We hosted our annual facilitator summit last week alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

Read on for summaries of this year’s Control the Room Summit presentations. Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session in the morning of their following 90-minute facilitated session that afternoon. 

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Voltage Control founder Douglas Ferguson started the summit with an introduction to the importance of connection in the virtual landscape and the critical role facilitators play in it. 

He encouraged the group to not only soak in all of the great information provided by the guest speakers but to network with guest attendees and experts alike to gain as much perspective as possible. 

The first round of lightning talks and workshops consisted of Van Lai-DuMone, Mohamed Ali, Leslie Forman, Michael Wilkinson, Emily Bowen, and Erik Skogsberg.

Van Lai-DuMone

Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations

Van Lai-DuMone, the founder of Worksmart Advantage, discussed incorporating creativity into virtual facilitations. Creativity allows facilitators to make people feel heard, that their ideas matter, to express themselves, and to feel connected. Van’s workshop was focused on how incorporating creative tools can not only serve to harness the attention of the group but also serve as a practical tool for: Team Building and Development, Collaboration, Idea Generation, Problem Solving and Trust Building. 

“Creativity allows you to make people feel heard.”

Mohamed Ali

You’re That Audience

Mohamed Ali, Service Designer and Facilitator at Independant, discussed how self-interest can create engagement and participation for your audience. Mohamed taught workshop attendees how to prepare an audience for a workshop, long before they show up. The questions attendees answered together were, “how might we effectively onboard participants without overwhelming them with the exercises and time needed to conduct the workshop? How might a beginners’ mindset assist an audience to contribute what they really wish to?” 

“Self-interest for an audience is beneficial; engage your audience as much as possible.” 

Leslie Forman

Secrets, Constraints, and Emojis

Leslie Forman, Senior User Experience Researcher at Linkedin, spoke about secrets, constraints, and emojis. By implementing the 3 Cs (concrete, colorful, and constrained) we can produce the best results from our team. Leslie discussed practical techniques that facilitators can use to guide participants into deeper discussions, especially about ambiguous or sensitive topics. 

Michael Wilkinson

Consensus Building: Techniques for Getting to Yes

Michael Wilkinson, CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies presented techniques to getting to “Yes” in a disagreement; understanding the issue is key to coming to a solution. According to Michael, three reasons people disagree are due to information, different experiences/values, and outside factors. Exploring the type of disagreement – information, different experiences/values, outside factors – and asking questions are instruments to solving the disagreement. In his workshop, Michael equipped attendees with a clear understanding of the three reasons people disagree, three methods for establishing a consensus-focused process, and five techniques for getting to “yes” when disagreements occur.

Emily Bowen

Peace, Love & Understanding

Emily Bowen, Holistic Leadership Consultant and Educator at The Peace Nerd, discussed how to facilitate using peace, love, and understanding. By remaining present and in the moment, facilitators can engage best with their users. Emily showed workshop attendees how to create lightness and ease when facilitators want to connect people to each other and build trust when working remotely.

“Take a moment to breathe and be in this space.” 

Erik Skogsberg

Learn to Transform

The last lightning speaker of the day was Voltage Control’s own Erik Skogsberg speaking on how the best learning experiences are learner-focused. Erik informed the group that the best facilitators, whether they know it or not, are Learning Experience Designers (LXDs). LXDs bring the best of user experience design and the learning sciences to bear on creating transformation: whether in a meeting, presentation, workshop, or course. Participants were guided through some hands-on practice in these methods for use in a meeting, workshop, or training of their own and then were introduced to how to design for better learning experiences and lasting change in their future facilitation work.

“It is up to the facilitator to move and adjust to the learners in the room.”

Day one ended with special prize giveaways and a virtual happy hour with all participants. 

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

After an introduction to open up the day, the second round of lightning talks and workshops consisted of Jennifer Marin Jericho, Kaleem Clarkson, Caitlin Loos, William Aal, Solomon Masala, Alison Coward. 

Jennifer Marin Jericho

How to Pivot When Things Go Wrong

Jennifer Marin Jericho, Co-Founder and Design and Communication Strategist of Jericho Vinegar Works, presented tactics for Effective Facilitation and Facilitation Pitfalls on some of the tips she has learned along the way for when things don’t go the way you expect. We often think of facilitation as the moment when we are in the room, Jennifer said, running a workshop or meeting, but there’s quite a lot of work to be done before and after to host a successful workshop.

“The devil is in the details.”

Kaleem Clarkson & David Klasko

Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play

Kaleem Clarkson, Chief Operating Officer at Blend Me, Inc., and David Klasko, Actor, Comedian, and Founder of Artly Working, presented on what the research says about the dangers of isolation, and how playing simple (and incredibly fun) games can create meaningful human connection in the virtual workplace. Technology has provided a platform to find and foster these relationships, but it takes a thoughtful and structured approach to create a human connection. Based on improv comedy, and built for video conferencing, Artly Working has designed workshops to add humor, vulnerability, and spontaneity to the virtual world – in other words, the human element! Using games and exercises developed specifically for the platform, the goal is to fight isolation and loneliness and build bonds on our remote platforms, and not in spite of them. Participants learned games and exercises that can be implemented with teams right away.

Caitlin Loos & Jordan Hirsch

7 Hours on Zoom…In a good way!

Caitlin Loos, Director of Creative Services at Phase2 Technology, and Jordan Hirsch, Director of Innovation at Phase2, taught participants how they created a 7-hour zoom conference that was energizing, inspiring, & fun. The workshop explored how they turned their annual company conference — a deeply human, connected experience for 100+ people — into a Zoom call that lasted seven hours and spanned four time zones, but still worked. The group experimented and played with activities that helped turn a virtual event into a virtual experience.

“Embracing virtual events should engage all of the senses, incorporate the home, and recognize that virtual is not always better, worse, or the same.” – Caitlin Loos

William Aal

Equity, Power and Conflict in Meeting Design

William Aal, Co-founder and Managing Partner of unConference.net, explored how to disrupt patterns of privilege and oppression that are often overlooked in meeting design in his lightning talk and workshop

 “Explore those dynamics in your facilitation practice. Have fun making the invisible visible!”

In his workshop, participants learned how to set the table for people to fully participate, taking into account the currents of power difference in the space. They also learned how to be aware of their own privilege dynamics; how to acknowledge conflict and use it as a tool to deepen community and when process becomes liberatory and when it furthers patterns of oppression.

Solomon Masala

Zip in your Zoom

Solomon Masala, creator of the Source Consultng Group, reminded participants that most humans have been conditioned to get in front of a screen and go passive. He said we forget that real learning is an active, full-body experience, and in our virtual learning world it’s critical to keep the learning juices activated. In his workshop, Solomon engaged participants in 25+ kinesthetic activities that range from 1 minute to 1 hour, guaranteed to get participants energized and enlivened, regardless of the group.

Alison Coward

Workshop Culture for a Better Workplace

Alison Coward, Founder of Bracket, closed out the day by discussing the lasting impacts of workshops. Her presentation explored the real potential of workshops in improving our experience of work, and what else that may bring. Integrating workshop culture into an environment allows for the intended products of workshops like engagement and progress as well as the unintended possibilities such as open communication and more trust. 

“Workshops bring many of the factors that we want to see in productive, engaged and positive cultures – collaboration, inclusion, motivation, creativity – so how can we take these elements beyond a one-off event and bring them more generally into the workplace?”

Day two ended with prize giveaways and a happy hour with the summit’s participants.

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Summit participants were welcomed with a warm introduction to the final day, followed by lightning talks and workshops from Madelon Guinazzo, Vinay Kumar, J. Elise Keith, Joshua Davies, Elena Astilleros, and Rachel Ben Hamou.

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Madelon Guinazzo

Facilitating Fearlessly with Heart

Madelon Guinazzo, Co-Founder of Cuddlist, addressed that all facilitators have fears, and participants all come with their own fears as well. Her experiential-based workshop explored some common facilitator fears in a safe way. Participants built resilience and the sense of connection that leads to grounded positive action in the midst of fear. Madelon showed attendees how to tap into the powerful potential of transformation that fear holds for both the facilitator and participant. She demonstrated how to let those fear fuel participants into fun and greater trust in themselves and life, and challenged them to explore how to hold fear – their own and others – with equanimity.

“Let your fear out. Exaggerate it. Give it a voice.”

Vinay Kumar

Connecting People and Thinking for Shared Values

Vinay Kumar, Director of Client Engagement at C2C Organizational Development, discussed engagement and creating meaningful connections. In this new age of digital engagement and connection, accessing ways of creating that safe and brave space allows our users to form those bonds and further goals. Using the right brain is not only fun but also helps in drawing out many aspects that participants often find difficult to articulate in a group setting. This is especially true when groups are extremely diverse in terms of experience, cultures, hierarchy, language, etc. Vinay’s workshop explored two methods in creating strong connections that increase the effectiveness of group work.

J. Elise Keith

Facilitating in Real Time, Near Time, and Far Time

J. Elise Keith, Founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, spoke about facilitating in the present, near, and future. We can take a project from real-time excitement to near and far-time enthusiasm through creating records and remembrances of the occurrence. In her workshop, J. Elise explained that professional facilitators are pretty skilled at planning and running events. But the challenge is how to make sure that the work in facilitated events and the changes these events inspire have an impact on the everyday lives of those being served. Participants explored what it means to facilitate across different time scales and surface ideas we can all use to make a more lasting impact.

“Traditional skills are being replaced.”

Joshua Davies

Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation

Joshua Davies, Founder and Lead Conversation Architect at Knowmium, examined how conversations operate and move in our facilitations. If we are to reach an understanding with others, we must have a path to empathy. Too many conversations are treadmills, endless, going without ever getting anywhere, or broken parallel monologues in search of true dialogue. In his session, participants explored practical techniques for better awareness and co-creation in discussions using conversation mapping, contrasting, and cadence control.

Types of conversations: understanding, problem-solving & exploring, blocking/telling, storytelling/persuading.

Elena Astilleros

$h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love

Elena Astilleros of Empoderment, discussed turning your meeting from “Sh** to hit.” Facilitators are the ones who bring the magic to the room, she said. Our users can’t go further than where we are at ourselves. Elena taught participants how they might be creating the wrong kind of drama (without realizing it) when facilitating. Elena’s workshop taught participants how to lead lively meetings where they (and everyone participating) feel alive and reinvigorated from their time together. She provided attendees with practices they can start using to trigger group genius in their next meeting or workshop and a simple way to up-level the questions they ask their team.

“Do you feel totally drained after facilitating your sessions? When you ask questions, do you get crickets…or worse, only the same handful of people answering every time?” 

Rachel Ben Hamou & Andre Ben Hamou

Onboarding Without Hoarding

Rachel Ben Hamou, Director of Talent Development at PeopleStorming, and Andre Ben Hamou, Co-Founder of PeopleStorming, explored how to develop processes and criteria (that they will genuinely use) that allow facilitators to evaluate exercises and activities at speed. They taught participants how to ‘Yes And’ the great resources they discover, without things becoming unmanageable. By using play and creating a toolkit, we can embrace both the face-to-face interactions as well as creating a space that also includes our virtual interactions as well.

“Since everything has gone virtual, the internet is a treasure trove AND a landfill of every process and exercise humans can imagine. How do you sift through all that noise to find activities that will help YOU facilitate well?”

The final day was wrapped with a raffle prize giveaway and a celebratory happy hour.

We’re already excited about next year’s summit. To be a part of our facilitator community in the meantime, join us for our weekly Facilitation Lab and check out our upcoming events.

The post Control the Room 2021 appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Van Lai-DuMone.

Van Lai-DuMone, the founder of Worksmart Advantage, discussed incorporating creativity into virtual facilitations. Creativity allows facilitators to make people feel heard, that their ideas matter, to express themselves, and to feel connected. Van’s workshop was focused on how incorporating creative tools can not only serve to harness the attention of the group but also serve as a practical tool for: Team Building and Development, Collaboration, Idea Generation, Problem Solving and Trust Building. 

“Creativity allows you to make people feel heard.”

Watch Van Lai-DuMone’s talk “Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations” :

Read the Transcript

Van:

Hello, everyone. Nice to be here today. I’m so excited to be here today, to talk to you about this concept of incorporating creativity into your virtual facilitations. So my work is steeped in creativity and still, this is something that I had to really actively learn to start doing, in March. So I’m going to do today, is share with you some of the tools that I use, to bring creativity into virtual facilitations, and then also share with you why I think it is important to use creativity in our facilitation skills. So my name is Van, as Douglas said, and my work is in team development and leadership training, all through creative integration. And what I mean by creative integration is basically, I use creativity, play and experiential learning, in everything that I do. So let’s start with this idea of what is creativity and why do we bring it into virtual facilitation?

So when I describe creativity, I talk about it as a capacity, not a skill. So for example, oil painting is a skill, opera sing is a skill, but the creativity behind those skills is a capacity and is a capacity that we all have. We’re all creative. So if there is something that we should be universally training on, it’s creativity. You can train me on accounting until we both turn blue, and I’m never really going to quite get it. You might try to train someone else on sales and they might not quite get it, but when you bring creativity into any type of learning environment, what you’re doing is tapping into a capacity that we all have. Creativity also challenges our way of thinking. It allows us to hear from different perspectives and see things from different perspectives. And I’m talking about our own perspectives, right?

Sometimes we can be singular minded, but by being creative, we can see things from different perspectives. And there’s also something about creativity that allows us to see and hear perspectives from other people in the room as well. And then finally, what is creativity? Creativity is something that gives us access to ideas that are untapped by left brain, analytical thinking alone. And oftentimes particularly in the workplace, that’s where we at. We’re in that left brain, analytical thinking. So drawing in creativity is like bringing in that hippie sister. Who’s getting great, bring all these creative ideas, these wild and crazy ideas, and that’s what we want. And then why use creativity in virtual facilitations? Number one, it keeps your audience active and engaged in their learning. It’s hard to be disengage when you’re asked to maybe sketch your neighbor, or if you’re asked to do the floss, it also leaves people energized rather than drained.

So it can be easy to leave people drained, especially now that we’re in front of a computer screen. So as facilitators, we can’t just take what we used to do in person and bring it virtually. It doesn’t really work. We have to be very intentional about how we’re talking to our audience and engaging them to leave them energized. And then there’s something very natural about creativity that creates this opportunity for connection and collaboration, because creativity is so much about idea sharing. It really offers this opportunity to collaborate naturally. And then also it offers this experience of emotional connection, and that is something that I find very beneficial to bringing creativity into this virtual environment. So there is a quote that I like to use in my facilitations, and this is it. People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And that’s Maya Angelou.

So I love this quote because it really shows you how creativity allows you to make people feel heard. Creativity allows you to make people feel like their ideas matter. To feel that they can express themselves and to feel connected. So now let’s talk a little bit about the how. So, how do you bring creativity into the workplace or into facilitation? So I am aware that although we’re all innately creative, some people may not be that comfortable with their creativity. So I scaffold the delivery of my creativity into my facilitations, starting with something that helps to connect people, and there’s a low barrier of resistance. Then I slowly challenged them into their creativity, giving them a little bit more challenging activities, that’s going to walk them through their creativity, which is what we’re going to do later today in the workshop title. Hang on a second, I’ll get my thing back here. In a workshop that’s really going to show you how to incorporate your creativity and creative tools into your facilitation.

And we’re going to model it through a workshop called, Discover your unique characteristics, that make us stronger together by the sum of our differences, because of the sum of those differences that creates possibilities for ourselves and for others. So I taught just a minute ago, about this whole idea of scaffolding integration into your virtual facilitations, and starting with something that connects people and has a low barrier of resistance. So one tool I use for that is storytelling. And I’m going to demonstrate that for you right now, and to do that, I am going to go way back in time. All the way back to 1975, to Hope Village Refugee Integration Center, where my family and I found ourselves after fleeing the end of the Vietnam war, and it’s here that hundreds of volunteers showed up and donated their time, their skills and their natural characteristics and strengths to help us transition into our new country.

And there was one volunteer who took particular interest in helping the women at the camp, and that volunteer was Hollywood movie star actress, Tippi, Hedren. So back then, she was most famously known for her starring role in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds. Now she’s probably more famous as Melanie Griffith’s mom and Dakota Johnson’s grandmother, but back then she was a huge Hollywood movie star who brought her kindness, her attentiveness, and her influence, to Hope Village, to help this group of refugees. So TippI, what she decided to do is start a program that help these women learn to type and sow, so they could take those skills and start a career for themselves in this new country. But there was something else that sparked the curiosity of my mom and 19 other women at the camp. And you can see it slightly here in the picture that was Tippi’s long, red, manicured, nails.

So Tippi could easily overlook that curiosity, but she didn’t. What she did was, she was attentive, and what she did next was, she asked herself, well, what if, what if we can get these women trained and licensed as manicurist? So the first thing she did was, she went back to Los Angeles and invited her personal manicurist, Dusty Coots Butera, to come up and help these women learn how to do a basic manicure. So weekend after weekend, Dusty showed up and she brought with her, her patience and her natural ability to teach and to connect, and she taught them how to do a basic manicure. And what that did, is it made my mom and her friends, even more curious and more determined to make this their career, and Tippi was determined to help them.

So despite the fact that none of these women spoke English, and certainly none of them had any money to pay for tuition to go to school, Tippi got creative, and she went down to the local beauty school and she asked them, would you be willing to take on these 20 Vietnamese refugee women as students? And the owners of Citrus Heights Beauty College, with their compassion and their willingness to help, they said, yes.

So because of this, these 20 women, all of them passed their manicure practicum and written tests, in English in under 10 weeks. And the story doesn’t end there. There was the refugees who came after us, that learned about the profession from my mom and her friends, and then their friends from them. Some of you may know that the Vietnamese manicure industry or the manicure industry in the United States is now an $8.3 billion industry, dominated by Vietnamese Americans, who make up 53% of the profession across the country and 80% here in California. So the lesson I get from this is that it is in fact, the sum of our differences and our connection that makes us stronger together, and makes it possible for us to achieve what might seem impossible on our own. Tippi brought her kindness, her attentiveness, her influence, and her creativity. Dusty brought her patience, her natural ability to teach and to connect. The women brought their resilience, their determination, and their curiosity. And then the owners of the beauty college brought their compassion and their willingness to help.

So I share this story and this presentation for a couple of reasons. I just gave you an example of how to scaffold creativity into your virtual facilitations through storytelling. Now, clearly your story doesn’t have to be as dramatic as fleeing a war torn country, or trailblazing an entire industry, but what it does have to do is level the playing field, connect people and elicit an emotion to draw people in the room with you. And you also got to show a little bit of vulnerability, because by doing so, you allow others to do the same. And if you’re going to ask people to tap into their creativity and get a little vulnerable, it’s important that we model that first. And again, with this particular story, what I want to show you… And I hope I showed and inspired all of us to do, is draw on our natural character strings and follow our curiosities over the next three days to find ways to connect, collaborate, and create possibilities for ourselves and for others.

So why did I showed this tool of storytelling this morning as a starting point? Right? So I talked about the whole idea of scaffolding your creativity into your facilitations. So the next step after storytelling and connecting, is what I like to call transfer exercises, where you’re asking people to participate by building on or drawing with some defined shapes. So for example, I can’t see any of you, but I’m going to ask all of you to just look around you right now and pick up five things you might see next to you, just five small objects.

And I’m going to ask you to just take 30 seconds to use those objects, to build a tower. So I’ll give you about 30 seconds here, loosely 30 seconds to build a tower. Okay? So some of you may have your towers up by now, and then what you might want to do is ask them some questions, such as, how many have you built for height? How many people built for aesthetics? How many people built for a strong foundation? And now what you’ve done, is you’ve given them something to do physically, right? Now you’re doing manual tactile building, and you’ve asked them some questions that helps them learn a little bit about themselves. And what you can use that exercise now for, is to break them… You can take them into breakout rooms and use it as a way to do an icebreaker or introduce themselves.

So, that was the next step in the scaffolding. Is this idea of transfer exercises. The next step is the use of visual cues. And since you have your tower already, I’m just going to use that as an example. So as an example, you might now say, what visual cues do you see from that tower? What characteristics of that tower might make you reflect on a way to overcome a challenge that you might be talking about? So you’re looking at characteristics now and trying to force a connection between what they built or what they’re looking at, and some ideas to solve a problem. So, that’s another way you can bring in this idea of creativity to your virtual facilitations. And then the last step would really be to have people use their imagination. Now that they’re comfortable and kind of getting into this concept of using their imagination, using their creativity, you can stretch them a little bit more.

So I like to ask people to either sketch something or tell a story. So I’m going to ask you to do right now, is to sketch, sketch one thing that you can bring to the conference today to make it valuable to others. So again, sketch one thing today, that… Sketch one thing right now, actually, that you can bring to the conference to make this conference valuable to others. And it might be your humor. It might be your energy. So whatever that looks like to you in a sketch, go ahead and draw that sketch right now. And what I have to say, is that this is not an art project.

Your sketching and drawing skills do not matter. It’s just this idea of using your creativity. And after you sketch that one, I’m going to ask you to do another sketch. I’m going to ask you to sketch something that you want to get from this conference and this summit. So what’s going to bring value to you? So that might be… You might be looking for more collaborations. You might be looking for more tools to bring back to the work you do. So take a minute to do that.

And hopefully you guys show up to my workout later today. We can share those. All right. So I’m going to close with this idea, that when we meet later on, we’re going to use some of these creative tools and the scaffolding idea to bring creative tools into your virtual facilitations. I’m going to teach you some of the tools that I use in that scaffolding method, but we’re going to do it through the lens of uncovering your natural character strengths, that can be used to create possibilities for yourself and for others, just like my mom, Tippi Hedren, Dusty, and the owners of that beauty school did, all the way back in 1975, to create possibilities over the next three days for ourselves and for others, and some possibilities that are foreseeable and some possibilities that we can’t even foresee what those might be. So thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to enjoying and being part of the rest of the conference. You can connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to, or we’ll connect over on Zoom as well. Thank you for your time.

The post Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Mohamed Ali.

Mohamed Ali, Service Designer and Facilitator at Independant, discussed how self-interest can create engagement and participation for your audience. Mohamed taught workshop attendees how to prepare an audience for a workshop, long before they show up. The questions attendees answered together were, “how might we effectively onboard participants without overwhelming them with the exercises and time needed to conduct the workshop? How might a beginners’ mindset assist an audience to contribute what they really wish to?” 

“Self-interest for an audience is beneficial; engage your audience as much as possible.” 

Watch Mohamed Ali’s talk “You’re That Audience” :

Read the Transcript

Mohamed Ali:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s wonderful to be here, and thank you to the Voltage Control team for making this feel a little homie. Pun intended.

So the concept here, the principle that I want to share, initially, is we really should pre-connect. I’m Hammad Ali, and this is a story about incidental digital facilitators.

What makes an incidental facilitator? If you’re the type of person who seeks to create harmony, build bridges, and make sure everyone is happy, you might be an incidental facilitator. If you’re frequently hosting clarifying conversations or dealing with and trying to resolve conflict, it’s either your calling or your craft. Recently, a lot more people have been thrown into the deep end of digital facilitation with mixed results.

Over the past five years, I’ve been deliberately working towards building a remote friendly career, specifically in something called service design. I’ve had the chance to build and lead workshops across time zones which allowed me to exercise my digital facilitation muscle. And like you, I’ve noticed the challenges people have with the increasingly digital components of their workshops. Do you remember when using Slido and polling apps was a fun, engaging distraction, and now we’re in an environment where it’s necessary to juggle having different types of hosts for a dominantly digital workshop.

What gives me hope is that the pain shared by facilitators and participants continues to be independent of location, digital or physical. Do any of these sound familiar when you’re the audience, and feel free to snap your fingers as I [inaudible 00:02:08] them out. A sense that you’re wasting each other’s time, a nagging feeling of having different expectations, zero impact or no takeaways, and the free food no longer obliging you to review the workshop positively.

Let me take you through a story of what this might look like using a story arc. So it’ll be in three acts, and our protagonist is Abdullah. In the first act, Abdullah is the resident fixer and incidental facilitator in the company. He’s told no one is traveling and to re-think how to put together the company town hall that was being planned months in advance. He’d been tapped to facilitate things before and is told that it now needs to be a digital extravaganza. He talks to the heads of departments, and they make it clear this needs to be special.

The process and responsibilities for delivering the event is opaque. And Abdullah starts hearing about promises made of bells and whistles and fancy set ups. “It’ll be like you’re there,” but no one knows what the outcome is, including Abdullah.

In the second act, the day of the event arrives. There are mercifully minimal amounts of technical glitches. There’s music, icebreakers, monologues by someone important, but for all intents and purposes, it seems successful so far. However, questions by attendees are being ignored. And as people get more frustrated, we arrive at the climax. Abdullah notices people turn off videos during breakout rooms and then sees them just exit in the second round of breakout rooms. It’s the dreaded death by breakout room. That is where we are now. So what do you think happens next?

In the third act, Abdullah goes into damage control. He’s blamed, loses his job, becomes poor, eventually dies.

So what happened? Where was the gap? There’s definitely a gap between the intention, facilitate the event digitally, and the outcome, people feeling unheard and leaving. I think core and central to that is understanding that one of our roles as a facilitator is not to deliver a workshop, but to identify and close a gap that exists by listening.

So how can Abdullah aim to listen better by pre-connecting, the principle I shared earlier. Well, he could have interviewed the audience with the intention of building a stakeholder map to plot and understand the organizational challenges. He could use this map to continue connecting with other attendees to build on what he learns in these interviews. And through these conversations or surveys, you could use surveys as well, he could build a shared space that contains synthesized insights. This would have allowed Abdullah to better understand and notice similarities between the intended audience, their story arcs, and maybe could have figured out a way to help the participants feel both seen and heard.

His story is connected to another principle, the need to create space for everyone to be seen and heard. You’ve heard me say that more than once now. So I believe that no matter how many Zoom calls we have, we won’t be able to have everyone feel heard. Instead, I opt for what I like to call a slow-burn workshop. So here’s a scenario to clarify what I’m sharing.

A nonprofit leadership organization wants to form a board to offer ongoing direction, programming, and assistance to board members, but they don’t want to do it in the old world command and control model. The people participating in this initiative have all been a part of this organization at various times over the last five years. They really love it. They understand that they’re building something new, that it’s untested, and it’s on a voluntary basis. They can’t show up to every call. They all have work and life obligations. But they’re really invested in this goal and would like to keep things moving asynchronously or not necessarily being there at the same time. They’ve tried Google Docs with meeting minutes, recording past video calls, but there was no way to pick up where they left off.

Through our interviews with them, we were exposed to beautiful… sorry, metaphors such as it feels like there are invisible rocks in our path, so how might we see these invisible rocks together? An insight that arose from the conversation was that it’s not a bunch of workshops. It’s a journey. So we re-oriented and approached it as an invitation for people to go on a journey. They shared their StrengthsFinder profile which gives people a way to describe what they naturally do best and what they might need help with. And this is important because these people are working across industries, and we needed a shared language.

Another thing we did was we had people complete forms that had them reflect on their intentions. What was in it for them? What were their goals? Why did they need this to succeed? We asked them to share images that represented them, the things that they care about, their aspirations, and the answer prompts about themselves, similar to a user manual, about their quirks and how they prefer to relate to others.

This was all capped by an invitation to opt into connecting with others on a one-to-one get to know you call. And now, every time there’s a call, it’s not the same faces, but they all share in the progress because it’s all tracked in one location. And so this is an example of the location.

In the second scenario, it’s a consultancy with corporate problem-solving offerings. It’s building a cohort=based learning program to support internal Mavericks or entrepreneurs. One of their challenges was how to get people hooked in and caring for not only the content, but for the people who they’ll be meeting. The content offering is strong in its own right. The power of learning with and from people facing similar challenges is what makes a long-term difference in how people learn and apply their learning.

Three days prior to the event, we created and shared a one minute video clip inviting people to respond to prompts via Voice Note for two reasons. But first, I’m going to share the prompts. The prompts we sent went like this:

How will they prepare their environment for the upcoming event? And we asked them to also reiterate, what is it that made them curious to attend and to share what it is they wish to resolve by attending this space.

So the responses we got were powerful, and the reason being is that the Voice Notes work because it’s not as anxiety-inducing as a video recording. The prompt work because we could meet them where they are. And what this allows us to do is get a sense for who is showing up way in advance. And if we’re able to sensitize people to this approach as being a part of the process, then what we’re getting is a lot of information on what seems to be top of mind for them. Are their challenges pervasive? Are they just the flavor of the month? And you can do two things with this information. I mean, a lot, but I’ll focus on two things.

You can remove identifying information, synthesize the themes on a whiteboard, and give people access to it well in advance. Or, if you have a strong sense for the people, from the responses and from their voices, you can invite them into a group like a Signal or a WhatsApp group and encourage them to share the responses to their prompts with others.

In preparation for this talk, I tried to do this using a Google Form. If you’re coming to the workshop, please complete the form. And the theme that kept arising was connection or feeling connected. It’s something we constantly seek. And what you do by pre-connecting is you create the conditions for people to feel that they’re being seen and heard, for them to feel that they’re connected. And I think that’s what listening is all about when it’s done well.

Thank you.

The post You’re That Audience appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Rachel Ben Hamou.

Rachel Ben Hamou, Director of Talent Development at PeopleStorming, and Andre Ben Hamou, Co-Founder of PeopleStorming, explored how to develop processes and criteria (that they will genuinely use) that allow facilitators to evaluate exercises and activities at speed. They taught participants how to ‘Yes And’ the great resources they discover, without things becoming unmanageable. By using play and creating a toolkit, we can embrace both the face-to-face interactions as well as creating a space that also includes our virtual interactions as well.

“Since everything has gone virtual, the internet is a treasure trove AND a landfill of every process and exercise humans can imagine. How do you sift through all that noise to find activities that will help YOU facilitate well?”

Watch Rachel Ben Hamou’s talk “Onboarding Without Hoarding” :

Read the Transcript

Rachel Ben Hamou:

Hello everyone and happy Thursday. I hope you’re doing well and really enjoying the conference. It’s time to celebrate. We’re coming towards the end. And so yeah, welcome to Onboarding Without Hoarding. It’s such an honor to be on the agenda with so many amazing people and I’ve just been learning so much. I’m Rachel, I’m one of the co-founders of PeopleStorming and my partner Andre is also here. So he’ll be lurking in the chat during the talk. At PeopleStorming, we’re fascinated by the way that progress is made in the modern work environment. We obsess about communication, collaboration and culture and our aim is kind of for people to close those gaps and those areas so that they can deliver on their mission in a sustainable way.

So as facilitators, we have to be really adaptable in our engagements because they can vary a lot. And this means having both a comprehensive toolkit and also confidence in our ability to improvise. Now since we’ve given quite a few talks about applied and organizational improv in the past, we thought for control of the room, we’d focus more on the toolkit building because this is foundational stuff that I think is valuable for all of us to revisit. So even before the pandemic, the internet was filled with team building exercises and decision-making methodologies and reflection questions and all of that stuff.

And now since the pandemic has forced even more of us online, a lot more materials have popped up. And as with anything that you search for online, you’ll find the web as both a treasure trove of goodies and simultaneously, there are a lot of poorly thought out or ill-fitting ideas. So the question is how do you sift through all of that noise to find activities that will help you facilitate well? Our talk and our workshop today will aim to answer this question with your help and we’ll focus heavily on the development and the use of helpful sifting criteria.

So I thought I’d share a little bit more context on the idea for the talk and the workshop. It started with a funny conversation that we were having about the different ways people shop at the grocery store. So when my partner shops, he’s laser-focused on getting just the items on the shopping list, the rest of the store just might as well not exist. It’s kind of a blur or stuff that he goes past on the way to the things that he wants. And whereas I on the other hand tend to take more time. So I look at alternative brands, I’m looking for inspiration, for new meal ideas, ways to use my new crockpot. I also take a little time to process special offers and coupons just to make sure that I understand that I’m getting good value.

So you could imagine shopping with the two of us is kind of an interesting experience. So in other words very broadly, he tends to hunt and I tend to gather. And both approaches have their upsides and their downsides. We’ve also noticed these tendencies when we work together as well. I’m good at gathering the details and lots of sources and building an open creative space for our projects. And he tends to be the one that leans deeper into analysis and the highly focused portions of all of that.

Now although I don’t have access to the chat today, Andre does and so when I’m in the audience for talks like this, I always find I can learn a lot from other attendees. So if I ask a question today, pop your answer in the chat box and we’ll see what insights can be generated. So my first question then is regarding hunting versus gathering. What’s your style and how does it change from one situation to another? And I’m just going to pause for maybe 30 seconds whilst you share your thoughts on that.

               (silence)

 So how does all this relate to the talk and the workshop? Well, we realized that there is something approaching optimal shopping behavior for facilitators. Not for tomatoes and laundry liquid, but more for the exercises and the activities and tools. So our premise is this. You need to be somewhat adventurous in exploring the tools that will increase your value as a facilitator. If you play it safe, you may only have value to a limited set of audiences and that value might diminish over time. Conversely, if you constantly experiment with whatever’s shiny, you may not be able to make commitments to clients that they can rely on. So you may compromise your ability to have predictable value.

So if that premise is correct, then we need to be deliberate about two things. How do we assess the potential value of new activities and tools for all the different definitions of value that matter to us and our clients and how much time and energy do we spend on finding, assessing and incorporating those new tools and activities? So if you come to our workshop today, those are the fundamental things that we’ll be exploring together. Specifically, you’ll be building up set of criteria that you can use to compare the relative value of new activities. And everyone’s list will look different because everyone’s experience and skills and domains and clients are all different.

We will also want to help you build muscle around using that criteria so you can assess new ideas rapidly and confidently. So we also have an activity hunt as part of the workshop. Then we’ve included some time for self reflection and coaching so you can think about when and how you incorporate new ideas. And we’re also going to help you harness that wisdom of the group from each other with some Troika Consulting, for those of you who know what that is and those of you who don’t, will have to come along and find out. So speaking of ideas, it’s useful to understand how new ideas will fit into our existing mental structures.

So when we boil down some of the tools, exercises, processes and activities to their essence, we can see that they are a method of enabling the group to do a particular thing. We might call them phases at the meta level. So for example, let’s just consider a sort of classic session structure. So you start with a game or activity to get people’s heads in the room and their spirits high, you energize. Then you use a method to carve the group into smaller teams on the fly, you scatter. That’s what we call it. And those teams then need a way to discuss and share their ideas, you ideate. Then you give them a way to make sure that they can record their inclusions, you capture. And then the teams reconvene and have a way to share and coalesce their ideas, you gather. And then there’s a period to process what they’ve heard, you reflect and so forth.

Now you will undoubtedly have your own set of phases that may or may not look like ours and for the kinds of activities that you do and a sense for when you’ve used them in the session. So that’s phases. Now within those phases, you have a myriad of choice for the exact exercise or tool that you’ll use. So it helps if we can have a way to carve up the choices and this is something we’ll explore more deeply in the workshop. So I want you to give you a taster of that right now. We often ask ourselves whether we’ve squeezed as much value as possible out of the activity choices on the basis that each choice meets the goal that we’ve defined. So it’s either reliable, fresh or efficient.

And when something is reliable, it consistently works well and almost always gets a great result. And so you might call these things old faithful. When an activity is fresh, it means we’re trying something that almost nobody in the group has done before so that they have a fun shared experience or challenge. And it opens up their brain and generates energy. It’s like the workshop equivalent of extreme mining. And then the last one is efficient. When an exercise is efficient, it will tend to break down the boundary between the phases that we just talked about, energize, ideate, capture and get multiple things done at once like riding a bike whilst talking on the phone and eating pizza, which I don’t recommend.

When we build workshops, we typically incorporate activities that meet these goals within one session. And this allows us to deliver reliably and efficiently on the purpose of the session whilst also throwing in a little surprise and delight something to make the session more memorable. And typically, we’ll do the surprise and delight through something playful. I won’t begin to tell you how much I value play as a tool because this is meant to be a lightning talk and I would talk all day. But prior to running PeopleStorming, I had a company called AgileImprov, where we provided organizational improv training to companies.

And so spending nearly a decade in the improv world means I have collected and developed just a wealth of games and resources to draw upon, particularly when it comes to energizes. So to illustrate those goals that we just talked about in practice, let’s take a phase from the previous six I listed and I’ll go with energizes and explore the three goals through that lens. So first off is reliable and energizer that we can rely on to warm up a group, whether it’s virtually or in person is a Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament and feel free to put in the chat, whether you’ve tried that or not and if it’s one of your favorites.

It’s a reliable game because essentially everyone seems to know how to play it. I haven’t actually met anyone so far who’s never played rock paper scissors. It has a lot of energy because it’s played so that the winner from each pair goes on to play the winner from another pair and, and this is the crucial part, all of the losers up to that point become the winners biggest fan. So ultimately you end up with two people playing around a rock paper scissors with roughly 1/2 the group cheering on each one. And yeah, we’ve never seen it fail to energize a group of almost any size.

The second goal is freshness and you can take this to mean new creative, innovative, your own interpretation. So an example of an energizer that is fresh to many groups that we work with is the Danish Clapping game. Say yes in the chat if you’ve played that. The possible exception obviously is if the group has Danish people in it because it actually does originate from Denmark. So I was going to say from Danish, that makes no sense. So like rock paper scissors, this game also runs in pairs facing each other and it works like this. So you both slack your thighs in unison and then you do one of three moves at random. You go left, right or up.

And here’s where it gets interesting. If your moves match, let’s say we both choose up, after next thigh slap, we high 10 each other instead of doing the left, right or up. Then we go back to the normal cycle starting with the thigh slap. So basically the high 10 just replaces one of the three standard choices during that beat. And if that made no sense to you, just check out the video that’s on the MURAL. It’s so much easier to understand through a two person demonstration. So if you haven’t tried it before, definitely give it a go. Find a friend who’s COVID free or a family member, be safe and obviously when we’re back in the real world again, see whether your groups enjoy this.

 And so we always have so much fun playing this, particularly because the speed keeps increasing. And speaking of going faster, what about the third approach? Picking something for efficiency sake. So let me tell you about a game called Enemy-Protector created by the Brazilian theater practitioner, Augusto Boal and feel free again, put in the chat if you’ve played that. In this game, everyone starts by standing in a clear space that they can move around in. And each person is secretly going to choose one enemy and one protector. When the host shouts go, everyone has to obey three simple rules. One, keep moving, two, keep the protector between you and your enemy because they’re your shield and three try very hard not to kill or injure anyone which in practice means just keeping things to a brisk walk, no leaping or jumping.

Chaos rapidly ensues and people usually start laughing inside of 10 seconds. People also focus so much on the game that they become less worried about things like personal space, which is something we’re all hyper aware of right now. That’s why this is a great energizer in non COVID times. So why am I talking about this game in relation to efficiency? Well, we realized one day that not only is this game enormously energizing, but by its nature, it randomizes people’s position in the room. So instead of people standing with their friend or standing with their team, you can have them play this game, freeze people at some point in the game, then carve out clusters of a certain size. And so the game becomes an energizer and a scatterer. And this can save time and it also makes for a more fluid transition.

So from that energize step to that first team activity. So their energy is high as they get started. And it’s like a two for the price of one. So that’s exactly the kind of thing that we have in mind when we’re trying to create efficiency in our gatherings. So with that quick tour under our belt. So I’d like to invite you to just spend 30 seconds thinking about an exercise that you currently like to facilitate that satisfies each of those three goals that we’ve talked about, something reliable, something fresh and something efficient. And so put those in the chat and let us know which approach each one signifies. Andre’s there now and I’ll check it out after I’ve finished this talk. Something reliable, something fresh and something efficient that you like to do.

So we’ve had a little bit of time here to talk about phases. So energize, scatter, gather, ideate and goals that we can use to subdivide those phases, reliable, fresh, efficient. And these are just a couple of the lenses that we can use to analyze and choose from our collection of potential activities when we’re designing sessions. And speaking of design sessions, in our workshop, we’ll be going deeper on the methods and the criteria to select the exercises. So you’ll be sourcing lots of new ideas and then you’ll be collaborating with the other participants. To kickstart your thinking, we have some questions for you to consider. These are also on the MURAL board as prompts.

 So the first one is where do you find activities, tools, and exercises? So we’re regularly watching Twitter feeds participating in Slack and Facebook groups, reading books and newsletters and chatting with other facilitators like you. And we particularly follow certain keywords on Twitter and Slack like workshops facilitation, leadership development, agile training and we’re continuously building on our own experiences to create new activities or ways of doing some of those things like the Enemy-Protector one that I mentioned.

So the second question is how do you know a good, useful or valuable activity when you see it? Well, we already mentioned our phase and goal lenses. There are so many others that you can use. Do you have any criteria that you use instinctively? How do logistics like group size and available technology affect your choices? Does activity selection vary by how playful your clients are? And then the last question is where or how do you gather together or store your activities?

We’ve had to scale to hundreds of activities, tools and processes and we’ve ended up building a specialized database with classifications that worked particularly well for us. Maybe you have a Google Doc or an Evernote, whatever you use, you need to be able to quickly access the right tool for the job so that you don’t get option overload or decision fatigue. Again, these preliminary questions and some other useful links are on the conference MURAL. So feel free to check that out.

And we’re reaching the end of the talk now. So if you have questions, I’m just going to tell you how to get in touch with us in case you can’t make it to our workshop. There are so many good ones to choose from. We would love for you to join our twice a month community newsletter and we’ll send you five coaching and facilitation tools this week if you do that. We post our ideas and our thoughts and some coaching questions daily on LinkedIn. And so we’d love to connect with you there. Thank you so much for coming along today. This was awesome.

The post Onboarding Without Hoarding appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Elena Astilleros.

Elena Astilleros of Empoderment, discussed turning your meeting from “Sh** to hit.” Facilitators are the ones who bring the magic to the room, she said. Our users can’t go further than where we are at ourselves. Elena taught participants how they might be creating the wrong kind of drama (without realizing it) when facilitating. Elena’s workshop taught participants how to lead lively meetings where they (and everyone participating) feel alive and reinvigorated from their time together. She provided attendees with practices they can start using to trigger group genius in their next meeting or workshop and a simple way to up-level the questions they ask their team.

“Do you feel totally drained after facilitating your sessions? When you ask questions, do you get crickets…or worse, only the same handful of people answering every time?” 

Watch Elena Astilleros’s talk “$h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love” :

Read the Transcript

Elena Astilleros:

Hello hello, everybody. Thank you for joining and welcome to Shit to Hit. Creating meetings participant love. So let’s take this time, these next 18 minutes and learn how to turn around dead meetings into something your participants can come into and feel revived, to be rejuvenated and get the results they want. Sound good?

Okay. Before I move on though, I want to share with you the story behind this erasy title, because I don’t sit around thinking titles like these, but I had been working with a client and they had a 50 person status meeting that had not been facilitated. So if you put yourselves in the shoes of those participants, you might have an idea of what they were facing. It was not good. It was not pretty. And after working with me for a while, my client came in and she’s like, “Oh, Lena. Our meeting really turned around. You turned our meeting around from shit to hit. I loved our meeting today and I want it to continue that way.”

And in honor of that client and in honor of all the people in the world, sitting through dead meetings, I titled this Shit to Hit. So let’s go on a journey and let’s talk about the three steps to make us hit meeting. And now, before I start, I want you to know that these three steps that I’m going to present can actually be presentations in and of themselves. They involve learning a set of tools, but for our purposes here, I’m going to talk about all three together at a shallower level, just to give you enough information and I’ll share some of the materials that I referenced and I used so that you can go in and learn it yourself as well. So those three steps are know yourself, know your team and know your outcome.

Now first know yourself. When I was coming together with how do I make this presentation pop? How do I make this work? I have a whole set of facilitation skills and tools that I use. And I bring out and I’ve been studying flow for several years now. So how do I bring this to you so that you can get the most out of your time? And it was important to me to do something for you because do something that would easily make you have a killer session with the tools at present. Because when I see someone like John Cutler, or Lisa Atkins, and I’m hearing them speak and I learned something and I can immediately apply it and share, sometimes I’m in a virtual meeting with them and I’m like, our company’s the product. It’s not the team. It’s not the product. It’s the company.

I feel really alive and excited. And I really wanted to provide that with you, but everything I was trying, all of the steps just seemed so inauthentic. They weren’t working. And I was telling my best friend and how do… what’s going on here? What can I do to make it work? And she told me, she’s like Alaina, it’s you, you could give any set of tools. And it would only be half effective because it’s you who brings the magic. It’s you who knows what to do with them. And I realized, well, it’s not just me. It’s any skilled facilitator, just like you, who are sitting here to learn, you bring the magic. So how do you take a set of tools and bring them to life so that your meeting can come to life and get the results that everybody wants?

Well, you’ve got to know yourself and when you know yourself, there’s something cool that happens. You see that the team won’t go any further than you can. So if I’ve never felt quaking boots and worried that I’m going to say something and worried if I should say or not say it or what, but it’s so strong that I say it anyways and it totally shifts the room. That’s courage. If I’ve never felt that before, I can’t take you on a journey to such courage, to that level of fear and overcoming that fear. So you must be a student of yourself because they cannot go any further than you. The reason we can see a Brene Brown presentation and feel moved to our core is because that presenter has worked with vulnerability so long, and she’s gone to uncharted waters so long that we can feel it and we could build there too, she opens it up.

And just like her as a performer, I live and hunt near Hollywood. So Hollywood performers know that your job as a performer, and that’s what we are as facilitators, when we’re taking individuals through a journey and taking them to a new places, we are performing because we are here to change the molecules in the room. You want to go from Shit to Hit. You’ve got to change dead molecules and make them come alive. And you can only do that if you know yourself and you’ve taken yourself there first.

So some ways to make yourself know yourself is to go back and do that humble inquiry of what makes you feel alive. What makes your eyes dance? What did it feel like seeing fireworks for the first time in your life? What brings that spark or what was it that gave you the courage to do those crazy things that you’ve done in the past, or to be vulnerable or to listen? Know yourself so that way you can bring it forward because there’s one thing that old clockmakers knew, and this is going to sound random, but I’m going to bring it back together. Don’t worry. Old clock makers knew this one thing. And it was that if you put a bunch of clocks in the room against a wall, what would immediately happen is that the clocks would start synchronizing to one another. Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck.

And if you put something really big, like a grandfather clock in the middle of the room of that wall, everything sinks to the big pendulum. There’s a word for that. It’s called coherence. And I learned about coherence from Dr. Alan Watkins, who took the UK rowing team from unremarkable to Olympic medalists. And he says that coherence is that state where elements are in harmony with one another. And it’s important for us to know this because human beings have a pendulum and it’s our heart. And I know it sounds so woman fuzzy to say it, but actually the pure chemical of our heart, our hearts rowing off electromagnetic energy every second. And it comes alive through our voice. It comes alive through our body stance. It comes to life through what we’re seeing. And if you can control that pendulum and know that you are the big pendulum in the room for everyone to sync up with, then you can use that power to take folks on a journey.

And you need to know this because sometimes when you’re facilitating, you need to adjust your style. I’ll tell you a story. When we came back from winter break, I had spent the whole winter break indulging in holiday cookies. I was really happy. I was indoors, I could bake. There was just too many cookies. I enjoyed them. And I come into a meeting and I’m facing two VPs. One who was almost finished with the whole 30, which is a completely clean meal plan and another who has spent the whole break doing meditation and yoga and spas. So we’re in that meeting and it’s slipping from me. There’s nothing I can do to facilitate and what’s happening. It’s because my heart was so full of sugar and carbs. I couldn’t be the strongest heart in the room. So I had to adjust my style. I actually had to stand up.

So that way I could take control of the room because otherwise I would’ve been like, Oh, please try and to get in there. And we all know how that feels. It’s miserable to try to get into a room where you’re not the biggest pendulum in the room. So you do this because you’re actually going to take your team on a journey. And really when folks are coming into a meeting, they want to come out with an outcome that they couldn’t have done by themselves, that they couldn’t have gotten to otherwise without being in that session. And what you want to trigger through yourself is something called the flow state. And I’m going to say slow is that one state where you’re in the pocket, you’re in the zone and ideas come rushing to you. The best creative answers just emerged from your body. You just make connections that you couldn’t have made.

And that cycle is actually well-documented, well-researched for the last 50 years. And it has four stages. It doesn’t just magically happen although it feels like it. There’s actually things that are happening in our bodies. And the first stage is struggle. To get us to that flow state, we have to struggle. We have to have something that’s a little bit challenging. Not so challenging that it’s going to cause us anxiety, but it has to be challenging so that we can build up our cortisol and norepinephrine so we can have a charge against it because it’s a challenge. So it could bring us up. And at some point, the science shows that at some point you’re working on this challenge of struggling. It’s like, “I’m never going to get it.” And then you have this aha moment. You make a realization and that realization moves you into the second phase of the flow cycle.

And that is your release phase. That’s when nitric oxide, not nitrous oxide, that’s a whole different experience. But that’s when nitrous oxide floods your system and allows that cortisol to fade away and gets you set up to go into the next stage, which is the juice stage. And that’s called flow. And that flow stage is where you’re getting this cocktail really good, feel good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins. And this one chemical called anandamide. And that’s called your bliss chemical. That’s why when you’re in the zone, it feels so good because your body’s actually producing bliss. It’s producing the chemicals and this stage, your brainwaves, the brainwaves that are flowing are Beta and Gamma brainwaves. And they are so expensive. You are doing such high computation at this stage that it turns off parts of your brain so that you can do this computation.

And the parts of the brain that it sends off is your frontal lobe and not all the frontal lobe, but it takes away your sense of self, your sense of time so that way you could do these computations. And that’s why this magic happens in that phase. But what’s happening is that it’s actually very expensive for your body to be in flow. That’s why we can’t always be in it. That’s why it turns off those parts of your brain. And we need to recover. We need to down-regulate and recover after flow. And that’s going to allow our brain, our nervous system to reset our brain, to just calm down and get ready for another flow cycle. But if you’re in this room, my guess is you’re not very good at self care and recovery, because there’s so much like drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.

That’s why you’re here, right? You want to get better. And that’s my guess. I may be wrong, but I’m guessing you want to get better. And we don’t give ourselves a chance to recover, but that’s so important for us to get back in flow and for us to expend more time in the flow. I’m here, I’m going to tell you something and it’s going to be really sad. It was really sad for me, but I’m going to tell you something that will make it easier for you to get in flow. And if you’re in flow, you can lead your teams in flow. And that’s this, TV is not recovery. Television viewing is actually high Gamma, which means your body is in flow when you’re watching television. It feels so good to watch a good show, but your body is expending a lot of energy.

That’s why when you Netflix binge a whole season of Cobra Kai, you feel so exhausted afterwards. It’s because even if your body’s not working, your brain is working. So what are some ways of recovery? Well, ways of recovery, you can look at massage, you can take an Epsom salt bath, meditation, uplifting conversation, and queen bee of them all is a walk in nature. That will help down-regulate your system and get back to normal and recover from the hangover flow. So now we covered that, know yourself. We’re going to move a little bit faster because we’re going to talk about knowing your team. That’s the second step. Now in my book, invisible leader, I write about how to interview your team before big session. So that way you know what’s alive on the team. You have to get a pulse. I’m not going to repeat any of those here.

You could go get my book. It’s under 20 bucks. It’ll give you some sample questions. But what I am going to do is I’m going to share with you some of the quotes that I’ve seen, and I want you to listen to this because these are not atypical. The first one is, “I feel we are holding off the Fort until the Calvary arrives. Now the cavalry is forming and coming to our aid, I would like the confidence that the Calvary turns up with our guns and their horses working, and they don’t show up late.” Or how about, “I’m struggling with believing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.” And then this one, “The team is really working, but stakeholders don’t see it that way, putting in your all, and it’s not good enough? The team is discouraged.” Now, the reason I’m sharing this with you is that these are just a sampling of what I get in my interviews.

And it goes in line with the fact that 85% of the workforce is disengaged worldwide. And it’s only going up that disengagement with COVID. I don’t know what the latest numbers are. Knowing what your team’s at gives you the starting line. And it also humbles you because if you think that your team feeling discouraged, you can go in and flip a meeting like that, that’s actually disrespectful, and you want to meet them where they’re at. You have to know where they’re at. Because the next step is know your outcome. Knowing your outcome allows you to have you finish line. And Steven Kotler, who a lot of this flow research is his. He says, “Our brain is really resourceful. If we know the starting line and we know the end, the brain will fill in the rest.”

Well, one thing that’s important is that flow follows focus. And as a facilitator, you’re helping the team stay focused. You don’t know that. They’re going to go on rabbit holes. They’re going to want to do something else, but you keep them in focus. You allow them to struggle in that focus and something that’s challenging, and you bring them back so that they, as a group, will go through that flow the cycle.

Because once you hit your outcome, you want to celebrate that win. There is so much good in celebration. And I don’t think I need to stress that part, but when you celebrate your win, you’re actually, again, releasing dopamine. You’re creating the chemicals that people go pay money on illegal drugs for. So let them celebrate the win with you. And not only that, there’s this halo effect. When you teach teams to celebrate is that they see you and you become the celebration person in it. It’s slightly manipulative, but that’s what life is. We’re all manipulators for whatever reason. But then they see you when they go back into that state. And it’s a good thing. It’s good for them to go into the state of celebration to know, I’ve had teams where I had to pull out things that they accomplished because three months ago, they were facing problems that they had spent years with.

And after three months, they resolved the problem, but it was like no big deal because all of a sudden they’re in a new place and they have new challenges. So I have to show them, this is where you went and in showing them, they can actually have that celebration and remember what they’ve done. It allows them to recover from all that hard work. So now I said, I wanted a full proof set of steps. I don’t quite have that, but what I am going to give you at the end of this deck is the set of flow triggers. These were created by me, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Steve Kotler and Sawyer help you get better meetings. Thank you.

The post $h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Joshua Davies.

Joshua Davies, Founder and Lead Conversation Architect at Knowmium, examined how conversations operate and move in our facilitations. If we are to reach an understanding with others, we must have a path to empathy. Too many conversations are treadmills, endless, going without ever getting anywhere, or broken parallel monologues in search of true dialogue. In his session, participants explored practical techniques for better awareness and co-creation in discussions using conversation mapping, contrasting, and cadence control.

Types of conversations: understanding, problem-solving & exploring, blocking/telling, storytelling/persuading.

Watch Joshua Davies’s talk “Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation” :

Read the Transcript

Joshua Davies:

All right. Thank you very much, Kara. And I should say, hello from beautiful, very, very sunny, 2:00 AM Hong Kong. So, a little bit later in the day.

So, let’s just jump right into the deep end, right from the start. I’m going to toss you into a conversation, which you’ll see on the screen now, between Robert and John. And this is a debate about a project management role. So, it’s a project, they both know about it. And this is a conversation. It’s a real conversation. It’s a debate between the project management. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, except for Robert, his name, that’s my colleague, he insisted I keep it in place, come what may

So, we’re a few minutes into this conversation about two, three minutes in. And the debate is going. The discussion is going on. And just take a quick little look at that. I’m going to pause ever so slightly. Just take a quick little moment and see if you noticed any patterns of their interaction.

And what I’d really like you to be focusing on here, is how do they pass the ball to each other? What do they do with what they are given? So, when Robert finishes his sentence, and in this case, there’s no interruptions happening, they are actually waiting for the other person to finish, he’s tossing the ball to John. And John has a couple of different things he can do to it. He can completely ignore the ball, just let it fall to the floor and go to what he wants to say. He can take that ball go, “Oh, I understand you.” Or at least pretend to understand, drop it and go back to what he wants to say. Or he can in some way, return the ball, asking questions, taking things that Robert has set and leading to what he’s saying.

Basically, what I’m asking is, how many different ways could this conversation go? So, many times in our conversations, we forget that every conversation has many possible conversations. There are many possible ways to go, but when we get to the end of it, we feel like it inevitably led to that final place.

Elizabeth Stokoe, author of one of my very favorite books on conversation analysis called, Very Aptly Talk, says that all conversations have a landscape, a conversational racetrack. And well, many of these conversations, quite honestly, many of them are, well, stuck. We’re on autopilot. And it’s like the conversations in the very classic movie, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray is living the same day again and again, and again. And he begins to finally see that there is a huge predictability to the interactions. He knows every sentence that’s going to come up. And I’m citing him here, not just because I stole his tips on beard grooming, but because way too often in our own conversations, we are parallel monologues desperately in search of a dialogue. And unlike Bill Murray, we don’t even know it. We’re not even aware of this.

This image right here is called the Troxler image. It’s a Troxler effect. So, if you stare at this long enough, it’s about like 30 to 60 seconds, the colors will begin to actually disappear and it will completely fade into gray. It’ll completely fade into gray. And what’s interesting about this, is that that fading, it’s not just in the eyes, but a good chunk of that fading happens in the brain. And the same thing is true with so many of our conversations. We’ve been having the same conversation so many times after, again and again, and again, that we don’t even realize that we’re so stuck.

So, how do we get out of this? What actually is positive influence? Now, when I say positive influence, what I really mean is, what’s left? After the conversation, what do we actually walk away from and with? Are we just walking away with it from the conversation with what we’ve brought to it? Have we learned absolutely nothing? Have we listened to absolutely nothing, and we’re just walking away with our own thoughts? Or have we actually created something new? Okay.

I love this quote from Paul Watzlawick, that really one of the biggest, biggest dangers is that the belief that one’s own reality is the only reality, is one of the biggest of all delusions. Similar to Anais Nin, who said, we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

So, my question is, how do we get beyond this? How do we get beyond this series of monologues? So, ultimately, I’m a big believer that good influence is coming from a recipe. And it’s a recipe that’s very much built up of two people. It’s not just built up of the ingredients that I’m bringing in, but good influence is co-created. Now, I might want to add spice to this recipe. And I might have to convince you, “It’s not too spicy. Just have a little taste.” But ultimately, half of the ingredients are coming from me and half of the ingredients are coming from you. And if I’m not using all of these ingredients in forming this conversation, then ultimately, it’s going to be burned or half-baked.

So, the question is then, how do we actually do this? How do we make a recipe that really co-create a positive conversation that moves forward, whether that’s in a negotiation, a meeting, a facilitation session, talking with our friends and our loved ones, how do we do this?

So, before I dive just a little bit deeper, I do just ever so briefly need to touch on culture. So, being based in Hong Kong, and like many of us working a bit of everywhere, my work is very, very cross-cultural. So, the question always comes up, “Yeah, that’s great. These ideas are great about influence and better conversation, but will it work here?” And the short answer is, well, it depends.

I like to look at this triangle when we’re about, how do we influence people? How do we have a better conversation with them? And it’s really this triangle of what we would call context, culture and character. Context being the situation. Is this a new relationship, old, upward, or downward influence, that kind of stuff. Character being the individual. Everyone is very, very different. And culture being, wherever we happen to identify with, identify whether that’s geographically and et cetera.

And it’s really dangerous to just start making giant generalizations about culture. I think my favorite actual book on this is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. And she makes that clear, clear point that ultimately, in a conversation it’s not the culture that’s the determiner. We have to ultimately be aware of that, but listen to the individual. And one point that she makes in this, is that there’s a lot of things that we actually have in common. And cross-cultural research on influence does play that out as well.

So, well, yes, there are some things that we want to be aware of, mostly to avoid putting our foot in our mouth. Ultimately, we very much need to listen to the individual. Let me give an example of this and why this matters, and why having a bit of awareness on this matters.

My friend, Bob, Robert, from the previous example, if he falls down the stairs, I might say, “Bob is very clumsy.” But if I fall down the exact same stairs, 20 minutes later, I’m not going to say I’m clumsy. I’m going to say, well, the stairs are slippery. One of these is blame oriented. And one of these is situational. Guess which one we tend to use cross-culturally? We have a tendency to, as it said, to accuse others and excuse ourselves. So, it’s good to have that awareness of where the potential conflict areas might be in terms of directness, in terms of pacing. But overall, we have to listen to the individual.

So, some of the things that we have deeply in common when it comes to influence in all the studies is, well, number one, nobody likes upward pressure. No one likes to be bossed around regardless of culture. People do enjoy feeling included in the conversation. So, everyone likes consultation with a bit of rational praise and supporting it. And ultimately, in terms of information density, there’s all the enough similar information rate from language to language. So, that’s just a little tiny bit on culture. I’m not going to do a deep dive now, but just being aware that it is something that’s in the mix. But ultimately, what we’re looking at is stuff that works across the overall spectrum.

“It’s not perfect.” A quote from George Box, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And in fact, all quotes are wrong because that’s a bit of a misquote of him, but some of them are still very, very useful.

So, let’s dive on deeper. Shall we? How can we actually look at conversations and begin to improve upon them? This right here is a really interesting look at conversations. This is from one of my favorite books called Dear Data. And this is an image by Stephanie Pacific. And this was actually a postcard she did, where she was tracking all the times she said, thank you, during a week, who she said it to, was it a genuine, thank you? So, she’s tracking her conversation.

And of course, this is not the only way to track a conversation. I’m not suggesting you go into the office and start making postcards that you send to everyone with thank yous all over them. But there are ways to track things. And a lot of people are trying to do this.

Out of MIT, we’ve got things like Riff Analytics, where this is a meeting platform, and it’s looking at how much time are we talking? Who’s influencing you? Who’s interrupting who? These kinds of things. And also at MIT Media Labs, one of my favorites way back with Alex Pentland and Honest Signals, was you can see this image on one side. It’s actually what the gentleman is holding up, is something called a Jerk-O-Meter. Yes, that is the actual term in the actual research paper. And it was measuring, how we’re coming across in the conversation. Alex has actually progressed far beyond that by now, and now he’s actually doing a bunch of stuff with coaching, where he’s beginning to predict conversations there as well.

But we’re going to go a bit more analog and a bit simpler. We’re not going to be using a bunch of fancy tech, though, we’ll use a little bit of digital in the workshop later. I just want to work on a very simple way to look at conversations that we call the conversation map. And it’s basically looking at anytime in a conversation, we are somewhere within one of these four boxes. We’re either hanging down, out in the red zone, where what we would call loudership. And that’s blocking your telling. Anytime you’ve got a conversation where it’s back and forth, “I understand you, but I understand you, but…” Statement, statement, statement. That’s where it’s living. Or potentially, we’re actually trying to understand the other person or going up and genuinely understanding them.

Of course, there is that profound difference between me telling you, “Hey, I understand you.” And you’re sitting there going, “No, you don’t.” And you actually going, “Yeah, you understand where I’m coming from.” Then, not just telling people, but actually showing them and bringing them along is storytelling and persuading. And fully going up into the green corner, it’s that problem solving and exploring area.

So, the question that we’re trying to figure out really is quite simple, it’s this idea of in any conversation, where are we on the map? Oops, skipped a slide there. Where are we on the map? And how can we actually positively move around the map? Basically, how do we actually catch the ball? And how can we do so better?

If we go back to John versus Robert in that conversation there, you can see them back and forth that they’re not really using what the other person is saying. Robert says something, he goes at the end, he’s talking all about this. And John goes into a question. Question is not a bad question, but it’s more of an interrogation. It’s a self-oriented question, where he’s just gathering information for his stuff. He doesn’t tag any of the concerns. He doesn’t really use anything that Robert has given him in the way he’s structuring his response. Basically, he doesn’t wear a very good one of these.

And this right here is not a paintball uniform. It’s not a military gear. This is actually an empathy suit. And this is designed by researchers who want to, in this case, be able to design products for people who are a bit older. So, this makes it harder for them to see, to hear, it makes them heavier, so that they can empathize and step into the shoes of that other person.

And if we’re going to actually get up into the blue box, pull out of that red box and really begin to understand others, we need to think about what are our empathy suits in conversations. We need to dodge nod-crafty. Now, nod-crafty is one of my favorite words. It’s an 18th century adjective. And it literally means the tendency to just nod your head and pretend that you’re listening. And we do that so, so, so often in our conversations.

So, we want to actually take advantage of that time, that differential between how long it takes us to speak or to hear and how fast we can actually think. And we want to use that to try to more positively engage with the conversations through a couple of different techniques.

One, if we’re really going to understand people, we have to be willing to name the bears. Now, when I say name the bears, I mean this literally, the word bear is essentially Voldemort, it’s that which shall not be named. That’s what it actually means. Bear is not the name of the animal. It literally means that brown furry thing that shall not be named. We don’t want to have that. We want to actually name our bears and bring things to the surface. Leaving them below the surface, isn’t going to help.

Second, of course, we want to actually do a bit better perspective taking. We’re on this side of the bridge, there on that side of the bridge. And there’s a tendency to just go, “Get over here.” To try to pull ourselves into that yellow zone, but not really bring anyone with us. And fundamentally, we’re not in that yellow zone unless they come with us.

Beyond that, we want to learn how to share the orange a bit better. What I mean by that? It’s a famous example from William Murray. He’s got two people in one orange. And he tells the story that, there’s two people, John and Sue. John’s perspective, “I want this orange.” Sue’s perspective, “I want this orange.” What’s the fair way for them to share this orange? Now, a lot of people say split it in half.

Best example, I was doing this training in Singapore. One person said, “Well, one of them should take the orange and the others should take the seeds and plant orange trees.” Very creative.

But ultimately, William Murray says that too much focus on what people want, stops us from understanding why they want it. Too much focus on the position, stops us from understanding the interests that are underneath that position. In order to actually do this well, we need to stop focusing on just what they want and actually ask a little bit more about why they want it, what led them there?

John wants to make orange juice, we need to actually give him the middle of the orange. Sue wants to make orange frosting, we could get her perfectly happy by giving her the peal. But too often in our conversations, even though they’re more complicated than oranges and orange juice, we stay at that statement level and we don’t really go any deeper.

Last but not least, we have to be willing to be influenced ourself. If we think influence is just coming in and getting what we want, we’re not really open to change. We’re just using those ingredients we brought with us. We have to be willing to take on that which is out there. So, how can we do this? Moving down into that yellow quadrant, we’ve got to think about what our mental model is. How do we actually see this?

Now, this is an image. It is, yes. You’re not missing it. That is the Taco Bell Zodiac by Valerie Niemeyer. And if this is my mental model that the world it’s controlled by tacos, I’m a Leo, which means I am a grilled stuft burrito. I’m extra large and et cetera, et cetera. If that’s my mental model, then that’s the story I’m telling myself. That’s what whoever’s trying to influence me, needs to work with, if they want to try to move my mind. Okay?

So, what we think works in terms of moving minds, and this is a great meta study by [inaudible 00:15:55] and a bunch of others, what we think works is rational persuasion, just dumping a bunch of information out there and, “Oh yeah, they’re just going to buy it.” And if you actually go further in that conversation with Robert and John, that’s what John does. He just goes through all the reasons why, “I’m amazing. I should have the head of this project. It’s great. It’s fantastic.” Nothing to do with what Robert cares about, but very much John oriented.

But what actually works cross-culturally, that’s what I mentioned a little bit earlier, this idea of consultation and inspiration. Now, inspiration, it’s not this vague concept of, “I inspire you.” It’s this idea of not just telling people that there’s a way forward, but actually showing them and bringing them along.

As Seth Godin really nicely said, persuasion is the transfer of emotion. It’s not that we are illogical. It’s that our logic is actually curated by our emotions. And we have to actually recognize that.

So, if we’re the stories we tell ourselves, if we’re just telling people, and I’m trying to persuade you that Lanikai is the best beach in Hawaii, 76% of people living in Hawaii agree, maybe you believe me. But what you’re going to do with that information is create your own mental model based on your experiences. And oftentimes you’ll go, “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

So instead, I really want to show you and bring you along, tell you that as a child, I used to play on the beach with my brother. It’s beautiful, fantastic. And if I really want to take you along, I need to engage you and ask, “What would you do on that beach? How can you follow along with me?” And this is so critical to actually work with what grows there.

There’s two ways to make your lawn look nice. You can put out a bunch of grass, that’s just going to end up having to be watered and die, and stuff, try to force it through. Or you can actually look at what grows there and try to build from that. This is not to say everything should be dull. We can actually do interesting contrasts.

But ultimately, we need to watch for the desire paths, the way people want to go. And we need to remove obstacles and help them forward. And this really the only possible way to do it well. (silence)

The post Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Kaleem Clarkson.

Kaleem Clarkson, Chief Operating Officer at Blend Me, Inc., and David Klasko, Actor, Comedian, and Founder of Artly Working, presented on what the research says about the dangers of isolation, and how playing simple (and incredibly fun) games can create meaningful human connection in the virtual workplace. Technology has provided a platform to find and foster these relationships, but it takes a thoughtful and structured approach to create a human connection. Based on improv comedy, and built for video conferencing, Artly Working has designed workshops to add humor, vulnerability, and spontaneity to the virtual world – in other words, the human element! Using games and exercises developed specifically for the platform, the goal is to fight isolation and loneliness and build bonds on our remote platforms, and not in spite of them. Participants learned games and exercises that can be implemented with teams right away.

“Let your fear out. Exaggerate it. Give it a voice.”

Watch Kaleem Clarkson’s talk “Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play” :

Read the Transcript

Kaleem Clarkson:

All right. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone for attending today. I really, really appreciate Douglas inviting me. I’m pretty amped up. It’s really a pleasure. I know one thing, a lot of people talk about having a imposter syndrome, of course, right? And this this past week, I get a chance to meet all of the presenters and speakers. And it’s actually a privilege and an honor to be part of this event. So thank you so much Douglas in controller room for having me. So today what we’re going to talk about, is we’re going to talk about Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful relationships through the Power of Play. We’re going to go to this next slide here myself. My name is Kaleem Clarkson. I am the COO of Blend Me, Inc. And basically we help organizations, startups and small businesses, with the remote employee experience.

And that includes a whole bunch of cool stuff. So what we’re going to do today is I teamed up with my man, David Klasko from Artly Working. And the idea is that we’re going to merge some science, some research, right? Because all of us as whether we are facilitators ourselves or whether we work for an organization and just want to learn more about facilitation, I think we can all agree that remote work is here. And that’s why I was so honored that Douglas invited me to come today because remote work is out of the bag. We’re not going back. Of course, they’re going to be some organizations that are going to ask people to go, come back to the office. So I’m very curious to see what those reasons are.

I think there’s going to be a lot of challenges around organizations who don’t think about that, but the idea of this whole workshop that we’re going to be doing later on this afternoon is we’re going to provide you with some research and some, maybe some statistics that can really have you, okay, I’m sorry. You know what? Sometimes with these virtual things, you got to focus. The Slack Chat just got me distracted for a second. So I’m glad that everyone was active in the Zoom. I can’t actually can’t see it. So I’m sorry. I couldn’t do shout outs. I couldn’t do shout outs. That’s my thing. So if you come to the workshop today, you’re going to see what I’m talking about. We’re going to do shout outs to the area code. So thank you.

Thank you all for doing that. And hopefully you’ll come the workshop and enjoy some more. So anyway, right back to what I was talking about earlier, we’re going to provide you with some research in the importance of isolation and how it can actually have an impact on your actual employee experience. And as a facilitator, hey, we got to have some statistics and some research behind what it is that we’re doing. So your next client, your next call, if you’re talking to somebody and they’re like, “Well, hey we want to do this.” Throw a couple of these statistics items so that you can prove your value. So here we go, Octo Q let’s see what we got here. So Remote Work Challenges, right? The three major challenges for managing remote teams are…

Of course there are plenty of challenges that managers are having, but these are the three biggest challenges. Okay? Lack of social interaction, right? No ability to be able to interact with your colleagues. As a manager, if you’ve always been that type of person that’s, “Hey, let me tap your shoulder real quick.” Then the lack of interaction is definitely a challenge. Think with lack of face-to-face supervision. We’ve had this years and years and years of experience of learning how to manage in the moment. Let me look in the camera for emphasis. Managing in the moment, right? We’re now moving to a position in society where everything has to be intentional. So that lack of face-to-face supervision is a big challenge for all of us. I mean, for me as well.

And then the third one, lack of access to information. As a manager, you may have other people who you always just tap them on the shoulder real quick, or buzz them real fast to ask a question, but unfortunately you can’t do that. Now I’m in that remote space. So those are the three major challenges, as far as some of the biggest struggles as individuals. Some of the biggest struggles you can see here, shout out the buffer, always go to their state of remote work. They’ve been doing it. One of the longest out of the ones who are doing it, love, buffer, suggest that you check them out. Love it. But in this state of remote work report in 2020, you can see the top two biggest challenges with remote work that employees are actually starting with, right?

So you can see collaboration and communication. That’s tied for number one and then loneliness today. Our workshop, what we’re hoping is that you can see we’re going to have some fun. I can’t wait to do this. We’re going to act a fool on camera. We’re going to act silly, but we’re also going to accompany that with some important parts of the employee, the remote employee experience where the power of play helps you alleviate some of these challenges, for example, loneliness, communication and collaboration. So those are the two things we’re going to focus on. So the impacts of loneliness in the workplace. Why does it matter, right? Obviously people in this community, I learned this a lot. This community is very well-read. So a lot of this stuff is going… A lot of people are going to have seen this, was in a cool co-op house room the other day with Adam Grant. It was pretty cool. But basically when you’re lonely, we feel invisible, right?

If you feel invisible and then one of the most powerful ways to fight is just to help others feel seen. I’m sure all of us have gone down this route, especially as facilitators. I mean, I know this group takes it personal to ensure that everybody is being seen or people being heard. So that’s really important. So what is loneliness specifically? It’s complex. But it’s a set of feelings that occur when intimate and social needs are not met. Notice that intimate and social needs are highlighted there because you need social interaction. I am a remote work advocate. We consult, my partner and I, we can solve them on remote work, but let’s not fake the funk. We need to be sociable. That’s actually, we are a tribal species, right?

We’re not like, what’s that animal I learned with my daughter, Sonic the hedgehog there. The hedgehog is like a animal that lives by itself. I learned that watching cartoons with my daughter, by the way. So the impacts of loneliness, quickly. Because this is a lightning talk. So I got to keep rocking and rolling fast, right? The physical impacts of loneliness are real. The first one here, just think about this. Remember cigarettes? You all remember that? Some of you might remember when cigarettes were cool, some of you may not. Well, number one, it’s as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That’s a lot of butts. That’s a lot of huffing and puffing, and we all know how bad smoking is for your health. So just think about that. How bad is isolation and loneliness? It’s equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s dangerous being alcoholic, not a huge fan of exercise, and I’m trying to be better, but it’s as harmful as never exercising. And twice as dangerous as obesity.

So how can we fight… Loneliness’ Impact on the Workplace. Sorry, the control is a little bit behind for me. We’ll go through some of these real quick. So loneliness, not only does it impact you physically, but also that impact goes over on to the workplace, right? So lonely workers, they take double the number of sick days. In a lot of business, absences can be very costly for organizations, especially if you’re not set up correctly. We’ve learned that some organizations who are set up correctly, they didn’t have very many challenges with the pandemic. Organizations who were not set up correctly, obviously, had a lot more challenges. So absence can really be a big challenge. Reduces job and task performance. Lonely employees, they feel alienated and less committed.

The relationships between between teammates can deteriorate, co-workers perceive lonely people as distant. I mean, think about that in your mind like, “I’m just lonely. I still like all of you, but I’m just lonely.” Just think about how that that perception could be incorrect, right? Like, “No, I like all of you. I’m just lonely and I’m feeling it.” So you can see there how that has an impact there. Reduction in executive functions. Chronic stress causes decline in executive functions such as like reasoning and decision-making. So if you’re an executive, it can have a major, major impact on your ability to get through things like that. This one number four. Having a best friend at work, increased engagement by seven times, that is one of the things that we found in our research that I found absolutely surprising.

And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? You spend more of our waking hours at work than we do with our colleagues. So if you have a place where you can celebrate or console about your personal professional lives, when you don’t have that in that absence, you can feel really really lonely and impact C-suite executives as much, actually half CEOs report feeling lucky. Everyone wants to be their own CEO, right. But it’s lonely at the top. You’ve heard that phrase, I’m sure. And then for new CEOs, it’s even worse. It’s like nearly 70% of new CEOs feel lonely. So you can really see how, it doesn’t just impact lower level employees. It impacts employees at all levels. And then last but not least, and we’re going to talk about this decrease engagement due to a lack of trust, the willingness to communicate with others.

And because you feel alone, you don’t have that confidence. You’re not motivated, right? You’re not motivated to participate. So that drops. A degree of engagement drops from that. So you can really see how loneliness can have a financial impact. So for all of all of the facilitators out there, we’ll have these notes and the slides for your notes. If you need to show this to some of your clients, I totally urge you to do that because with the state of remote work, moving forward in 2020 and beyond, this has to be a top priority for managers and leaders in companies who are going to be distributed.

So how can we fight back against isolation and loneliness? I mean, there are many ways, of course, this is not the only way. There are so many great sessions that are going on today. The master facilitators, they’ve been thinking about all of these things for years. So it’s nothing, anything new, but Hey, the power of play, what we’re going to figure out today, what we are going to dive into is we’re going to dive into some silly. I mean, I like to be silly. I think we all like to be silly. I mean, let’s not face it. So I mean, that’s not true, but I like to say that it’s one of my favorite saying, so come along and play at 1:30, central standard time, come with us. Sorry I’m hyping my session. But we got to, it’s a lightening talk.

So, you know, we’re going, we’re going to hype our session a little bit. So Why Improv Games? Not only are they fun, but builds confidence, increases engagement amongst your teams, creativity. So I’m not an actor. And my homeboy, my homie, David Klasko, he’s going to talk to us a lot about this, but when we’re passionate and we were just having these discussions, you don’t think about, I don’t anyway, and I apologize, but you just forget sometimes when you’re watching a movie, how skillful they are at their craft, at their trade, they practice. And it just seems so easy because we’re just watching the show or a movie. You don’t even think about it. But creativity, it’s a muscle. He was explaining that it’s a muscle and you can actually practice it.

So that’s something that we’re going to, we’re going to dive into. It helps you practice empathy. Is it for everyone? We’re all… Some people are more introverts than others, but these are all skills that service well and interpersonal skills are skills that service well in any industry. So yes, they are for everyone. And then it also provides higher inclusion. It’s a structure. I’m sure that you’ve seen in some of these conversations. Our job as facilitators is to have some sort of structure in the meeting so that people feel comfortable and sharing and participating. So you have to do different things to ensure that you have different modalities to allow people to participate. Well, this space, it helps you produce some sort of structure so that you can… If you want your team to spend quality time, having a structure helps.

So this leads to that. So I hope that I provided you with a little bit of information. We’re going to get into some of the research, but loneliness is important. Loneliness is a real thing that can have a major impact on your business, financial line, it can have an impact with your clients. So hopefully we gave you a little bit of research. Hopefully we piqued your interest. So let me just show you, we were going to play a video here but, hey, pictures are worth a thousand words. So you can get the idea. We are going to act a fool. We’re going to act silly and hopefully, we get some laughs. But then we’re also going to break into groups and talk about how we could use some of these games in our own meetings. And also talk about some of the challenges that you could see with some of these games. So with all that said, hope to see you soon.

The post Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was J. Elise Keith.

J. Elise Keith, Founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, spoke about facilitating in the present, near, and future. We can take a project from real-time excitement to near and far-time enthusiasm through creating records and remembrances of the occurrence. In her workshop, J. Elise explained that professional facilitators are pretty skilled at planning and running events. But the challenge is how to make sure that the work in facilitated events and the changes these events inspire have an impact on the everyday lives of those being served. Participants explored what it means to facilitate across different time scales and surface ideas we can all use to make a more lasting impact.

“Traditional skills are being replaced.”

Watch J. Elise Keith’s talk “Facilitating in Real Time, Near Time, and Far Times” :

Read the Transcript

J. Elise Keith:

All right. Hello, everybody. I’m super thrilled to be here. Today, we are going to talk about facilitating in real time, which is what we’re doing right now in near time and far time. And I will tell you, I haven’t talked about this before. I probably have way more content than will fit in our time. So let’s go through it and see what we get. This particular topic is super important to me and to the people I work with because, as Douglas mentioned, my company focuses on helping teams run successful meetings every day. And that’s the key, so we’re talking about every day, we’re talking about the everyday business meeting. So all of those project status meetings and the one-on-ones, and the weekly team meetings and the 90% of meetings that everybody else has to run every day that get work done.

And right now is a really good time to be looking at the everyday business meeting, because in the business world, it’s becoming more and more important to get it right. I think this slide that I’m about to show you from the WEF brings that home in a nice way. So in this last year, the WEF published this list of the Top 25 Skills for 2025. And it might be hard to read for you, but it includes things like the ability to work well with others, the ability to influence, the ability to problem solve, to work through decisions, to do all of these things. So there’s very little on this list that’s about coding or mechanical engineering or all of these other kinds of traditional job skills. And when I saw this list, for me, I saw two things. I saw number one, okay, the world of work is changing, and this list brings that home. Work has become increasingly complex.

The shift to remote work is just one sign of that. So increasing complexity and the trend towards automation, which had begun before, accelerated in 2020 like it had never done. So folks who were thinking about replacing manual labor, simple jobs with robots have absolutely jumped on board. Did you know that there’s even a robot in fields right now that can go through and pick strawberries?That’s amazing stuff. But what it means is that the jobs of now and the jobs of the future are no longer the jobs where people can be told what to do. They’re the jobs of what social psychologists call the meeting class. So that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this list, okay, the jobs of the future are the jobs of people who meet. Which means, of course, the second thing that comes to mind is, A, they’re talking about facilitators, All of these things are facilitator skills.

And this list isn’t new, so in 2017, 2018, something like that, the Corporate Learning Skills Group published this list of what they consider to be the essential power skills for workforce agility and success in the future. And if you look at this list, how many of those are things that you know 20 techniques to run with a team? This is facilitation. This is the power of the future. So you won’t be too surprised that after I work with a client and we help them on their everyday business meetings tackle some of those basics like, hey, you should know what your meetings are about, and wouldn’t it be cool if there were notes. After we get the basics handled, one of my number one recommendations to them is that they should send their people for facilitation training, they should work with more facilitators, and they should get a facilitator or two on staff, because facilitators design fabulous meetings.

We know how to bring a group together. We know how to merge the opinions, get all of that diversity into the conversation, because it’s fundamentally complex, work through all of that information and then come to a convergent decision so that we can move forward. Fabulous, necessary critical skills for the future of work and for the today of work. So I’m always telling clients, “Facilitation, facilitation, facilitation,” and they are giving me this reaction. Turns out a lot of my corporate clients have got some real beef with facilitators. They have been burned time and time again by a facilitator who’s come in and run a great workshop with them and then I left them with a stinking pile of sticky notes. I had a sales person on my team the other day come back and said, “Yeah, I talked to this executive at this local corporation about doing a project with them and they said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We did that once. We had a person come in and they did a day for us on how to run better meetings and all I got was this lousy poster.'”

So this is not new. Everybody here has experienced some of that. And I know some of the other folks have already talked to this theme a bit. In fact, the facilitator, Cameron Frazier, I think did a really nice job of summing up this phenomenon when he showed me this graphic several years ago. Now he facilitates strategic planning, and he said this experience with companies and their focus on strategy was that they know they need to do it so they hire the facilitator, and there’s no strategy, business as usual, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Two days we’re all about the strategy. Nothing. So the word facilitation means to make the process easy, and Cameron and other folks who do great strategic planning workshops like this make the process of getting a strategic plan created in the workshop easy. Fabulous work. That, however, isn’t the actual goal. The actual goal for the company is to have a strategy that they can then execute on to achieve their larger goals.

So this pattern is not actually making the larger process easy. But what are you supposed to do? You’ve been hired for two days. You haven’t been hired to go work there the whole time. Or maybe you’ve been given permission to get the team together for an hour. What are you going to do with that? It’s incredibly challenging to make sure that our work has an impact beyond the workshop, but it can be done. And to do it, it requires thinking about different tools in different ways. Now, this is an especially challenging thing to do because we’ve got a number of cognitive biases that make it difficult for us to accurately project visions of ourself into the future. So if you have a little time, check out things like the End of History Illusion and the Uh-oh Effect. But these things make it so that when we think about ourselves in the future, we think that we’re going to be just like we are, today as if we know everything we know today, as if we have the same motivations and needs and pressures. And that’s just simply not true.

So to help us think about the kinds of tools we might use when we wish to take our facilitation from the real time and project it out into near time and far time, let me tell you a story about my dog. So this is Mabel, and Mabel is a Lagotto Romagnolo, which is this Italian dog, and she was bred explicitly to hunt truffles. And truffles, they’re these kinds of mushrooms things. They live underground, which means she sniffs, sniffs, sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. She’s a sniffing wandermutt. And one day, we were walking to the farmer’s market and back, and it’s a mile and a half, it’s just this really short walk, and my dog is sniff, sniff, sniffing and every time she sniffs, we are like, “Come on. Let’s go.” So she has developed this technique where she wants to sniff something and we’re trying to make her go so she pretends to pee. Because we’re not going to drag her if she’s being right. So she was like, “Okay, I’m going to sniff and I’m going to pee.”

And this particular walk, we were noticing that she was doing this an awful lot and we started to keep track. We’re like, “Okay, well, sniff, pee, sniff, pee, sniff pee, my good golly.” And by the time we got back from the walk, we were like, “Oh my gosh, she went 13 times in a mile and a half. 13 times.” And my daughter looked at us and she said, “Oh my gosh, mom, we should have taken a picture.” Now, if you stop and think about that, what would that picture have looked like on my iPhone roll? Wait a second. Why is there a picture of my dog peeing? So in the moment, in the real time moment of this walk, we had a vivid vision of what this looked like and we were able to keep track. But we decided, that must be a record. We would want some way to count and see if Mabel ever broke that record in the future. So we devised a plan for facilitating that result having this record both in the near time and then later on.

So when we got home, for near time, we didn’t recreate the entire walk for my other family members. We told them, “Hey, we went on this walk and Mabel did this. And we have this new record and this record is 13.” So that way, in near time, the people who weren’t there for the real time event had an awareness of what was going on and they were able to get some immediate information that allowed them on the walk the next day to go ahead and put that information to use. And then finally, knowing that three months, six months later, we weren’t going to remember this, I mean, it was a cute story, but who’s going to remember this? We decided to create an artifact that helped us remember it, and put it in our environment. And my daughter made this poster, which is the Pee Record. So how many times does Mabel pee on a walk? And we have this on our refrigerator. So now, no matter when we are in time, that real time event has some resonance and we can put those effects to use and act on them again in the future.

A gross, simple example, but it gives you the idea. So in the business world, as we switched to the working online and then pandemic, I know many facilitators already began to work with time in a different way. So that fabulous one day or two day workshop became a fabulous workshop series. This event is not full, full, full days. They’re shorter events with lots more breaks broken out over time. So that’s great. That’s step one, being more aware of how to break out the cognitive load over spans of time. But remember, our focus is everyday business meetings and impacting team success over time, and workshops in that world are just one of 16 different types of meetings. So to provide a glimpse of what’s possible, when you look at the entire spectrum of different kinds of meetings that teams run, let me show you how the business coaches handle strategic planning.

So this is what we call a meeting flow model, and this is a meeting flow model for strategic execution. So just like when Cameron went in and he does his two day strategic planning workshop, business coaches will do the same thing. They do the facilitated strategic planning work in a two day offsite workshop. But then they plan for exactly how that strategy shows up in the everyday meetings that team runs. So once per day, the leadership team will have a huddle, and in that huddle, they will talk about anything that’s coming up that’s getting in their way of executing on that strategy. That’s blocking and tackling. What’s going on today? Who needs help? Where are we? Every week, they dedicate 90 minutes to looking at their strategic execution. Now, this is not just a weekly team meeting where people run around and they report status. This is a highly designed meeting where they look explicitly at how they are tracking on their strategic metrics, they talk about what’s in and out, and then they solve problems that have come up between their goals and their ability to actually achieve them.

And they solve those in real time in the meeting. So it’s, problem solving, it’s status, it’s all kinds of things. And then finally, because no plan survives contact with reality, every 90 days they run a half day workshop to refresh the strategy. 30, 60, 90 days, they are keeping that work that they did in that workshop front and center active, alive, and they are acting on it. So those are some of the many ways in which you can take a strategic planning outcome and drive it through the organization in both that real time workshop, in the near time, the next day, the next week, and then looking out 30 days, 60 days, 90 days later to make sure it stays alive. So we call this a meeting flow model, and this is just one of the ways if you plan for and help your clients design, not just your workshop but the meetings that follow it, that you can extend your impact. Now, in our work, we teach clients how to make their own meeting flow models. In this case, it’s literally documentation.

It’s very much like the workshop plan that you may have written for any other time only including many more small meetings that the teams can run themselves. So clear structures that can run themselves. And what do they get when they do this? Well, a team who has something like a meeting flow model, and meeting flow models are one of many ways we can extend that impact, but they’re some of the most obvious, and when teams have meeting flow models, they get better meetings. The meetings they’re running are designed, they’re designed to take this work that you are doing and make sure it shows up in real time with them as they move forward. And that has impacts in terms of their business budget, their money. So you get productivity. But you also get things improved sales reach and impact. So for those of you who work for nonprofits, when you design the way in which your clients then engage their stakeholders, that improves their impact.

You can improve employee engagement and retention. There’s really strong data that if you do a little bit of work to change the conversation perhaps around diversity, perhaps around strengths in the manager meetings, that will have a significant impact on engagement and retention. And all of those metrics change. Now, more importantly, for those of you doing the facilitation work, when you design this kind of work, you have a place to embed the culture change you’re seeing. What question, if you are focusing on innovation, should teams be asking themselves in their weekly team meetings? What question should managers be asking their leadership team on a monthly basis to know that they’re on track? And finally, the biggest benefit you get when you do this kind of work, both for you as facilitators and business leaders of your own, but also for your clients is a significant competitive advantage, because most leaders do not realize that designing the way of working is their job.

So today, if you choose to join me in the workshop, what we’re going to do is we’re going to play with this idea and we are going to literally draft some plans that you can use to extend your impact of your workshops and out from the real time work into near time and then out into far time. We’re going to look at some questions like, what mechanisms can you use? What do you need to know about your clients to make it go? And what can you do that makes the process, the true process, easy for your clients over time? Come play with me. It’ll be totally fun.

The post Facilitating in Real-Time, Near Time, and Far Time appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Vinay Kumar.

Vinay Kumar, Director of Client Engagement at C2C Organizational Development, discussed engagement and creating meaningful connections. In this new age of digital engagement and connection, accessing ways of creating that safe and brave space allows our users to form those bonds and further goals. Using the right brain is not only fun but also helps in drawing out many aspects that participants often find difficult to articulate in a group setting. This is especially true when groups are extremely diverse in terms of experience, cultures, hierarchy, language, etc. Vinay’s workshop explored two methods in creating strong connections that increase the effectiveness of group work.

Watch Vinay Kumar’s talk “Connecting People and Thinking for Shared Values” :

Read the Transcript

Vinay Kumar:

Great. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you here, thank you for coming in. So, very quickly, the topic today is about how do you create deep connections in a virtual environment. So, I’m going to get you to think about an answer to two questions, and I’d like you to write it down and if you’re coming to my workshop later, we will deal with both questions otherwise, leave these things for me in MURAL, and I’ll make sure I get back to you.

So, the first is, if you had to introduce yourself in a metaphor as a transportation vehicle, what would it be? The second is, your top challenge in creating connections when facilitating virtual events.

So, let me introduce myself with the metaphor. If I have to think of myself as a transportation vehicle, I would say I’m like a Hummer, for a couple of reasons, and you can’t see all of me here. I am six foot, three. I’m about 250 pounds. I’m a pretty big guy so, just like a Hummer and as Douglas just said, I travel way too much, or at least used to, before the pandemic. So, that means my carbon footprint unfortunately used to be terrible. I’m probably going to downsize because of the pandemic to a small scooter or something, because my carbon footprint a lot better now. So just something to just make a note off someplace and feel free to put that in MURAL or Sharp in my workshop.

So a couple of quick things. We talk about engagement, and I’m going to give you a minute to look at these four quotes. This entire summit has a wonderful quote on it’s homepage, but I’ll let you see this, in chat, if you could just put in which code resonates the most for you. Which author maybe anonymous might show up over there. I will give you about 15 seconds to read it.

Okay, great. So, we’re talking about engagement. We’re talking about virtual connections and one of the things that I have discovered is, that a lot of us, I lead teams, I manage people, I am part of the teams. So we have our weekly connects. I get into calls with a lot of people and there’s two types of connections I’ve seen evolve over the few years. There’s what we call transactional connections and on the other side there’s also meaningful connections. Both have significant value when we are getting groups together in the virtual environment.

Now, the interesting thing is thinking about what has value when. Now, I would say, my experience and I love to hear from all of you in chat. What are some of the most common connection mechanisms used to get people together when you get them online?

 So let me just share with you a couple of the most common ones I’ve seen. Some of them are very creative starts, they’re people who use props, find something. I was part of a funny hack party recently at work, clothing, virtual backgrounds keeps changing during sessions. Lots of other ones that are work use, either in chat or Rename or feeling or something you did to check in. Something no one knows about you, that three questions that’s often done. The most common is two truths and a lie. One new skill or hobby you’ve learned in the last one year, multi renaming chances. All of these are awesome to get it started, get groups together that they’re are really useful, icebreakers, we call them energizers, there’s so many other things that are used when we talk about it.

 Now, these are all great. They serve the purpose of starting to create a safe space. Now, the interesting perspective that we talk about is, when do we need to move to more meaningful connections? Now, the reality is, where all of us, when we did most of our work in a face-to-face environment, those meaningful connections happen when. It’s before we start, it’s during the coffee breaks, it’s when we go have lunch together, it’s the evening connections and networking.

Now, these spaces that we just talked about, or these mechanisms that you see on this slide, are useful to get us going. They’re good to create a safe space. The interesting aspect is at times, we need to move from safe space to Brave space. When we’re having conversations that go deep, they’re significantly meaningful. How do you move people from a safe space to a Brave place?

Now it’s actually, how do you create a safe space and a brave space? What would we define as a brave space? I’m going to leave to your imagination, it’s something that we will dig a bit deeper. It’s in the workshop, but it’s really about when we start talking about our values, when we start bringing some of the real human side of us into it and how we do it becomes a very, very critical aspect.

So some questions and thoughts that we need to have when we’re talking about creating connections. So, one of the first questions I want to get you to think about is this one. How intense and deep the conversation needs to be during your facilitation or during when a group comes together? I was in a workshop on Monday and Tuesday, which prevented me from training day one and day two of the summit but in that workshop, we had one group that was coming together to talk about which product they are going to discard.

Now, a lot of the people in that meeting, were working on that particular product, their jobs are on the line. Mike telling them, let’s do a visual cue or let’s do a rename yourself, probably wouldn’t be enough to get them to talk and really go deep into that conversation. So one of the big things I had for me, was how do I create that brave space for them to be very open about, because I knew that conversation was going to be really intense and really deep.

The second question I want to throw out to you is, how critical is it to create a safe and brave space, to have meaningful and challenging conversations in order to achieve the outcome?

If we need people to challenge each other, we need people to say, “I don’t agree with you” or, and this is has significant life-changing impact for some of the participants showing up. It’s a question for me, that I also now have. Do I need to create that brief? Now, I want to be very clear, there are plenty of situations where we do not need to go that deep. In fact, you’re probably not necessary. It’s okay to just create a safe space, right? So, how critical is it for me to have that if I want to achieve the outcome? That’s the second question to think about. The third one is, how much value is derived in creating some time at the start of your working with the group.

I don’t know what all of you do. We, when I design a three hour engagement with Group, multiple people will always have a 10, 15 or 20 minute check-in, some kind of an activity as soon as everybody comes on. Now, is that the time? Let’s think about it. When we work with groups in a face-to-face environment, the simple truth is, we know that meaningful conversations take time and it happens with deep conversations.

 In fact, so those of you are few who ever run a meeting or facilitated a conversation of a group of people meeting together for the first time, it’s not when they walk into that room, that the connections that created. It’s maybe the little coffee and donuts or the coffee and bagel they’re having outside, or today when we started, we had those little breakout rooms, where a few of us would book you and connect with each other. So we know those connections take time, whether it’s in the virtual environment or whether it’s in the face-to-face environment. It takes time when we break for lunch and we go and sit down and ask each other questions.

 So here’s the simple truth for us. That we need to bring in the separate times space for those connections to happen. It is so critical to be able to do that. So, I’m going to invite you to put it in Jeff, how are you creating that space and time for connections to happen in virtual environments. It could be your team meeting, when you’re getting those four or five people in your team together and the other truth is if you’re a facilitator and you’re working with groups. We actually need to create that space in the virtual environment as well. So happy to see the breakout spaces, the networking spaces, all designed in a summit. It is so critical and it’s probably a lot of value that we’re getting out of that. It is even that middle space that we are putting there. It’s the Slack channel that Douglas talked about wherever we’re using ourselves.

 Now, this is an environment where many of us have come together to learn. Now, in the real world, when we are facilitating in our work contexts, we are bringing those groups together to achieve a particular outcome here. It’s learning, we can make it fun. There, that might be intense. It might lead to conflict.

So, what are some ideas? I’m going to share with you one best practice that I’ve seen and I’ve started to use in my work. Again, would love to hear from you, what are some of your ideas? Keep putting them in check, put them in MURAL. We’re going to generate a list of best practices and make it available for everybody.

Now, I wanted to share with you, a very common assumption. The common is that meaningful if you want to really create meaningful connections, you have to do it in a synchronous way. When we move into a virtual environment, do not underestimate the power of asynchronous connecting as well. We’re doing that a little bit of introducing ourselves on Slack. About 12 years ago, I was a participant in a major workshop and I saw a facilitator of that time send out a really interesting instruction to all of us.

 She said, “There’s a group of 15 people coming in. We’re going to be working together virtually across 10 cultures, nine time zones.” Most of us do not know each other. We only exchanged emails and she said “in order for us to dig deeper and go and really connect over the next few days of working together, I’d like us to introduce ourselves.” She sent out instructions for us to create a slide, with whatever we would like to share. So she said, “If you’re going to add some pictures, put some professional stuff, etc”.

This is the slide I created at that point in time and I’ve updated it as well and it became my E Introductions. Again, so if you want to get to know me a little bit, here it is. I had an amazing reaction because we had 15 of us or 12, I don’t remember the right number now, but there were 12 or 13, between 10 and 15. We had a slide deck with 15, or how many ever people there were, everybody spent hours going through it and on the first call that we got into, or even before we got into that first call. If you notice my 4th bullet point, I am a huge football fan and it’s soccer, the real football and we get in trouble with a lot of you. My team is Manchester United and there was a Liverpool fan. If any of you know between the Liverpool, Man United rivalry.

He was a Liverpool and he reached out to me before saying, “Hey, I heard you’re this.” It was hilarious. I said, “I’ve got to rub some salt in this wound”, because we had just beaten them. So, I showed up with my Man United jersey on and he showed up with his last year’s winning championship jersey on and he said, “Well, you guys just won a game today, [inaudible 00:14:34], we won the war last year, here’s my Jersey.”

It was hilarious how we were connecting and everybody was jumping into that. So, it was really asynchronous, but it came alive when we got together to connect with each other. The other interesting thing is if you look at my most interesting meeting with the Dalai Lama. It created so much curiosity. People were asking me, “What was it like spending time with him”, et cetera. So, do not underestimate our asynchronous connections as well. This is really important. In the workshop that we’re I’ll have in a little while, we’re going to to get into a few synchronous connections.

So here’s some tips that I want to just share with you. One is create that time and space before. One of the best practices I want to leave with you is, trying to create a quick connection for 15 minutes or 30 minutes in the start of a workshop. Yes, you’ll get somewhere, but there might be an opportunity to have a separate space to do this. So again, in chat, just put some of your best practices. I just want to share with you a quick story.

I’ve got a workshop coming up on Monday and Tuesday with a group where we’ve got a very significant outcome. My stakeholder has said that we need to put the elephant in the room. We’ve got to get some major issues out there and I was sitting and designing it with my colleagues and we’ve decided that if we really want these people to connect with each other and get to know each other, we need to do that beforehand.

So I have a session tomorrow, Friday, in the evening from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, where the group’s going to come together for pure networking, drinks, virtual connect session and we’ve got E introduction, we’re using a platform for people to wander around and network et cetera. A lot of people have already messaged me today, saying they’re really looking forward to that. They, in fact, haven’t even asked me about the agenda for Monday, but they’re more curious about how we connect with each other. So, the business is going to be making some very significant decisions based on what that group comes up with.

So creating a separate space? I’m not even going to do a check- in on Monday. I’m probably going to do what was the most fun thing you learned from Friday, and that’s pretty much it. So with that in the workshop, we’re going to go a little bit deeper because of how we bring value based conversations into those connections and make it meaningful and brave as well. So, I would encourage you to post your questions, share best practice, put that up there and I’d love to hear what your transportation or metaphor is on a MURAL. Put it up there and I hope to see many of you in that session. I hope you thinking about your next workshop as well. With that, thank you very much. Stay safe. I hope to connect with all of you.

The post Connecting People and Thinking for Shared Values appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Madelon Guinazzo.

Madelon Guinazzo, Co-Founder of Cuddlist, addressed that all facilitators have fears, and participants all come with their own fears as well. Her experiential-based workshop explored some common facilitator fears in a safe way. Participants built resilience and the sense of connection that leads to grounded positive action in the midst of fear. Madelon showed attendees how to tap into the powerful potential of transformation that fear holds for both the facilitator and participant. She demonstrated how to let those fear fuel participants into fun and greater trust in themselves and life, and challenged them to explore how to hold fear – their own and others – with equanimity.

“Let your fear out. Exaggerate it. Give it a voice.”

Watch Madelon Guinazzo’s talk “Facilitating Fearlessly with Heart” :

Read the Transcript

Madelon Guinazzo:

Hey, everyone. Wow! What a thrill to be here? My heart is thumping. Are you ready to play? All right. Facilitating Fearlessly With Fun is my workshop later today. This talk is actually having fun with our fears. Fun is the antidote to fear, so we’re going to start with a sense of possibility. I’m going to say a few words about what led to this content.

As Douglas said, I am a big scaredy cat, and I’ve recently learned that I have ADHD, which reframes the 50 years I spent of my life wondering why so many simple things about getting through the day seemed to be so much easier for others than for me, and why people kept telling me that I was too sensitive and to get over it. Well, in my childhood brain, the reason was obvious, I was defective. I’d better work really hard at keeping up or I’d be left behind. I have a really loving heart, and I’m committed to loving myself and the others the best I can.

Those two things together set me up for a lifetime of finding kinder and kinder ways to deal with fear. It also kicked me into being a pioneer in the field of therapeutic cuddling, which is a whole other story. But the with is underlined in this first slide because we’re never making fun of our fears. They are very justly sensitive to being mocked, and they deserve our deepest respect. And I believe that they are the portals to our greatest potential, our deepest desires, and our greatest sense of fulfillment. And as facilitators, we all have fears.

The degree to which we can engage with and connect with our fears, the way we relate to our fears is the degree to which we can show up in the room giving our full gifts, and we can also be with our participant’s fears. The degree to safety that we have in here is the degree of the safety that we bring into the room. And we’ve been talking a lot about safety, emotional safety, psychological safety. I call it perceived safety. Now for that sense of possibility. We’re going to start with a thought experiment.

I’m going to ask you right now, if you have a piece of paper or something, actually you can use the chat box for this if you want, just to record, and I’m going to ask you to think of three adjectives that describe how you’re feeling right now. What state are you in? And we’re going to remember, fears are… We’re going to switch from our left brain to our right brain and just allow those words to drift up and trust them. They don’t have to make sense.

They might or they might not, but we’re going to take 10 seconds right now just to tune into yourself and say, “How am I right now?” Go ahead and record those three words. Now we’re going to think of something… Think of something that you don’t like. Something that shouldn’t be that way. Things should be different. Bring something to mind that is a problem for you and allow yourself to notice the images that come along with it. Notice any sensations that arise in your body. Let yourself think about the implications of this problem for a moment.

And once again, we’re going to pick three adjectives. We’ll pause for a moment while you record those. How are you feeling right now? And let your first thought be the right thought. You can’t get it wrong. Okay. Now we’re going to think of something wonderful. Think of something great, something that you’re grateful for that it exists in the world. It could be big or small, simple or complex. It doesn’t matter. Something you’re just happy that that exists. And once again, three adjectives.

Go ahead and notice how you’re feeling with those thoughts and images of something that you’re grateful for. Okay. Now, if you had the same three adjectives each time, please email me and let me know, because I’m collecting data too. And if not, whatever you brought to mind, however it exists or doesn’t exist in the world out there, notice that nothing had to change for your state to change, other than your thoughts and where you directed your attention. We’ve just collected some data.

 You can run that experiment anytime you like if you notice that you’re kind of falling into the belief that we’re at the effect of circumstances. That happens to me pretty regularly, so it’s a useful reminder. It’s changing our thoughts. It changes our states, and it changes how we show up and respond to situations and circumstances in life. And that gives us a sense of possibility that we can have a different experience in the same situations when our thinking changes about it. Are you ready to play? All right, we’re going to play with our fears in a minute.

Well, actually we’re going to play with my fears, right? And maybe you’ll be able to relate. We all have slightly different flavors, but there are some universal fears about facilitators. Now, you can play along. I always tell people to participate at your own level. So you might want to sit back and just be entertained and enjoy. You might want to be an active participant and work with your own fears. This is embodied work, so we’re going to invite them into our body and our voices and to play a little bit.

Wherever you’re at with that, if you want to turn off your camera, whatever makes you feel comfortable, do this at your own level. But first, we’re going to say a word about shame, right? Because this is shadow work essentially, and we want to be really, really respectful of that. Most important thing I want to say about shame is that there is no shame in shame. It’s something that happens really easily and innocently without us even being aware of it. And I mentioned feeling defective as a child, right?

I looked outside me and I didn’t see my internal experience reflected back to me. I concluded that I was alone in it and therefore the exception and not the rule. And I responded by hiding. And that meant that other people out there couldn’t see it either, and they might conclude the same thing and hide what was in them as well. We often don’t take into account as children that we’re always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. And we live in a world of incredible diversity, so there are so many different flavors to outsides as well as insides.

But the result of shoving some part of us inside and not letting it out is that it gets compressed. Just play with this image of something that has been shoved in a drawer and it gets bent out of shape. It builds up a lot of intense energy, and all the while we’re getting really good at ignoring it. La, la, la, la. Some people call that denial, that’s a big word, but the point is that we’re not seeing our insides clearly after a while. All this is natural and normal.

 And when we work with fear and invite it to play with us, it helps remember that there’s a very good reason for it to be cranky and, frankly, kind of scary when we start letting those fears out. We’ve shoved it away, ignored it, abused it. We’ve taught it that the world is a scary place. And now we’re teaching it that we’re trustworthy and kind. And that takes times. Be gentle and maybe wear some padded gloves when you open that drawer. All right. Here we go with some of the fear. All right. Remember, we’re having fun with them, not making fun of them.

Let’s see. Here’s one of my first fears as a facilitator. What if I’m too controlling? Am I being too controlling right now? It’s a fear I have. It’s vulnerable to be in charge. What if I’m oppressive? What if I’m a bull in a China shop shattering precious things when I turn around? What if I’m wielding my privilege and my status irresponsibly? I felt controlled. I don’t want to be that person. All right. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to exaggerate this fear. This is what it looks like when I opened Pandora’s Box.

I said do it my way! Now! This is a very controlling fear. The idea here is to kind of exaggerate it and let it out. Give it voice. And we know we’re not taking it seriously. It’s not actually happening, but this is that fear exaggerated. Drop and give me vulnerable, because I said so! All right. That’s fear number one. We’re going to move on. Fear number two, am I taking myself too seriously? Nobody will want to be around me if I’m taking myself too seriously. Maybe I’ll look stupid. Am I preaching or trying to convert people?

Am I being a fanatic. All right. Here’s what she looks like. Are we ready? Don’t you all see how important this is? The world needs to be a better place and we need to make it better by being better right now. That’s what my fear looks like of her. She’s sweet, but she’s not exactly the facilitator I want to have in the room. All right. My next fear, I’m too bossy and impatient. This one is kind of a form of controlling, and I think this one has a lot to do with my female cultural conditioning. I have to be nice or people won’t like me or include me.

But if I’m too nice, people won’t respect me and they won’t listen to me. What if I’m condescending? Oh no. Being too bossy. This is the other, I’ll be pushy or bitchy. All right. This is what she looks like. She’s really bossy. She’s just so frustrated with people not understanding. I’m speaking English, aren’t I? Or are you all just stupid? Not a great facilitator. I think. That’s one of the fears. Am I going to see my participants as idiots? Am I going to see everybody as being too slow? And are they going to see me seeing them that way, right?

Act it out if you want. Let yourself just be like, “Oh my god, everyone is an idiot. Why don’t people get this stuff? I’ve explained it a gazillion times.” All right, one more fear. Actually, I got a couple more. This one, I’m too different and people can’t relate to me. This is the, I’m a weirdo. I don’t fit in. Maybe I don’t fit in because I really am full of crap. Imposter syndrome sometimes. Anybody? All right. This is what this one can look like. Nobody understands me. Let that out if you want or just sit back and watch.

But this one sometimes looks like a pity party. This is the I’m ugly duckling syndrome. And just have some compassion for these parts and notice if the judgments are coming up for me, for yourself, for others and just see if we can just be with that and say, “Wow, that’s all really natural that that can happen.” And again, if that stuff comes up, we just kind of come back to being kinder with ourselves and slowing down. All right. The last fear we’re going to work with today is, I’m way too excited about this and I’m going to scare people away.

This is I think M mentioned that it’s my greatness that I’m really afraid of, which is there’s some truth in that. There’s a lot of truth in that quote. The inverse of I’m not enough is that I’m too much and I’m being inappropriate. My crazy is showing. I better tuck that back in. And that I’m not relatable. This one’s a biggie. This is what she looks like. This is exciting! Why don’t you all look excited? She’s a little scary, huh? So again, that fear of not being enough is the inside out version of too much.

This part of us that is so huge. And when I’m stuck in the not enough, it’s like a sweater I’m wearing that’s reversible and the inside is the too much. But being aware of that really helps me unravel the black and white either/or thinking that is underpinning a lot of fears. But that excitement is really the key to us being able to share our greatest gifts. Because if you noticed, right, all of these fears are some version of love. They have something to really offer.

The point is to feel compassion for our fears, because they really are the signposts to our hearts, and they can be the key to our greatest sense of possibilities. And when we let them out and they have fun and they feel like they can be invited to the party, they start to share their juice with us. They start to share their life energy with us, and we have more access to that life energy. And what we do, again, all the participants in the room do.

They have more access to the transformation, the sense of possibility and change that we’re here to provide space for and catalyze in the world. And if shame comes up, it’s natural and normal. You might want to shift our play into cuddling. The fears love to be cuddled as well. Say sweet, soothing, comforting things to them. Let them know that they’re safe and lovable. Well, that’s pretty much it. I hope that I haven’t been too controlling, pushy, obvious, boring, demanding, preachy, et cetera. This is my own process.

I always say and I teach that we are the facilitator of the workshop of our life, and we are also the participant that is never going home. This work is internal work. And again, that’s what we bring into the room. If you want to come play later today, we’re going to do some embodied experiences. We’re going to share some of our fears, some of our excitements, and we’ll just be gently in that process together. Good to be the first on the last day of the summit. I’m one of the new kids on the block, and this has been such a great experience.

I want to say that getting to play with voltage control and these amazing people has been so fun. And my fears have been coming up as well about being new. I feel like the new kid and the mom whose like, “Have fun. Play nice. Don’t worry about the bullies.” Thank you, everyone. This has been fun for me, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. See you later.

The post Facilitating Fearlessly with Heart appeared first on Voltage Control.