Difficult Behaviors
Finally – Your Very Own Complete Professional Facilitator Development Library
We did it. We worked for years to make facilitator user-friendly content. Now we hope you will benefit from it in some new ways. This blog shares a bit of a story about my journey (and my collaboration with Eileen) and where I am now. Sorry – not much on technique today. BUT rich on…
Staying Calm When the Group Hates Your Facilitator Process!
Or you, the participant hate the process! Some people profess to not like process. I guarantee that at times in meetings, it might be as high as 75%+ of the group who are not enjoying the process. If you could hear people think out loud it might sound like this, “Why can’t everyone just think…
People Who Talk Too Much in Meetings – Respectfully Dealing with Dominance
When I looked up the phrase “dominant behavior” on the internet, I found a lot of articles on dominance in animals – the alpha male phenomenon etc. In fact, one definition of dominant behaviour said it was “initially established by fighting, threatening displays or interchanges. AND, once established, usually maintained by competitive behaviours…” I realized quickly…
Facilitating When Senior Leaders Are in the Meeting
We’ve all been in meetings where our direct boss is attending or there are very senior leaders in the room. That’s a real facilitator dilemma. You the facilitator should have full control of the group, but you may not feel you can do this with senior leaders in the room. This is a common question…
Finding the Silver Lining… for that Facilitated Event Gone Wrong!
What do you do when you have a facilitated an event that has gone badly? It might just be one moment in the whole event that you keep dwelling on after the fact. You realize you made a mistake. And you don’t exactly know what you could’ve done differently. This blog is about many stories…
How Facilitators Stop Power Imbalance, Dominance and Oppression
This week marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, November 11, 1918. WOW. I was in Canada for the last 2 weeks and we passed through a small village on Vancouver Island on this anniversary date. We passed by a beautiful gathering of veterans and citizens in a cemetery. People were…
Challenging Participant Behaviors – An 8 Step Survivor’s Guide
Imagine you are presenting at a pre-conference workshop where everyone wants to be there. People have signed up and paid to be there. There was no possibility that someone could show up at the facilitators conference, pay a good amount of money and not want to be there. Right? Not so! This is what happened…
Spring Clean Your Meetings! The Art of A Fresh Start
This blog contains a series of videos and handouts on how to dramatically enliven your meetings. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring is often the time we take to get rid of old, NOT useful things. It is a time to freshen up our day-to-day living space. We call this process “spring…
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…
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…
