News You Can Use

Upcoming events for folks interested in coaching, facilitation, and general good times:

I’m launching a pilot course this week, with a full launch for the course in January. The One Change course will take coaching into a group setting, and have me pull out all the facilitation stops to support five people determined to make their One Change.

If you like having a good time and watching people be professional and energetic about course delivery, check out the good folks over at MicSkills4KaraokeThrills. Not only did I see them get 30 karaoke-newbies up in front of a mic, I also saw a group of karaoke coaches who ran a smoooooth operation, from registration, logistics, welcoming vibe, encouraging newsletters, regular check-ins, and evaluations. I love it when people bring that level of care and planning to their passion. The first course is over, but watch their website for karaoke redux.

Finally, I have every confidence that Coach Buffet is going to be an event full of learning, warmth, energy, and connection. Coach Buffet brings the speed-dating approach to coaching: who’s the best coaching match for you? Find out by meeting 12 coaches in one night and finding out who you click with. By the time you leave, you’ll have had multiple chances to get some awesome coaching, and you’ll have met some coaches who are ready to sign you up as a client and support you as you aim for your next goals. See you there!

Making Our True Move

Mary Stacey, of Context Consulting, and Arawana Hayashi, a master meditation teacher, dancer, and movement instructor, recently teamed up in Toronto to run the workshop Making Our True Move. I was lucky enough to attend.

Arawana has been running variations of her workshop “The Art of Making a True Move” for decades. Mary brings her coaching training, leadership and consulting expertise, and her strengths as a MasterMIND facilitator.

I took away from the workshop a personal realization: that the people I most believe in and look up to are people who have fully realized themselves. They are a variety of people with a variety of strengths – so it’s not that I look at one of them and think, “She’s really good at x; I need to become really good at x.” They just each have become very good at being who they are. They have fully realized themselves. They have come into a full expression of their being.

So rather than look at people twenty years older than me searching for the answer to “How can I be like that 20 years from now?”, I’m realizing that the question of authentic leadership is more something like, “How can I become more fully myself over the next 20 years?”

Otto Scharmer, who, like Arawana, is a faculty member at the Shambhala Institute, writes about the idea of attentional violence:

Attentional violence is to not to be seen and recognized in terms of who you really are–in terms of your highest future possibility. Instead you are only seen in terms of your journey of the past, that is, in terms of the circumstances of the past, in terms of who you happen to be today. People are blind or ignorant of that aspect of your self, that isn’t (fully) born or manifest as of yet.

Who is the victim of such attentional violence? It’s our highest future possibility, our essential or authentic Self.

Coming out of the workshop, I’m thinking about how to grow into my highest future possibility, and support others to do the same.

Conflict

As a facilitator focused on a group that is hearing each other, listening to each other, and making new discoveries together, sometimes I forget the value of conflict.

Brian Stanfield’s The Workshop Book reminded me (p.124):

Tension is a sign that a group is healthy and thinking.

A diversity of views is valuable to ensure that decisions are sound and well thought-through.

Groups do need to gain an understanding of the perspectives involved, resolve issues, and make choices.

Most arguments happen when people are really getting to the central questions and are moving toward choices.

This Week’s Projects

Spending a few days designing a World Cafe discussion on leadership for the chapter presidents of Engineers Without Borders Canada. World Cafe discussions are, without fail, stimulating.

Our group of facilitators is planning on following up the leadership cafe with a few sessions on self-awareness exploration for leaders. I’m planning one of these sessions, where we’ll go wide (not deep) presenting a smattering of self-awareness tools, from learning styles to Myers Briggs to action learning theories to categories of listening to group dynamics analysis and more. We’re closing out the day with guided journalling, offering participants time, space, and some suggested structure for reflection on their first day at the leadership retreat.

hard at work on planning…

Peer Learning, Experiential Learning, Learning Styles

When I first started work as a facilitator, one of the first sessions I designed and ran was on Peer Learning. I’m running it again this week for a non-profit group, and every time I return to it I’m reminded of the basics of facilitation, the basics of learning.

The session is designed for a beginner audience, and covers principles of adult learning (intent: adults learn best when they see the utility of what they’re learning vis-a-vis what they intend to do; participatory: adults learn best when they interact with new information, through experiential and participatory learning; building on previous knowledge: adults learn best when they can bring their own knowledge and experience to the table, and have it interact with what they’re learning; physiology: understanding that the more types of and numbers of interactions with information that the learners get, the stronger the connections built in their brains – especially as we get older and need more iterations to start transferring between short-term and long-term memory).

To support an understanding of how to create new and different interactions between learners and content, in this session we go over kinesthetic, auditory, and visual learner classifications, and then create presentations maximizing our use of cues designed for each of the learning styles.

After a review and debrief, each participant gets a copy of the Facilitator’s Guide I co-created a few years ago. I just heard this week that someone who has taken this session has since introduced the Facilitator’s Guide to their workplace (a major Canadian engineering company), and the facilitation skills are spreading.

For someone like me, who believes that our understanding each other’s ways of learning and interacting together is part of creating a better world, this is good news – and a reminder that going back to the basics of learning and facilitating can have a far-reaching impact.