Posts
The Facilitator Role: Shifting Harmful Situations to Healthy Ones
This is a story about a woman who changed everything. She took something that seemed impossible, and turned it into the most amazing project that a whole community got behind. (See her project here: www.washedashore.org) The model of this project could be used anywhere in the world. We, as facilitators can be agents to help…
25 Women Who Influenced My Facilitation Career – A Tribute
Thursday, March 8th is International Women’s Day #IWD2018 #PressforProgress. This year has been rather an extraordinary year for women around the globe. We have found our voice and spoken about things that we all took for granted or for things we could not speak about. At first, I was a bit ambivalent about the various…
Facilitator Endurance: 4 Stages That Win You the Gold
I’ve been thinking about endurance. The winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea now, are a very big demonstration of endurance. Athletes go through a four stage process more or less of endurance training. What about facilitators? I’d like to talk about the why and what of the four stage process as it relates to our…
Get More Facilitation Clients and In-House Opportunities
Have you had trouble convincing potential clients why they need a facilitator? Three recent events have led me to choose this topic for our blog today. In these events, everyone wanted the same thing. They were starting a facilitation business and wondering how to sell their services to prospective clients. Or, they were in house…
Facilitating From the Side – There’s Hope for Bad Meetings
I worry a lot about people who attend meetings. I worry because many tell me how bad they are. I am totally spoiled. I simply don’t attend others’ meetings unless I know they will be well run. Most of the time, I am facilitating them or facilitating from the side without permission. What about those…
Facilitator Marketing 101: Demystifying Blogging and YouTube
Since we are doing our first pilot of a marketing course for ToP Facilitators and trainers today in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, I thought I would talk about how to market yourself as a facilitator. In particular, I would like to cover blogging and “YouTubing”. I would have to say that blogging and creating YouTube videos…
Got 10 minutes? The Power of Reflection
I started to write my blog today and part way through it I felt like throwing it out the window – it was sooooooo boring! I felt I had said the same things a million times. So instead I’m just talking to you from the heart today – it is something I have wanted to…
Create a Meeting Agenda Quickly – Template Inside!
You’ll notice below that I’ve done a short 4 minute video introducing you to designing meeting agendas. However, I get to share the joy of my mosaic practice with you as well. Because I enjoy designing things so much, it’s likely no surprise that the art of mosaics is quite fascinating to me. In this…
Facilitating When You Are Sick
I haven’t been feeling well for a few days. I can feel a cold coming on. Usually I get pretty worried about getting sick. The worry comes from not being able to perform my so called duties. When I actually think about just the getting sick part, it brings up an amazing feeling of just…
Tinkering with Open Space!
A number of colleagues and I occasionally debate whether it’s ok to modify a well known, well established, outstanding framework. In the course of a recent conversation, a few of us came up with a modification to one of the steps in the Open Space Technology (OST) framework. For me, OST has always been a…
