Your Presence is Your Present to Your Group

I’m in beautiful downtown Madison, Wisconsin this week delivering our increasingly popular Journey of Facilitation and Collaboration (JOFC) workshop. It’s a tad bit nippy here, to say the least, so it’s really easy to working inside all day. We have a wonderfully committed and talented group of facilitators and we look forward to a great [...]

Five Ways to Facilitate Group Conversations

With Christmas just around the corner, many of us will be attending parties, family and social events. And while we think of facilitation as a skill set used only by thusly initiated group change agents, the opportunity to use at least the basic elements of this skill set is available during ordinary social interactions.
Consider your [...]

Facilitating Ego Surrender

I was talking with my friend Darin Harris this morning about the impact facilitation has on our personal and spiritual development. As we were talking, a metaphor came to mind about the facilitator being an instrument. While I’ve used the instrument metaphor before, today it showed me something deeper than in the past. In this [...]

The Art of Not Doing

This holiday week, I want to present an idea that might easily be labeled as a sacrilege in this society. Ours is a culture of doing, even at an increasingly frenetic pace. It’s a common view that if we’re not doing something, we’re failing or lagging somehow. Everything in our world is about growing, progress, [...]

See Your Group’s Potential

Groups tend to evolve through a fairly predictable series of stages over time. A very popular model developed by Bruce Tuckman, calls these stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. I also particularly like author Scott Peck’s community building model which refers to these stages as: Pseudo- Community, Chaos, Emptiness, and True Community. In this week’s [...]

Using Mistakes as Tools

Each week after sending out this ezine, I sometimes receive a grateful response to the ideas I share, or a personal story or situation that relates to them. With many issues, I’ll not receive any responses. I’m not complaining. I know we’re all inundated with Internet information and can’t read and respond to everything, nor [...]

6 Tips For Speakers to Better Engage Their Audience

Most of the people you address as a speaker have been conditioned to sit and listen to you as passive observers. This role they take does not usually serve their highest and best good. Perhaps more importantly, the role you take as a dynamic, high energy presenter may at times get in the way of [...]

Transmitting Self-Cooperation

Last weekend, I attended a workshop on the Alexander Technique. The Alexander Technique works with your body awareness to help identify and release bad habits of movement that you have built up over a lifetime of stress. This tool is especially useful for singers, musicians, actors, dancers or athletes to help them perform at their [...]

Experiencing the Tenets of Facilitation

Last week one of our readers, Noelle Celeste offered a wonderful new application for the use of one of my favorite experiential activities, The One Word Story. In this week’s article, Experiencing the Tenets of Facilitation, we present this activity and how it can be debriefed to illustrate the importance of ground rules or basic [...]

Effectively Designing Experiential Activities

When speaking to trainers and facilitators who see the value in delivery experiential activities, many wonder how to go about designing activities that meet the unique and changing needs of their groups. There are hundreds of experiential activities already designed for just about every purpose. However, we may not always be so fortunate as to [...]