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 41: Unleash your inner intrapreneur: How facilitators can liberate innovation and creativity in organisations with Dr Irena Yashin-Shaw
Today's guest is on a mission to liberate innovation, creativity and leadership within organisations.On this episode, you’ll hear how Dr Irena Yashin-Shaw transitioned from a high school teacher to become Australia’s leading expert on creativity and innovation.
Today's guest is on a mission to liberate innovation, creativity and leadership within organisations.On this episode, you’ll hear how Dr Irena Yashin-Shaw transitioned from a high school teacher to become Australia’s leading expert on creativity and innovation. Listen in when she discusses the strategies she uses to facilitate knowledge retention and behaviour change in the workshops. We also talk about the role of Intrapreneurs in organisations, and how they’re the future of organisations.If you’ve ever heard anyone say they’re not creative, or you think you’re not creative, it’s also worth taking note of Irena’s response to that statement,.If you want to stay connected to First a Time Facilitator when the show's over, join our community on Facebook called ‘The Flipchart’. In the group, we have 50+ other listeners around the world, who are all sharing tools, tips, techniques to help each other deliver killer content and workshops.
On this episode you’ll learn:
How she transitioned from a high school teacher to become Australia’s leading expert on creativity and innovation
The differences she observed from teaching high school students, to adults in corporate life (and why it’s important to give adults an immediate benefit from attending a workshop)
The pre-work she asks participants to do before attending
What an intrapreneur is; and why they’re so the future of organisations
How intrapreneurs can push through perceived bureaucratic barriers to add value to their organisations
How she developed her presence as a powerful presenter and communicator
Her response when people say the words, ‘I’m not creative’
How she recharges her energy to deliver day workshops
Her advice for subject matter experts who are asked to share their knowledge with others
About our guest
Dr. Irena Yashin-Shaw, PhD. is an innovation, creativity and communication specialist with a Doctorate in creative problem-solving and a Masters Degree in Adult Education. Prior to starting her consultancy in the private sector she was a Senior Research Fellow and academic at Griffith University. Here, she worked on a number of university-wide strategic improvement initiatives while lecturing in various academic programs.A sought after speaker and educator Dr. Irena has delivered keynote presentations and workshops in the UK, Russia, China, India, New Zealand, Malaysia and Australia. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications locally and internationally. Recognising that innovation and creativity are the key drivers of the Twenty-First Century global economy, she has developed a suite of programs designed to assist organisations to increase their innovation capacity by developing a culture of innovation and creative leadership.
Resources
A gift for the First Time Facilitator audience
Dr Irena Yashin-Shaw is offering an incredible for First Time Facilitator listeners - a 50% off discount to The Australian Intrapreneurs Summit . Simply use the code AISDISC50 when purchasing your ticket.
Like this show?
Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally.
Tweet Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode!
Episode transcript
Click here to read my conversation with Dr Irena Yashin-Shaw on the First Time Facilitator podcast.
Episode 37: Announcement: Facebook Group is finally here (p.s. It's called 'The Flipchart')
This week’s episode is a bit unusual, it’s a lot shorter than others and it’s really an announcement episode. For a while, like more than six weeks, I’ve promised to launch a Facebook group for the First Time Facilitator audience, or really, anyone that wants to become a better facilitator, trainer or workshop content developer.
This week’s episode is a bit unusual, it’s a lot shorter than others and it’s really an announcement episode. For a while, like more than six weeks, I’ve promised to launch a Facebook group for the First Time Facilitator audience, or really, anyone that wants to become a better facilitator, trainer or workshop content developer.
Where can I find The Flipchart group on Facebook?
The Facebook group is called ‘The Flipchart’, like the name of my e-newsletter. email newsletter.You may be wondering why it's called The Flipchart and not First Time Facilitator. The reason is that I know many of you are beginning your side hustles, or consultancy, business in this space, and you probably don’t want to be seen in a Facebook group called ‘First Time Facilitator’,as it may create an incorrect assumption.The reason I started this group is because, as a facilitator, I spend a lot of time scouring the internet and YouTube, trying to find a perfect activity, exercise, game, video, image to support my learning material. I'm sure there's a few of you out there who are doing the same thing! Let's make it easier for each other. This is a global community for facilitators who want to get better at their craft, and also more efficient at developing their workshop content. In this group, we share awesome training tips, hacks and recommendations to help you with the next workshop you deliver. I haven’t gone too prescriptive on what this page really looks like but to give it a bit of guidance, here are some of the daily hashtags - but don’t worry if you want to post something and it’s not related to the daily hashtag, just go ahead and post it!
Group daily Hashtags are:
And then at anytime,
I’d love for you to join the group. Just head on over to The Flipchart on Facebook
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 31: It’s time to stop recreating content: How to be a more productive facilitator with Sally Foley-Lewis
When you're asked to deliver another workshop, do you find you’re having to recreate content, or dig around different folders, trying to find that one slide or activity that worked really well all those years ago? This happens to me. It drives me crazy. I wish I had a better way, or system to store these resources.
When you're asked to deliver another workshop, do you find you’re having to recreate content, or dig around different folders, trying to find that one slide or activity that worked really well all those years ago? This happens to me. It drives me crazy. I wish I had a better way, or system to store these resources.
If you listen in our guest today, Sally Foley-Lewis has a solution for you.
Sally is obsessed with productive leadership, helping dedicated professionals (like you), achieve more, reduce your stress and take back two hours per day!
Listen in to her when I ask about her tips on how she embeds learning on her workshop.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Valuable and time-saving hacks for first-time facilitators
Coping mechanism on dealing with feedback
The three big elements of productivity: personal productivity, professional productivity and people productivity.
Essential questions you need to to ask yourself before standing in front of your audience.
Skills needed as a first-time facilitator.
About our guest
Sally Foley-Lewis is a dynamic and interactive presenter, MC, and much sought after facilitator and executive coach. Blending 20+ years of working with a diverse range of people and industries, in Germany, the UAE, Asia, and even outback Australia, with exceptional qualifications; a wicked sense of humour and an ability to make people feel at ease, she’s your first choice for mastering skills and achieving results. Obsessed with productive leadership, Sally helps you achieve more, reduce stress and take back two hours per day!
She has written three books, her latest is The Productive Leader and she gives presentations and runs workshops to help people become Productive Leaders. Sally's clients rave about her because she leaves the audience equipped to take immediate positive action.
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 Sally.
Quotes of the show:
“The goods are good; don't devalue good. It's good and that's a positive word.”
“I think for facilitators, it's being okay to play, be flexible and adaptive and to continue trying to work things out because your audience wants to get it".
“The more content you shove in; the more shallow you're going to be. I think that's that balancing act that makes it very hard for facilitators sometimes.”
Transcript
View the transcript of my conversation with Sally Foley-Lewis.
Episode 22: What clients really want from a workshop (and no, it’s not information) with Sean D’Souza
In today’s episode, I talk to Sean D’Souza. Sean is a cartoonist, author, online marketing strategist, a pretty good cook (judging from his social media photos) and an energetic facilitator who applies his skills in creating a different kind of workshop. He reads on average 100 books a year. Teaching runs in his blood, as his father, mother and grandmother were teachers too. He's that good, I flew to Singapore to attend one of his three-day workshops.
In today’s episode, I talk to Sean D’Souza. Sean is a cartoonist, author, online marketing strategist, a pretty good cook (judging from his social media photos) and an energetic facilitator who applies his skills in creating a different kind of workshop. He reads on average 100 books a year. Teaching runs in his blood, as his father, mother and grandmother were teachers too. He's that good, I flew to Singapore to attend one of his three-day workshops.
In this episode, we talk about the motivation of the people coming to your workshops… are they really there for the information, or are they there for another reason? We explore workshop design and giving your participants time to reflect on content. We also discuss creating a safe workshop environment - not only for the people in the room, but for you as well…because, as the facilitator - it’s important that you feel safe, too.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Sean’s ratio for instructing vs group discussions and activities
The power of frequent breaks
Why it’s important to create a safe space for your participants
Why he shares his learning materials prior to a workshop
What clients really want out of a workshop (and it’s not information)
A winning formula that features energy, confidence and skill
The importance of feedbacks and testimonials in a workshop.
Tips for facilitators starting their journey in facilitating and leading workshops in their own context.
About our guest
Sean D’ Souza is a cartoonist and an online marketing strategist who runs a zany online marketing site named PsychoTactics. He is also the author of “The Brain Audit” which is about how customers make decisions.
Originally working as a freelance cartoonist, Sean somehow found himself indulging his talent for marketing and understanding consumer psychology by helping out others with their marketing efforts. It wasn’t long before he started writing about his own experiences with marketing and slowly but surely, he began to gather an audience hungry to learn more.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sean’s online home Psychotactics
Sean's book, The Brain Audit
We Are Podcast conference
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 Sean. https://twitter.com/seandsouza?lang=en
Quotes of the show:
“What 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, they use less energy.”
“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.”
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.
“You have to be comfortable that you're going to goof up 50 to 60 percent of your early days before you start getting comfortable But breaking it up is always good because once you're confident, then you don't have to overcompensate. You don't have to be, ‘“I’m the boss here and you're just minions.’”
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Sean D’ Souza.
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.
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Jane Anderson (Episode 21)
Here is the episode transcript from my interview with Jane Anderson on Episode 21 of the podcast.
You can listen to my interview with Jane Anderson on the First Time Facilitator podcast.
Leanne: Please welcome to the First Time Facilitator Podcast, Jane Anderson.
Jane: Thank you so much for having me, Leanne. I'm really happy to be here and feel very privileged to be part of your show.
Leanne: Oh, that's lovely to hear. You’re extremely impressive! So I was just reading your biography, you've worked with over 50,000 people, you've written five books, you have your own podcast, you’ve worked with some huge global clients now living in Brisbane. I see you and your brand everywhere.
Jane: I’m stalking you know…
Leanne: Yeah you probably got some remarketing cookie on me but for those listening around Australia or possibly haven't seen your brand or globally, can you just explain a bit about yourself and how you entered the world of personal branding and helping others in terms of building their influence capability?
Jane: Yeah sure, so I started, how I never thought that I would probably be doing this but when I started, I started working with personally branded businesses when I was 14 years old. The very first experience I had, I don't know if you remember growing up but whether you had bought shoes from “Mathers” shoes, like maybe your mom made you wear “Clarks”.
Leanne: A “Clarks”.
Jane: Yeah, but Clarks was a fact came from a personal brand, it was someone who founded the Clarks brand. Then I saw Robert Mathers and the Mathers’ family, the people who founded Mathers. Sir Robert was knighted for his services to the business community and they were my first mentors in my life and they were like family to me. I worked for them for twelve years and then I went on and did a marketing degree and then Tom Peters had this concept called “Personal branding” when I was in second-year uni. and I was like, imagine having like somebody say “I want a personal brand and here's my credit card.” and I was like, “this is…” and that was long a bit like the internet hadn't even been in store.
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: I just remember thinking “Imagine people doing that!” I have always had this love, I did a marketing degree but I ended up working in HR for working sort of between those two fields which those two connected are all about influence. So it just sort of evolved that way and I worked for the Mathers family as I said. I also worked in government and worked in large organizations but I kept coming back to. I always had an interest in people's personal branded businesses like I worked for Tony Ferguson the Weight Loss Company, Rotary Weight Chemists as part of that whole branding and then worked in for Super Retail Groups, Supercheap Auto, BCF. The CEO of that company had an incredible personal brand, he's very humble, his name is Peter Birtles and he won CEO of the year.
I was really drawn to people who had strong personal brands and it was just the value of who people are and not just about the organization brand but the individuals that work there. All those people who have had the courage to put their face on the shingle out the front and say like I always found it fascinating that the people I worked for had the courage to do that. I was such a behind-the-scenes kind of person. I was like...
Leanne: Oh, no way!
Jane: Yeah, I think I just was always in awe of what they could. That they had so much courage to put their face out there and it was something though I never had the courage to do so I was like “Yeah, I'll support you whatever you need done, if your face is on the shingle that's great as long as mine is not.”
Leanne: Isn’t it funny how times have changed?
Jane: Yeah, well that was what happened, you know we had a change of government in Queensland in 2012. I had started my business but a 70% or 80% of my contracts went overnight with the change of government because most of my contracts were government work. I was sort of hiding behind a brand because I just didn't have the courage to put my personal brand out and then I went, you know what, actually I have to change something and I have to change something very fast and I thought “Okay, I can see now why personal brand works because of social media.” because I just noticed that all the things I was doing with helping wasn't just businesses but I'd also spent five years working in career counselling and helping market people for jobs and I thought “Okay, I've danced around it long enough, I've helped everybody else and now I have to do it for me.” It’s not something that I've ever started up feeling comfortable with. I've always been a cheerleader in someone else's corner and but you know one day the time comes where you've got to do it for yourself and you know you just got to “step-up and let's do it!”
Leanne: It's really fascinating! A couple things I want to just to point out was I liked how you talked about the intersection of marketing and HR. That's my background as well as I was in marketing before I moved into HR, studied HR though but I think the similarities are that you are influencing over people you've got to sell ideas you got to persuade them particularly around culture change. Great to hear that you've got that intersection but also around having to step-up as well and have that courage, you use the word “courageous” quite a lot there which I really like. I think with our first-time facilitators a lot of them are getting their step-up by doing a lot of facilitation internally with businesses which is a great way to hone your skill and a lot of this podcast has been focusing that how you deliver those workshops but we have never really spoken about let's just say you actually get really good at this and you want to go out on your own. How do you transition and how do you create that step? and so I got your book “EXPERT to INFLUENCER” and I really wanted to point out there's one thing I was like “Oh, this is brilliant and haven't heard this word used before.” and you're talking about how do you develop trust with people because that's how people buy your brand, buy your credibility and everything else and as a facilitator we need trust in our workshops to get the great outcomes.
Now, what I thought there was under personality. You're talking about the twelve pillars of trust, an item there was called “remarkability”. How remarkable are you? I love that word! Can you just explain a bit more about that or how we actually can start finding “What does make us remarkable? What does make us unique?”
Jane: Yeah, when you think about “Why would you want to do that? Why can't I just keep doing what am I doing? Why can’t I just keep facilitating on contents that's already been out there or their stuff it's out in the market?” I could keep going with Covey’s Seven Habits forever and it's amazing and I love Covey's work so it's not saying that there's anything wrong with that but it's more on how do you make this leap and what you've got to do is be remarkable. Seth Godin talks about this with some in a lot of his work and you actually need to be the artist. What happens is when you're the facilitator, if you're using or you're working with other IP or you feel facilitating your strategy day, there's some kind of framework or context that maybe you have learned. It might be maybe you've learnt pro-side principles or maybe you've learnt add car models or maybe you're facilitating around some kind of someone else's IP and to make the transition yourself is you actually have to be the person creating the ideas. I know that's like- “How am I supposed to compete with like Myers-Briggs or DISC Co.?” All that stuff's out there, I have nothing else to add. But you have insights and experiences and knowledge that no one else has and it took me a long time to get my head around this because I went inside up for every certification possible and now because I was like “Good, I don't have to create this stuff, you've already done it. Great!” and those things still serve well in fact, I've created my own certifications for other people. But if you really want to stand out, what happens if you don't, if you want to stand out the benefits are particularly if you're making that transition now, the difference is in, first of all, what you paid. So there's a very big difference in your day rate and what you will be paid by clients because they need to see the value in what you bring and you can still bring in some of those things. So for example if it's like DISC Co. or Myers-Briggs, I might do it as part of what I do but it's not my whole practice otherwise I'm the same as everybody else and then what happens is they're going “Oh, we need a Myers-Briggs workshop.” and Myers-Briggs is great by the way, I'm not saying it you know I've done thousands of my not-wise Myers-Briggs profiles. I followed about 6,000 people.
Leanne: Wow!
Jane: Yeah, it's been a lot.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: But what happens is that people will say “Oh, we need a team-building thing, why don't we do that Myers-Briggs thing?” and they go out to market and look around and all the pricing is pretty much the same. So you have to be even more remarkable to try and get that work because otherwise what happens is you're like a “toothpaste on the supermarket shelf” where the customer's standing there going “Well, I don't know which one to buy so I just buy the one that's on special.”
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: So you're competing on price now, so the problem is if you're not remarkable and the problem is we've got this “Tall Poppy” thing so we don't think we're very much remarkable at all and in fact we are. I find everybody fascinating that it's we're too close to our own stuff to think that we're “I'm not good enough or maybe I don't really know anything.” but you know that was what my problem. When I realized that I had this problem, I had this commoditization problem and so I realized that actually I'm competing on price with people and how am I differentiating myself or how am I articulating my value so that I can say something other than “You just need to buy me because I'm better!.” or “You just let me do it because I'm better.” but then you got to have a bit more than that to be able to get that over the line and so it's that fine line isn't it between the cocky and arrogant and trying to sell yourself and you're like “You look at these other people I go. How did they do it? How on earth are they’re so busy? How are they doing all this amazing work?” and so you spot on the difference. The remarkability is what makes you easy to buy and unique.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: And if you find out what that is then you're well-positioned and you can start to unpack your thinking and your ideas and what your experience it is. You know I've got some clients who have done you know PhDs and they get very cranky because when I work with them and they say “Are you telling me that you do this with people who haven't had to go and do a PhD and they are earning more than me?” and I said “Yes!”
Leanne: Yes. I mean isn't it interesting like ten years ago, if you wanted to be paid more I think the default response as well- just go to another course. It's so different nowadays.
Jane: Yes, but you don't need to.
Leanne: No.
Jane: You really don’t need to. If you can solve people's problems and you can help them have the insights and have the empathy to help them understand their own challenges and you're able to care. If you know how to care and run a tribe, if you know how to do that and you can solve problems, you don't need an MBA, that's just not needed anymore. But if you know your customers, if you understand them or the people in your rooms whether your customer is within an organization or outside if you're making the move. I always say the person who understands the customer the most is the persons whose business grows the fastest.
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. I love that you talk about what you said about we're so close to what we're thinking because it's in our own head so of course we take it for granted and we just assume – “Everyone thinks this way.” “Everyone would have the same response to that.”
What I like about your book though, it's you've got all these questions where you can articulate what your responses would be to different things like your values and things like that. I can totally imagine if you had thousands of people complete your book not one person would have the same answer to any of those questions, it’s like combination alone, if you put it to some paper and talk about logic we're all completely unique. So I hope all of our listeners get that and find the importance of what you're talking about because it does seem like nowadays you hop onto LinkedIn and it seems that everyone is a speaker, a coach, a facilitator so you have to get through a lot of noise.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: Yeah and what you spoke about it's important about knowing what the customer wants. So I'd like to hear that in the context of facilitating a workshop. I mean you've run, you’ve worked with 50,000 people, what do you do beforehand to find out what they need from the day that you're there? What kind of tactics?
Jane: Great question. I wish so many people would ask that question so much more. I would say, if anyone said to me “Why do you get booked so much? Why do so many people work with you?” and it's because I spend the time on this and if there's anything that I would say that makes the big difference and this is where I’m with my clients, this is where I spend the time. So for example, let's say you're walking into a room of workplace health and safety or a consult teams in the mining industry. I've worked with lots of mining, oil and gas and so I know that getting them in the room is the first challenge.
Leanne: Big time. Hello to all my colleagues who’s listening. Yes it is, we all know it is. Time-poor. Yep!
Jane: Right? Time-poor is the first challenge. The second challenge is that you're in a highly reactive space so if something goes wrong, if you've got a mind shut down, if you've got, you know there's so much volatility and safety is a number one. So if there's something that goes wrong onside and particularly if you're dealing with workplace of health and safety, they're in a highly reactive role so then I go, “Okay!” So empathy and understanding is like dude. If you can get that then I can connect so I'll say “Okay, so what's going on for these people right now? What's going for on for them not just in their role?” so you've got what I call “Higher and lower order problems”.
Higher order problems you know they're going through a restructure, you know this particular mind sets has been going through. It's in a shutdown at the moment or there's lots of specific volatility that's happening in that specific role or there's a lot of compliance issues.
Lower order problems, they're still relevant which is around being time-poor that’s across all industries. But if you can take the time and I do this for keynoting as well so I do a lot of research. I have a research team so I get them out to go and find out. One of the specific challenges I've got the clients problems that I'm talking to them about but then I'll go and research what else is going on in the industry so I have them find out.
So for example, I spoke at a keynote I remember it was a couple of years ago and it was about working with young female lawyers like it was early career lawyers and it was particularly women and I was like “Okay, well I'm not a lawyer and I think I've got a bit of an idea.” but you can always assume too much so you've got to know that you've got a natural unconscious bias and assumptions. So I put it on Facebook and I said “Here's an early career female lawyer, you need to be in this age group. I'll pay you for your time. I need to interview you.”
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: So I say to them “Whatever you charge for client, I don't expect you to do it for free. Whatever you charged for a client you can charge me, I have a few questions.” and I usually take up about a half an hour of their time and I'll do it over the phone and they can bill me that's no problem because I know that builds my understanding not just for that client but I think I've worked something across 52 different industries now. So being able to know those problems that those different industries are facing and that's how you end up getting the work because I know that you can solve that.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: So I think it's worth…one of the things I find like I had a client just recently and he's done a PhD in this amazing management theory and I think there was sparks coming off him and I had so much stuff. He was amazing and I said to him “What problem does your customer say that they have?” this is after three hours of explaining his whole mission philosophy branding journey life story. I said “What problem does your customer understand that they have?” or “What problem does your customer say they has?” and he said “I don't know, that's my problem.”
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: So otherwise, it's you telling them that they've got a problem and that's like calling someone's baby “ugly”, isn't it? It sounds like “You know, you’re problem is?” So it comes from huge compassion and empathy and understanding and then only then it's like trying to land a plane- you got to clear your tarmac! You can't get anything through and you can't create change in a room and you don't have to regurgitate back to them everything that you've read. But you've got as a facilitator you've got to ask the right question and if you know the right questions to ask, the value you bring to the room is that's your job as the facilitator, isn't it? Your job is to change the room.
Leanne: Yes.
Jane: If you can have that understanding, it's not necessarily you’re being an expert in that person's job but if you can know the right questions to ask they've got the answers as you know. It's then that's really how and then that's when the value they see the value bring.
Leanne: Yeah, it's just being comfortable with the language that you're using as well and making sure that is relevant to that industry because you also talk about credibility in your book and I really I got this quote out that I loved. It's a John C. Maxwell quote that you've used in your book:
“Credibility is a leader’s currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it he or she is bankrupt.”
It’s so important to be credible! I mean I guess you've been doing this for some time since you were 14 years old you've got this bank of clients you've worked with and got such a great reputation. For someone starting out, how do they create that credibility? I can't imagine, I know I'm very uncomfortable walking into a room and saying “Yeah, this is the stuff that I've done.” I don't really want to talk myself up again, the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” but it's really not about me anyway. But you want them to trust that you are meant to be in that room, you deserve a spot. How do you create that?
Jane: Yeah, great question. So trust, there is a difference between trust and credibility. Credibility brings trust, sorry, well credibility builds trust so I say there's three things that will build trust and this is some other new IP I'm working on. You saw the 12 pieces to building trust but I've really got it down to what are the three key big things that you need to be able to do to build trust.
One is authenticity, you've got to be just you, you've got to be your best self and you know that means knowing what you're trying to do, your mission, your clarity about what, who you are as a human being and just to be your most authentic self and I know that's easy to say, that first part is authenticity. The second part is empathy and empathy is that understanding that I've got an understanding, whether it's around, whatever the challenges that audience has or the team or the group or customer, whatever. If you've got those two things, so first of all its authenticity and then empathy which is what your challenges are on your world and then the bottom one is credibility so if you can get those three things the authenticity, empathy and credibility. If those three things come together you get trust because now you suddenly “I have more confidence in you; I can see the confidence in what you're saying; I can see you have conviction.” so that empathy is what actually makes you do go deeper in your knowledge.
Leanne: Yeah and like you said I mean you gave the example before of putting out a call to lawyers and then getting billed for the time. Not a lot of people do that. No, they don't! And especially with keynotes because you think “I've got this speech. It's all packaged up. I've spent a lot of time developing it. I can just go into any kind of industry and deliver this.” and I think that's where it does fall flat so what you're doing is as part of that research contextualizing it for that audience which is amazing!
Jane: Absolutely!
Leanne: So the three things that you talk about authenticity, empathy & credibility. It all talks, we're talking maps in the facilitation context but that is really what leadership is about as well.
Jane: That’s right.
Leanne: So that's what I love about doing this podcast about facilitation. Everything I'm hearing about people in terms of the great skills facilitators bring in terms of having empathy, showing up caring for people, taking that time. All of those attributes what makes a great leader.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: So if you're becoming a great facilitator, a side benefit is you'll probably also be an amazing leader as well.
Jane: Absolutely, you know James Hume, he was the speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and he said “Whenever you're presenting and facilitating is the same thing you're auditioning for a position of leadership.” So you're in front of a room, you're already in your… I think sometimes we go out- “I'm a facilitator; I'm a trainer; I'm not a leader, I just run training programs.” but you know if you're in front of a room but even when we're branding and positioning people and around to give that credibility, we will look for photos where they're standing in front of a group. So it doesn't matter if you've got three people, if you're the one in-charge of the room, it's your room and you're the one holding the space for everybody, you're the leader!
Leanne: Yeah, you have a leader. I love that. I did read it in your book about when you are given the opportunity to present, try and document that. So this book, I have to say I love the practical nature of it. You can read a lot of books at a very theory and you're like how does it supply but I think it's great for facilitators that do want to start stepping out of their companies. One example you gave was “Before you're traveling to a workshop, take a selfie at the airport or before you hit the road.” Like that's just something so simple but that immediately what that tell people “Well, I'm on the road, I've been asked to go somewhere else to run a workshop.” such a great little hack!
Jane: Yeah and even if you are trying to show people that you don't just work in your local town so you know when I started, my problem was because of the changing government you know 80% of my business went overnight so I realized that actually half my problem is that I have a business that is very focused on clients in Queensland so I said “Okay, I actually need to build not just a national but an international brand so that if anything goes wrong at any time I can pick up. I can go somewhere or I can work with clients. I can reach out and I'm not going to be affected by local government challenges.” and that was what happens to a lot of businesses here in particular Queensland because of our volatile government so what I did exactly that I said “Okay, every time we go check in, airport; Facebook post! So it was around building the brand to be and the communication strategy that went with that and of course people go “Oh my God, you're everywhere, every time!”
Leanne: You are!
Jane: And it's very deliberate and so I've probably settled down on a bit now. But when I first started, it was very deliberate because I had to really send the message that you know if people; “I won't worry you because you're in Brisbane or you're not in Melbourne or you're not in Sydney”. I needed to open it up and create access so people would instead say “Oh, when you're in Sydney next or when you're in Melbourne next.” so I was in Sydney or Melbourne most weeks so it was just opening it up to say “I'm prepared to get on a plane. I’m prepared. “Yes I'm in town!”
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. I want to talk about a bit of travel and environment because I know you're running a workshop at Peppers at Kingscliff.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: For anyone, for those of you that have never been there it's absolutely amazing. It's very relaxing, this beautiful beach, the town is just if you get there and all your stresses pretty much dissolved. I would like to ask you yet just about that. Was that a deliberate move to create a strong environment for you workshop? Why did you pick that spot to run your one day workshop?
Jane: Well, it sounds like I won't be doing very much.
Leanne: Yeah, cocktails by the pool but that sounds like a perfect day.
Jane: Yes, exactly. White boards can be wheeled out to the Spa.
Leanne: That's a really good idea. You should get into hotel design and thinking about conferences and things like that? Why not?
Jane: That's right! Yeah you know one of the things that I've noticed, I'm a mentor in Thought Leaders Business School and my mentor who was the founder of Thought Leaders Business School. I’ve been in there for five years and his name is Matt Church. It has this mantra, you want to get to a point where you do work you like with people you like or love, people you love the way that you want. He said to me “If you could have a program that runs any way that you want, how would that work?” and that takes a while to build up to that so yes I was running around the country and I was running programs everywhere and I said you know like Kingscliff dope I grew up around that area so it's like home to me. The beach is like home because I live in the city now but the beach is where I reconnect, it's where I get off the treadmill and so when he said “What would that look like? What would work you love, work you like with people you love the way you want?” and I thought “Okay so what I would love is I would love to be able to have a be at a point where my business had grown enough and my brand was strong enough that people would have the courage to you know maybe not stay in Melbourne get on a plane and come and disconnect to reconnect a little bit.” but it's branding work you know you're really connecting with people's identity and the core of who they are that's quite hard to do in a corporate battleship grey office.
Leanne: And they're battling traffic to even get there on time.
Jane: Yeah. You know you've got to kind of get grounded I know because I grew up around that area maybe I'm a bit of a hippie at heart but you know it's those things that you really have to consciously stop and reconnect to who you are to actually make some of these decisions that you're making and go “Oh wow! Yeah I do, do that.” But what I had to do was create that base for me to work in to help other people so that they could see that for themselves and so that's the challenge I often start to pose to them; “What would your version of this look like?” and so there's one lady that I know that has done. She's a fantastic coach and she's a beautiful cook so what she does is she cooks in her coaching sessions so you go to her house and you sit up at the kitchen bench and she coaches while she's cooking. So she cooks, she bakes so by the end of the session so she spends the first few minutes you know putting all the recipe together and whatever. I'm not a very good cook but nothing like she’s like.
Leanne: I’m a terrible cook!
Jane: Microwaves, come in very handy sometimes. You know by the end of the session then you have that by the time she's finished cooking and then you sit down you have the meal together and so that's the end of that coaching session that goes for I think an hour and a half or whatever it might be. So you know hearing some of these stories of how people do it and its part of how they love to do it that's part of their brand that's what she's known for and that's what creates the remarkability.
Leanne: Yes. I was just that word was just coming up. I mean how many people would talk about that afterwards and that is something that's completely unique to her and I love that you know because we think of workshops and we think we're boxed in a room we've got them for half the day there's going to be pretty average catered lunch, we need to have PowerPoint slides but she's completely just gone- No! This is the way we're going to do it and but then by doing that she's attracting the type of people that she'd want so it's like hitting those three things that you spoke about earlier that's such a cool quote.
Jane: Yeah you stop trying to conform but having said that when you first starting out, you've got to be easy to buy and it's hard to buy you if you set something like that up straightaway. You haven't got enough trust, you haven't built up the credibility and all that sort of thing so you still kind of got to do the hard yards initially but build up your database, build up your relationships and once there's some you'll see in the book there are a few metrics that we look for to be able to know at what point if I did. Because people are scared to do things like that so there are certain metrics that I work with people in their businesses to say “Okay, yes you've got these numbers of certain people on data bases, certain revenue, customers types of programs” and then we say “Okay, yes now is the time to do it!”
Leanne: Yeah it's a calculated risk rather than just going “I must give this a Go!” and to be completely disappointed when no one buys it. Where did that go? Why did that fail?
Jane: Yeah you've got that trust and the relationship with those clients, they'll follow you, they'll go where you want and then because they wouldn't necessarily look for something like that but when they go, the fact that you're the one running it so you create, one is actually matters that CEO of Thought Leaders said, he said “Business is changing from the business of ideas particularly with facilitators. If you're in this space, you're working with your ideas and what your worldview is and how you articulate that to get the best out of people based on your experience.” but he said just recently that “It's not just about the ideas.” Because I can go online, I can find those ideas, I can read your blog's. It's actually the experiences you create that how those ideas are applied and how do I get to connect with that which is the whole remarkability. “What’s the essence of you that makes that experience?” because yes I can get the knowledge from you but I don't want to sit and read a blog, I want to hang out with you for a day. I want to know “Oh yeah, look at my stuff, yeah give me some attention. Look at me for a day and I want to be around your energy in the space that you hold.” and that's the real value.
Leanne: That’s what would attracts me. Yeah. I'd like to talk about energy as well, sorry I'm just coming up to like a keynote or the workshop that you're running down at Kingscliff. I've been really interested in listening to a lot of podcasts recently about the morning routine and what different people do. What do you do to get sort of psyched up or do you have to calm yourself down before you start delivering one of these?
Jane: Yes and its interesting, isn't it? Like keynote and facilitation as such different modes of delivery of ones thinking, ones “tell versus ask”. So you know you've got different energy spaces that you're working with but facilitation kind of got it. The thing they have in common is you've got to meet the room where they're at. You can come in, managing your state is everything so if you can manage your energy that's for sure. I have to fire myself up a little bit because I'm actually my natural state is mentoring so I'm very introverted ironically most people don't realize that but I'm more introverted than I am extroverted. And to facilitate in groups or to keynote and I keynote every week so it's not something that comes naturally to me, it is tiring. So I have to make sure I've got myself pumped up so it'll be things like make sure I get sleep, just eating well particularly when you travel because a lot of these conferences and things are interstate so I will never I always travel the night the day before. I also will go into the room the day before so if I fly in that afternoon if I'm the first or second one on in the morning, I'll go into the room because I need to know the energy or the space of the room. I'll do it just a quick practice on stage just so I can get a sense of how it works and it's funny I spoke at an event a few years ago and I was on straight after. I didn't know that the person who was speaking before me was going to be running a meditation session.
Leanne: Hard that to follow.
Jane: I had my headphones on and I had like you know right against the machine on and I was so fired up and then I went in and it was like “Okay.”
Leanne: You could feel that mood as “Woo!”
Jane: “Okay, we’ll slow down”. But you know you get even much the energy and then bring it out but you've got to bring, there's so much energy that comes to a keynote and to being able to prepare for that and it's knowing your stuff so that you can be present to the room and serve the room and connect with the room like things like what will give me energy is I'll stand at the door and greet people when they come in. It’s also clear that to them that “Oh, she must be somebody who's working here.” or “Oh, that's right. She's the lady that maybe she's on the hand out garden.”
Leanne: Oh yeah, and she's approachable as well which is great.
Jane: It's not me saying “I'm not coming in going right. I'm the speaker, I'll have my blue M&Ms. Thank you.” You've got to connect with the audience, my job is to change the room while I'm there so you just got to do everything you can to get that energy in connection, don't you?
Leanne: Yeah I love that my job is to change the room while I'm there. Gee! That’s pretty impactful, that's going to be the quote of the episode, love that! But I think as well, I'm entering I love seeing the room as well even the day before because then it helps you go to sleep at night because he's not wondering what does the room look like and you want to have like most your questions answered before you have that sleep so you can have a restful you know eight hours or whatever it is that you need.
Jane: Yes and unique to them. You know I've had things like I've fallen off the stage, technology hasn't worked every age.
Leanne: You’ve fallen off the stage?
Jane: Oh, you name it! Like when you do as many as I do, everything goes wrong but you know you've got to know your keynote forty-five minutes inside out back to front, if anything fails what are you going to do. You know I've had that happen before. You’ve just got to know plan ABCD and E.
Leanne: Have any times where like something's happening you're like “I just can't continue doing this, what am I doing?” Have that ever crossed your mind or you like “No, just get on back on the bike and let's just keep going.” You must have been talked at times.
Jane: Yeah there was one particular time it was actually really early and when I started speaking and I got booked for this keynote it was at the Gold Coast and it was Royal Pines. I don't know if you've ever been to Royal Pines but the meeting room is massive. It's like a nightclub like they're stripe lights, it was like a rock concept this thing.
Leanne: At the golf club, that's not, now I wouldn't have thought that but…
Jane: Yeah it's got a really big, it's really popular for conferences. It's got a great massive room so there's about a thousand people at this conference and I walked in the room and the A/V guy was there and I saw my presentation on the computer and I thought it looks a bit different though and so I went over to him and said “Hi, my name is Jane Anderson, I’m on this morning.” and he said “Yeah, marked me up.” and then I said “Can I just ask you? I think there's a slide there, I just looking at that presentation, it looks a bit different than the one I had to send through.” I had send to his head two weeks prior and he said “Ah yeah, you can have a look.”, so look through and it but there were slides missing, there were things I'd never seen before and so I was on in 20 minutes I couldn't change anything and so I said “Okay, all right I'll just work with that.”
Leanne: Gosh, well done.
Jane: “Have you got a whiteboard? and he said “Yes, I think there's one down at the back.” and so I thought all right I know where my where the breaks are I think in the content so I was like “Okay, I can work I think with it.” and then he said “Just so you know, you know the remote?” so he said “With the remote, just so you know it doesn't go backwards that only goes forwards in it.” so I said “Okay, so what happens if I have to go backwards?” he said “Oh look! I'll be at the back, I'm the A/V guy, you just yell out.” So of course I started the keynote and the slides started moving. I hadn't even touched anything and I thought “I should have known when he said that. How would he know that?” Anyway, I got it, I said on to Mr. A/V “Can you come back to the first slide again?” and so I started again and they just started moving in and I thought “Okay, I'm not touching anything!” so I just turned them off and I was in the first five minutes. Anyway, I got through it but I was kicking myself because I thought “What have I done wrong, I can't…” you know because everyone's looking at you that you're the problem so you've just got to work with. Anyway of course I got off the stage and the coordinator came running up and said “Oh my God that was amazing. I don't know how you did that but what you didn't know is that your remote was connected to the room next door and theirs was connected to yours. That was fantastic, would definitely get you back next year”. I can’t do it, I can’t do this thing!
Leanne: Oh my gosh! That’s up there! There were some of the worst stories I've heard. Wow! You handled that so well. But you wouldn't have been able to pull that off if you haven't prepared. There's no way I mean you could have, you can wing things for certain time but not for 45 minutes. Oh my gosh, well done! High five! I was getting goose bumps when you're telling me when you're framing that story that is the worst scenario and if that ever happens though at least we know “Hey, what's going on next door, I think we need to swap.”
Jane: Exactly, it’s a good tip for facilitators.
Leanne: It is really a good tip. Speaking of tips, are there any tips or words of advice that you can offer our first-time facilitators listening in?
Jane: Yeah I think if I think back to. I remember the first time I facilitated I was terrible. So I would, allow yourself to you know just be- know that you're not going to be perfect straight away and this still days where I like not very often but sometimes you just have an off day. It doesn't mean it's like your whole career is destroyed. If you have a tough day that would be the first thing is to know it's just a tough day. If something goes wrong that's all part of learning and part of growing. The other thing I would say that has made the biggest difference and I wish I did this much earlier was find your tribe, find the people who you need to be around, who are doing the same thing as you or trying to do something similar. But you want to also work out find your mentor and often the mentor will be the person leading that tribe so if you want to get really great at like it might be at training activities then find the expert who is the expert in training activities. Do some mentoring with them but work out as well- “Who are other people who are trying to solve that problem as well?” or “Where do other trainers hang out?”
So for example, I have a program which is called the “Women of Influence” and we have this power up program and so these are all women who are facilitators, trainers, coaches, speakers. So I lead the tribe but they're all trying to do the same thing but they're all different at what they do. Some do leadership, some do personal branding got three in there that do personal branding, we've got others that are business coaches but they do a lot of facilitation for businesses. Everybody's so different but to work out we'll you know particularly I think for women as well you know for women, we don't naturally get out of build the networks the blokes tend to. So find your tribe, go and ask around if it's you know whether it's the AITD may be there's some members in there if it's training, the Australian Institute of Training and Development. If you're a coach but you also include facilitation in your work maybe you do group coaching it might be that kind of space. Look at the ICF professional speakers if you're a facilitator and you're wanting to include more speaking, you'll be like this plenty of speakers who also do facilitation. So look for your associations, find your tribe get around with the right people and find a mentor.
Leanne: Excellent advice, brilliant! Jane, I've loved our conversation today I could easily talk to you for another couple of hours. I think we've just kind of touched the surface but I've learnt a lot already. A lot of what I picked up free reading your book which I will recommend to all the listeners especially if you want to start differentiating yourself in a crowded market I think it's really useful. But also hearing, you’re very authentic and vulnerable when you came out with some of those stories and I think that cheers the audience that it's okay to mess up and you need to stretch in order to develop at the end of the day. Finally Jane, where can people find you?
Jane: Yeah thank you. So they can jump on my website so its jane-anderson.com, you're welcome to jump on there and of course there's all LinkedIn and Instagram and those places so I'm always around like you said.
Leanne: Everywhere!
Jane: I’m kind of everywhere. You’ll be sick of me probably. But one of the things that you can do is when you go to the website. This could be useful actually for your listeners and you'll probably notice on the book it's got where you can do take the “Influencer Score” so I created a diagnostic to help people to understand like just the communication channels and just you know you don't have to try and do all of them immediately but just to know where to start and so you can go on it takes three minutes to fill out so you just go to the jane-anderson.com website, if you scroll right down the bottom it's actually a little bit hidden and because otherwise you go to the shop and you'll pay $80, so just go!.
Leanne: Wow that’s so cool. Okay!
Jane: There’s a little link its right down the very bottom and it's called the “Lead Generation Indicator” so if you're starting out or if maybe you're thinking about making the move or you have made the move out of corporate and you're starting to do this yourself. It gives you a seven page personal report of exactly where you sit now. I'm based on what you've got to do so you know your gaps on what and where to go from there.
Leanne: Oh that's perfect and we'll definitely link those in the show notes for sure.
Jane: Oh thank you! Yeah better, right!
Leanne: Lovely. Thanks, Jane. You've been awesome!
Jane: Thank you very much.
Leanne: Have a great evening.
Jane: Thank you.
Leanne: Well done!
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:
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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 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?
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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.
Episode 16: How to strengthen your facilitation by connecting, teaching and landing with Adam Mustoe
In this episode, we hear from Adam Mustoe – a Gallup certified Strengths Coach and second-generation pastor. He uses an assessment tool called CliftonStrengths to help people find the intersection of their unique talents and rewarding work.
In this episode, we hear from Adam Mustoe – a Gallup certified Strengths Coach and second-generation pastor. He uses an assessment tool called CliftonStrengths to help people find the intersection of their unique talents and rewarding work.
The CliftonStrengths assessment is based on 40 years of research by the Gallup corporation where it reveals 34 potential strengths- our natural ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Adam shares his story on how he found his strengths in 2009, how it changed his life, and how he is changing the lives of others – one workshop at a time.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How to bring out the element of “surprise” in your workshop delivery
How Adam developed his storytelling skills
Story of how he found his “Strengths” in 2009 and how this changed his life
His experience on some challenging workshops he facilitated and some practical advice for first time facilitators
The 50 mile rule and how, as a facilitator, you can use this to your advantage
What prompted Adam to get the Clifton Strengths accreditation
Adam shares his top 5 strengths and how it helped him in his career
How to use your strengths outside of the corporate world.
Resources mentioned:
Connect with Adam
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!
Episode 15: Facilitating and leading with your head and heart with Therese Lardner
In this First Time Facilitator episode, you’ll hear from Therese Lardner, a psychologist, leadership coach, speaker and workshop facilitator. She shares how being thrown into the deep end helped build her confidence in public speaking, and why your choice of words matter as a facilitator.
In this First Time Facilitator episode, you’ll hear from Therese Lardner, a psychologist, leadership coach, speaker and workshop facilitator. She shares how being thrown into the deep end helped build her confidence in public speaking, and why your choice of words matter as a facilitator.This is why Therese dedicates her career to teaching people how to use their vocabulary more effectively.
We also talk about employee engagement and creating strong work cultures; and discover what organisations need to consider to improve the employee experience.
About our guest
Therese 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 is just as comfortable in the boardroom as she is on the factory floor. For Therese, connection at work is the key to success, developed through personal insight, alignment with company culture and cohesive teams.
What you’ll learn
How she adjusted her academic language to connect with diverse audiences
Some advice she was given that took the weight off her shoulders when she was a first time facilitator
Why it’s important to develop your vocabulary (and your emotions) as a leader and how you can do that
How she landed a speaking gig at a positive psychology conference in New York City
Resources
Therese speaking at Disrupt HR Brisbane - below
Desperately Seeking Emotional Vocabulary | Therese Lardner | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.
Episode transcript
Click here to view the episode transcript with Therese Lardner
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.