Facilitator Development
How to ‘Hang’ with the Client…and Still Get the Job!
Are you in your stride, i.e. relaxed, friendly, laughing, having fun, with every new or prospective client? Are you able to “hang” with any potential client? “Hang” is a slang expression in English that means you are in a very informal, relaxed setting, and you are just enjoying the people you are with, typically friends.…
No Tent Poles, Too Many Flies, Low on TP and Facilitator Adaptability
Remember I told you I was going on a canoe trip this summer? It was my first adaptability test of the summer. My second one was experiencing two super typhoons in Japan and Hong Kong in September. I’ll tell you about that experience in another blog. The canoe trip reminded me what we take for granted as…
How to Overcome Your Fear of Co-Facilitation
Just back from Osaka, Japan (Typhoon occurred just before I arrived shutting the Osaka airport down for a week+ and knocking out electricity at our Bed and Breakfast for a day!) and Hong Kong (Super Typhoon while I was there delaying my flight home by a day). I share this because I was jointly facilitating 6…
3 Key Areas to Dramatically Improve Your Facilitation Practice
This blog asks some provocative questions and gives you starter answers and example stories to help dramatically improve your facilitation business or practice. It has application to both in-house and external facilitators. It is meant to inspire you to make your facilitation practice more rewarding, balanced and joyous. We’ll briefly look at specific ways to…
Facilitation Can Change the World – An Interview with Barbara MacKay
Joshua Voon, of our International Facilitation Cohort (2018-2019) interviewed me in July 2018 with what he calls meta questions. I thought his questions were wonderful and would perhaps be of interest to those who have or are starting a facilitation practice. Here are his questions and my answers. Q: What got you interested in facilitation?…
What Can A Facilitator Do to Honour Life’s Milestones?
Since 1995, when I first learned the Technology of Participation methods from The Institute of Cultural Affairs, I have been impressed with the tool I have heard them use on staff and collegial special events, good-byes and birthdays. However, the way I’ve been using it over the decades, is to conduct a conversation with my…
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…
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…
