facilitation

A facilitator’s role is not to make everyone comfortable. Our job is to help people through their discomfort while using all of the knowledge and feelings in the room to make meaning and take actions informed by the learning.

How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves?

Transform Yourself to Transform the World. This guidance, articulated by Grace Lee Boggs, is facilitation and mediation gold. How you are, how you show up, invite a quality of presence from participants. If you want to change what is possible in the room, change what you believe is possible. Change how present you are, increase your rigor, focus yo

Consider the top two things people say they are afraid of: 1. Speaking in public 2. Death. Every facilitation experience confronts both. And when people are afraid, they do not breathe. I assert that your primary responsibility as a facilitator is to keep people breathing in the face of their greatest fears—including rejection, not knowing, being w

“If there’s no conversation possible at the level of pairs, there will be no conversation possible for the whole room…It is quite remarkable to have a room of hundreds willing to move forward together because they trust at least two other people in the space. This is what I sometimes think of as trust flocking, finding the balance between depth of

facilitation is making it as easy as possible for groups of people to do the hard work of dreaming, planning, visioning, and organizing together; and mediation is supporting people when conflicts or misunderstandings arise that make it hard for them to hear and understand each other in direct conversation

As facilitators we step back from the knowing that makes us stand out as individuals, the call to make ourselves distinct from each other and the universe. Facilitation is a commitment to the power of the collective. We hold space for humans to find each other, clearing the debris between them so that they can access the forward motion of life, the