How Can Effective Facilitation Transform Personal Connections and Group Dynamics?

A conversation with Kellie Artis, Founder @ Mission Identity™

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“If you don’t have those underpinnings of being anchored to something, it’s really difficult to do anything else. That’s just baseline sort of human functioning.”- Kellie Artis

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Kelly Artis, founder of Mission Identity, who empowers women through the Enneagram. The discussion highlights the transformative power of facilitation, particularly through Kelly’s experiences in the George W. Bush Institute’s Veteran Leadership Program. Kelly shares her journey into facilitation, emphasizing the importance of psychological safety, empathy, and deeper connections in group settings. She reflects on how effective facilitation goes beyond traditional teaching, fostering meaningful interactions and personal growth. The episode underscores the impact of creating safe spaces for dialogue and collaboration.

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About the Guest

Kellie Artis is a passionate advocate for high-achieving women, bringing nearly two decades of expertise in communications and personal development to her role as the founder of Mission Identity™. As the Director of Communications at Virtual Veterans Communities (VVC), Kellie excels in supporting military-connected students who seek to advance in their careers and personal lives. A scholar of the George W. Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program, Kellie is dedicated to empowering women through leadership and community engagement. She has earned certifications as a Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher and Professional Certified Marketer, leading workshops that promote self-discovery and growth. Her work has been featured on platforms like Fox News and Military.com, where she is recognized as a respected voice in helping women achieve their full potential.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with vultures control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltage control.com/facilitation lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12 week facilitation certification program, you can read about it@voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Kelly Artis, the founder of Mission Identity, where she empowers women to reach their full potential by utilizing the Enneagram as a powerful tool for self-discovery, personal growth, and leadership excellence. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

Kellie Artis:

Thanks so much, Douglas. I’m excited to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s always amazing to me to watch folks that are making these transitions into coaching practices and becoming solopreneurs and really empowering the way they think about work and taking control of their destiny, so to speak.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, yeah. It’s wild and crazy and fraught with uncertainty, but yeah, it’s something to follow your passion, I think.

Douglas:

Well, it’s interesting you mentioned uncertainty. I always like to remind folks that most things are uncertain, and a lot of times we fool ourselves into thinking that there’s certainty or there things are knowable. It is like the safe little pod around ourselves that we think that is there. It’s not really an illusion for the most part when it’s there, and so if you become comfortable with complexity and chaos, life becomes more fun and more easy to engage with. Not easy, but easier,

Kellie Artis:

Right? Yeah. You’re less attached to it and you can just kind of flow. That’s the goal. Yeah. It’s almost like an entitlement. You’re like, things should be certain and they’re not.

Douglas:

Yeah, and I wonder how much that flow comes up in the work that you do with your clients when you’re coaching.

Kellie Artis:

Oh, I mean, it’s almost constant, right? It’s always like, okay, even the Enneagram as a tool in and of itself, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about later, it’s a professional and personal development sort of framework that you can use for self-discovery and inner observation, all of these things. But almost everyone I talk to is looking for the goal, right? Okay, how do we get there? How do I achieve it quickly? How do I do this more efficient? I’m like, no, no, no. The goal is to just allow and just kind of flow and be more okay with the flow and be less limited the pursuit of something. So yeah, I mean, it always plays a part. Is it achievable? Even saying is it achievable is like it’s kind of missing the point, right? It’s enjoyment, it’s contentment, satisfaction, all of that stuff. It’s a work in progress in my own life too. Plays, I don’t know what it actually looks like or what it means, but the pursuit and the enjoyment of the work is why I do it.

Douglas :

Awesome. Well, let’s take a little step back and look at the formative moments for you. As you were starting to realize facilitation was a thing there, skillsets and tools and the discipline around it, and I think it was the George W. Bush Institute of Veteran Leadership Program. I recall you saying that was the pivotal moment for you.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah. I’ve attended all kinds of things. I’ve attended facilitated workshops before and working sessions, and many of the various groups and nonprofits and organizations that I volunteer and work with. I’ve observed good sessions and not so great sessions. Some that I’ve walked away frustrated by and some that I was like, oh, that was really great, but never put it together that that was an actual sort of framework. I thought these folks were just particularly gifted and creative and being able to gather people and convene them in a purposeful way. When I was accepted into, yes, it’s the George W. Bush Institute’s Veteran Leadership Program. They do an annual cohort where they gather. There were 34 of us I think, for our class last year, folks that are working in military family and veteran spaces, so we aren’t necessarily all connected to the military. I happen to be, my husband has been active duty for 20 years now, but gathered all of us together for a five month leadership cohort, but the day one, first session, very first session, I was super apprehensive.

I don’t know where these people are all coming from. There’s a lot of imposter syndrome. The veteran folks who have served often, for those of us who aren’t veterans, feel like they kind of have ownership of this space so often, and just by nature of being a military spouse, I feel like I’ve always kind of had to elbow my way into certain conversations like, Hey, we’re here too. We have things to say. So anyway, I came in with all that apprehension and just really almost skeptical of how this was going to all work. Was I going to get anything out of it? Was I going to be heard and noticed, and oh, so quickly. All of that was allayed by nature of the fact that we had the most amazing facilitator I think I’ve ever experienced. This guy’s name is Todd Connor. He’s a veteran and super engaged in the veteran space, does amazing work in everything that he does, but one of his roles is as the facilitator for this specific program, and I was just in awe of being able to walk into a space and literally from the first 20 minute session we had realize we’re going to be well taken care of.

This container is well made, it’s protected. We can be vulnerable. There was psychological safety established almost immediately, and I know I was supposed to be taking part in it, but I was really doing my Enneagram five thing of stepping back and observing what was happening, and from that moment on, I was just like, it shifted my project that I was working on during the cohort. It just kind of gave me this awesome opportunity to sit back and say, wow, this is how you do complicated things, gathering really diverse groups of people and coming up with something great at the end. Wow.

Douglas:

Do you remember if there was anyone in attendance there when you were in observation mode? I’m just curious if you noticed folks that were especially moved by the experience that, because often that folks come into spaces like that and have never really witnessed good facilitation before.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, you can almost categorize personify different types of people. Who are the people that are going to jive with what they’re going to support the facilitator. There are people that are kind of dissenters in the back. They’re going to critique everything. This group was no different. We had all of that, but I feel like the people that would have otherwise not been as engaged, kind of just like, I’m here. I’m going to say my thing. I’m not going to ask questions. I’m only going to give comments. I want people to hear me and see that I’m here. I think it checked them really quickly. Oh, I’m expected to engage authentically. Just example, the very first group sort of table question that we practiced or were given was, Hey, everyone at your group write this down and then share with your table what’s one thing that people often get wrong about you.

I was like, that’s profound. That right there, you’re just laying bare. Your biggest insecurity in this really sort of just sneaky way. How do people misread you? So you’re being misread, obviously, I was misreading everyone in the room because I’m making judgements, but you’re able to then so quickly say, people get this wrong about me. And then you’ve developed empathy around the table for people who now have compassion for you about this thing that you’re self-conscious about and that you probably over project for, compensate for. Anyway, I just thought it was amazing. So in a way, it had us immediately leave all the egos at the door, and they were able to somehow kind of sustain that through every gathering. We talk about Priya Parker’s thresholds when you enter and leave the space, that was a very intentional thing that was done in order to remind us every single time that we walked into the room that we were convened in, that this is the way we’re going to behave. This is who we’re going to be. We’re not going to bring in all of our rank and labels and other sort of egos into the space.

Douglas:

That sort of thing is also really powerful when you might be judging the room, especially if you hear someone say something and it’s like, oh, wow, I totally thought that about them.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, I was guilty on

Douglas:

Several counts. They’re explaining why that’s a wrong perspective, and then it really helps everyone start to maybe just observe and think a little more versus jumping to conclusions

Kellie Artis:

A hundred percent, and I mean, I loved being able to share mine. I never share that, and I was like, oh, people think I’m aloof, and I mean, I could be perceived that way, but I’m really just trying to take it all in. I’m overwhelmed by it all. I’m more of an observer, so being able to say that and like, oh, there’s so much more to you than what I’m seeing in the moment. I loved it. I thought it was a great practice.

Douglas:

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the aloof thing. That’s one. That’s to the point I just made really powerful for connection across the group, not only for things outside the group, but in the group especially. So because if someone is thinking, well, she’s a little aloof, but then you say that, and then they realize, they start to realize, oh, wow, she is a processor,

Kellie Artis:

So

Douglas:

She’s absorbing things in a different way. They’ll just have a different perspective on you and a different level of empathy around who you are and be able to approach you in a more connected way.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, I think so.

Douglas:

Did you notice any of that having an influence on how folks related or connected across the group?

Kellie Artis:

I mean, so quickly. Personal stories were laid bare. It didn’t just stop at a characteristic because of shared experiences of this type of convening of people who are all connected to the military at a certain point in their career. We’ve been through the past 20 years of global war, so there were really close to the surface personal stories that came out in that literal first hour of us being together. So not only did we get the high level, this is a misjudgment that people often have about me, but here’s some of the personal context that also plays into my passion, the thing that I’m pursuing and that I’m working on right now. This is why this is important to me because it’s touched me personally. So just again, so quickly, there’s just humanity and compassion that often I think, in other scenarios and other maybe less well facilitated types of convenings would take forever for that to come up. So because we just,

Douglas:

If even,

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, if ever, right? Yeah, exactly. So the shared sort of agreement that this is how we are not going to share this beyond the group. This is our space, and this should be sacred, and just putting all that out there, making that clear, I think gave us all permission to say, okay, we can handle it. This is a group that will support us. And I mean, again, the relationships were instantly founded and forged. I mean, I can’t imagine never not being in touch with most of my cohort members because we were able to just so quickly connect.

Douglas:

Yeah. So it seems like Todd’s approach really broke some barriers down, and I’m curious, how did that shift your perspective on what facilitation could be?

Kellie Artis:

I mean, I think I thought of it before coming into that experience, and then obviously after working with Voltage, I had this idea that a facilitator is just a teacher that maybe there’s some teaching methodologies that my families, I come from family educators, so it was like, oh, this is just a learning design sort of, I don’t know. It’s something that you could implement in a classroom and help people absorb the information better or to latch onto the content or promotes understanding or comprehension. Right after this, I realized that there was just so much more to it, that there was so much more that you can accomplish and agree to and move forward together with and co-create with people. And so having that experience, but then also sort of holding separately this struggle that I had been having and something that I’d been noticing through all of my work in self-discovery and self-awareness, a lot of things that I’ve never really felt or hadn’t really felt qualified to do and handle.

So here I am learning the Enneagram. I’m passionate about it. I know a lot about it, but there had always been this hesitation to step fully into helping other people understand it because I felt like I could mess it up for them. Or what if, God forbid, they share something really sensitive or emotionally complex with me that, and I don’t comfort them in the right way. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know if I can handle that properly without causing damage. I was just really nervous about it. After experiencing and learning some of the facilitation tactics and techniques and realizing it’s more about making sure people feel safe versus fixing anything or deciding anything or teaching anything definite. It’s mostly about the space that you’re able to create during that time, how that is protected and handled and how people feel when they leave it, when they enter, when they leave was so much more important than any of the content, any of the other stuff. So it’s purpose, it’s connection, it’s all of those things. So that’s how it shifted for me. And then, I mean, gosh, I overlay now everything, every meeting I’m in, why are we here? What’s our purpose? How are we entering, where are we leaving? I mean, literally every aspect of any of the work that I do has some sort of element of the facilitation techniques and practices that I learned.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so helpful to get those perspectives. And I’m remembering, you also mentioned feeling imposter syndrome, which is somewhat related to what you were just talking about, and I think you were talking about it from the perspective of when you showed up for the program and even I guess ideas in your head about not being a veteran, et cetera. And I guess what specifically shifted that? You talked about getting to a point where that subsided, and so what do you think were the critical pieces that were at play that helped you overcome that?

Kellie Artis:

There were a couple of speakers that had some, I thought profound things to say that I was able to latch onto and give myself permission to pursue relentlessly what I came in with as my passion, my project initially. So we come in and you start out with an idea of a project that you want to work on during the cohort. It’s important, but it’s not the most important thing. I mean, the projects are great and have, I mean, some people have full-blown nonprofits now because of their personal leadership project, but it’s the skeleton. It’s the structure that they put the teaching and the rest of the leadership instruction onto. So we have a capstone at the end, and then they follow up and see what kind of support is needed after you’re an alumni. But I came in with a project that I wasn’t super passionate about.

It was part of one of my day job work, and it made sense. It was good enough to have gotten me a spot in the cohort that’s a part of their application process. It’s like, what are you working on? But from the start, it was enforced through all of the activities and through all of our facilitated time that it needed to be something that you’re passionate about. How are you going to make an impact? And it can be making an impact on one person. It doesn’t have to be huge and broad reaching and solving veteran homelessness. It doesn’t have to be that big or grand, right? It could be literally making an impact in your world, in your sphere, in what you can. And I was like, well, this is who I am. I can impact the lives of people like me, people who’ve gone through things like me, using my personal story, using the ways in which I’ve kind of crawled out of stuff and made sense my life and how I’ve gotten where I am.

So being able to have that constantly reinforced from the facilitator, again, purpose, it was, this is why we’re here. Yeah, we’re going to teach you all these techniques and we’re going to teach you how to do data measurement and collaboration and all of these things, but for the most part, we want to make sure that your why is always being answered. So that sort of being the central focus of everything that we were exposed to really helped reaffirm for me what it was that I was there for and how much I belonged, how much I was meant to be. The one speaker, he was an astronaut, and he came and he was talking. He gave the story. I’d literally written in my journal, by the way, another facilitation practice that we were encouraged to do every morning during our Todd Time, set some intentions, write some agreements with yourself for today.

And then at the end of the day, we would go back and reflect upon them like, okay, did you meet your intentions for the day? One of my intentions was like, I’m going to hold onto things less tightly. I’m going to hold things a bit more loosely and just see what emerges. So there was an astronaut that gave us a story about how he was doing his first spacewalk, and he was nervous about it, and before he went up on the shuttle and everything, a former astronaut wrote him an email and all it said was, loosen your grip. And so he tells this whole story about how he’s outside on the ladder thing and freaking out and didn’t want to let go, and it was paralyzed scary, and he remembered the email from the guy, and that’s all it said was, loosen your grip. So he just kind of let go and was able to have this amazing experience that he shared with us. And I was just like, well, that was for me. So not to be too dramatic about it, but that was, I think, the moment that’s like, okay, not only do I need to loosen the grip of who I think I am and whether or not I belong and whether or not this is what I’m supposed to be doing, there’s so much more expansiveness out there and opportunity if you just kind of just go with it.

Douglas:

And after that first session, you mentioned that you were so curious about what was happening and what Todd was up to you, and you were in that observation mode that you mentioned that you actually managed to get yourself on the seat next to him on the bus ride to dinner. Did that spark the original interest in Priya Parker’s

Kellie Artis:

Work? Oh, it totally did. It was the first thing you said. I was like, I know whatever you just did was amazing, and everybody’s raving about it, but you’ve got something. You’ve got a framework. You know what you’re doing. You’ve learned this. Tell me everything. Again. I’m an Enneagram five, so it’s all about acquiring information and knowledge. So I was like, how can I research this? And he was like, okay, well, so he gave me a couple of resources, and then we got to talking about, yeah, definitely Priya Parker. I ordered it on Amazon while we were driving to dinner, and as soon as I started reading through, I was like, oh, yeah, that was that exercise. That was that. So it was neat to not only see it illustrated in the book, but then also, oh, I had that experience. I know exactly what was happening there. But yeah, and then that’s when I started rethinking my project too. It was like, not only am I interested in how you did what you did, I think that would’ve just been cool anyway. But also, I can absolutely see applying this to all of my Enneagram work, because most of it revolves around group classes, workshops.

And again, back to that apprehension of I had been really nervous to convene a bunch of people, and what if they asked me a question I don’t know the answer to. I was hung up on the knowledge part of it and the expertise versus how I would just like to be able to build a safer container for people. Maybe I could just be the person to provide the space and some guidance, but there doesn’t need to be definite. It’s not math. There’s not an equation that’s either true or false. It could just be exploration. So yeah, that really helped just open my perspective on it a lot.

Douglas:

I love the curiosity. It’s such a facilitator’s mindset, isn’t it? Wanting to know how behind the experience.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah. Yeah. It was a little meta and probably annoying. That was not the point. They didn’t convene us to learn how to be facilitators, but that’s what I took away from it. I was like, ah, this could be so useful in almost any application. So

Douglas:

Well, they were simultaneously helping you dive into your why, and I would argue that if that was resonating, maybe it was exposing some deeper insights into that. Why. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s all that adjacent or different than what they had planned.

Kellie Artis:

True. No, that’s true. I mean, it’s definitely a realm of leadership to be able to guide a group and do that safely. And yeah, no, it was just overall great experience. I loved what I learned about all of the things about leadership and running big businesses and all of the things. But I think, yeah, that was definitely my takeaway.

Douglas:

It’s not uncommon for students to come in having already read Priya Parker’s book. What was it like for you as one of those folks who had read it previously, to go through it again with some targeted focus and also in discussion with the cohort about the text?

Kellie Artis:

I thought it was great because it was another repetition of seeing it in practice, how it works. It wasn’t just like this anomaly that I, maybe there was something just super, super duper special about Todd. There is. He’s amazing. But it wasn’t like uniquely, he’s the one person that’s born to do this work. No, it’s like it’s work that we can all adapt and use in our lives. So that was encouraging, but then, gosh, just being able to be exposed to people who also were in on it, you know what I mean? I don’t know. Again, not having not been exposed to this as a discipline, essentially, being able to then kind of say, Ooh, what are you guys doing over here? This is kind of cool. And then not only what are you guys doing and how are you doing it, but how are you applying it?

And all of the different industries and ways in which people work. I came into the voltage cohort thinking like, well, I’m not a facilitator and I’m not trying to be a facilitator. I’m not going to put a LinkedIn post up and say, Hey, hire me to come facilitate anything you want, just come. That wasn’t my intention or purpose, and I was a little worried that that’s what I was walking into, that it was going to be a bunch of people who are just professional facilitators. I mean, I’ve done this before too, with even my Enneagram training. I took a whole course on therapists how to be an Enneagram and for therapist. I’m not a therapist, but I’m like, how are you guys using it? Because this feels like something that would be helpful to know, just exposure. So anyway, came in very quickly realized that I was in the right place. Once again, that curiosity did lead to something really profound and helpful. Okay, you can be a facilitative anything. So that was one of the biggest, the coolest things for me to see, especially overlaying everything that Priya had talked about in her work, and then seeing it executed, hearing about how people execute it, hearing about the cool outcomes of sessions or different techniques from everyone in the room, from all kinds of industries, which is really cool.

Douglas:

And after learning some of this stuff, you started to integrate it into your work with military connected families and veteran students. What were some of the first changes you made and what sort of impact did you start at sea?

Kellie Artis:

Oh, gosh. I mean, the top thing is just stop starting meetings with admin. Crap. Nobody,

Douglas:

Never start a funeral with logistics.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, logistics. It was just like, I always hate that. I mean, I’ve always hated that, but I do it. It’s one of the very first things like, no, you need a hook. You need something to grab people’s attention, and why do I deserve your time right now? Why are you giving me an hour of your life or however long? And how do I prove to you that I will use that hour well, and it’ll be well spent. So stop doing the logistics, the agendas. Setting up agreements I think has been really helpful just for me personally, for whatever reason, that has helped me step into my role more confidently. I can be really transparent about my insecurities. I mean, frankly, usually I used to do this as, I don’t know if I’m the right person to teach you all this, but here we’re going to start doing all this self-deprecating stuff.

And I realized, oh, no, we don’t have to do that, and I don’t have to sacrifice my credibility because of my insecurities. We could just all come to some group conclusions and some agreements that this is the goal. This is what we’re trying to achieve this session. I’ll do my best to guide you guys as long as you’re doing your best to participate and learn. So that helped me kind of shake off some of the issues that I’ve had around leading groups. But yeah, just being able to keep things fresh, keep it active, seeing when there’s some energy needed, not just getting stuck in the content, which is what I typically have a tendency to do, and then making sure that it anchors somewhere. Whatever the experience is, not only are we clear about what we’re trying to accomplish, but then does it resonate? Do you leave with something? Then why did I take your hour if it doesn’t? So having those things top of mind, I think just result in just such better experiences for everyone.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Working on the agreements can be such a nice focal point to help with intention as you’re designing the session as something as simple as thinking about, well, how do people need to show up? I mean, you can’t answer that question unless you’re really clear on your purpose

Kellie Artis :

And

Douglas:

You’re really clear on the conditions and the scenario you want to unfold in the space. And I think the number one reason so many people get things wrong or stumble is because they haven’t spent enough time thinking about that. And so to your point, the agreements are a great little hack to here, just three to five things to write down. But in order to write those down, you got to think about what’s the purpose and how do I want people to be,

Kellie Artis:

And what are you stepping away from? So I’ll give you just a quick example from my world. So in the military spouse world, so when we say military spouse, we mean we’re married to someone actively serving. A lot of military spouses have also served, but most of us haven’t, and we’re predominantly female. It’s like a 94% female ratio whenever you gather folks in the military. I mean, service members wear their last name on their chest and everyone knows what that last name is and what rank is associated with that. And just by nature of us being humans, that crosses over into the spouse world as well. So one thing that I realized really early on when particularly working with folks who are attached to people that have rank, no, they don’t have the rank themselves, but they’re still married to that person with rank. So there’s still these hierarchical things that we have to navigate really quickly. I was like, I know you guys may know each other, but I want no last names. We are not our service members. I want first names only. There will be no last names. No asking, what does your husband do? That’s not a question that is valid in this space. We don’t care. We care, but we don’t care.

It’s kind of like the shortcut for any conversation when you meet someone who’s this world. So that not only kind of alleviates the pressure from the folks who are attached to higher ranking service members, but it frees up some space for folks that aren’t to be able to be authentic and true. But then a part of that agreement also is that we don’t leave with anything that we’ve talked about here. This stays here. So being able to say, no last names really clearly, at least plants that seed of y’all, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to pretend like we’re all on the same page. We’re all on the same playing field. We’re all dealing with the same struggles, and then we can work on ourselves from there.

Douglas:

I remember you talking about revamping the veteran student orientation sessions to focus more on community building rather than, I guess cramming information, I think was how you refer to it. And so what were some of those specific changes you made?

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, so we help, in my day job, I help universities stand up their veteran support services. So part of what my role is, and my self-declared purpose as the digital community manager is to make sure students feel engaged, connected, and supported. Because if we have those three things, we have a successful student experience, and then we also have a successful career experience on the backside of school, which is everyone’s goal. We want student success, and we want ultimate mission success for those veteran students who are transitioning by way of college into the civilian world. Veterans are accustomed to being given, they call it death by PowerPoint. That’s

Douglas:

Getting briefed to death.

Kellie Artis:

Briefed to death. So anytime you say you have to come to this mandatory orientation, they know they already have a preconception of what that’s going to be. They’re super excited about it because it is just like, Ugh, here’s the number for this, and here’s, then it’s boring and rote and whatever, but however the information is important and they need to have it. So what do you do? So what we’ve shifted a lot of that session, and it’s an hour, I point to places where they can find the information, but we spend most of the time connecting. So first and foremost, we have a session called Transitioning from service to school where it’s a panel. I’ve recorded it, so we kind of play the same thing over, but it’s a panel of students who talk about the things that they’re nervous about and what they were worried about and how they’ve tried to adapt certain techniques to be able to counter that fear and that apprehension. So just right out the gate, we’re doing that same practice of what do people get wrong about you? Let’s call out the elephant in the room. Are y’all nervous? You should be. It’s hard. Let’s say we’re nervous because this population has a real difficult time asking for help. It’s just part of the nature of military service. You are either told to do it, you figure it out. There’s not a lot of

Seeking help. So we want to go ahead and squash that right out the gate. This is what we’re here for. We exist to help you, and we’re going to call you and we’re going to proactively try to help you, but we also really want you guys to get accustomed to calling us too. It makes our day, when you call us, it actually makes me really happy when you send me an email. So establishing that we spend a lot of time meeting our team. I’m really emphatic about people seeing faces. We’re not just on the phone and we’re virtual. So yeah, it’s going to be a lot of zoom, but here we are, us, we’re besties. Now you’ve seen us in orientation, and then we do breakouts where we have cool fun prompts where people can talk in small groups about what it is that they’re nervous about or what they wish they had known before they left service, or it could even just be little icebreakers, energizers, things like that. So again, we spend probably 30% of the hour not doing anything traditionally considered productive, but to me, it just feels so much more important that they have made a connection with just anybody, one other person in our virtual hallways.

Douglas:

What kind of shifts in energy that you notice?

Kellie Artis:

Well, they’re so much more engaged with our office. I mean, again, we do have a physical office in one of our campuses, but for the most part, it’s a virtual sort of, we’re here if you need us because they’re not able to walk by and come grab donuts when we have them out. So there’s often a lot of like, oh, hey, if we are on campus and do run into people, I’ve gotten like, oh, you do the orientation or you post the newsletter, or, I know I don’t know them, but that’s okay. You can be internet famous for your community, and that’s totally fine. It means that they’ve seen my face and I’ve gotten across some way that makes them know and trust me in the same way that people do business with folks online. I want the students to feel like they have advocates and allies and friends and friendly faces that are helping them navigate the system.

There’s also just there’s more of an eagerness to help other students. So we’ve never had an issue onboarding veteran ambassadors, which is a work study program that we work with the VA with. I mean, often there’s a wait list of people who want to become an ambassador because they get exposed to us so early on, and the ambassadors during that orientation that they then want to step up like, oh, I could do that. That sounds awesome. You get to meet all the people and help people and serve in that way. So there’s, I don’t know, I’m not going to say it solved all has solved all the problems. Everyone gets an A and graduates on time and all the things, but at least while they’re here, they feel like they’re a part of something and they’re a part of a community and they belong.

Douglas:

Yeah, there’s that belonging. I was thinking that earlier when you were talking about the, or I asked you about imposter syndrome and you went into a story about the NASA loosening your grip and just connecting into the content and also just the work that Todd was doing to make people feel comfortable and connected. I mean, it struck me as all of that was creating a sense of belonging, and that once you felt like you belonged, the imposter syndrome wasn’t even a consideration.

Kellie Artis:

Well, now that you’re saying it, Douglas, that’s like, yeah, I mean, if I were to think back and summarize my experience as a military spouse, even, we belong to a larger community. I still belong to the town and the community that I live in. I belong to my family, et cetera. But when we overlay all of the dynamics of our lifestyle, so the frequently moving and the shifting jobs and spending seasons of really having to intensely focus on your nuclear family, your two little kids while your husband’s deployed, that sort of thing, you can, I have noticed falling out of touch or out of feeling like I belong to things before and just how disorienting that is and how it’s just not a comfortable place to be, and no one deserves that. I mean, we all deserve to be in community, some sort of community. So I do think that that subconscious maybe consciously drives a lot. It

Douglas:

Really rocks your confidence.

Kellie Artis:

Totally. And your identity. I mean, it’s the core of who you are. If you don’t have those underpinnings of being anchored to something, it’s really difficult to do anything else. I mean, that’s just baseline sort of human functioning. So for people to ever feel like they didn’t have that, and we know our society in general is becoming more detached from each other and more detached from their communities and feelings of loss and belonging are resonating high, particularly for the community that I serve, the military spouse community, those are some of the top complaints that people have. When asked about would you recommend service to someone you love, or are you satisfied with the military lifestyle? When people say no, those are the key things and the key reasons. So there’s definitely a desire and a void there that I think if we’re all working towards some sort of goal that includes belonging in some way than we’re doing good for society.

Douglas:

And I think that’s a nice transition into the work you’re really focused on now. And that brings me to the work you’re doing now, which came up briefly. We talked about mission identity and the work you’re doing there, but specifically, I’m curious about the Enneagram insights and how you’re working with spouses and what you are looking forward to as you continue to grow that business and help folks with identity and belonging or any of these other challenges that might be well suited to the work that you’re doing.

Kellie Artis:

So with Mission Identity, I am really passionate about helping, particularly women. I am expanding my view of who I want to help serve into more the woman entrepreneur space. The professional woman who, like myself, have gotten to a point in our careers where it’s just like I’ve gotten here. I’ve just hustled and done the thing and gotten to a certain point, but now I’m reflecting. I’m not going to call it a midlife crisis. I don’t like that. But reflecting on who am I now, who am I, and what does this need to look like for the rest of my life? It’s a moment to just slow down and sort of investigate who we are, where we’re going, and what’s the impact I want to leave behind. So we’re using the Enneagram as a framework for self-discovery to help make sure that we are truly understanding who we are and the motivations behind what we do and how we feel about things, how we perceive the world around us.

And the Enneagram provides a really profoundly helpful framework for that work. So once we understand who we are and we have a strong sense of self and identity, then we can move into things like purpose and then combining self identity or self identity and purpose together within left with our perception of reality. That’s whether or not we’re seeing the world clearly, whether we’re experiencing what we’re experiencing in a way that is connected to reality or maybe distorted based on some of the things that we’ve been limited by in our experience or from our personality. And then from there, I mean, gosh, there’s contentment in that, right? There’s success, there’s freedom, and then there’s where the impact can really happen. So working with women who are mid-career farther along, et cetera, just to provide, again, the space for them to do that exploration safely without any of the ego or worried about the image or the pretense.

So I want to be able to provide that opportunity for them, provide some context and some teaching, but really do this invitation into the self-discovery in community with others. They’re, again, group cohorts. I’ll still be focusing a lot on military spouses sort of as an offshoot of mission identity. The military community is near and dear to my heart, and I am so excited to be able to provide group training exercises for them, but it actually functions as more of a piece of my story and a piece of my credibility versus now. I mean, really my inspiration into doing the work that I do, and hopefully it will inspire others, but always here for anyone who’s interested in doing the work of personal discovery and growth,

Douglas:

It’s such a strong passion for empowering others, especially women, to clarify and build confidence. So I’m just kind of curious, what would be a dream outcome for you as you continue this journey?

Kellie Artis:

Oh, dream outcome. VP Harris recently said that there are not a lot of women out here aspiring to be humble. And that quote resonated with me so deeply because I think for so long, I had convinced myself that being humble was the way to be and not the way I wanted to raise my daughter, by the way. However, we limit ourselves in so many ways and we’re often the worst offenders in capping our potential, and I can’t wait to be able to look around and see more often than not women who are not only not aspiring to be humble, but who are stepping into their greatness and their power, and just changing the world, taking control, and showing us all what it means to love and to live with purpose and to live in community. Just, yeah, there’s going to be bumps along the way, and we’re still very much learning how to do this as women. But yeah, I think that really intangible and hard to measure, but I think even seeing that on a small scale is my dream.

Douglas:

Kelly, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you today. I could keep talking for a long time, but we have to cut it off here. So before we go, I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Kellie Artis:

Be kind to yourselves. There’s a mantra in the school that I studied with for the narrative Enneagram, and it talks about having grounded presence and compassionate curiosity. I think those are valuable tenets that I try to live by and are just so important.

Douglas :

Such a pleasure. Kelly. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

Kellie Artis:

Thank you.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration voltage control.com.