How Can Facilitation Foster Genuine Connections and Healing in Our Communities?

A conversation with Lori Boozer, arrative Alchemist & Social Impact Strategist

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Lori Boozer, a narrative strategist and wellness visionary. Lori shares her journey from law to facilitation, emphasizing the importance of creating inclusive spaces for genuine participation and healing. The conversation explores group dynamics, the power of storytelling, and removing hierarchical barriers to foster authentic connection. Lori reflects on her experiences in Thailand and the need for “reparative engagement” in communities. Together, they discuss how facilitation can drive collective transformation, especially in workplaces and a world increasingly shaped by technology.

Show Highlights

[00:04:07] Recognizing Group Dynamics
[00:09:09] Zooming Out and Sensing Group Energy
[00:13:38] Reparative Engagement in Politics and Community
[00:22:39] Facilitation as World-Building
[00:28:43] Blending Facilitation and Narrative Change
[00:32:28] Understanding Behaviors and Work Stories
[00:36:32] Vision for Healing and Wholeness in Workspaces
[00:39:58] Final Thoughts: Leaning into Fear and Connection

Links | Resources

Lori on Linkedin

Lori on Instagram

Lori on the web

About the Guest

Lori Boozer is a social impact strategist, narrative alchemist, and wellness visionary with 20+ years of experience spanning law, politics, government, and philanthropy. Known for making the complex usable and the invisible visible, she has built a career designing stories, strategies, and systems that enable people and communities to thrive.

Her leadership has included senior roles in New York City government and philanthropy, where she directed multimillion-dollar initiatives focused on poverty alleviation, health equity, and community empowerment. At the Robin Hood Foundation, Lori led the $25 million Mobility Learning and Action Bets (LABs), advancing community-driven strategies to lift families out of poverty.

Drawing on lived experience and professional expertise, she integrates research, foresight, and cultural insight to help leaders and institutions move beyond performative change toward deep, transformative change. She is particularly recognized for her ability to merge strategy, storytelling, and spirituality into frameworks that shift paradigms, policies, and possibilities. She is also an adept facilitator, known for creating spaces where diverse stakeholders can engage truthfully, bridge divides, and co-create solutions that last.

Currently based in Southeast Asia on a working sabbatical, Lori writes, consults, and explores global approaches to wellness, belonging, and sovereignty. Her emerging platform, Root × Water, centers individual and collective healing, reminding us that systems change begins with self-liberation.

A sought-after speaker and facilitator, Lori creates spaces grounded in truth, courage, and connection. Her work continues to be guided by a simple belief: healed people heal systems — and build new ones.

Outside of her work, Lori finds joy in writing afrofuturist fiction, nature photography, global travel, and long afternoons at the spa.

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 Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, where I speak with Voltage 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 voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today, I’m with Lori Boozer, narrative strategist and wellness visionary. She’s the creative root and water, a developing platform dedicated to individual and collective healing, freedom, and reimagining community. Lori is also writing about her journey from survival to alignment and the practices that help us move toward wholeness. Welcome to the show, Lori.

Lori Boozer:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so great to have you here, and really neat to have you calling in from Thailand on such a special break from the insanity.

Lori Boozer:

I’m happy to have a break. I’m happy to call in.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, so often we need breaks and we don’t get them, so I’m happy that you’re taking one and we get to spend some time doing it, so you’ll be… You’re clear-eyed and fresh and whatnot. So let’s get started here. You began your career as an attorney focused on individual cases in New York City. Looking back, what were some early moments that hinted you were already stepping into facilitation?

Lori Boozer:

I think I can say one of the earliest things that hit me, probably even before I got to law school. I remember interviewing for a fellowship, and they gave us some individual exercises, and then they gave us a group exercise, and I remember thinking, “This is the most perfect opportunity for me. I’m going to kill this.” And while we were in the group exercise, I remember sort of defaulting to… I wasn’t as engaged in the act of solving the problem they gave us. I was more focused on how to organize the group, how to collect everyone’s thoughts, how to keep the conversations moving. That was sort of just my default, the default position that I ended up playing. I don’t think that’s what they wanted us to do. So I didn’t get the fellowship, but I remember, it’s funny, this just came to me as you asked the question.

I remember in that moment thinking that that was really weird, and I said to myself, “Why were you doing that? Everyone else was leaning in and trying to solve the problem, and my draw was to how do we get the flow of this space to work?” And I was too young, I think, to kind of contemplate that facilitation was even a thing. But I think as you asked the question, I was sort of playing that role, and I think that that is an energy that has sort of always emerged from me in the different spaces that I’ve worked in. I think it’s maybe a combination of that, but also just the way that I think and sort of recognizing that I tend to be able to zoom out in a lot of ways that people aren’t able to when they’re stuck in the thick of a problem. And so I think just naturally I sort of take on this sort of facilitator-like position in spaces. And so that brought me to wanting to explore a more formalized way to improve the practice of it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do you remember what you were noticing in the moment that made you want to focus more on the dynamics in the room versus the problem at hand?

Lori Boozer:

Disconnection and chaos, and I think I have… It’s like nails on the chalkboard. So when I’m in a space and I see humans unable to center and organize, I think I just naturally default to, “How do we bring order to the chaos?” because we’re trying to move towards a goal. And typically I’m in spaces where that goal is something that is to improve something, someone’s life, the betterment of humanity. And so that pull for me to want to see the outcome, the impact, brings me to a space of, “Well, I don’t need to dabble in the problem always, but if I can help us move towards, move the conversation that’s solving the problem,” that feels just as powerful to me. So I think that that’s kind of what I’m feeling. And I think the more you become embodied in your leadership, you start to feel physically what your friction points are. And so for me, my friction point is always, “We’re going in circles, we’re not moving towards the goal, people are frustrated. How do we make this feel like a smoother process for people to participate in?”

Douglas Ferguson:

So you’re more invested in getting to an outcome versus what the outcome was.

Lori Boozer:

Yeah. In that type of role, I think it’s more about creating the space, creating the container for people to show up in a way that allows us to get to the outcome. I’m invested in the outcome too. I guess it depends on what my position is. I have a job to do. If I’m purely a facilitator, then yes, but if I’m a manager, it’s probably a mix of both. I’m invested in what the outcome is, but I also know that in order for us to get a good outcome, my team has to operate in a certain way.

And I think one of the things that I took away from my training with Voltage, and I didn’t think this was going to be a part of the conversation, was the work we did around group dynamics and meeting structures. And I think people in management positions, we tend to make agendas and throw up meetings, and we don’t really think about ourselves as facilitators in that moment. And so in hindsight, after doing the work with your team, I really started to make the connections between this facilitation for a facilitation sake. You serve specifically as a facilitator; you show up in the space, and that is your role to create the container, to hold the space for the action and the activities to take place. But there’s also just the skill that you embody when you may hold different titles and positions in workspaces. And how do you bring the idea of facilitation through the way you organize your meetings, the way you create your agendas, the way you structure time with your teams to be more efficient? So I think that there’s a duality of that as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it comes down to, are we talking about competencies versus tools or identities or behaviors? And I think you’re speaking from that perspective of competencies. Anyone can take these competencies and apply them in lots of different scenarios.

Lori Boozer:

Yeah. And I think what’s important too, and why I think facilitation has become so critical and especially now, is that we’re so easily disconnected that I really, and maybe this is just my own personal way of thinking about it, but I think that there’s just a powerful moment in our current state of being where we need people who can hold those spaces because we’re so naturally inclined, in this day and age, to be so disconnected. We have computers in between us, we have social media in between us, we have AI now coming in between us. And so to use Priya Parker’s term, The Art of Gathering, in different spaces, in different capacities, to be able to bring people together in conversation or to achieve a goal or to work through things or improve dynamics and workspaces. I think people are overlooking, to some degree, how critical the competency is and how we need to, I think, train towards being able to hold or create more of these containers for ourselves.

Douglas Ferguson:

And you talked about zooming out earlier when you were in that moment, and I’m curious to hear more about that. What does zooming out mean for you? It conjures a few different things from me, and so I was just curious if it was about the moment or if it was about seeing a bigger picture somehow or stepping outside of what everyone else is in and noticing dynamics. What does zooming out look like for you?

Lori Boozer:

Zooming out for me, I think it looks like noticing where my own energy is being pulled and if there’s a bit of an imbalance there. So if I’m starting to lean into the dynamics of the conversation, like we’re trying to solve X and sort of recognizing that… It’s like I’m able to pick up on the human, the unspoken dynamics. I can see in this person that they don’t feel like their response is being heard or the idea is being respected. I can see tension, I can see hesitancy and people who don’t want to participate. I can see the people who are participating and taking up all the energy. And so sometimes that for me triggers, “Okay, I want everyone to belong.” I think it’s just a part of my natural wiring. I want everyone to feel heard. I think some of that comes from being a black woman and sort of understanding what it is to not feel heard or to not be seen.

So there’s a particular focus that I have sometimes in spaces where it’s like, “Is this space welcoming everyone’s participation in a meaningful way?” And so I think the zooming out is starting to zoom out, and I think a lot, we don’t do this right; we don’t really pause to pick up on the energies and the dynamics that play. We sort of just get really wound up in the thing that we’re trying to do. But when you have this inclination to facilitate, I think you can zoom out and say, “Ah, it looks like it’s a conversation, but really there are people who aren’t speaking.”

There’s stuff that’s not happening, which means that that collaboration, that interaction, that exchange isn’t going to be able to produce the best outcome because it didn’t have the participation of everyone in a way that would get to the best outcome. I think we get outcomes, but sometimes the silent people are carrying information that we need, and people who are not speaking up or people who are having their ideas overlooked. And so how do you create a container or space where everyone starts to feel engaged so that the outcome reflects the breadth of everyone?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s making me think how, I don’t know how good this metaphor is, but what’s conjuring up for me right now is this idea of some people’s style is more like they have a megaphone and they’re trying to rah-rah-rah and rile folks up. And some people have a bit more of a, they’re more like an antenna. They’re tuning and measuring the energy in the room and trying to drive engagement by understanding what’s there and responding to it versus the “Let’s pour energy in the room and hope everyone responds to the energy.” And certainly both approaches can work, but it’s fascinating to think about that distinction, and I’m wondering if any of that conjures up any memories or any thoughts.

Lori Boozer:

I think the rah-rah has its place. I think it’s like, you kind of want to walk around with a toolbox, and you want to understand what different spaces might require, and some spaces might require a rah-rah or some inspiration or an energy that just kind of elicits things from people. I think it depends on what the purpose of the space is. And I think that there’s different spaces where it’s intended to maybe be more collaborative, not so much focused on a particular person or a particular… Energy is supposed to be about this exchange. And I think in those spaces, rah-rah can kind of take up the space, but it doesn’t necessarily invite everyone’s participation in a meaningful way. I think if we zoom this out to society and not to, I don’t know, be a little rude. I think it’s the way we think about our political system. People run for office, and those people are like, “rah-rah,” and they bring in energy, and that energy elicits something out of you.

You go vote. There’s not really an exchange. You might not see this person in person. You may not ever be someone that goes to a debate and sees them hash out the issues, but there’s a dynamic at play that as a society who’s going to follow along in that energy. But I think what we notice is where the breakdown is, the disengagement of voters and sort of the silos of people who aren’t responding to the rah-rahs anymore. The people in Cole County who feel left behind, people who for whatever reasons are on the margins, and it’s like, “Well, the rah-rah isn’t enough to get those votes.” What they require is actual reparative engagement. And reparative engagement means that that’s more of an energetic exchange and more of a collaborative way of listening to and receiving what they have to say and inviting them into conversation. And that’s the difference. I think that’s a different part of the puzzle.

And I think that that’s maybe where politics kind of gets some things wrong in the ground game. We rely a lot on the rah-rah, but we don’t do enough in small communities to actually listen and lean into people who are not, what I would say, we have this idea of the polls telling us this group votes the most, so we’re going to rah-rah at that group, and that’s who we rely on. But then now we have built up these silos of people who are on the margins and who are not really feeling heard and seen within their government. So I think that’s the example that I would say demonstrates the difference between inspirational leadership and magnetism and moving people in the direction versus engagement and maybe reparative engagement in spaces where it’s about listening and exchange and collaboration.

And I think as we think about just how disrupted we are as a country, how divided we are, in order for us to see our own landscape shift, we have to think about… We look at facilitation as like this thing we use in office spaces, but it’s actually universally applicable because it’s really about the capacity to zoom out, zoom in, and understand how to bridge connections, hold space, and create containers for people to engage in dialogue and to feel belonging and that they matter. And I think we have an opportunity where it’s time to be out in some of these communities to do that, to change, to move away from just the rah-rah paradigm of politics.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. Yeah, I love that that question led to that line of thinking and sharing because I think it’s super relevant what you share here about voter behavior and politicians’ behaviors. It’s an important topic now given the landscape, but also it parallels how things work in the office, how things work in organizations of all sorts. Anytime you have a constituency that needs the need to be met, those dynamics are at play, right? That’s really fascinating, and I love this idea of reparative engagement. I haven’t heard that term before. Does that come out of the work that you do, or what are the origins there? Of that term?

Lori Boozer:

I think you mentioned that I’m on this break, so my time at my last job sort of came to an end, and I was in this in-between space of, “Do I get another job, or is there something else that calls to me?” And I was close to getting another job. The job I just left, I did a lot of work in community. My focus was really on community engagement. And I think as I was shifting into this space of giving myself permission to kind of rest and think about vision and what would I want to create, the question you asked, “If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?” And I think a lot of it really centered around healing and sort of healing as the missing link to some of the conversations that we’re struggling to have. And from a community perspective, I think I started to think about the ideas of what is repair at the community level.

There’s community engagement, but usually when we engage, we want something. I think reparative engagement is more about what does the community want and what are we building together? And how are we restoring trust in our communities? I think if you were looking at it through a political lens, reparative engagement is critical because communities don’t trust their politicians. And so I think it’s if you move away from a model where it was just about extraction, “I’m just going to show up when I need your vote, I’m going to give you enough things so that you feel like I care about you.” And moved into a model that said, “I have a two-year runway or a four-year runway. What does it look like to keep boots on the ground and to keep conversations going and to speak in my community from a place of repair and understanding? The harms that this community may have suffered, the harms that they currently suffer, the needs, the wants in a real meaningful way.”

I think that that’s how you restore the trust and how you bring a lot of siloed communities and siloed voters back into the fold. But you can’t build that trust if you’re just showing up a couple of months before the election. And I think that favors the status quo system because it doesn’t give people space to make a decision from a place of having had any real encounter. It’s just the name recognition, and there’s maybe limited options, two or three candidates, and you have to vote or you don’t vote, right? The worst case is you don’t vote. The medium case is you vote for someone you’re not really interested in, any of the candidates, because there’s not been any real engagement there.

Douglas Ferguson:

I want to bring us back to your trip in Thailand. So in the pre-show chat, you kind of mentioned some recent experiences and how it felt so different from your experiences at home, not only having a big break from being deep in work and in the grind but also just culturally. And it kind of echoes something you said earlier about being a black woman and how that influences how you show up in spaces. And it sounds like you had a similar experience in Thailand, just noticing what it was like to be in those spaces.

Lori Boozer:

Yeah, I noticed what it was like to feel welcomed and to feel… I think in America we talk a lot about this idea of belonging and inclusion and all the fuzzy words, and I don’t think anyone understands how to actually create that. And I think while I’ve been here particularly, I was in the northern part of Thailand, in Chiang Rai, for about four months, and it was an interesting… I felt unguarded, and I felt less hypervigilant, and I felt more belonging than I do at home because it is almost like there’s a level of hospitality and engagement that just accepts you in the state that you’re in.

I never really, I didn’t walk around feeling, “Oh, well, I’m black, so now I’m being watched,” or, “I’m black so I’m not going to get good care or good treatment.” I actually had to have surgery in Thailand, and I found myself kind of going along with the care in a way that I just would not back home because I would say, “Oh, they kill black people in America. I have to ask all the questions, do all the things. I don’t trust this doctor. I don’t feel comfortable; I don’t feel safe.” That’s sort of where the trauma exists. And then to be in a different country and feel like you can kind of relax, I think it’s kind of been really healing to give my system the space to feel free in that way.

And that’s why a lot of my work now is really thinking about healing and reparative practices and how do individuals heal, but also what does a collective healing actually look like. Because I think we don’t really know how to get ourselves there. So when you’re in a place where you just feel welcome and you can kind of let go, it’s like, “Well, how do you translate this energy? What’s the difference?” What’s the difference, Douglas?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Lori Boozer:

What is the difference between the energy in a place like this versus the energy in America, and how do we get some of this good juju?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. How do we create that imaginary world for folks so that they can start to adopt it on a more regular basis?

Lori Boozer:

Or how if we really wanted to explore ideas of belonging, when you think about it as a facilitator, this is the energy that you want to… That you create. You create that hospitable, welcoming, be-yourself, you-have-permission kind of energy. If you’re good, I have some bad facilitation. You’re just like, “Ah, I don’t know about this.” But I think when you do it, you kind of create that kind of energy. And it’s weird. It is like facilitation kind of lets you create these; it’s like world building.

You get to create these little spaces that are not the outside world. You’re going to leave the space and go back to the real world, but in the facilitated space, it’s protected, and it’s cocoon-like to some degree. And so I think the energy that I experienced here feels a lot like that. Welcoming energy is you want to create in those spaces. And I think, I guess, how I’m trying to connect this is… Part of how we move forward back home, I think, is in creating that energy more often, creating that welcoming, “I see you just because you’re you” energy, which I think is really hard for us because we’re so into containers and labels and boxes. But how do you create that? I think that that could be really healing for people to experience.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s making me think of this group here in Austin. I used to get invited to, called House of Genius, and they had this thing where when you showed up, you weren’t allowed to tell people anything other than your first name. You couldn’t say what your job was, you couldn’t say your last name, you couldn’t talk about anything you do when you’re networking and chatting ahead of time. So as these startups are presenting and everyone’s given advice, everyone’s advice is on an even playing field because you don’t know if this person next to you is on three different boards of public companies or the janitor or whatever. And at the end you get to reveal during the networking after. I thought that was really interesting. When you remove the labels, when you remove the expectations, how much it shifted the dynamic of how I experienced the room and showed up, and I’m a white guy, and so it was a super neat space. They were creating.

Lori Boozer:

It’s interesting; when we did the last convening from the Mobility LABs initiative that I worked on at my last job, we did something similar. We purposefully had people leave off their organizations and their titles, and all they had was first names and the word “community member” on their name tags, but it was for the same purpose. It was to mitigate power dynamics, to remove the separators, the things that make you play a particular role. Because if you are a manager or the nonprofit and you see a funder and a foundation, there’s a default set of roles that you fall into. I think we don’t even realize that the way that we’re programmed, we sort of fall into roles within spaces based on how we react to people’s titles, what we perceive someone can do for us or not do for us. So it is interesting, the similar concept of how do we just make this about human beings in a room and less about in the room because you do X or you have Y.

And so I agree. I think that that’s actually a really powerful way to structure time, communal time together to take away the separators, the things we use to create distance or false connection. We connect with people for reasons that are about service to what we need, not necessarily the depth of who we are. So it’s a false connection. “I don’t get to know Lori, but I get to know Lori, who may have money to give me.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, yeah.

Lori Boozer:

It’s a very different thing. I used to hate that about my job because all I felt like was a dollar sign walking around.

Douglas Ferguson:

False connections. I love this idea. You’re making me think about how the false connections are very superficial, right?

Lori Boozer:

In front of you.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because they’re there because of some other pretense, but it really gets in the way; it’s a hindrance to go into, actually, deeper.

Lori Boozer:

How can you actually solve problems if there’s not or any real connection there? I think, as I was saying, that’s one of the things working in philanthropy that was a pain. It was like I wanted to connect deeply with people or learn about work that people were doing. Not necessarily because I had money to give, because I often didn’t, but I think people just connected with me as a dollar. And so that was like if I said, “I don’t have any money to give,” it was like, “Okay, next.”

But I’m like, “Well, I could probably help you in 10 other ways,” but because there’s no space to connect more deeply outside of the role. This wasn’t everyone, but there were just instances where you could tell where it was like, “Oh, I don’t have any money.” So that’s the end of that conversation. And I think, to your point, false connections, we have a lot of that. It’s like an epidemic. Social media is a false connection. We think we’re in community, but we’re not. We’re just on there chitchatting, and we feel like we’ve got a million followers, but we’re not actually connected in any meaningful way. We’re more socially isolated than ever before. So how do you get back to the real connections?

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. I want to pivot a little bit to the future here as we’re kind of ending our time together. And I remember you talking about blending facilitation and narrative change and storytelling. What would an ideal project at that intersection look like for you?

Lori Boozer:

So I think the idea first came to me at my last job, where I was hosting a Women’s History Month event, and I did an activity, which was an icebreaker, where I basically wanted to demonstrate the concept: we’re not as connected, but we have more in common than we actually understand ourselves too within our workspaces. So I had people close their eyes and think about the community that they came from, not where they live now, where they grew up. What did it smell like? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Who were your neighbors? What did you do when you were a kid? You weren’t running up and down your local street. And then when we came back together, I asked people to share their experiences. And it was fascinating to watch these people who didn’t talk much in the office or seemed to not anything in common light up around these sort of shared childhoods filled with pride that they had in their communities or recognizing that they had touched the same spaces and letting people sort of tell their story.

And I think it disarms the room because you start to see another human. You don’t see the job, you don’t see the title. You see Lisa from Pennsylvania, and your aunt is from Pennsylvania, and then now it’s like, “My aunt is from Pennsylvania, and I grew up there too,” or… So it’s interesting letting people tell those stories because I realized that when we worked together, we are trying to solve the same problem, but we’re influenced by the perspectives that we have playing in our minds that are related to our personal stories. Whether we say it out loud or not, I am impacted by my personal childhood as a black woman growing up in a particular neighborhood. And when I’m in a nonprofit space, whether I’m saying that out loud or not, the perspectives that are playing in my mind are influenced by that experience.

And so I need to understand your experience, Douglas, but what was your experience? Because that helps me understand the perspective that you bring to the work and how we might bridge disagreement about the work because now we’re able to see eye to eye and understand sort of where we’re coming from. So when I think about narrative change and facilitation, I think that the narrative change piece, as twofold, is the personal storytelling to break down the walls between individuals, and then it’s the forming of a collective narrative in the facilitated space that supports the outcome that the group is trying to achieve. So once you break down the wall, and this is kind of like the divergence-convergence theory in some degree, right? There’s divergence in the beginning, but a lot of times it’s not just about the work; it’s just personal perspective. So how do you sort of chip away at that a little bit so that you can get to this collective outcome and use storytelling to do that?

And then when you get to the outcome, it is also, “What is the shared vision?” but, “What’s the narrative around this that we all are going to tell?” We now have a shared story. So we’ve gone from, it’s like divergence and convergence and narrative. We had these individual stories that are driving us in the background that we’ve now talked about and brought into the facilitated space, and we move toward this outcome, this shared outcome, but also a shared narrative and a shared story that we’re now going to tell collectively as a group that unites us around the work and how we want to present that work to the world.

Douglas Ferguson:

It also makes me think even slightly less deep, maybe a little bit more superficial. This trend manifests itself too, because you’ve got situations at work or disagreements come up, and when I say work, this could be in any collaborative endeavor. We’re trying to work on something together, and problems start to arise. And oftentimes this is rooted in beliefs and values and even fears that have been created in our prior collaborations, our prior projects. So it might not have been how we grew up or some of the foundational things about what we believe, but just some beliefs that we gathered around, “I don’t like this tool because the way my prior company used it was really painful,” or “They treated you really bad if you didn’t enter stuff in a certain way.”

And now when I’m being asked to use it here, I’m resisting. Whereas the person on the other side is like, “Why are they so resistant to the simple thing?” but not understanding the context by which some of those behaviors and beliefs were rooted. And I think people don’t spend enough time trying to understand the why behind behaviors. They just look at it as like, “Well, that’s dysfunctional, or that’s a difficult person.” And I think the spirit of digging deeper, really getting connected and grounded in what’s driving the need to feel supported in a different way.

Lori Boozer:

Right, yeah. We all have a work story. We all have a personal story, but it is just we’re carrying these things in every space that we go to, but there is no space to hold it because I think we came out of a time when it was looked down upon to be honest about how you feel. If you were bothered by the tool, you couldn’t just say what you thought, right? You had to kind of go along lockstep with whatever your job was asking. So then you do get labeled, or you get ostracized, or you don’t really feel like you’re fitting in, but it’s something that could be resolved if there just was understanding about what was happening. Or I think even people show up with all sorts of challenges that they don’t talk about, but we spend how much time at work. How much time do we spend in our job with coworkers?

I think it’s absurd that we have to leave all authenticity and humanity behind when we’re in these spaces for at least seven, eight, or more hours a day. They’re only 24 hours, so almost half your lifetime is spent working, right? I don’t know the exact data points. But what would it mean to just have more storytelling and narrative work in spaces? I think narrative work can also just be how the space tells its own story to create space for you to show up in that way. Like, “This is a space that values X, and it looks like Y.” And then you show up and you say, “Okay, I’m having difficulty with this because…” So it kind of feeds into the permission to lean into more authenticity, more connection, more understanding within the workspaces. So I’m still playing around those concepts, but I think just from an organizational change perspective, there’s a space for storytelling and narrative work that can be really powerful in terms of how we work.

And I think with AI now more than ever, we have to learn how to connect. We have to. We can’t go to work anymore and just be, “Oh, that’s just Bob,” and that’s it. Because that human connection is the thing that is going to distinguish what we do versus what a computer does. And the more we allow ourselves to lose that, the more likely it is that people will feel like, “Well, humans are just replaceable.” And I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that we’ve just lost a little bit of our humanity along the way.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s important for us to identify what that is and cultivate it. So what does this work look like for you as you continue to shape it? Where are you hoping it leads to?

Lori Boozer:

I’m hoping, and I’m just really getting started. I feel like Thailand was the birth of a vision, and now I’m in the space of trying to build out the different elements that I see, and that is a long game, but what I would love to see is really just creating more spaces for individuals to talk about healing and what that journey is really like, what it really takes. So that our workspaces and our places of engagement can be spaces that can hold the wholeness of people and not just the fragments that we’re expected to show up with. So that we are connecting because we understand that people are carrying so many different things, either things from their past or things from their present that are affecting how they show up. And so how do we just take away the stigma? And make it acceptable to say, “You know what? If we’re not healing, if we’re not healing ourselves, if we’re not investing in that, our workplaces are going to stay sick, our society doesn’t get better.”

Like collective healing and transformation, all the things that we say we want have nothing to do with just changing the system and everything to do with your own personal change. People are who make systems. We build the systems; they’re a reflection of who we are. So the more we give ourselves permission to heal and expand, the more we help our systems heal and change in ways that support people who can be whole people. So I think that’s where I’m hoping this conversation goes. What does healing look like? How do workplaces become safe containers for whole people? What role does facilitation play in helping people to make that bridge? And how do we embody that? How do we embody that in an age where we’re dealing with artificial intelligence, which I’m not against, but how do we not lose ourselves to it because we become more embodied in our humanity?

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, what an amazing journey to be on, and you’re at this moment of exploration and curiosity can be exciting and daunting and all the things. And I want to remind you, as a Voltage Control alumni, you have access to free office hours, and we love supporting and also just being a sounding board. Sometimes it’s just helpful to tell someone else something and then see how it feels to say it out loud. So join us for the weekly office hours if you ever, you know, contemplating a direction or wanting to sound out some ideas because that’s why we do it. That’s why we want to be there for y’all as you’re going through these transitions.

Lori Boozer:

Definitely. And I think I definitely will. I remember doing my little portfolio. And my picture was about, “How do you have difficult conversations?” And I remember saying, “I want to lean into the hard stuff. That’s where I want to be, in the space where people are afraid to talk.” So I think knowing that there’s continued support as I develop the vision that I’m working on is always great to have operating in the background.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, happy to help and glad to be there for alumni. As we wrap up, I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Lori Boozer:

I would say for a final thought, I’m going to say two final thoughts. One is every time you feel fear; that’s the moment where you need to lean in. And I think right now there’s a lot of fear because of everything that’s happening, and so we shut down. But it’s like, how do we challenge ourselves to lean into what that fear is asking us to think about or to consider? I think we just have space with everything that’s happening back home to really lean into our healing and to lean into change and personal transformation and use that as an opportunity. And that’s on the individual side.

And I think on the collective side, I feel like, I don’t know that I’m a Meghan Markle fan, but she gets a lot of slack for her show, With Love, I think it’s called. But at its core, it’s really about connecting. And I feel like for all of the backlash that happens, and the way it’s talked about, it’s not just about making the jam; it’s the fact that she’s bringing these people into her world and they’re doing these activities together. And I guess, how do we continue to find ways in all that’s happening to have little moments of connection? To keep the charcuterie board parties going, jump on a Zoom with a bunch of friends. Like, how do we just continue to honor that and create space for that in front of us?

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Well, Lori, it’s been a pleasure. I could keep chatting with you on and on and on, but we had to hit the pause and pick up again some other time. But it was a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for being here.

Lori Boozer:

Thanks for having me. And to be continued.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. 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: voltagecontrol.com.