying yes but also just taking the most of the opportunities and I think having a kind of theme like that like you said it's very easy for that doubt to creep in that imposter syndrome that person in your head saying “Oh, you're not ready for this” but if you have that theme and it’s your default response, you can just, it doesn't matter because you just say yes and let's get on with it.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Yeah I am anyone that does have that kind of doubt within themselves it's completely normal I think we're all walking around all of us with a bit of self-doubt having a default theme like that definitely recommend.
Dana: I agree completely.
Leanne: Yeah, now Dana, is there any other advice that you could offer to our first-time facilitators that are listening in?
Dana: So the first thing is get out there as much as you can, say yes, okay? So the only way to become better at the skills of facilitation is to actually facilitate. If you're feeling nervous maybe find someone that you can buddy up with to deliver sessions always a good idea but really you want to be spending as much time as possible actually facilitating because that's how you get back to is the first thing. The second thing is don't be afraid to borrow from other facilitators who you think are awesome. What I like to do is attend training sessions myself but I like to do it incognito. I don't want to put any pressure on the facilitators facilitating until the very end. I'm there to learn what the course is about but I also find that I always pick up some facilitation tips that I can add to my arsenal as I watch other facilitators do what they do.
So don't be afraid to attend some training courses yourself, it’s always great. Go to Meetups, write anything where you can see other facilitators, other facilitators in action is great and then try and incorporate some of those things into the stuff that you do on a day to day basis.
Leanne: That's a brilliant advice and I especially agree with your role modelling. I'm actually doing, I'm in a two-day workshop at the moment as a participant and I've been picking up on so much that I can learn and just writing it down even little simple activities.
Dana: Exactly!
Leanne: Making notes, I need to get Trello on my phone actually just so because I've got like 10 different notepads at the moment. Actually, I'm getting the new iPad so I'll be carrying that with me everywhere and also role modelling. I think after this conversation a lot of people will probably wish there are in London attending one of your workshops because you can tell, you're just so passionate about this you really invest that time and to make it an energetic and fun experience and I think we all appreciate that all of us would have been to corporate sessions or technical training. We are a bit bored of the old approach of a manual and just the status quo so its love to it's great to see someone challenging that. So finally, Dana where can people find you?
Dana: Where can they find me? Well, on social media is a great place to be able to find me. My website as well www.danathetrainer.com and from there you link to all of my social media. Don't be afraid to drop me an email, to reach out, I love connecting with people like I said I'm always on there as well searching those hashtags. I think it's great to build a network especially of people who are facilitators as well so please do find me and I'm on email as well dana@danathetrainer.com you can't forget that it's really easy to remember!
Leanne: It's very sticky and I definitely suggest that you follow Dana especially because of all the colourful moments it'll just colour up your social media feed. So thank you so much for being on the show, I can't wait to share this episode with our listeners. I think you've provided some really practical advice but also you know some aspiration on how we can lift our energy levels. I wish we had your energy but other things that we can do on the room to make that fun for everyone so Thank You Dana!
Dana: Thank you so much for having me. I was so nervous but this was actually so much fun just like a conversation with a friend so it's been great thank you so much I am thrilled that I said yes!
Leanne: I'm thrilled that you said too. Chat soon!
Episode 18: Help! Suggestions needed for facilitating a two hour workshop. Listener Q&A
In today’s episode I respond to a listener’s question - I do these listener Q&A’s from time to time, to give you some practical insight into how I facilitate and approach situations.
In today’s episode I respond to a listener’s question - I do these listener Q&A’s from time to time, to give you some practical insight into how I facilitate and approach situations.
Today’s question is from Joanne Alilovic from 3D HR Legal.
Like me, Jo likes to do things a little bit differently.
In her business she takes her legal knowledge, combines that with her HR skills to help create tailored polices and procedures for individual businesses.
Her question is:
I have a client who wants to throw out their existing human resources manual and start fresh. We are thinking of creating documents such as a Code of Conduct, a performance management policy, complaints procedure etc.
In order to create something that is truly reflective of the workplace and the people who work in it, we decided it would be good to get the staff involved.
So we have scheduled a 2 hour facilitation session to discuss the types of policies and procedures they need, and the content for them.
Do you have any suggestions on how to run this session?
Do you have a question you'd like me to answer on the show?
If you have a question you’d like to send through, either tweet it to me @leannehughes or send me an email – hello@firsttimefacilitator.com.
Resources mentioned on the show
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Episode transcript
Episode 17: The 45 year group facilitation experiment (and how I'm still learning) with Bob Dick
Bob Dick is a change agent and facilitator who has been in the business 45 years. He believes that teachers don't teach, learners learn. In this episode we talk about the difference in process and content, the power of action learning, and how he helps his groups transfer learnings from a workshop, back into the real world.
Bob Dick is a change agent and facilitator who has been in the business 45 years. He believes that teachers don't teach, learners learn. In this episode we talk about the difference in process and content, the power of action learning, and how he helps his groups transfer learnings from a workshop, back into the real world.
Bob also shares his thoughts on how we can teach leaders the facilitation skills that are rapidly becoming a vital skill. The most inspiring part? After being in the game for 45 years he still experiments with his facilitation style and approaches.
What you'll learn in this episode
The difference between content and process and how you can effectively manage a group by looking at the process
How strategically arranging furniture can change your participants' perceptions of the learning environment
Why teachers don't teach, learners learn
Strategies to keep learning and improving as a facilitator
Why Bob doesn't use technology in his workshops
How to deal with conflict within a group
Dealing with your nerves before a workshop
The importance of vulnerability and authenticity
How to turn commitment into action once the workshop is over
About our guest
Bob Dick independent scholar, an educator, facilitator, coach, and change consultant. He has 45 years experience and started an Industrial Psychology for the Department of Labour. He helps people to change their work, learning and life.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Action Research and Action Learning for community and organisational change
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Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally.
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Show transcript
View the full podcast transcript from my conversation with Bob Dick.
Quote of the episode
Bob describes his safety net: "If the process isn’t working, I will drop the content and engage with the participants about why the process isn't working. I'll invite them to join me in figuring out what process will work better for all of us".
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Bob Dick (Episode 17)
Leanne: Our guest today has the longest CV I've ever seen and that's because he has over 45 years experience in helping to make the world a better place. He is an independent scholar, an educator, facilitator coach and change consultant. He uses concepts and processes from action lining, narrative and facilitation to help people, including himself, teams, organizations and communities to improve their work, learning and life. Welcome to the show, Bob Dick.
Bob: Thanks
Leanne: It's great to meet you. I want to hear a bit about yourself and how you wound up 45 years ago entering the field of training and facilitation.
Bob: It was all an accident really, I applied for a position in the department of labor and they invited me instead of that position to apply for the position of industrial psychologist. I hadn't applied for it because I didn't think I was qualified. In three years, I was expected to know everything about industrial democracy and employee participation. I did research in that area, including local case studies of interesting practices. I was expected to spend a couple of days a week reading in that area to be up to date and then the university borrowed me for six months to plug a gap and then that extended and became 21 years. I wanted to take what I had learnt from those three years in the department of labor into the classroom thinking that all I had to do was to invite my classes to have their say in what they wanted to be the syllabus and the processes and that was so different to their expectations that it just made them anxious.
We finished coming up with a collaborative design but it was fairly pedestrian and so I set out to experiment with how to engage people so that they would want to take on more self-management and I didn't think that it was facilitation. It was just trying to be a better educator but really that was the foundation of most of what I now think of today as facilitation.
Leanne: When you approached that group, in the beginning, you said that it was a very different approach, is that because they were used to being in workshops where they were spoken to and it wasn't really participative? Is that what they thought was different about your style?
Bob: This was a fairly traditional psychology programme in one of the sandstone universities and people were used to sitting in lecture theatres in rows where somebody at the front would lecture them often reading out the lectures from a set of notes. What I learnt to do eventually was I'd get into the room early, I'd ask for a room where the furniture was moveable, I'd stark the tables at the back of the room, I'd arrange the chairs in a circle as a way of saying, people when they came into the room, this isn't going to be a lecture you don't know yet what it is but it won't be a lecture.
Leanne: That's really fascinating. Who did you take the lead from in terms of the furniture design and making it a more welcoming environment because back then doesn't sound like it was a very common thing? Is it just some ideas that you came up with one night to make the environment better for learning?
Bob: It didn't happen overnight, it happened over the first two or three or four years that I was at Queen's Uni. In fact, I deliberately stayed away from the literature in adult education and experiential learning at first because I thought that if I found my own way, it would be a better fit for my own style and then I could use the literature to further refine what I was doing.
Leanne: That's really good and that's why I like talking to facilitators from all different backgrounds and industries. Everyone's got something that they do that's a little bit different that works for them but you might be able to resonate with some of our facilitators that think that is a cue that I can pick up and already that furniture design and the environment of the room is important. That leads me on to the question around your website you had a statement, I believe that the term teaching is a misnomer. I assume the teachers don't teach, learners learn. Teachers so-called create an environment in which learning is enabled and encouraged and rewarded. So, how do teachers create this environment?
Bob: That was really what I was experimenting within the first three or four years and every year since then, I keep on fiddling with what I am doing [LAUGHING] and looking for ways of making it more effective, and when things don't work I then change things until they do. But the main thrust of it all the time was that- that saying about teachers don't teach, learners learn, that was my own experience as a learner and it was those educators who did most to engage my curiosities that I learnt the most from and so I wanted to offer the same opportunity to others.
Leanne: I find it fascinating that after 45 years you are still refining what you do. How do you keep learning on the job and what keeps you excited about being in this industry still?
Bob: I would do it for fun if I wasn't doing it for a living. It's a great buzz and if I keep looking for ways of improving that keeps me engaged and in the moment. I notice more of what's going on and so while I am facilitating, I'll work out what I want to say to take the next step. I'll watch the expressions on peoples faces and ask, does it look as if they are taking this in an understanding, if not I can think to myself, well, that wasn't the right way to say that, let me have another go and rephrase it in different words and see if that works better.
Leanne: Yes. It's really is about constantly refining what you doing and then just seeing what the reaction is in the room. Given all the changes with technology as well, have you tried to implement some of that in your teaching method?
Bob: I haven't. I've deliberately tried not to use any technology, I don't use powerpoint.
Leanne: That's great I like that. I like hearing that.
Bob: In the early days I used fancy stuff like those soft koosh balls and things like that and did a lot of play time of activities and then the thought occurred to me, people don't have gear like this is their normal work setting and I'll probably get better learning transfer if I stick with stuff that's pedestrian and day to day for them and rely on the ideas and their engagement to create the excitement. Now I'm not recommending that this is really the way to go, I'm saying that suits my style and what I'm trying to achieve.
Leanne: I have been talking to a facilitator yesterday and I was pitching these innovation problems to some graduates and the questions were very rush there wasn't a lot of information and he said that was deliberate because in the workforce you're not given much time to do anything and you can't sometimes clarify what the question is, what the problem is you're solving. You just need to run with it and solve it in the best way that you can, so I think keeping it really really is important.
Okay. I was looking at one of your facilitator guides, your A- guides which was fantastic, really great resource and you talk about two things that's content and process. Can you explain the difference between the two things? What is content and then what is the process and why is that important for us as facilitators to know?
Bob: Usually, when we are involved in meetings for decision making or problem-solving or we're doing planning or we are in any kind of task-oriented discussion, we pay attention to what goals we want to achieve and what information is relevant to achieving those goals. How we interact, we run on automatic, we don't pay conscious attention to it at all. So, what then calls out fast brain handles all the complexity of the process and our slow brain- our analytical brain, focuses only on the task and the information that's directly relevant to it. As a friend of mine David Natale says, if you're chewing gum, gum is the content, chewing is the process.
Leanne: Oh, I like that. So how then do you get out of that autopilot of focusing on the content and then how do you think, right we need to work on our process because we are not really getting so far? Who does that who should take that initiative to change that focus?
Bob: I would guess that some of the facilitators that you've talked to have talked about the importance of facilitators staying out of the content and merely being a process guide because that seems to be the generally accepted belief and so it's as if the facilitator is responsible for the process because the participants aren't paying attention to it and the participants are left free to pay attention to the content but it seems to me that it's really hard to choose the best process if I'm not also tuned in to what the content is and I'm asking are people exchanging the information that's relevant to the decisions they're trying to make for instance. If not, how can I modify the process so that the relevant information is more likely to be exchanged? Or things like, they're probably not ready yet to move into decision making but they’re starting to talk about that. How can I use a process that will slow them down so that I make sure that all the relevant information is exchanged and understood before we try to do something with it? I need to pay attention to process and content too.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: I think that whatever the facilitation style that a person has, there's some requirement to do that.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: It's not something we do naturally. We tend to focus on one or the other. It's almost as if we have to keep switching quickly between them and remain curious about both so that we stay tuned into both.
Leanne: That can be exhausting, can't it? Because not only are you having to pay attention to the content, you're actively thinking ahead. Thinking where is this going? What strategies will I use now to intervene? It's a really tricky and fine line that whole intervention piece. What kind of things do you use when people mention an example they've moved into decision-making mode really quickly? What steps would you take to reel them back to say, hey we haven't really explored a lot of the solutions or identified what the problem really means?
Bob: If I can address that before the problem happens and that's even better, one of the things I invite people to do early on is I make the point that our task is to reach these outcomes or to achieve this purpose or goal. To do that we have to make some decisions about who will carry this out, who will do what by when. To make good decisions, we have to recall the correct information and we have to share that so that we all understand it because that body of information constitutes the building blocks out of which we construct the decisions.
The decisions then lead us into helping to choose who are the right people to carry those forward into action. I let them know ahead of time that we'll be structuring this in a number of phases. That also makes it easier to intervene because I can then say to them I think there's still some information to be exchanged, can we postpone the decisions until we've checked them? Because I would prefer that they don't leave responsibility for the process entirely to me.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: I prefer to share that responsibility with them. Some preparation as well as being willing to intervene when it happens is a bit of combination than either one on its own.
Leanne: Yes, absolutely. Setting those ground rules sounds like it's very important. Have you ever been in really high-pressure situations where you need to drive an outcome and there's been a bit of conflict in the room and over that time, where a really important decision needs to be made and needs to be the right decision, have you been in any environment where that's occurred?
Bob: I mentioned earlier before we started recording some of the work I did in the mining industry and some of the- and particularly the really bright miners tend to be quite willing to be competitive about things. They could often be a pretty lonely group to work with. I've also worked with research scientist in CSIRO from time to time. That was where I met David Natale that I mentioned earlier and research scientists weren't satisfied until they had demonstrated to me and themselves that they were brighter than I was. Sometimes I had to feign being dumber than I am to keep them on site.
Leanne: You’re sacrificing a bit of your ego to drive a result.
Bob: I was lucky to be born with a fairly manageable ego.
Leanne: [laughs] Okay. Really diverse audiences. It's interesting that you have to shift your mindset as well and the way you behave in that room just so you can enable them to all work really well collaboratively too.
Bob: Yes. One of the tasks I've set myself over the years is broadening my repertoire so that I can more easily work in a wider range of situations and with a wider range of people. My preferred style is relatively unstructured. I plan in detail but then I don’t expect to follow the plan. I want to be responsive to what’s happening in the moment in the room but if there's a lot to do and time is short and particularly if there are a lot of participants, then that doesn't work and so I have to move to the other end of the continuum and structure things tightly and push things along a bit rather than work at a more natural pace.
Leanne: Yes, absolutely. Do you ever -- Now that you've done this for 45 years, do you ever get nervous anymore or were you ever nervous when you first started going into these workshops where you may not know the industry or the content? This is quite new to you because we've got some little first-time facilitators here that are slowly building up that confidence develops to present and talk in front of people and shift conversations along. How did you deal with the notes if you had them and are there any situations now we you'd walk into a workshop and think, "I don't know how this is going to go, the brief is pretty interesting”?
Bob: I aim for a balance between nervousness and confidence. That the nervousness helps to lift my arousal level and helps me be more present and paying more attention. There's an enormous difference in how much information I can take in when my arousal is fairly high and I have that in the back of my mind that I have my safety net. And that is that if the process isn’t working, I will drop the content and engage with the participants about why the process isn't working and invite them to join me in figuring out what process will work better for all of us.
Leanne: That is such a cool little trick that you can rely on.
Bob: And keeping that in the back of my mind means that if I feel my arousal getting too high, I can say to myself, "don't worry if it does blow up in my face we'll deal with that when it happens."
Leanne: [laughs] Wow. You've got to be pretty vulnerable to have that approach as well. I think a lot of people will expect that if I'm at their facilitating workshop, I need to be professional, I need to do all these things. But what you're saying is you can actually let down your guard and let other people into the conversation and say, "why isn't this process working? Let’s addressed this if it's an elephant in the room." Does it really need strategy?
Bob: The assumption I work on and I don't always manage to achieve it- but the assumption that I work on is that the more real I can be, the easier it will be for the other people in the room to be real and authentic. That means that things that might otherwise be censored become surfaceable. That means that the information exchanged and understood is more complete. That means the decisions are better and the actions are likely to be better and there's likely to be more ownership of them.
Leanne: Yes, fantastic. I want to talk about the action because I also read about this in your facilitation guide especially in my early experience. Much of my facilitation was of meetings, decision-making and problem-solving. Did it work? Often, I couldn't tell. The meetings were to decide what to do. Then doing happened later and more often than not I wasn’t there later. How do you control then what happens after you leave that workshop to ensure that they are continuing with those outcomes?
Bob: I've learned over the years to give more and more attention to what happens before the decision-making starts and what happens at the end before we leave the room. Time for meeting anything I can do to create more of a sense of community in the room so that people can afford to be a bit more authentic with each other. The greater the extent to which I can negotiate expectations with the people I'm working with so that they and I are on the same page and the greater the extent to which they're willing to share with me the responsibility for making this a success the easier everything becomes during the middle.
Then at the end, trying to achieve a state where people will be committed to acting on the decisions that they've made is crucial. The literature is a bit demoralizing there if you look at the literature on learning transfer for instance. The amount of learning transferred from most workshops is distressingly small. I now regard that as an essential piece of any meeting. It's about having the actions specific enough that people know what actions they've agreed to and getting a commitment from somebody in the room that they will themselves take the actions or if they have to get somebody else to do it, that they will monitor how that proceeds. I try to build commitment to the final stage of the meeting because if the decisions don't lead to actions, why did we just wasted their time having a meeting?
Leanne: Absolutely and we often find that you do a lot of work on trying to find the solutions and then it's only the last five minutes when everyone's exhausted, they're ready to go out the door because you meant to finish at five o'clock or whatever it is and it's a really rushed process. I think building it into and that commitment all three workshops is a really great idea.
Bob: I try to design processes that take less time than the time I'm given, so that I have a quarter of an hour, half an hour, a bit more of flow time to deal with the unexpected that is going to chew up some minutes on its own because I agree with you, being rushed at the end helps to kill the learning transfer or the carrying forward of the decisions into action.
Leanne: It really does. I'd like to talk about the concept you raised which is action learning. Can you tell us- you've got an example that you wrote on your CV, I loved reading that by the way, when you advise the Electoral commission in a developing nation to improve their electoral system. Can you explain first of all, what is action learning and then how you used it in that context.
Bob: There are two very different varieties that just happened to have somewhat similar origins and the same name. The British style, which developed is that a group of people from different organizations come together regularly or semi-regularly. One of them offers a problem or issue that she or he faces and the others then ask curiosity motivated questions to deepen the problem owners understanding. Then the problem owner goes back to her or his own organization and uses this deep and understanding to do a better job, that's the British style.
It tends to be unfacilitated - I would provide some early facilitation but then he would assume these are all senior responsible managers, they're capable of managing their own process. I think it was brave of him to make that assumption with some groups of people. When the Americans took it over, the usual pattern there except in tertiary education, where it's used for educational purposes is that it's a shared project. It's within an organization and a diverse team usually from within the organization is set up to take that project on and they work collaboratively together to resolve it. There's usually a facilitator often called a coach or a set advisor who really makes sure that people do what they're supposed to do, that keeps them on the process.
Leanne: Yes, you need that accountability buddy, that's right.
Bob: The process that I use is a bit of both. I usually work with a single project and in-house teams because that's what I'm asked to do. It can be a bit different in the university classroom or in Ph.D. supervision where I also use it but often, the aim is to help people expand their leadership skills by increasing their ability to facilitate because increasingly, leaders are being asked to facilitate that collaborative problem solving rather than telling people what the answer is. A bit like the shift from presentation to facilitation in training.
Leanne: Two very different skill sets.
Bob: If we learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle, I don't think anyone ever learned to ride a bicycle by studying a book, then surely we learn facilitative leadership by practicing facilitative leadership. To do that it acts against that if I'm present all the time and guiding them very rigorously through a very set process. Instead, I facilitate the first meeting relationship building and being clear about the project in outcome terms so that they know what achievement will look like and negotiating expectations and negotiating process guidelines and making sure that they understand who the other stakeholders are that they can engage them.
Helping them to understand what they want to get out of it for themselves as well as for the organization so that they're motivated to hang in there and fine-tune it until it works the way they want it to. At the second meeting, one of them facilitates and I'm there as a supportive coach. By the third meeting, I'm there but I hope not to have to intervene so that at the end of the third meeting I can say, "You've just demonstrated to me that you're entirely capable of managing your own process. I'd be delighted to be invited back at any time but from this point on it's your show".
Leanne: How do they feel when you say that to them must be pretty happy with that.
Bob: Because one of them has facilitated the second meeting and been supported in doing that and because I insist that there's a process review at the end of that meeting and because the process review is then facilitated by somebody else within the group, that person is then likely to volunteer to facilitate the third meeting and the reviewer of that can then volunteer to facilitate the fourth meeting. They're invited into it so that at any stage the step they're being asked to take they know is within their capacity.
Leanne: Yes. It's not a huge leap at all. Especially the whole co-facilitating model is actually really useful and that's how I started in facilitation was, it's always nice having someone that you can lean on. It's a bit more professional then you learn from them and then when you're on your own it's okay because it's not that set from sitting in a room to then leading but stepping in the room to co-facilitating to leading is much easier. It's a great idea. In your observation what are the good skills that a facilitator really needs? If you're to pick say your top two or three which I know is difficult, what do you think those skills are?
Bob: Some of them are conceptual. I'm reluctant to offer advice to other people because in terms of my own preferences and personality, I'm surprised that I finished up as a change agent and facilitator. I can say with some honesty that I'm one of the most introverted people that I know and I'm much more intellectual in my approach to facilitation than a lot of really good facilitators are. What works for me doesn't necessarily work for others. I can talk about what I found most useful for myself.
Leanne: I think that'd be great particularly as we do have quite a few introverts that listen in, again to get that confidence. We want to dismiss the myth that every facilitator needs to be this extrovert that's really confident. That's absolutely not true at all as we can see from your success. I'd love for you to share the skills that you brought to the role.
Bob: There is one conceptual skill which is probably common across all or almost all facilitation and that's to understand the distinction between process and content. For example, the usual ground rule about facilitators not intervening in the content is useful because when a facilitator does that, the danger is that the participants think that the facilitator has an agenda and that can contaminate the process.
Knowing where that boundary between process and content is, is a useful skill for anyone who does facilitation. Then there are times when you need to intervene in content and somehow rather that has to be done so it doesn't contaminate the process. For instance, if I'm holding a marker I would deliberately put it down and I would move to a different part of the room.
Leanne: You actually physically change where you are?
Bob: Move away from the whiteboard and/or the front of the room and say, "I'm now going to speak to you as Bob Dick citizen and it's entirely up to you whether you pay any attention or not to what I'm going to say". It seems to me that that decision that you were about to make has some dangers that I don't think you may realize and I would invite you to reconsider that. Then I move back to the front of the room and take up the marker pen and stand by the whiteboard and say something like, "Okay, what do you want to do now?"
Leanne: Just that tiny shift of moving your physical location and is it just more of a status thing and saying, I'm actually out of the role of facilitator now. Is that what it does subconsciously to your audience and participants?
Bob: That's the intention that people denote authority to facilitators to look after the process. That's why they ask a facilitator in. If I intervene in content from the front of the room in my facilitator persona, then the danger is that they will pay attention to that because I've said it. The danger is what I mentioned before that they may think I have some agenda about a particular outcome. At the end of a facilitation session, the ideal for me is they don't know what views I had about the content or even better is that they think I'm on their side whether I'm or not.
Leanne: Have you ever had a client approach you just on that and asked you to drive a specific outcome? What would your response be if that was the case?
Bob: I say, "I don't think I'm the person for this. Would you like me to suggest some other people who might be able to do what you want?"
Leanne: Absolutely, great. Let's say you're talking to Bob 45 five years ago, Bob just stepped up as a facilitator, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Bob: Whatever happens, you're going to survive it.
Leanne: That's brilliant.
Bob: That means you can afford to experiment if things aren't working. If the process isn't working, it's pointless to continue with it. Drop the content, fix the process, then when the process is fixed you can return to the content.
Leanne: That's really good advice. I think this whole content and process, not philosophy but the way that you approach that as a mode of delivery is really useful. I've never really thought about that before. I know that I've been in meetings and frustrated with because you're not actually making progress but you continue ahead and talk about the content no one really stops that conversation and says, what we're doing here sitting in this room is not working maybe we need to go for a walk or maybe we need to rethink. Do we need more information, should we consult with someone else? I think that's really helpful. Bob, is there anything else that you'd like to add to any of our first time facilitators that are starting the journey?
Bob: Facilitation can be an enormous buzz and it seems to me that the way in which we structure our organizations and our teams and meetings and our social structures generally suit the world we moving from and often spectacularly unsuited to the world we're moving towards with much more ambiguous and complex environments and much faster rates of change and solutions that don't stay appropriate for as long as they used to. The more of us that can be competent in both content and process, the better placed we are to help the world survive some of the trauma that's headed towards us down the road.
Leanne: Yes. It's a very volatile environment we're heading into and I think the today's of going into a meeting with a set agenda and 10 minutes on this topic, it's no longer relevant. I think your strategy of being prepared but also being flexible and open to where the discussion could lead is such a crucial step for any facilitator. Finally, Bob, you're also running workshops for facilitators, where can people find more information about you and those workshops?
Bob: I have quite a large website, some of it about facilitation, most of it about action research really, which is the mindset that I carry around with me in most of what I do. The URL for the website is www.aral.com.au. The A-R-A-L is short for action research and action learning.
Leanne: I was wondering what that stood for.
Bob: There is a load of material there. If after that URL you finish with a slash, it will automatically give you an index to the main versions of the site. One of the links that come up on the index page will be workshops and that will take people through to a description of my program for the year and some of the other workshops that I've offered in the past or plan to operate in future years or offer in-house.
Leanne: Fantastic. We will link to your website and those workshop details on our show notes for this episode. Bob, thank you so much. It's been great meeting you and talking and you've really broadened my perspective on facilitation in terms of splitting up into content, process and keeping focused on what's actually happening and what we need to fix in that situation. I've learned a lot from you and I'm sure our listeners have as well as. Thank you for taking the time out for our conversation.
Bob: My pleasure.
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript (Episode 15)
Leanne: Our guest today is a leadership and engagement coach, workshop facilitator, speaker, executive coach, and psychologist with a simple no-nonsense approach to building leaders and businesses. Her natural way of engaging with people means that she's just as comfortable in the boardroom as she is on the factory floor. That's a fantastic description. Welcome to the show Therese Lardner.
Therese Lardner: Thank you so much for having me.
Leanne: It's great to have you here. Now, Therese and I met each other as we were both speakers at Disrupt HR last year. I completely agree the way that she comes across is effortless and completely natural. Now, Therese that's I know a bit about you, but I'd love you to share with our listeners. How did you enter the world of this career in terms of training facilitating and working with businesses?
Therese: Sure. I started out straight from school, going into psychology. Not really knowing exactly what it is that that meant, and what that was going to entail, but knew that I always wanted to work with people and loved working with people. Fast forward through my degree and getting out into the workplace as an organizational development consultant, one of the first things that I was tasked with doing as a recent graduate was facilitating workshops and training. Which for a new grad was completely nerve-wracking, but I was still talking about topics that I really enjoyed.
Things like change management and leadership. Back then it was the multi-generational workforce, which is gained a lot of pace these days, but 10 years ago that was a really big topic. I was thrust into the world of facilitation you could say, [laughs] but have always enjoyed being with people and being in front of people as well. I don't mind being on a stage that's for sure.
[laughter]
Leanne: That would have been very daunting. Did anything in university prepare you for actually stepping up in front of corporate people and trying to communicate, or change their opinion, shift their behavior?
Therese: In small ways, yes. What I really learned in terms of the transition from university into the workplace is that I almost had to forget all of my academic training, how we would structure arguments. It was all around what will happen as opposed to what may happen. May is a big word in psychology.
[laughter]
We like to catch all kinds of things, but the language that you use presenting to a corporate audience is very different. As I said, how you structure the argument is quite different. I really had to navigate my way through that vocabulary and that structure to be able to connect with the corporate audience. I think one of the best pieces of advice I was given when I was starting out and facilitating, rightly or wrongly, was that you know more about this topic than your audience will. If you use a wrong word here or there, if you mark up the order that the content is meant to be in and you revised version three instead of version two, they're not really going to know.
What they're going to remember are the key objectives that you were going to take them through. The key elements that they had to walk away with, as opposed to a misstep here and there. That really took the weight off my shoulders as I was starting out.
Leanne: That's really good advice. It's all about what's the end goal here, and the journey, you might have an idea of what that map looks like, but I think you do find in facilitation depending on where the conversation goes or what stories are brought up with your group, instead of going from ABC, you might go AC through to B and--
Therese: It's absolutely okay. [laughs]
Leanne: I'd love to talk about the language. Coming from an academic background you talk a lot, might use some big words or talk about statistic. I really need to back up a lot of what you say with facts and evidence. It's a very evidence-based approach being a science. How did you lose that, not armor, but that vocabulary and switch over to more of the corporate talk where you could relate to more people?
Therese: I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you were talking about outcomes. It really is about what is it that this person will walk away with, as opposed to what will make me as the facilitator seeing the smartest person in the room, and what's the biggest word I could use to possibly describe that. In terms of what problem you're solving and the outcome that they need to walk away with, that's what you really focus in on when you're shifting that language away from the very scientific or the very academic.
Leanne: I love it. You've come from this background and now you travel quite interstate, to mine sites, construction sites, but you're also very comfortable in boardrooms. When preparing for the different types of audiences. Do you do anything--? How do you prepare for that? Do you dress differently? Do you come in with different approaches? What does that look like for you?
Therese: It will vary depending on the client and what it is that I'm doing. Sometimes I will dress differently. Particularly if I'm out on site if I'm out in a rural or remote area. If I'm wearing PPE, there's no use wearing high heels, it's just not going to work. [laughs] Sometimes I do dress differently. It's really about understanding what the drivers and motivators of my audience are?
What's important to them? What drives, what motivates them? What do they need out of the communication? Then, going from there. Sometimes that might mean me using slightly different language, different ways of explaining things, and sometimes in multiple ways of explaining things if I've got a wide variety of people in the room. It would just depend on who I'm speaking with.
Leanne: Now, you mentioned earlier that you're very comfortable on stage. That came across with your speech last year. You absolutely killed it. laughs]
Therese: Thank you.
Leanne: Have you always had that confidence? Have you always felt comfortable presenting in front of people growing up, or is it something that now that you're doing more of it, it's just evolved and now over the course of the years you've got this great experience under your belt?
Therese: A bit of both. As a fairly young child, I was involved in lots of choral work. Lots of choirs and voice work and singing. That just gave me a natural level of comfort with being in front of potentially thousands of people and that being okay. As a young kid I heard that, but then moving into the workplace you have this extra pressure of judgment that you don't necessarily have outside of that environment.
I certainly had to overcome what do they think of me or I've said the wrong word or I'm losing track of this. Certainly had to overcome that but have always had that level of confidence in terms of being in front of people to fall back on. There's always been a bit of a performer and me. [laughs]
Leanne: That is so cool. I never knew that about you. It's just fascinating.
Therese: There you go.
Leanne: I think the best thing about this is that it doesn't matter what industry you're from, there's always something to take away that will give you that confidence. Love that, Now, I'd love to talk about an upcoming trip that you have on. Would you like to share that with the audience?
Therese: I'm off to New York shortly to speak at a World Summit on positive psychology, mindfulness and psychotherapy. It's a very long title.
Leanne: Tell us, how did you score that gig? I'd love to hear that. Also, what are you sharing with the audience over there?
Therese: Sure. The story behind this is very serendipitous. I had started out in the land of Twitter, which I don't still really understand. I'm not big on tech, but I'm getting there. I had accidentally followed a conference. Then, they got in touch with me, obviously having seen my website and looked at some of my work on LinkedIn externally and said, "Would you like to present?" I submitted an abstract, they loved it and the rest is history. [laughs]
Leanne: Congratulations.
Therese: Thank you.
Leanne: I could virtually give you a high five now. Love to hear what you're sharing with them.
Therese: One of my biggest areas of passion is around employee engagement. I'll be talking through the future of employee engagement and how what we'll be doing for the last decade or so really isn't working and some different ways forward. I've done some very cool research and partnered with an organization here in Australia to do that and to trial an awesome app that has just come onto the market as well, based on my research so yes.
Leanne: Nice. Now, a lot of our listeners, they aren't actually full-time speakers, they all work in-- Well, the most of them that I've heard from, work in organizations, a lot of them and are in HR roles. I'd love to hear what's one take away regarding employee engagement? I guess that we've done wrong. That we can change for the future.
Therese: Yes. I don't know that we've done it wrong, but it's not working. If we keep on doing the same old thing, we're going to get the same old results. In my mind, the biggest thing is that we're focusing on head engagement. We're focusing on are we giving people interesting work? Are we giving them the right salary, the right benefits? Have I communicated a compelling vision? Which is all very important, but what the research is telling us and what we know from our experience as well, is that we need to engage people's hearts. We need to provide that inspiration.
We need to make sure that the work they're doing is energizing. That they have that sense of flow and connection to what they're doing in their team. That's the future of engagement is head and heart engagement. In the context of leading from an area of growth. Making sure that we're investing in our people. My real passion is that head and heart engagement.
Leanne: That is such great terminology. Head and heart. From what you're saying, I think you're absolutely right in terms of creating that flow in your work because you can work on some assignments and it plays to your strengths. If something isn't-- You're not losing time involved when you're actually working through it and time just seems like it goes on. It's gone so quickly. You're not actually structuring that work in the right way. That's really interesting. Are there any sort of practical takeaways that a leader, who's out at say a project or at a site knowing that, what's something that they could do to start bringing in the hearts of their staff?
Therese: It might sound very simple, but the simplest things are often the most powerful. It's having real conversations with people. Not the superficial stuff. Not the, "Hi. How are you going?" It's, "What's going on for you at the moment?" Really getting to understand some terminology that I used earlier. Understanding what drives and motivates them. What gets them out of bed? What puts fire in their belly? Because it might be their work or it might be something else.
Even if it's something else, you can't hope to connect someone to their work unless you understand what drives and motivates them. I think that's the essential part that's missing from engagement as well. There's real conversations that backs up all the surveys and all the steps that we do to really understand what makes people tick. How we can connect what they love into what we would love them to do.
Leanne: That sounds very similar. You recommended a book to me when I last saw you. That was Simon Sinek's, Find Your Why, the workbook. I have started reading that. It's very similar. I think he starts off with everyone has the right to wake up in the morning and feel motivated to do something that means something for them. Links it all really nicely. Now, you spoke about the practical tool which is shifting the language and saying-- Instead of asking, "Hey, how are you going?" You think something a bit more substantial.
That leads into the talk that you did at Disrupt HR last year which was amazing. We'll link to your video as part of the show nights for this episode. Can you share with our audience why you're so passionate about this topic? Why leaders of today need to really work on their emotional vocab?
Therese: Yes. At Disrupt HR, I spoke on this topic of leaders needing emotional vocabulary. The reason I'm so passionate about that is I see so many leaders who have the internal drive to have conversations with people. They know that they need to have these great conversations, but they don't necessarily have the vocabulary to have those conversations. They don't have the words to use. What I spoke about at Disrupt HR is if you track that back, it can go back to childhood. Not from Sigmund Freud, "Let's lie down on a couch" type thing.
We don't encourage even babies to express how they feel. We shush them up. We tell them that we don't want to hear they have to say. As kids grow, we're not, again, encouraging them to use nuanced language. Does a child know the difference between being angry and frustrated? A simple example, but that then translates in to schooling. That translates into the workplace. If we're not encouraging people to express themselves and we haven't given them the tools to do it, then they pop out the other end of high school, go into uni, go into the workplace and, all of a sudden, we're expecting them to have these amazing human conversations and they struggle.
I also know that the HR systems and trends of the '90s had a lot to do with that as well. When we're telling people to leave their baggage at the door, and not to speak about themselves at work, then we've created this whole-- Well, a range of generations who are in the workforce who can't be themselves. They can't be whole human beings at work. It's compacting in terms of not being able to express yourself. Not knowing how to express yourself. Then, it not being appropriate when you go into the workplace.
Leanne: Wow. Let's just say an organization has recognized the need for this and they've called on Therese to come in and help them, what is your approach to helping leaders and managers develop this vocabulary and really recognize how their feeling and how they should communicate?
Therese: Yes. I think a lot of it is actually breaking down the barriers that are there to having the conversations to begin with. That's the most uncomfortable part. [laughs] It's the part that lots of people like to skip over and "Let's just go and do the workshop. Let's get on with it." Unfortunately, you need to unpack some of that stuff and understand how it is that you've arrived at this spot of not being able to feel comfortable having those conversations. There is a certain element in--
That's done 101 because it needs to be done in a very safe, sensitive environment because folks are pretty vulnerable having those conversations. What you can then do is back that up with some group work or small team work around pure vocab. Introducing people to new phrases, new terms, new perspectives on situations. You also need to back that up with giving people an understanding of the physiological reactions and feelings that they have that connect to those words, so that when they start to actually experience them in their body, they have this new nuanced, subtle, lots of detailed language they can use to describe what they're actually feeling because again, one without the other is useless.
If you have the words without actually knowing what that attaches to, it's useless. If you go, "I'm feeling that my heart rate is going up. I've got a frog in my throat. I'm starting to get a headache, but I can't describe that." Again, useless. They need to go together.
Leanne: Wow. That's so fascinating. You do this 101 first, then-- That makes so much sense. Because it is, it's quite a delicate topic. You possibly are uncovering some things that have happened in their past which have led to that. Then, do you start to get-- I'm not too sure what you do. Do you get them to start thinking like, "If I was angry, how would I react?" Or getting them to think of a time where they think they were frustrated and what that felt like?
Therese: Yes. It needs to be very relatable because otherwise, again it's too theoretical and people just don't understand it. Emotional vocabulary is one very specific part emotional intelligence. It's a tiny subset of it. Recognizing that if you start then to increase emotional self-awareness, that has a flow-on effect to the other parts of emotional intelligence which is exactly what you're talking about. Now that I know this about myself, how does this relate to how I regulate my emotions? How do I manage the ups and downs as part of my day?
How do I use that information in decision making really effectively, in a way that makes sense for me and my organization and my team? How do I manage very strong emotions like excitement, passion, anger, in a way, that again, is appropriate? Because I've got this awareness to fall back on, it's the first building block that has to go down before the tower can start getting stacked on top of that.
Leanne: Such a fascinating topic. Your organizational psychology is also huge. It covers so many different things. What really attracted you to the emotional intelligence space when you could be working on motivation or team dynamics? What was it about this in particular for you?
Therese: I was introduced to emotional intelligence fairly early on in my consulting career. Number one, just found it fascinating. I find feelings and emotions fascinating. Another area that I had been involved in more recently though is working with the fly-in fly-out workforce. A lot around mental health in that type of workforce. Again, given that it's a male-dominated environment, one of the things that is really predominant in that type of work is helping, particularly males, to identify what it is they are going through and be able to have conversations around that, so they can either support each other or seek support for themselves.
That really prompted that passion again. Even more recently because I have two children, my first is a girl and my second was a boy. Lord help them both, they have a psychologist for a mother. I've recognized that how people were interacting with him and his emotional expression was different because he was a boy. I thought, "There’s something here." Then, I started to really look into, again, emotional expression as a child, and how we foster that as a society or we don’t foster it as a society. Then, it built from there, or in the last two, three years.
Leanne: That bit of a merger between what you're noticing in the workplace as well as family life. You could bring into the niche that you're now doing really well in and presenting in New York on. I love how that all integrates together.
Let’s just say, you come in, you’ve done some intervention work one on one, then in little groups. Let's just say then you have to lead the organization. How do you feel, how is learning transferred or embedded into their behavior change once they get back to work? Are there any great strategies that you could recommend or--?
Therese: Because as you and I know, the transfer of knowledge from pure classroom learning to the workplace is pretty ordinary if you don’t manage it really well. One of the things that I really like to do, again depending on the culture of the organization, is sustainability sessions. After the one on one coaching is finished and the small group work is finished, actually going back on a regular basis and holding sessions to allow people to brief and then debrief on what it is they are implementing.
They have an action plan. How are you going to implement that? How have you implemented that so that there's this ongoing check-in supporting their learning back in their workplace? As opposed to, "Here's an action plan. See you later." Best of luck.
[laughter]
Leanne: I love that action plans keeping everyone accountable, especially if you’ve got peer support and you've made these commitments to check-in following that. Nice idea. Love it. In your observation, what are the skills that every good facilitator needs?
Therese: That’s a big question, Leanne.
Leanne: It is.
Therese: Funnily enough, I think that one of the first things to cover off is the capacity to listen because folks think that particularly facilitation, which is quite different to presenting, facilitation is just talking. It’s not just covering off content because you need to be able to facilitate those back and forth group discussions. You need to be able to pick up on the cues of all the different people in that group to see number one, "Are they getting it? Are they engaged in the content? Is there a different way that I can explain something? Do I need to draw someone out a little bit more?"
The only way that you can recognize that is by listening and observing because if you just talk at them, it's about you and not about them. It’s a presentation and not a facilitation.
Leanne: That is such a great point. I think it really relates to what you’re doing in the terms of emotional intelligence space. Actually being aware of firstly, that you need to hold back and listen but also observe and say, "Okay, that person, their physiological response is this. I feel like they might be getting a bit nervous about the subject." As a facilitator, you really need to be aware yourself.
Therese: Yes. I think the other element of being a facilitator is just being switched on the whole time which can be exhausting if you’re doing lots of facilitation, which I have been recently. You do need to be present. You need to be switched on because the group or the team is relying on you to connect dots for them. Again, if you're just throwing content out there and you’re not connecting what Sue said in this morning's discussion with the piece of content that we're discussing this afternoon, then you’re not drawing them in and engaging them in that discussion.
You're not connecting the dots for them and helping them to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Being present and being checked in, I think is super important for facilitators. That’s where I see some fall down is that they just don’t understand the need to just be in the room and not thinking about everything else that's going on.
Leanne: It’s so hard but it’s also a relief to hear that other people are getting really tired after running a workshop because I thought it was just me. It really is. At the end of the day, you're like, "I need a glass of wine, I need to put my feet up, and reflect back on what could I have done there?" Every time it’s a learning opportunity, every time you’re in the room, I think.
Therese: Absolutely. I’ve had periods just recently where I’ve done a number of workshops, I’ve done recently four days of facilitation in a row. You’re right, the only way that I was able to stay present and mindful through that time is, as soon as I've finished, I put on my running shoes and went for a run. Even though I was exhausted, it still allowed me to disconnect from what had happened during the day, get some fresh air. Then, later on, come back, circle back and reflect, as you said, "What could I have done differently? What do I need to focus on tomorrow knowing what I’ve seen and heard today?"
If you don’t allow yourself that space and you just keep on pushing through and chugging through, you can’t be present. It’s just not physically possible.
Leanne: It is. It really is. A fellow facilitator I spoke a couple episodes ago said, "It is actually a really physical job." We can’t just remember it’s all just a brain, we actually have to prep ourselves. Physically, we're walking around, we're listening, we're focusing. It can be exhausting. Not to put any facilitators off because it's a great career field to head down. [laughs]
Did you find in those four days that you were actually modifying some content, like shaping it because you heard some things, or was it just quite structured approach?
Therese: A bit of both actually. It was two two-day workshops back-to-back. I had two different groups. I was delivering the same content twice to summarize. There was a certain level of needing to be able to get a certain amount of content across to both groups because there needed to be quite a lot of overlapping similarity in terms of what the two groups were hearing. I subtly took the learnings from previous workshops because I think that was the fifth time that I had run that particular workshop for that organization.
I was subtly taking the learnings from each one, and modifying as I went depending on who was in the room. How they were feeling. Were they very chatty? Were they quiet reserved? Skipping over content that I knew wouldn’t draw them out. Focusing on content a little bit more if I thought it'd be more engaging. That type of thing.
Leanne: That’s great. Great advice for facilitators on how to modify, or what you need to do to modify some of the content. Especially when you’re delivering to the same company’s similar workshop material. You’re just learning every time and going, "Okay, I think they know this, so the next group will.” Nice one. You've offered a lot of practical advice for first-time facilitators. Is there anything else you’d like to add as a piece of advice for them?
Therese: I wouldn’t downplay some of the fear that folks have around facilitating because not everybody feels as comfortable with public speaking as we do. What I would say is if you’re able to prep yourself, be mindful and in the room, what you might get out of facilitation can be quiet amazing.
You get such a buzz from being in a room with a group of people getting a message across and them just really getting it. No matter how scared you are, no matter how underprepared you think you might be, just give it a red hot go because odds are on the other end of that will be such an amazing feeling for you and a group of people who have learned something they've never known before.
Leanne: That’s very powerful. In fact, if I wasn’t a facilitator-- I'm already like, “Yes, I want to go and facilitate again.” It’s so true that amazing feeling that you get, the adrenaline, but also to know that you’re actually on that one-to-many ratio, just impacting so many people. When the lights switch on in their eyes, and they brighten up, and they start using the language through the workshop, there's nothing better.
Therese: Absolutely.
Leanne: That’s great advice to finish on. Now, Therese, where can our listeners find you?
Therese: Sure. You can find me by my website mindsetcoachconsult.com.au, or places like LinkedIn and Facebook, Mindset Coaching and Consulting or Therese Lardner on LinkedIn.
Leanne: Fantastic. Therese posts up some incredible words of advice, some wisdom on her LinkedIn page. I do recommend that all our listeners follow her on that. I love seeing all your updates. Therese, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. I've learned so much from you. I can't wait to share this chat with our listeners. I also wish you the best of luck. You're flying out to New York on Saturday morning. I can't wait to hear how that goes.
I think they've done really well getting you on the speaker card. This is going to be such a huge gig for you. Congratulations.
Therese: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a wonderful experience.
Episode 14: Q&A: Share some of the amazing facilitation tricks you’ve seen, Leanne!
This is the first solo episode I’m recording and it’s come in response to some feedback I received from a listener, Aminata N’Doye from Toronto, Canada. She asked me if I could incorporate listener questions periodically. I think it’s great suggestion, it allows variety for the show and typically, we’ll keep these ones short -they won’t run for longer than 15mins.
Hello fellow first time facilitators and welcome to the show this week.
This is the first solo episode I’m recording and it’s come in response to some feedback I received from a listener, Aminata N’Doye from Toronto, Canada. She asked me if I could incorporate listener questions periodically. I think it’s great suggestion, it allows variety for the show and typically, we’ll keep these ones short -they won’t run for longer than 15mins.
From time to time I’ll incorporate these episodes, either as an add-on feature for the week (I’d originally planned to call this Workshop Weds) ; or a standalone episode, depending on the length of my response!
Would you like your question answered on the show?
You can email me: hello@firsttimefacilitator.com
Send me a tweet @leannehughes
Message me your question on Instagram @firsttimefacilitator
Given Aminata had the idea for this segment, I threw it over to her to ask the first question, and her question is this:
“Along the way, you've seen a number of tricks from fantastic facilitators. What were some of the amazing tricks where you thought, "Wow! I need to add this to my facilitation!"?
Listen to the show to find out the facilitator tricks that have stunned me (in a good way)!
Resources mentioned in this episode
The Air-dropped workshop notes from Sean DeSouza's workshop: Andrew Tarvin's Walk/Stop icebreaker or energiser: Create your own game show using Kahoot.
Episode 13: A facilitator is an entertainer (even if you think it’s all about the content) with Greg Mitchell
Greg Mitchell is a bit of a superstar in the education world. He does many things - cartooning, MCing, consulting and of course, facilitating. In this episode, we talk about some band-aid fixes you can use when participants threaten to de-rail your workshop, why you need to treat facilitation like entertainment, why unpredictability can also help hook your audience and to notice and realise that facilitation is an emotional job.
Greg Mitchell is a bit of a superstar in the education world. He does many things - cartooning, MCing, consulting and of course, facilitating. In this episode, we talk about some band-aid fixes you can use when participants threaten to de-rail your workshop, why you need to treat facilitation like entertainment, why unpredictability can also help hook your audience and to notice and realise that facilitation is an emotional job.
In this episode, you’ll learn
Why it’s important to snap your participants out of their constant way of thinking
The lowest common denominator for engagement (hint: It’s our favourite topic)
Some incredible, simple activities you can throw-in to a workshop to create variety
What to do when you have a spare 30mins left at the end of your workshop
What he perceives the error of focus is for first time facilitators and how you can direct your energy to create more engagement
Why you need to keep your participants moving (literally!).
Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode!
About our guest
Greg Mitchell has been engaged with the world of education since he was four years old. Since them, he has been a student, a parent, a teacher, a writer, a cartoonist, an assistance principal, a university lecturer and a consultant. He has worked for both the Catholic and Government education systems and is currently enjoying being self-employed, having finally found a boss that he really likes.
Greg suffers from enthusiasm, a condition which helps him deal happily with issues such as Stress Management, Positive Intelligence, Multiple Intelligences, Boys’ in Education, Conflict Resolution, Resilience, Values Education and Building Collaborative Communities.
Resources
Episode transcript
Click here to view the episode transcript for Episode 13 with Greg Mitchell.
Episode 10: Keeping workshop content fresh after 25 years (and how I was inspired by a flamenco dancing facilitator) with Scott Amy
In Episode 10 of the First Time Facilitator podcast, Scott Amy from the Pacific Institute shares his secrets on Socratic facilitation and how he was inspired by a faciltator who incorporated flamenco dancing in his workshop.
In Episode 10 of the First Time Facilitator podcast, Scott Amy from the Pacific Institute shares his secrets on Socratic facilitation and how he was inspired by a faciltator who incorporated flamenco dancing in his workshop.
In this episode you’ll learn
Why seeing a strong facilitator (who used a style of flamenco dancing in his workshops) inspired Scott to leave the Defence force
How he’s run the same workshop for 25 years and how he keeps it energised/content fresh
How facilitators need confidence in themselves, ability to grow, desire to grow the org their working with; and their ability to engage people
What Socratic facilitation is all about and how it can help you discover the truth for your participants
Three great questions you can use to implement Socractic facilitation in your next workshop
About our guest
Scott Amy, Manager Client Services with The Pacific Institute has worked extensively in training, facilitating, coaching and project design with clients in many countries around the world, including Singapore, Indonesia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia.Working with The Pacific Institute since 1994, he has been involved in many project roles with clients from a very broad cross section of industry, education and community. Working with leadership and executive management levels through to front line operations staff, professional educators, students and community development resources, has provided him with valuable experience into how people think and behave in situations of change and leadership.With a strong background in training and training design, his skills in communication, allow him to reach all levels of an organisation and teams providing maximum outcomes. Combined with his Socratic approach to facilitation, which encourages participants to find their own solutions by working through options and applying information, Scott is one of The Pacific Institute’s most requested resources.Scott has been a student of leadership, and its effects for many years, and with a Defence Force background in training and education, has used these experiences as a basis for his continuing studies in Effective Leadership.He has played a major role in developing people and organisations with clients such as: Coca Cola, Snowy Hydro Limited, AMP Insurance, Queensland Education Department, Television Corporation of Singapore, Air New Zealand, Fonterra and Rio Tinto
Resources
Video we discussed: Forget big charge, start with a tiny habbit.View the First Time Facilitator episode 10 transcript.