Episode 166: Creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun" with Dana the Trainer #bestof
Energy is the most important thing when it comes to your workshops, and I discovered this nice and early when I geeked out on an energetic conversation with today’s guest, Dana Jane-Edwards.
This is a #bestof episode - I spoke to Dana back in 2018, when she called herself “Dana the Trainer”. Through a series of pivots and discovering her passion, she is now known as “Diversity Dana”.
Energy is the most important thing when it comes to your workshops, and I discovered this nice and early when I geeked out on an energetic conversation with today’s guest, Dana James-Edwards.
This is a #bestof episode - I spoke to Dana back in 2018, when she called herself “Dana the Trainer”. Through a series of pivots and discovering her passion, she is now known as “Diversity Dana”.
Today’s conversation is as relevant as ever - you’ll learn
Ways to make facilitation more fun, colourful and engaging
How to balance or lift your energy levels when required
What to do when things don't go to plan (hint: prevention is better than cure)
How to create content for new workshops
I want to share her website copy on her About page as a way of introducing her.
Here we go:
My favourite word is the F-Word – FUN
(Wait a minute … what F word were you thinking about?). Seriously!
As you can tell I take an unconventional approach to learning focusing on fun, colour, enjoyment and making things as practical and relevant as possible to make sure that key learnings make it back to the workplace.
What is it that I facilitate? Great question!
I have my fingers in many pies, but my 3 core areas are *drumroll please*
Diversity & Inclusion, Train-The-Trainer (or Coach) and Agile
And if that sounds like an eclectic mix of things that shouldn’t go together and make no sense you’re going to have to read the rest of my bio to find out why and how it all came about. To confuse you even further I sometimes even dabble in some Management & Leadership bits … but that’s a story for another day.
Read the rest of Dana’s story.
What’s new with Leanne and First Time Facilitator?
So excited to share that I’m partnering with Slido on their Online Meetings Revolution trend report. Come along to the launch and hear the interesting data + predictions to make your online meetings as engaging and relevant as possible. It’s on 14 April 2021, here’s the link to sign up.
Join the conversation when the show is over with 1300 facilitators from all over the world in our free group called The Flipchart
Support the show (and my ideas) by buying me a coffee
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Quotes of the show:
"There are so many things that you can do to bring learning, to bring a classroom alive to make things not so painful for people".
Even when you know the content and you're familiar with it, you’re still thinking, 'Who's going to be there tomorrow?', 'What if this exercise doesn't work?', 'What do I have as a backup for this?', 'Did I pack this thing?'
'You cannot be rigid, sticking to your lesson plan. The classroom is a place of surprise. The best facilitators pull the learning out of what is happening in the room, instead of sticking to the script'.
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Dana the Trainer.
Episode 42: Edutainment: How to combine knowledge, wit and interaction in your presentations with Dave Jackson
In this episode, I chat to 2018 Podcast Hall of Fame inductee, Dave Jackson. He’s been podcasting since April 2005, and has been the host of nearly a dozen different podcasts over the last decade.Most people chat to Dave about creating or improving their podcast but I wanted to focus on the fact that he’s been a technical trainer for over 20 years. I also like how he says in his bio that this means that he not only understands technology, but he can explain it in a plain English “geek-speak free” environment.We explore why it’s important to get out of your comfort zone, how Dave has brought his experience playing on bands on stages into the way he presents, what he does to make his presentations more engaging, how he handles his nerves before he presents, and why he is so damn funny.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How having water-cooler type conversations lead him down a new career path
Why it’s important to attend conferences and meet your target market
How he mixes education and entertainment to help make learning stick
How he prepares to speak at conferences
Why it’s important to challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone
Why it’s important to tailor your content and use analogies that fit your audience
About our guest: Dave Jackson
Dave is not only an award-winning podcaster, but he’s a podcasting consultant, teacher, and the founder of the School of Podcasting. A corporate trainer for more than 20+ years, Dave has a Bachelor's Degree in Education and was one of the early early early adopters of podcasting. Starting back in the primordial mist of 2005, Dave began the School of Podcasting, a podcast to teach other people how to podcast.Dave’s show has been described by many as the most entertaining and unique of all the “Podcast About Podcasting” offerings out there. Dave is a master at “edutainment” and has been using analogies to quickly help people understand the nuances of podcasting for over a decade. He has that rare ability to explain complicated concepts and processes in an easy to comprehend way.
Resources mentioned on this show
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Episode transcript
Episode 26: When you stand in service, you can’t be nervous with Neen James
In today’s episode, I talk to Neen James. Neen is a sought-out, high-energy keynote speaker in the States who challenges her audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life. Audiences love her practical strategies they can apply personally and professionally, and meeting planners love working with her – they often describe Neen as the energizer bunny for their events. She believes that when you stand in service; you can't be nervous.
In today’s episode, I talk to Neen James. Neen is a sought-out, high-energy keynote speaker in the States who challenges her audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life. Audiences love her practical strategies they can apply personally and professionally, and meeting planners love working with her – they often describe Neen as the energizer bunny for their events. She believes that when you stand in service; you can't be nervous.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How a happy little Aussie wound up killing it on stages in the US
The differences between Australian and US audiences
Why it’s important to change your focus and stand in service (and how this helps with overcoming nerves)
Understanding the importance of the three types of attention and how you can apply that to your facilitation
Her speaker role models (and the mad genius they focus on)
How the three types of attention drive profitability, productivity and accountability
Tips and tricks on how to contextualise your training content and marketing collateral
Strategies on how to engage with your audience.
About our guest
Neen James is the author of Folding Time™ and Attention Pays™. In 2017, she was named one of the top 30 Leadership Speakers by Global Guru because of her work with companies like Viacom, Comcast, and Abbot Pharmaceutical, among others. She earned her MBA from Southern Cross University and the Certified Speaking Professional designation from National Speakers Association. She has received numerous awards as a professional speaker, is a partner in the international education company Thought Leaders Global, and is a member of the prestigious League of Heroic Public Speakers. Neen has boundless energy, is quick-witted and always offers powerful strategies for paying attention to what matters so you can get more done and create more significant moments at work and home.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Attention Pays Sample Chapters (a gift from Neen)
Like this show?
Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode! (or, leave a comment below)
Quotes of the show:
“I want to make sure that every interaction they have, they feel like they are getting the attention that they want and need and deserve.”
“When people are making behavioural shifts, that's far more important to me than a standing ovation.”
“It's not about you and it's not about them, it's simply about a conversation you're going to create in the room.”
“One of the best engagement techniques is to keep it really practical. So as soon as they leave your workshop, they can share with someone else what they learned and they can implement it in their everyday life.”
“There’s always the next opportunity, the next level of performance, the next skill to develop, the next way to challenge an audience”
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Neen James.
Episode 25; Split brain workshop facilitation: How to balance the now with the ‘What’s next?' with Mark McKeon
In today’s episode, I talk to Mark McKeon about the parallels between creating high performance on the footy pitch; and high stake situations in a group workshop facilitation environment.
In today’s episode, I talk to Mark McKeon about the parallels between creating high performance on the footy pitch; and high stake situations in a group workshop facilitation environment.
Need some inspiration and motivation? Mark provides that in this episode, along with some extremely practical tips which you can start implementing in your facilitation game. We talk about the practicalities of workshop room setup, how to balance being in the moment with forecasting ahead to drive your workshop outcomes, maintaining energy levels and the key question he asks from client's to determine workshop outcomes.
Listen in to him when he talks about ways you can structure your day to be more productive using his Go Zone methodology.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How Mark pivoted from professional footballer, to high performance coach and facilitation/speaking
Parallels between playing and coaching in high performing footy matches/game day and preparing for a big workshop/stage
His requirements in terms of rooms setup and audiovisual setup (including practical takeaways for keeping your voice in check over a day’s workshop)
Why it’s important to be a little selfish during the day to maintain peak performance
The key question he asks clients to clarify the outcomes of a workshop (and why this is critical)
How to structure your day to get the most sustainable performance (and how we under-estimate the importance of recovery)
Why he channelled his inner James Bond to create a memorable message
What you need to know about using gimmicks and props in your workshops
About our guest
Mark McKeon is one of Australia’s leading experts on leadership, efficiency, productivity, work life balance and team cohesion. His latest book "Go Zone" reinforces all these factors.
He spent 16 years as the high performance coach at Collingwood, with the team also outsourcing their entire fitness and training function to Mark’s team. He was also Club Runner for more than 250 games, an AFL record, and worked with Victoria’s State of Origin Team on five occasions.
Mark previously played football in the VFL with the Melbourne team, and represented Victoria in the VFA. He presents keynotes and tailored sessions, and along with his team, conducts workshops and conference programs in lifestyle, team building and leadership. Mark consistently rates as, ‘exceedingly funny with a great message’ or ‘best conference speaker’. He spends time with delegates, and can MC or facilitate as well as present keynotes and workshops.
Mark has an insightful and engaging style and his uplifting presentations have been a conference highlight with lasting impacts for many years.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Like this show?
Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Click here to let Leanne know about your number one takeaway from this episode! (or, leave a comment below)
Quotes of the show:
“You don’t have to be a prisoner to the structure you’ve set for your workshop…I’m forever swapping slides around and stopping, accelerating and changing the times, all hopefully to the benefit of the audience”
“The best clues are always in the audience”
“The best facilitators approach their workshops with an audience-centric mindset’
“Start with the end in mind. One of the great dangers is that your outcomes are vague and you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.
“Work on your craft. Look for every opportunity to speak in front of a room”
Video: Mark channelling his inner 007
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Sean Lavin (Episode 24)
Here's the episode transcript for Episode 24 with Sean Lavin.
Leanne: Welcome to the First Time Facilitator Podcast my colleague and friend, Sean Lavin.
Sean: Thanks, Leanne. It’s really nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Leanne: It's great to have you on the show. Now, Sean tell us a bit about yourself, you've got a really interesting career history and I'd love to hear how you came to the world of finding facilitation and presenting in public.
Sean: Yeah, cool. I guess it was more of an organic sort of process. So in high school, I did a little bit of public speaking more forced into it because my brother did a lot of it and I think the expectation was kind of set but I always found it quite easy. It didn't really stress me out and I saw a lot of other people who I guess found it really quiet or they would get very nervous so I sort of did a little bit of that and then I finished school and I went to uni. I did Hotel and Tourism Management so I got into the hotel industry so my job was all about service and about going up and approaching strangers and saying hello to them and welcoming them into the hotel and trying to make their days as great as possible. So I sort of just worked on that I guess, it sort of became very natural that I was very confident in front of strangers and people. I’ve always been very social and then I sort of left that career to go into mining for a bit of a sea-change.
Leanne: So what was the reason sort of behind that?
Sean: Look, honestly, I just looked at, I look to my boss and what he was doing I looked at his boss and it just wasn't what I wanted to do. I really enjoyed the sort of social aspect of working in the hotel industry but I guess that the sort of shift work, changing shifts to the last minute, we're always sort of short-staffed and running around like crazy.
Leanne: Sounds a bit like mining though.
Sean: Well, yeah I guess so. Yeah, my brother-in-law at that time was actually working in the mining industry and business was booming and he said, “Hey, if you want to sea-change come and drive a truck for a while.” and so I thought “Great. Perfect opportunity to get on and even time rest there when I go back to uni and study something.” I was really keen on doing which was the people side of things so I went back and studied, did my masters in management in HR and the rest is kind of history. I was driving a truck around in circles for about six years studying on the side and then I was fortunate enough to transition into the graduate program in the HR space within the same business and so that brought me down to down to Brisbane, down to the city about 18 months ago. I've just joined started my third rotation of the graduate program into the final straight I guess and really diving into the facilitation side of things and loving it so that's the snapshot, I guess.
Leanne: Now, we've got something in common because I know that in those trucks you're driving in circles but while you were doing that, what else were you listening to in the truck?
Sean: Yes, yeah exactly. So a really good friend of mine, Matt Linney, big shout out to Matti. I'll put him on to this so he can never listen. He asked me probably would have been around 2014, whether I listen to podcasts I said, “I really don’t know what they are. I never really heard of them.” He said “Mate, you’re like out of everyone I know, you need to be getting involved in this because you love it.” So he put me onto a few podcasts and I just loved it, you could drive around in a truck in the middle of the night because we worked a 24-hour operation. I just felt like I was sitting in a room with some amazing people having these conversations and it was just awesome and so yeah I jumped on the podcast bandwagon. My phone is just constantly telling me I've got no storage left because I've got too many podcasts banged up and yeah, so honestly podcasts have actually become quite a big part of my life in the sense of where I get information and education from nowadays, yeah.
Leanne: Yeah. I think that's where Sean and I sort of bonded over very quickly is that he told me about a podcast, The Art of Charm was last year.
Sean: Yes.
Leanne: And so I started listening to that and I thought, “Oh yeah, Sean actually has good taste in podcasts.” and we frequently to share episodes and things. It’s so nice to know that four years later, you're appearing on your first podcast, who would have thought?
Sean: Yeah. The inaugural podcast. I was a little bit nervous but I thought, “You know what, let's just have a chat and have a conversation because that's how I used to feel listening to podcasts.” So I thought, “Well, how could I be actually be involved in one.”
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: Yeah. So thanks for having me, this is great.
Leanne: It is great. Now, I’d like to really sort of not a very straightforward segue but really talk about I guess the focus of this episode which is a tool an assessment tool but both you and I got accreditation before quite recently we decided to use and it's called the Team Management Profile. So in a previous episode I've interviewed a guy, Adam, we spoke about the strengths finder tool and I do have quite a few HR people that listen to the podcast and I think it's really nice from time to time to talk to people with accreditation, find out what the tool is useful for and how to use it. So I guess before you even stepped into that room and did the accreditation, what did you know about the TMP that stands team management profile what did you know about it?
Sean: Yeah, very little. I'm fairly fresh, a fairly green into the world of HR and facilitation really. It's really only been about 18 months, so very little. I knew there was a really pretty coloured wheel and that meant something that was very powerful. I'd sat in on a couple of sessions prior to our accreditation with another colleague of ours who is accredited and so I kind of got a little bit of a crash course into what it was all about and that really set me up going in to do the accreditation because you know I was really excited to learn more about the amazing tool that is TMP.
Leanne: Cool. So can you let us know a bit more about the tool and what it does and why you'd use it?
Sean: Yeah. So it's actually quite simple on the surface as you basically have participants who sign up and they go through a questionnaires about 60 questions and of that it sort of spits out a personalized report. It gives you a bit of an insight into the way that you like to work and sort of I suppose your preferred role within a team. So there's lots of different tasks that sort of fall into the work scope in any sort of industry in any business globally. I think everyone sort of has a preference for what they like doing in that life cycle of work and this is just a great tool to highlight or show hey what you actually prefer doing and then you can actually structure the way the tasks are delegated and this sort of work that you take on based on what you prefer to do.
Leanne: So as part of the accreditation process we each had to complete in our Profiles, I'd like to ask you just to start, what did you find personally from your profile? Was it a surprise, shock or you completely on-board with what you read when you got your profile? And what does that profile even tell you?
Sean: Yeah, look I was completely on board. I was quite blown away and this is something that another colleague mentioned only last week was that “I can't believe how 60 questions could be so accurate.” I think a lot of people go into it, thinking it’s a little bit airy-fairy almost like it's sort of telling your future or you're reading horoscopes or something. But it was really accurate and the description that it breaks down services you know, this is the way you probably like to work, you like people to approach you in this sort of way, you get flustered if this happens and you can kind of start relating to what it's telling you about yourself and the way you like to work and for me personally it was it was probably 95% spot-on you know I get. So my major preference I guess is what they call a concluded producer or my preference is all that output so it's all about just getting things done.
So there's some people that love researching, there's some people love thinking of the great ideas, there's some people that like organizing it all and you got the people who like myself just like doing it getting it done. I think that's why I really enjoy facilitation as well because it's the output. It's you who do the prep work before it but then when you actually get up and run a workshop that's the output from a facilitator’s perspective. Then you've got those who like to actually control, make sure that what's being done is what we wanted to do in the first place and then trying to maintain it as well. So a lot of different preferences and you can be across the board and across the spectrum in with the preference.
Leanne: Yeah, that’s right. Because if you look at the wheel it's all beautiful colours, it's really nice and bright. What we usually see from people is that they have a major preference and have two minor preferences and either side of that. But Sean's, your wheel was a bit different.
Sean: Yeah. So I was what they call a “split-wheel”. Where for instance generally your preference, your major preference and you'll have actually two minor preferences and they usually sit close by because that's the kind of scope of work that you like to do and it's that sort of process. For me, it was actually split so I actually looked at my percentage breakdown and found that I'm fairly brought across the whole wheel. I think my major preference, so I should say there's eight different pieces of that wheel and seven of them are all within about six percent of each other.
Leanne: Okay.
Sean: All adding up to a hundred percent. So it's not good or bad, it's just the way that we each like to go about our work and the work that we prefer to do and I like to think that it's for me personally that I can kind of touch into lots of different aspects of say a work cycle and be you know comfortable enough doing it.
Leanne: Unlike you're unbalanced friend that you're looking at right now.
Sean: Yeah. I’m staring down at you Leanne. So there's some people that might get 0% or 1% in some areas and so for instance, if you are quite low inside the reporter advisor piece which is all about gathering information. You probably don't like going and researching and trying to find information, how to do market research or doing say cost analysis that sort of work. It's doesn't mean you can't do it, it doesn't mean that you can't learn to do it, it just means that for right now that's not your preference and so then your preference would lie in another aspect of that work. So great task to delegate.
Leanne: Yeah, sure. I agree. I don't think I was very high and reporter advisor either. So when you received your profile have you actually looked at any of the action items or what kind of value has it given you to know that “Okay, this is what I am.” What does that mean for you now seeing that profile?
Sean: Yeah, it's actually quite funny. So in the team, I mean currently we've got quite a few people that have a different preference and you can kind of see the work that they do or the sort of ideas that they have and where that fits in. I'll share the story that we had, so we had yourself Leanne who thought of this great idea you then passed it on to someone who loves organizing. She put everything in place and got everything lined up and then she gave me the PowerPoint presentation to do you know that final sort of pieces to sort that output. So we kind of, we actually without realizing it and before doing accreditation. We were actually delegating tasks in line with our preference which is quite cool.
Leanne: Now in terms of teams. How can a tool like this help a team? So you might have a support team like a finance team that comes to you again talking to the HR practitioners or anyone in a business that's been asked to run a team building session. I think we often get asked to do that we've got two hours, we’ve got to come up with something. I found, I guess the TMP is a really great tool to do that with. How does it help teams?
Sean: Yeah. I think it really helps especially a manager of a team or so there's more senior people in the team to understand what the preferences are for the people that make up that team. So if you're going to delegate a task. So there's somebody who loves organizing and you delegate them a researching task, it's probably shouldn't surprise you that maybe they don't spend as much time as they should on it, maybe what you're expecting to get out of them wasn't they didn't live up to your expectation and so when you understand that preference when either that person doesn't prefer doing the researching tasks maybe that's something that you should really be delegating to somebody else and then giving them you know a piece of work that then falls into their preference and hopefully your start getting better results because you're allowing your teammates I guess to actually work to their preference, to work in the space that they actually enjoy and they like to do.
Leanne: That's perfect and I think another thing that we sort of when we were unpacking the tool they’re all different. There's two different scales that make up, what people prefer so people at work. It’s a formula people plus work equals people at work sounds very simple but when we break down the people, there's a scale it's called the right eye scale which we won't really go into but one of those measures was making decisions and it can be based on your belief or on analytical data.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: Yeah. I find that's a really interesting scale because if you put people with two different mindsets into a meeting trying to create a decision based on two different criteria, you can see where there might be some conflict as well.
Sean: Yeah, absolutely. So somebody who likes to make decisions analytically they look at all the facts and the figures and the data and they go, “Yep, this is a great idea, this is what we should do.” I think if somebody on the belief side goes, “Yeah. But how is that kind of that may look good on paper but have you thought about how it's going to affect other teams you know, what about the Penguins?” There could be all these sort of pieces that don't add up in the data but that we need to consider. So if you've got someone who's very heavy on the analytical that's fine, that's absolutely normal, that's okay. But sometimes it can pay to have someone who's got that preference to be more belief-based in their decision making so you can kind of they can throw out a few things that maybe the data hadn't considered.
Leanne: Yeah. I think that's for me, in terms of the tool and what the way I've seen our team sort of mapped across all those different areas, now I understand and like you said “I understand why people doing things differently in meetings or it's why it's not the same as you.” and I think I guess the real premises that it's different, does not mean that someone else is wrong just because I don't.
Sean: Yes.
Leanne: Yes, it's a really great diversity tool if you want to really bring that up.
Sean: Yes.
Leanne: Now let's talk about, so Sean and I were accredited and then shortly after so two weeks after I was in Indonesia working on another project and Sean was left to, were given the task of running a workshop for the first time to about 25-30 people. What was your process in using this tool to create a workshop you give it a brief off for three hours. I think the outcomes were to have fun but make sure people develop self-awareness and then we also developed a team awareness. What was the process you went through to sort of structure a workshop like that?
Sean: Yeah, cool. So I guess that the first step for me was to look at what the team wanted. So what do they actually want to get out of it, “Did they want to understand the TMP and what it's all about?” Did they want some sort of tangible tools to take away?” So sort of I guess, yeah saying “What's the end goal? What are you trying to get to?” and then they working back from there when it comes to your planning. So fortunately myself Leanne went and saw a general manager and asked her so “Hey, what do you want us to get out of the group or you know what do you want to see them see at the end?” and her response was great you know number one thing was just to have fun and I love that because I think that's you know the variety and the novelty that really makes any sort of workshop, it's amazing. So that was a really cool brief in the sense that “Alright. We're going to keep it light, we're going to keep it fun but we're all going to learn something about ourselves and we're going to learn how we can use the TMP to really engage or collaborate better as a team.” So that was the sort of the first step look at the end goal and what we actually wanted to get out of it. I then sort of had wanted to tailor the material to the audience.
So the team management profile is massive in the sense that the amount of information, the amount of data, the amount of things you can do with is huge and honestly you'd need weeks you know, a two-week workshop to get through at all which is great because there's so many resources but at the same time you've got to be very selective as to what you want to use depending on the I guess the time you've got for the workshop and then yeah really was going back and focusing on fun. So we had three hours, we probably spent the first half an hour, they had nothing to do with TMP at all purposely. We did that deliberately just to really break the room out really, we did with the networking, icebreaker, we did trivia, we had all this crazy stuff on the tables for everyone to play with. So we made it really fun in the sense that when we actually jumped into the material everyone was really relaxed, really comfortable and really instead of engaged and switched on and it works seamlessly.
Leanne: Yeah. I remember sort of turning to you after the first 20 minutes and go “Wow feels really good in this room,it just felt really nice and light.” and Sean, he’s underselling himself I think something happened and he kind of made this equip to one of our participants, one of our class clowns who's also my former manager and I just really lifted the mood as well so I think just moments like that you seized it. Share! I’d love you to share what was the Icebreaker question that you've got everyone to answer.
Sean: Yeah so one of my favourite things or favourite themes is around networking and that's something that I think especially in a workshop setting you kind of go back to your school days just naturally. So walk into a room and there's you know some people you might know, some people you're friendly with, somebody might not and you just sort of sit there, you've got a designated seat or you just sit anywhere except for the front row of course. And you just sort of sit there quietly not really sure whether you're allowed to talk, whether you know you can might say hello to someone next to you and then that's it and then you start looking at your phone you start looking around the room waiting for it to start.
Leanne: Hmmm, so true.
Sean: And I think the networking thing is just giving people the permission to speak to each other. It's okay, we're all here to learn and to you know enjoy our time together we may as well use it as best as possible. So when it comes to icebreakers, I think you've got all the resources you need in the room and that's just people. So all you need to do is basically give them the permission but also a little bit of guidance on how to do that so I love throwing out so you know to start with, just turn to the person next to you either say “Hello” or introduce yourself if you don't know them and then giving them a sparry sort of thought-provoking question or a scenario just to discuss.”
So the one that we use for instance was that some: “Life has given you 24 hours of leave effective immediately, you know you've got no commitments, you've got no kids, you've got no family, you've got no jobs to do, and you have 24 hours to do whatever you want. How are you going to spend it?” And so you say all right turn to the person next to you say hello, introduce yourself and then what are you going to do?- You're free 24 hours. And it's great, some of the responses were “I'm just going to put my feet up and read a book.” Someone says that “I'm going to call my friends and see if anyone wants to go to the pub.” Like it was really cool some of the responses and then you sort of debrief that quickly afterwards and you find some really interesting things out about each other about how they would spend 24 hours with no commitments.
Leanne: It was a really great question that's why I wanted you to sort of explain it on the podcast because I think if you are struggling for like another icebreaker or something that's really easy like you said you don't need any materials at all. You could use a sort of halfway through as an energizer as well but everyone sort of lights up and thinks, “Wow, what an opportunity.” I mean, how often would we ever get 24 hours free for ourselves, right?
Sean: Yeah, never happens you know.
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: It was great because it's one of those questions where you think “Oh yeah, actually I don't really know what I do.” and then you start thinking a bit more “Okay, well if I'm completely free and I have no kids and that I have no work, Wow! I don't know.” Because it's such a strange thing for us to have very rarely you know in the modern sort of world and corporate society that's we actually don’t get 24 hours where there is no obligation.
Leanne: What a dream.
Sean: Yeah. So that's just one simple thought-provoking question and they're the sort of ones I'd like to use because they're really simple, you need no resources and you can have a bit of fun with it.
Leanne: Yeah, it’s gold. So it lasts sort of twelve months. You have really started developing your skills as a facilitator. You've been travelling around Australia visiting small towns, my sites also different levels within the office that we're in.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: What have you sort of developed or notice about the important skills that a facilitator needs both personally and also what you sort of model from others and where do you want to sort of grow in that area?
Sean: Yeah. Okay cool. So I think one of the best things that our facilitator can do and I think any facilitator will tell you this is you've got to have an open mind and you've got to be able to approach everything with curiosity. So you can't really go into a session or a workshop with this set agenda that at 9:50 we're going to talk about this at 9:55 we're going to have a break. It just doesn't work and you'll the kill room by doing it that way so I think you got to be really open, really try and engage everybody try and get everybody interacting because the real goals really lies in the conversations that they have when you sort of debrief at the end of a session he says “Hey, you know tell me one thing you learned today, one thing you're going to take away.” Many times in my short career doing this, it's been “Oh, it's been great just to talk with like-minded people or people that understand my job and the role and what I have to do and what I have to deal with.” and just they suck a lot out of the conversation that they're having with each other and then the material in this sort of learnings goes with that. But yeah, I think as a facilitator, it's great to really focus on that interaction and then the day you got to make it fun- that's the best. Because the best workshops or the best say seminars and things you go to are the ones that are fun and get you laughing or you know thinking about something that's just completely silly and that's the sort of stuff that you take away. So if you can blend a lot of fun and humour with serious content the stuff that you're actually trying to get across to the audience I think it makes for a really good session.
Leanne: Yeah, cool. So I guess before you're really sort of having a stubborn facilitation. Do you kind of see it as an exercise where it was a structured thing and you need to really know your content and be all over the content and have you kind of relaxed that now or as a result?
Sean: Yeah. I think I approached it more like I was a teacher and that's not the way you should do it. I mean it's a natural because you're standing up there. Everyone's looking at you and you've almost feel this obligation like you have to give them education or you have to give them tools or tricks or whatever it is that you're trying to get across to them and it just doesn't work. It doesn't work at all because as I mentioned before I think the gold is in the conversation. So as a facilitator, it's about you know really trying to steer the ship as opposed to making sure it gets to its destination as fast as possible. So yeah, I think you can really kill the room by trying to teach people about unless that is what you're there for if you’re a lecturer.
Leanne: Yeah, that’s purely training in.
Sean: Exactly. So that's the sort of difference between I guess training and facilitation. And there's nothing better than as a facilitator when you can sit back say nothing for 10 minutes because there's people just chewing out you know some fantastic or really working on a problem or an issue and they're talking it out.
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: Yeah and that's so good, that's the best.
Leanne: It is. It’s kind of like invisible but the reason that they have such a stimulating conversation is because you sort of you've set the context, you've made it comfortable for them to do so.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. So it's okay, this is a safe place we can say whatever we want, we're going to you know we're going to be respectful obviously and I think everyone is in any way and yeah you can just have real genuine conversations and I think that's the best and the facilitator really that's the responsibility of the facilitator to make sure that it's okay for people to drop their guard and have those conversations.
Leanne: 100% agree. Now, did mention before that you've had a short career in facilitation. I'm just curious is anything happened in a training session so far that you've learned a lot from that didn’t go to plan that you can you can share your experience with our listeners so they may avoid things like that in their career?
Sean: Yeah. So I was tasked a few months ago to roll out some training around having or teaching our supervisors on our mine sites to have I suppose more difficult conversations with people and their crew. You know times we have some of those issues that pop up which you know it doesn't really aligns with supervisors day to day job but it is something that they have to deal with. So we put together a bit of a training package. It was a bit of a crash course for them but it was just to give them a bit of a model and a bit of a guide to follow when they had to have these conversations. So one of the first sessions I think at no fault of anyone's, it was just everything was wrong, the timing was wrong and the environment was wrong, the way I tried to deliver the training was completely wrong for the room.
Leanne: In what way?
Sean: I think I tried to make it more of a brainstorming-type education piece to you know basically it was a group that were up. I didn't realize at the time but they were literally walking out of the training session and going on their days off, they were finished work and it was the last thing before they leave.
Leanne: Yeah. That was a poor timing, isn’t it? It’s the last thing they need before they go.
Sean: Poor-time in the room. It was a good-sized room but we had a couple of extra people so it was sort of a bit crammed. It was only an hour session. I had two people walk in about half an hour just over half an hour late. It was just everything was terrible and I remember walking out of that going that was “I've got to change everything.” you know because I felt it was on me as the facilitator or as the you know the trainer in this sense I guess to make sure that the content is getting across to them and I just felt like I totally failed. So I had a session that next night and I just changed it completely. I turned it, I sat down, I didn't stand up, and I didn't use a whiteboard. I pretty much threw the script out and I just stuck, we had a few slides and I just sat down and we literally had a discussion piece to turn into a conversation piece and not a training education piece.
Leanne: Yeah, right.
Sean: It was so much better. It was great and I sort of I needed that terrible a home situation in that environment to realize that I wasn't rolling this out the way it needed to have been done to get them.
Leanne: Wow, so how are you feeling you would've been pretty bummed I guess?
Sean: Yeah. I was like “That was just awful.” But you know I was there for a reason and I think they were all the guys in the room. It just wasn't right, it wasn't right I mean and it wasn't really anyone's fault because I was on site, my time was very restricted. We only had small windows and the sites for a 24 hour operation so you literally pulling people away from their job and they've got deadlines, they've got things happening and they've got thing to go away to talk to some clown from head office about how to have a difficult conversation- “I don't have time for this.” you know. So it's really, it was a tough room, it's a tough crowd and the way I want about it was completely wrong but I didn't know that until I’d crashed on them.
Leanne: Until you crashed. Yeah, well, tough is the best way, isn’t it? Unfortunately. And we can talk about it a lot and share these experiences with all our listeners as well but sometimes you just have to go through the fire and not to come out.
Sean: Yeah, I didn’t know that's exactly what it was, it was baptism by fire. But I sound a bit bummed out but you know what I just need to change it, I need to make this. If I try and do that again I'm going to get the same result. So I didn't I totally changed and I sat at the back of the room and I sort of had everyone facing the screen and I was sitting behind them so they look at the screen but I actually had to turn around to then have a conversation or talk about certain dot points or pieces of the material. So it’s good, so they couldn't stare at the screen the whole time but they also weren't staring at me trying to educate them the whole time. It was great- “This is so much better.”
Leanne: It's interesting how the dynamics of the environment and the way that it's set up can have a huge impact and I think I'd like to explore that in future episodes with any sort of thing Feng Shui experts or…
Sean: Yeah, because the environment matters.
Leanne: Because I think, the second that you sort of stand up there, people looking at you for that information whereas if you want facilitate a conversation and I think Bob Dick spoke about this and one of my previous conversations around where he actually positions what he does with the furniture.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: And it’s good to explore what really works the best for different situations and yeah.
Sean: Yeah, environment’s huge. There's nothing better than especially when you show up, you've been asked to travel to facilitate something and you show up and you're like “This room is perfect, this is going to be so good.” Then you can see how you're going to set it up, what you want to do and especially if you're trying to throw some novelty and a bit of fun in there when you've got a great room it really sets it.
Leanne: Yes it does, unfortunately that's probably only 20% of the time.
Sean: I think you’re like, you got to work with what you've got.
Leanne: That's right.
Sean: Once again it's up to you as a facilitator to do that because your participants are walking in and they're expecting you to you know to give them something or educate them so it's totally up to you how you go about it you know. If you've got a terrible environment, you got to work with that.
Leanne: That's right. So you're on your new journey in facilitation. What advice could you offer to someone beginning their journey?
Sean: A 100% just say YES! It's kind of been a motto. One of my good friends used to say to me he's like, “Just be a yes-man, just say yes and just do it.” and so it was kind of this so much of a mantra I just say yes to everything.
Leanne: So in terms of life as well or just…
Sean: Generally.
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: If the opportunity comes up or someone asks you if you want to do something, just say yes!
Leanne: I can actually validate that. Every time I ask Sean to do something. But I only give you the cool, sexy task. Don’t I?
Sean: Yes, far as you know, yeah.
Leanne: Yeah but he does, he's very, he says yes and I think it's opened up so many doors for you. It's a great philosophy.
Sean: Yeah. I think if you say No straightaway, you shut it down whereas if you say Yes straightaway and then you think about it and go it's not going to work. You can kind of get out of it a lot easier and save a lot of face you know. If someone says, “Oh, can you travel you know halfway across the country next week to do this training session?” and you go “Yep, cool. I'll make it work.” and then you have a look at your calendar and you think about what you've got on personally and you go back and say, “Look, you know I said yes but it's really going to be very difficult so I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to do it.” and I think you get a lot more respect that way as opposed to just saying “No, I'm busy. No, find someone else I can't do it.” you said instead of you know always going back to No or answering everything with a No, if you answer it with a Yes, you know you get a little bit of leverage if in terms it doesn't work out. But I guess I sort of say yes to everything and try and follow through with that all the time and do as best as I can.
Leanne: That concluded a producer in you.
Sean: Maybe. Yeah, it's all that output. It’s like “Let's just get it done you know something needs doing. Yep I'll jump in and make sure it gets done.” Yeah, exactly.
Leanne: Everyone needs Sean on their team.
Sean: But it's great too because it opens up the opportunity you know. I've had many instances in the last 18 months on this graduate program where I've just said “Yes I put my hand out, yeah I'll do it, no problem.” and I think that's the mentality as a graduate you need to have because that's where the opportunities really coming up. People know they can rely on you that you are going to be flexible and the opportunities are massive. The people you meet you know all of a sudden you end up you're just having a conversation and you find out they are you know an executive of the company and yeah and if had you not said yes to being at that event or in that situation you'd never, you wouldn't be having the conversation you be yeah sitting there staring in an Excel spreadsheet wondering what you're doing with your life.
Leanne: Blaming everyone else of your second chances.
Sean: Exactly.
Leanne: Now, I’d like to a bit about talking about facilitation. The other thing that you've been doing and this is another opportunity that you said yes to has been getting into roles which include emceeing like a big event so you had a huge event earlier this year and it was based on a goal that you set yourself after attending the same event last year. Emceeing, I do find from time to time that a lot of facilitators because they are confident speaking in front of groups are often tapped on the shoulder and say “Hey, you can emcee as well.”
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: But they’re kind of two different skill sets yeah.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: Yes. So I'd like to know what your approach was for the emcee gig that you said yes to. How much lead-up time you were given and what you actually prepared? How you prepared for that?
Sean: Yeah, cool. So basically it was a big quite a large induction. Had about two hundred and thirty old people in the room. I'd actually put my hand up to present at that induction so I sort of said “Oh, look I really I think there's some value, I can add value. I want a 20-minute window where I can present.” and it was a really big goal for me because I was really interested in the facilitation stuff and I thought well what better way to try and you know jump in the deep end then get up on stage in front of 230 random people and the subject was actually on networking so I was talking to them about networking. So yeah, I did that and it was received with you know welcome arms, welcomed open arms and said “Yeah, we cry. So no one ever puts their hand up to present, we'd love to have somebody come down and do something a bit different so that was cool.” and about a month before that, I got a call and they said “Hey, why don't you just emcee the whole event?” I actually can emcee the event I should say with the colleague of mine Amanda and I just said yes. I was like “Yep.” I didn't even hesitate and I said “Yep, sounds great.” and then I hung up the phone and thought “Okay, what does that involve?” Like I said, I never emceed before so I thought “Yeah sure, I can do that. I just introduce a few people and say thank you can't be that hard.” and then I started thinking I actually got into the content and how big this event was for someone who'd never done it before and it was I wouldn't say I was afraid of it or nervous about it but I was definitely “Alright. I've got to be on my A-game. I've got to do some serious prep.”
So I guess the big thing was knowing the content as in knowing the sort of how big the room is, how many people you've got, what their background is, it was basically majority graduates. So a lot of people who are green to say full-time work or say corporate or site sort of work I guess so it's good to kind of understand the background of fortunately a majority of my audience and yeah and then I suppose knowing the content more who's going to be speaking you know, do you have their buyers, do you have their backgrounds and I really tried to make it fun and put a bit of novelty in there and so I get for instance get one of the managing directors profiles and his bio and then I just try and add something personal. I'd worked with a few of them fortunately and just add something from my piece you know, something I'd seen them do or something that talked about and try and relate it and just go completely off script in a very positive way.
Leanne: That’s good.
Sean: And it was great. It was received really well and I think it instead of just being many like reading off a teleprompter, it might have been more personal and yeah it was great.
Leanne: Natural and authentic.
Sean: Natural yeah.
Leanne: And has a personal touch. That person would have felt really good that you've actually noticed something about them as well.
Sean: Yeah. It was a lot of them I would met. The first thing they would say was replying to whatever I said.
Leanne: Nice.
Sean: For instance, I welcome one of our managing directors up and had the big buyer about what he had studied and how long he'd be in the industry and his assets look and on top of all that he is the nicest man you'll ever meet. So I welcome out you know this person and the first thing he said was get up he's like “Wow. I didn't realize I was so nice. It’s so great that you know…” He’s like, “It's so nice of people noticing how nice I am. This is amazing.” And that’s how we started.
Leanne: And everyone would’ve laughed and created off that mood.
Sean: Broke the tension like the boredom of you know just reading someone's bio and it was great, received really well.
Leanne: Oh, fantastic. Sean, if we've got some instances want to get in contact with you or find you or connect with you. How would they do that?
Sean: Yeah, look probably LinkedIn is the best way to get to me so it's just Sean Lavin. It's spelled L A V I N. You see me working for a company for Thiess which is a global mining services provider. So absolutely reach out to me a message I'll definitely respond as soon as I can. And I am on the other sort of strains as well on the other aspects of social media but more of the personal sort of things so I don't use them too often to be honest. I'm more of a stalker than a poster.
Leanne: Thanks for being so honest. So we'll have a link to Sean's LinkedIn profile on the show notes for this episode which I'll mention in the introductions so you can find them there.
Sean, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you again for saying Yes when I asked you on again this whole personal philosophy I said would you like to be on the podcast. As someone that's not becoming facilitator without hesitation he agreed so I think we've learnt a lot about the profile. I guess the stepping stones and it's become it's so recent for you becoming a facilitator so it's really great hearing the detail around what you did and the daunting experience has happened to you in the first sort of six months of doing it but how that shaped you as well as been really positive so thanks so much for your time being on the show and I'll let Sean head off now and head off on his holiday. I've kept him captive in our office.
Sean: Yeah, the beach is calling but no thank you. It's kind of cool that you know being a first-time facilitator I’m in my mind anyway and actually getting to come on a podcast of the same title is been great. So thank you so much for having me.
Leanne: No problem. Thanks Sean.
Sean: Cheers!
Episode 22: What clients really want from a workshop (and no, it’s not information) with Sean D’Souza
In today’s episode, I talk to Sean D’Souza. Sean is a cartoonist, author, online marketing strategist, a pretty good cook (judging from his social media photos) and an energetic facilitator who applies his skills in creating a different kind of workshop. He reads on average 100 books a year. Teaching runs in his blood, as his father, mother and grandmother were teachers too. He's that good, I flew to Singapore to attend one of his three-day workshops.
In today’s episode, I talk to Sean D’Souza. Sean is a cartoonist, author, online marketing strategist, a pretty good cook (judging from his social media photos) and an energetic facilitator who applies his skills in creating a different kind of workshop. He reads on average 100 books a year. Teaching runs in his blood, as his father, mother and grandmother were teachers too. He's that good, I flew to Singapore to attend one of his three-day workshops.
In this episode, we talk about the motivation of the people coming to your workshops… are they really there for the information, or are they there for another reason? We explore workshop design and giving your participants time to reflect on content. We also discuss creating a safe workshop environment - not only for the people in the room, but for you as well…because, as the facilitator - it’s important that you feel safe, too.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Sean’s ratio for instructing vs group discussions and activities
The power of frequent breaks
Why it’s important to create a safe space for your participants
Why he shares his learning materials prior to a workshop
What clients really want out of a workshop (and it’s not information)
A winning formula that features energy, confidence and skill
The importance of feedbacks and testimonials in a workshop.
Tips for facilitators starting their journey in facilitating and leading workshops in their own context.
About our guest
Sean D’ Souza is a cartoonist and an online marketing strategist who runs a zany online marketing site named PsychoTactics. He is also the author of “The Brain Audit” which is about how customers make decisions.
Originally working as a freelance cartoonist, Sean somehow found himself indulging his talent for marketing and understanding consumer psychology by helping out others with their marketing efforts. It wasn’t long before he started writing about his own experiences with marketing and slowly but surely, he began to gather an audience hungry to learn more.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sean’s online home Psychotactics
Sean's book, The Brain Audit
We Are Podcast conference
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Click here to tweet your thanks to Sean. https://twitter.com/seandsouza?lang=en
Quotes of the show:
“What you have to really work on when you're teaching people is you have to get their confidence up, because when you get their confidence up, they use less energy.”
“You have to understand what causes people to be motivated in the first place and it's not your stupid bullet points; it’s not your content.”
What clients really want in a workshop and that is they want to leave the room and you say, “That's not possible!” Well, do this the next time you're having a workshop tell them, “Look, all of you are here for the information, right? And they'll all say “Yes!” and you go “Okay, so we're going to do this workshop until 9:00 p.m. tonight.” and then watch their faces.
“You have to be comfortable that you're going to goof up 50 to 60 percent of your early days before you start getting comfortable But breaking it up is always good because once you're confident, then you don't have to overcompensate. You don't have to be, ‘“I’m the boss here and you're just minions.’”
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Sean D’ Souza.
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Sean D'Souza (Episode 22)
Here is the episode transcript from my interview with Sean D'Souza on Episode 22 of the podcast.
You can listen to my interview with Sean D'Souza on the First Time Facilitator podcast.
Leanne: Welcome to the show from across the ditch, Sean D'Souza.
Sean: Hello. Hi, Leanne.
Leanne: Hi Sean. Sean, I really want to get into it because I've given you a really fantastic introduction to who you are and what you do. But I want to talk about the time and a lot of these days when we run workshops and organizations or you know even outside. We're really limited with the amount of time that we have so in the two days we try and cram as much information into our participants heads as we can. But when I went to Singapore and went to your workshop it was a three-day workshop and in that you spent I think it was the first five minutes of the workshop explaining that “Hey we can cover all this content in half a day.” So I really like to hear your philosophy around embedding information in people's heads and guaranteeing a skill by using time a bit more differently to everyone else.
Sean: Yeah. First of all the reason why I say that at the start of a workshop is because of the objection that comes up you know it's like we seem to be loitering around a lot we have lots of breaks but the point is “Why do you go to a workshop?” and it depends on why you go to a workshop. If you're with a corporate you go there to waste time, right? But if you're a small business for instance, the chances are that you're looking for a skill. But even if you're in a corporate, there is a pretty good chance that you're looking for a skill and what the person needs to do, the person conducting the workshop is they need to understand that whatever they understand is not easily assimilated by the participant and then once they assimilate that they still have to practice it and so there's lots of this breaking down that goes on. So the formula that I have is like one-fifth or one-sixth of the time needs to be spent by me you know with slides and stuff like but the rest of the time is for them to work on the assignments that I give them and the group assignments and individual assignments in you know breaking it down to the point where they walk away with the elk notes and they know what to do. That is very crucial because if you need to go back and read a whole bunch of notes just to get something done that's like you know having to drive a car and going, “Oh, where are my notes?”
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. So on that, how do you confidently say then that you do guaranteed this skill and why do you think time giving people a space to reflect and talk about it? Why is that more effective than just saying than just throwing that information at someone? Why is that sort of group engagement giving them the space so effective?
Sean: Because information is very tiring. So what we do is we look at 4:00 p.m. and you look at 4:00 p.m. on day 1, 4:00 p.m. on day 2, 4 p.m. on day 3. You look at people's faces and they get very tired and if at 4 p.m. they are all bubbly and stuff and they're not exhausted that tells you that the volume of information is not too great and that means that they're able to assimilate it. Just like you would on a normal day, you have tasks to do and 4 p.m. doesn't necessarily tire you out but when you're at a workshop people just give you more and more information thinking that is the most important thing but it's not it's. What you really want from the workshop is you go in there not to get more information. You could sit at home, you go there specifically to come back after 3:00 so if I go to say a Photoshop workshop, when I come back from the Photoshop workshop I can have a 200 page book, I can have all of these slides I can have the notes and videos and stuff but can I do masking in Photoshop? - That’s the goal. So as a presenter, you have to go “Wait! How am I going to design this stuff?” so that everyone and this is without exception, everyone can do masking in Photoshop and it might well be that masking involves seven days. So in that case you go, “Okay, we won't do everything in masking, we'll do something that we can manage in five days.” and then maybe you can't do in five days and so you have to almost break it down to the point where you go, “Okay, if we do A, B and C then in three days it's guaranteed that everyone in the room will be able to do it.”
Leanne: I like how you said talked about A B and C and chunking it down because I've noticed something very similar in your podcasts you really talk about three things in every episode over the space of say 20 to 30 minutes. It is the number three something special to you or am I just reading too much into that?
Sean: The first thing is what I tend to do is I tend to say “Okay, I'll tell you three things about why you need to make workshops really safe.” and then I usually can think of one thing or the second thing and then ask to force myself to put the tether third thing in so from my perspective it's good because it forces me to elaborate on a specific point. But from a client's point of view as well, it's not that hard to focus or to work on three things you know if I do A B and C, they can kind of remember that. I don't think there's any science to it. We seem to like three things but I'm at the moment you go to 4 and 5 and 6, it's much harder because you have to remember these are not things these are concepts so when I say “Okay, safety in workshops.” Well, that's not a thing that looks like a bullet point but it's really, it could be a whole workshop in itself. That's what you know facilitators and presenters don't understand that one little bullet point that you just made. If you could just go deeper into that, that would be so much, I mean that would be useful to me rather than you jumping to point two and point three and point four and onwards.
Leanne: Yeah and you brought up a really good point about all those notes from a Photoshop workshop, we could take away a 200 page guide but how often do we really go back to our desks and refer to it? I think you know, let's put it on the shelf and think “Yeah. One day I'll read that but five years later it's still gathering dust.” So it's a very good point.
Sean: Yeah, because that should be the purpose of the workshop. The purpose of a workshop is to get people out of their house, out of their office space and you know give them time to travel because the travel to the workshop gets you to think, the travel after the workshop gets you to think. So those are very crucial but also in the workshop, because we give them so many breaks so you say, well, people often ask me, well, “How do you know that people aren't checking their email during the workshop?” Well, if you have like 12 breaks or 6 breaks and they have enough time to do all that stuff. So they're not going to do it in the workshop, in the workshop they're participating so this design of something is very crucial.
Leanne: And I think, if you're an external consultant going into a company I think you really want to guarantee that output but at the same time if it may be difficult extremely explaining to your client “Hey, I do need to give these people frequent breaks.” The first the client may be thinking, “What the hell are you doing?” you know it actually earning your hourly rate. So I guess it's important to convince that these kind of concepts are really important to guarantee that skill.
You've brought up the concept of creating a safe environment for your workshop. Is that something that you, I know you have Renuka in the corner there that helps you and with preparing and setting all of that up? How do you create a safe space with people that aren't really confident in asking questions or speaking out? How do you ensure that you guarantee them the skill by creating a safe place where they do feel safe to raise issues and questions?
Sean: Yes, so one of the things that people don't realize is that people don't care about your content. They don't care about your slides and they don't care about anything.
Leanne: Okay.
Sean: Yeah, they don’t. They only care until they feel safe. So they're not going to do anything if they end up looking like a fool or they end up, whatever! You have to think of them almost like five-year-old kids like you know, the five-year-old kid in the house is bouncing around laughing and stuff and then you take her out and then she's wiggling between the father's toes trying to stay away from your gaze because the father just said “Sing a song, come on Emily. Sing a song!” No, not going to sing a song, right? But you give Emily enough space and enough time and she will do that. So what we do is we set it up so that people are safe. Now, one of the things now, I don't know people have you know multiple questions to this and this becomes a whole workshop in itself but essentially what we do is for most workshops and not the one you did but for most workshops, what we do is we create the notes and we send it to them a month in advance. You’ll say “Well, if you're going to send them all a notes a month in advance then why are you going to show up to the workshop, as in the presenter, what's the point?” and the point is that I feel safe as a person reading the notes. Now there's no shock and awe, there's no “Oh, I have to come and I have to see all these slides for the first time.” and after you assimilate all the stuff- No! You're there, you’ve read the notes, you understand it, and so what's the job of the presenter? Well, the presenter has to show up there and now explain the same concept with different examples. So now you're getting a much deeper understanding of the same thing, different angles- same concept!
So if I say safety and I send you a book with several examples of how you create safety in workshops or how you create a safe zone then when you come to the workshop I show you different examples. How does it work in a corporate environment? How does it work if you're having a course online and you can't see anybody? So now you're getting depth in it. Now that creates one level of safety, the second level of safety and it depends on who's having the workshop. But what we do is we get people to show up before the workshop as in the day before. Now, in Singapore you know the workshop you attended, we landed just the night before. It doesn't usually happen but we tend to have a meet and greet the previous night. In Brussels, we went to the Tintin Museum.
Leanne: Oh, great.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah I know you missed out.
Leanne: I know. I got all the photos, thanks for that while I was sitting in my cubicle.
Sean: So all of this stuff is done as a preparation then we have soft toys that people chuck around. We have sometimes when you come to the workshop you'll get maybe a little postcard with your name written on it. These are all these little things that enable people to go “Oh, this is a fun environment. This is not a place where I'm going to be put down and made a fool of.” and this takes a long time. When you get to a Psychotactics workshop you don't realize it but until about 11 o'clock you're doing nothing.
Leanne: Ah yeah.
Sean: Yeah absolutely nothing. You just had a bunch of introductions which are also engineered for you not to introduce yourself but to introduce somebody else. You’re doing a whole bunch of stuff until you finish the first coffee break which is at 10:30 and then at 11 o'clock that's when you're actually doing the first assignment.
Leanne: Yeah, you're right. I'm actually just sort of reflecting on our days in Singapore and yeah there is a bit of a science behind it, good to hear.
Sean: Yeah. So this just goes on through the days and then as people you know they get to know so we put them in groups but of course we've had really bad examples in groups. So the point is how do you make that safe as well which is you know on Day 1, we'll have a group and it's random it's not even like necessarily the same groups and then sometimes if we find that we need to change the groups the next day we change the groups and what that does is now you say, “Well, that's uncomfortable.” but it is safe at some level because you feel “Okay, I don't have to be with this person all the time.”
Leanne: Yeah, absolutely.
Sean: And so, there are lots of very small things but essentially if you start thinking of it as an adult workshop and going, “I've got a whole bunch of 10-year-olds. How do I keep them comfortable and happy?” then yeah, lots of breaks, stuff toys. Think of it as a ten-year-old party and I think you'll have a formula out there.
Leanne: That it sounds really fun. Interesting point that you said that “No one really cares about the presenter, all the slides until you make them feel safe.” It's the first time I've heard anyone say that. A lot of people talk about the importance of getting everyone to know each other and feel comfortable but no one's said it like in those words which is really great.
You talked about the levels of safety so giving up the notes in advance again that's another new concept I've never heard and a lot of people would think “Hang on! Well yeah, what is the point of me showing up here?” and I think that challenge on the facilitator to start figuring out more examples or then putting more emphasis on how we're going to make this more relevant for the people in the room at the time especially if they've read their notes prior. And then I like the idea of the meet and greet beforehand, it takes that mystery away of who's in the room because like you said when you're rocking up to a workshop you could be pretty apprehensive of who's going to be in there, how I even get there, all these thoughts going through your head before you even see the first slide.
Now, I want to talk about the way that you introduce topics as well and you always start from a high level overview. So in Singapore you spoke about the Manhattan Skyline and then you're really just teaching us the importance of foundations. Sorry, is that the way that you introduce the concepts a lot of the time, is it through using stories and looking at things that are going out in the world and then trying to make that relevant to the concept you're exploring?
Sean: Yep, because that's what you remember. So information again is very tiring and most of us thinking that that's what the clients want. The clients don't actually want that, if you know, we know how, what clients really want in a workshop and that is they want to leave the room and you say, “That's not possible!” Well, do this the next time you're having a workshop tell them, “Look, all of you are here for the information, right? And they'll all say “Yes!” and you go “Okay, so we're going to do this workshop until 9:00 p.m. tonight.” and then watch their faces. Yeah, it's the same thing as school, right? So you know, if you tell a bunch of 10-year-olds “Hey, school ends at 4 o'clock every day but if we do all stuff really well, we can all go at 3 o'clock.” and they go “Okay, yes!” and if you take 30-year-olds in a room or 50-year-olds in the room and you do that it's exactly the same. I've gone away from your question but the point is that people are looking for the exit sign and so if you design your workshop around an exit sign which is, “How can I get people moving all the time?” then that's the way they learn because they don't really learn sitting down there while you're droning on forever. That's not when they're learning. That's when they're just hearing not even listening to you, that's when they're checking their email. But once you've given them stuff to do, once they're starting to move, once they're starting to discuss stuff, once they're going to the cafe and back and you know how many trips we did to the cafe and back. I mean, we pretty much spent an hour and a half just going back and forth.
Leanne: And I don't think anyone was looking at their watch thinking “We need to get back, we're enjoying all of our time away.” as well.
Sean: Right.
Leanne: I think what we're talking about, what we were learning as part of that drinking great coffee.
Sean: Yeah, but in that section, that's where you're doing all your learning where you're doing all your assimilating and your question was “the concepts”. So if you give people like a whole bunch of bullet points, it's very hard to remember but if I tell you a story like for instance, we have this book called “The Brain Audit” and in that I talked about how you land at an airport and you have seven red bags and stuff and then if I meet that person six years later and they go “Hey, you know I still remember that story.” So finding that story at the top of your presentation and then in the different sections of your presentation that makes a big difference because I can remember the stories and yeah after that and like for instance, you did the Sales Page Workshop and now you know that to build the Sales Page, you don't start, see, tell me, I'm putting you on the spot now. How do you build a Sales Page?
Leanne: Well, we started by writing all the bullet points.
Sean: Yeah, but where do you start from the headline?
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yeah, exactly!
Leanne: The benefits and features and you bullet points.
Sean: So what effectively, what are you saying is you're starting at the bottom?
Leanne: We are.
Sean: And that's where the Manhattan example comes in. You build a building a skyscraper from the bottom up not from the top down. So the concept stays in your head and then you don't have to refer, you don't even have notes until now but if I gave you that assignment to do, you could do it, right?
Leanne: Yep, absolutely.
Sean: And it needs to be something that you can fit on the back of a postcard. If you can do that then you've said too much.
Leanne: I have to upload an image of the postcard to the show notes for this episode because they're beautiful. So Sean hand drawn these- the postcards, which had all the important points and the process for writing a sales page and yeah I could look at that right now and write a sales page just from looking at the artwork on that.
Sean: And this is the interesting part that you know anyone listening to this will go, “Okay, I got the whole workshop. I don't have to go to the workshop.” See? That's the beauty of it. That all those three days are encapsulated in their postcard and in your head you can expand all of it.
Leanne: Yep.
Sean: But the person looking at it has no idea, I mean they have some idea but they don't have the same idea that you have.
Leanne: Yeah like the real substance and experience, yeah that's right.
Sean: Right and it's important to note that you still don't have notes or slides or anything and you can still do it, that's important!
Leanne: Hmm yeah, that is important. Yeah. So, do you use the same concept? I'm trying to, I'm trying to draw parallels now, so you put your DaVinci course out for sale, so what is Sean and his team can teach anyone how to cartoon which is just a skill that everyone thinks that they can't do. Everyone I know is, “Oh, I can't draw!” so cartooning is a bit of a stretch. You teach this to all system made, it create a structure so you can teach people around the world that are online not even in the same room or in the same time zone. How do you take to school like cartooning to an audience that's all around the world?
Sean: Okay, so one of the things that you went through and most people go through is what we call a “layering system”. So a layer consists of A then AB then AB and C then AB and C and D. So every time you're doing, you're always still doing A and then you're always adding B and then you're always adding, so what most training does is they go A B C D E and that's overload. But if you do A, AB, AC, AD, ABCD sorry then every time you're going back to the original, you're going back and practicing that and you're getting better at A, getting better at A, getting better at A and that's what we call tiny increments. So we increased it but all the time you're repeating it and I'm repeating myself here. So that is one of the things that we do.
The second thing that is even more crucial is this whole factor of getting people in the safe zone. So almost everyone who joins a course like we teach different skills like writing or presentations or whatever. And cartooning is so from left field because people say “I could never do that.” So the first point is to get them to the point where they're not making fools of themselves because everyone who draws like a six-year-old stop drawing when they were six years old which is why they draw like six-year-old. But having now been you know and now they're 35 or 55 or 75, it doesn't mean that they have to do 69 years more of drawing to get to a 75-year-old. Because a very fluent artist is like a very fluent speaker of a language. It takes about six to nine months to get very fluent in any language and what we do is instead of going “Okay, you have to practice every day you have to…” You just build this in tiny increments and then that builds a huge amount of confidence.
In fact, the first assignment for the cartooning course is to draw circles just random circle what we call “circly circles”. So it's just it's like a two-year-old could do so you get your first gold star as it were for doing stuff that any two-year-old could do very easily. And you know what? A lot of people struggle on that one, they try to draw a perfect circles and then we have to break that to the point where you go, “I want you to take a crayon with your thumb with your fist or whatever and how you draw it on the wall.” So you have to break those patterns and then very quickly within a few weeks they're drawing Snoopy, within a few weeks they're drawing complex stuff like stuff from Ice Age and they go, “Wait a second, this is what animators do. How am I doing this in five weeks?” So the confidence is what we're working on. We're now working on the skill because they don't have the skill and they don't have the practice. The main thing is they don't have that volume of cartoons in their head. They don't know how the finger goes, how the hand goes, how the legs go and then we get them to another level of practice which is copying.
Now, in almost every age, copying was the way to go about stuff. So Van Gogh, he copied all of Hokusai’s work from Japan. All of the Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, all, they're not sitting there and going, “Oh, what's in my brain?” –No! They have this model in front of them and they're copying and in our age we have confused copying with plagiarism. Like taking credit for somebody else's work but this is not taking credit and this is copying, as a kid you trace. So anyway, to answer the question in a briefer manner, what do you have to really work on when you're teaching people is you have to get their confidence up. Because when you get their confidence up then they use less energy thinking, “Oh, am I doing the wrong thing? Am I doing the, you know, am I a fool?” Because they burn up all of this energy trying to be so smart and you're giving them tasks that don't require so much energy and that boosts the skill level because now they go, “Okay I can do this.”
Leanne: Yeah. I mean because you taught us how to draw the whale as part of the workshop and when you said that “Draw a whale.” and I just draw any whale. Yeah mine looked like a of six-year-old’s whale and then you broke it down and said “Draw a rectangle and do this.” and the confidence I guess of all of us was we thought it was excellent because you broke it down into those layered steps and made it really easy and yeah while all the whale is just a combination of all different strokes.
Sean: Yeah and this is the problem that a lot of facilitators do. So the facilitator is also not in the safe zone. They're also feeling like they're being judged, right? So they're always in that safe zone themselves and so they try to be smarter than the audience and that kind of comes across. The audience figures it out that you're smarter, you're standing there on this pedestal as it were. So when you bring the audience, so often a client will tell you, “Oh, it's so easy for you to do that.” So now if you go, “Okay, wait a second, how do we get rid of this objection? It's so easy for you to do that and how do we get you to do it? Now you go, “Wow! If I can do this, what else can I do?” All the time you're working between these factors of: “How am I going to increase their confidence? How are they going to feel more safe? How are they going to use less energy?” Puff! We get skill. So skill is really…What people think, skill is “I'll just practice and practice.” but practice, it gets you there but it takes very long.
Leanne: Yeah. Would you say it's like a transfer of confidence?
Sean: The first thing is, it's a factor of energy so if it takes you a long time or it's a complex thing to do then you're going to use up a lot of energy and if you lose up a lot of energy, you lose confidence and then you never acquire the skill.
Essentially it's an equation, which is an equation is “this plus this equals to this”, right? So energy plus confidence is equal to skill. That's what it is! It's not “I will practice, practice, practice, practice and get skilled.” No! If you have continuously difficult tasks like “Okay, now go build a computer. Okay, now go destroy the building.” It’s like “This is really hard!” But if you say “Okay, go get me a glass of water.” Then you say, “Okay, go and make some noodles.” as in you know, the two-minute noodles. You can accomplish all of those things and now this is again you go back to a 10-year-old and the 10-year-old goes, “I'm so smart. I brought water today. You know at home I don't get to bring water but in school I did bring water today.” - Okay fine! So now they're excited about that activity because it requires a little energy and then you can say “Okay now we're going to chop onions with a chef's knife.” right? And you go “How am I going to give a nine-year-old to chop onions with a chef's knife.”
This is all the task of energy. The reason why people grow up and go “I can't cook. I can't draw.” it's because the first time they're given a recipe, it's like, “Okay, here are 30 ingredients go make a great Indian dish.” Sure! I mean it doesn't work like that.
So the facilitation process is the same thing which is if you give me tiny increments I don't have to burn up so much energy to learn it. I don't have to burn up so much energy to wonder if I'm a fool or whatever and I know that you're not trying to show off as a facilitator. So now because I have that energy, I can put it to use and gain more confidence and then as I gain more confidence I get more skill and in that whole formula you have all these brakes so you're like, you're confused you speak with someone else, you speak to the presenter. You have space to get rid of all the objections and the problems and stuff which otherwise it's like, “Ah I got stuck at five, at 10:30 and now it's 12 o'clock and now it's 2 o'clock.” and you know the biggest problem is that clients will not stop you, they will say, “I'm sure, he'll cover this on Day 2.”
Leanne: Yes.
Sean: And you never covered that on Day 2 because you have no idea that they have that problem and they're waiting for Day 2 by which point they're completely confused. So there are all of this and I'm not saying our system is perfect. In fact, we have to keep tweaking it for this very reason which is we want people to have that skill and they still have all of these obstructions that they put in their way and so we have to keep tweaking that, it's just how it is.
Leanne: Yeah, so you're actually writing a book on talent, aren’t you?
Sean: Yes.
Leanne: I know you've been talking about it for a while but I think you're getting momentum which is really great.
Sean: Yeah, we have to pre-sell it. Yeah that’s the only one I’m going to write.
Leanne: Oh, this a great podcast to talk about talent man. This can over-the-line build up momentum even more. So do you believe that you can teach anyone anything? Or do you think the person coming in to learn the skill has to have some degree of motivation to want to learn the skill depending on the complexity of that skill?
Sean: I'll give you an example of my niece, Marsha and I'll give you an example of the other niece Cara. So one was 8 in the other was 13 when we started this exercise. Now both of them were not motivated, as in Cara point-blank told me. We said we're going to have these Friday sessions and both of you can draw and paint like with real watercolours and in real watercolour books and stuff. Cara point-blank at 8 has decided, “I can't draw.” and “Okay, I come to paint because I can just throw colour on the paper.” right? – So, I can't draw. Then we have Marsha and Marsha is like “Okay, I'll do whatever you want but swimming, I rated it as a ten and painting or drawing is five.” So there's really no motivation on the part of both of these kids and what we decided was “Look! It's not about the content, it's about the energy.” and so we got them there and we give them Cola and they have you know they dance, they run around, they eat chips, they listen to music and stuff and in the last half an hour that's when they're drawing and painting.
Leanne: Ah.
Sean: If you see their work, you will be astounded. So what's really driving their stuff is first of all, its “Oh, this is so much fun!” So they would put up with the pain of drawing because 70% of it is fun. So okay, I'll humour you. But what happens is in the process that we teach them in tiny increments so it's like “Let's draw a snowman today.” or “Tomorrow, let's draw something.” We're starting to build it up and then you only figure out what it is right at the end, right? So it's still all this fun, fun, fun, fun and their drawings are superb. So now Marsha looks at her paintings and goes “Wow, that's so good.” and she's a teenager and you know pretty much like a teenager looks in front of a mirror and goes “Oh, I look so great.” or whatever they spend time in front of the mirror. Marsha does that with her paintings and Cara's like “What are you looking at your painting for so long?”
But Cara, if her parents say “Oh, do you want to go for painting class?” and she's like “Yeah.” and what she did was she said “I have these photos on my iPad.” and I let her draw on the iPad as well and she said “Where's my work?” because she did like three or four drawings and I said it's in this folder and she says “That folders called I can’t draw.” and I said “Yeah, because you said you couldn't draw so I put them in the ‘I can’t draw’ folder and she said “But that was two months ago.” So this is the level, this is how you start to get into this factor of talent which is you have to understand what causes people to be motivated in the first place and it's not your stupid bullet points, it's not your content, it's not all of that stuff. They are motivated by fun, if you want to teach spelling get the kids out on the playground and you say, “How do we spell appetizer? You’re A, your P, your P, your E.” and then move them around and then you say ,“Okay, now can we break up appetizer, so you’re the letter T, right? so you go and find other kids and you make a letter so you make a letter like taser, T, A, S, E, R or a sitter and now the kids are running around they're learning spellings but they're having fun. If you say “Tomorrow, who wants to learn spellings?” Well, everyone is like, “Yay, spelling time, what is wrong with this school?”
Leanne: That sounds really fun.
Sean: I know but that's the whole point. The point is that if I'm having fun, I'm not burning up energy. If I'm not burning up energy, I'm getting confident and I know that I'm learning. It's not like I'm saying “Oh, I'm just having fun I'm not learning anything.” So it’s a fun designed in a way that gets people to understand or to learn it. That builds the confidence all the time and then that leads to skill, well that's how we do it.
Leanne: Yeah, so that's how you do it and that's something that you've refined say over the last what 15 to 20 years, so it didn't start out this way?
Sean: Yep.
Leanne: I'd love to hear about a time where, was there a time that you can think, reflect on where things didn't go so well in a workshop or some of your Peterson's participants were still scratching their heads afterwards? Like we're going back quite a few years, I'd imagine and then when you started to think, “Hey, I actually really need to start thinking about how I deliver this now.” or have you always been this good as a teacher?
Sean: No one's, I mean, one of the things that we do is we always ask for feedback like not praise. We interview everyone for testimonials that's for sure but we also ask for specific feedback. So when I left Singapore after your workshop, I had like 25 points. 25 things that I had to fix from that workshop to the next workshop.
Leanne: Really? 25?
Sean: Yes, I can send you the list.
Leanne: Okay.
Sean: And you know, you thought, “Oh, that was a pretty good workshop.” but there are 25 and then the Brussels workshop, there are 25 and then when we do the same workshop. So we've been doing the article writing course for instance online since 2006 and at the end of the course people are expected to write a thousand words on what was wrong with the course. So now, say let's say 250 people have written what was wrong with the course, we have 250,000 words of feedback. This is how you fix things. It's not helpful, you need a stiff drink at the end of the day because they all sound very ungrateful.
Leanne: Yes. So you need to get yourself into a safe space before you rave in. Wow! 250,000 words.
Sean: Yeah but the good thing is what we do is we have that mix. So we have, “Okay, you give us your feedback, what you can…?” and it's not just feedback is like, “What do you suggest? How do we go about it?” and I have this conversation with them. “How do we fix it? What do we do? But what if I have this problem?” and then the clients come up with the solution.
The next stage is the testimonials where they talk about how much. So the client looks at feedback as, “Look. I really am giving you feedback not because I hate you but because I love your stuff and I want to see.” So they're trying to fix something that they see is broken. But you see it as, “Oh goodness, I gave everything and they want all of this more.” So that is a definite problem, you have to get yourself into loving feedback and if you can't do that, then do the feedback first and the very next thing you do is the testimonials. Because the energy that comes from the testimonial will kind of reduce the impact or the brutality of that feedback.
The problems that we've had in the past have really stemmed from me getting exhausted. So when I used to do any workshops or presentations before, I had to literally rest for a week. And I thought “Why am I having to rest for a week? I already know this stuff, I'm so exhausted. These guys must be really exhausted.” So started to think about this whole topic about what people want and it's to do with marketing rather than, because people, they say one thing and then they mean something else but it's not like they know what they mean. A good example of this is Weight Watchers and if you say, “What is Weight Watchers slogan?” Well, when they started out it was eat all the food you want and you think, “That doesn't make any sense?”
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yes, it does! It makes perfect sense. The people that get in trouble and go to Weight Watchers are people who eat all the food they want.
Leanne: Yes.
Sean: The people who don't have the problem don't have to go to Weight Watchers. So Weight Watchers is effectively saying is, “You can eat all the food you want, we'll show you how to eat it.” right?
Leanne: Yeah.
Sean: So that's the one factor, that is. I can't express that, I can't express that I want to eat everything in sight. I can't express that, I don't want to admit that. But when I see the slogan, I just go “Oh yeah, that's the right place.” So we had to look at our workshops and go “What do people really want?” and the answer is they want to have fun. Whether you look at a corporate event or you look at a small business event or any event. Everybody who comes there says, “I want to have fun.” So then you know you speak to your partner, you speak to your accountant and they say, “You're going to a three day workshop, you're going to spend all this money what are you going to do?” and you go, “I'm going to have fun!” No! That's not going to work, it's not going to work for you, it’s not going to work for them, and they aren't fun. You can have fun here, why spending all this money? So I can't admit that to myself but that doesn't mean as a facilitator that you can't teach while letting them have a blast.
Leanne: No.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: That's what I'm finding. I find the most effective facilitators are the ones that bring in the most fun and then learning is kind of like the side effect of having a great time.
Sean: Yes and the worst facilitators always said at the start they say, “Okay, are you guys ready to have fun?” and then you sit through three days of complete agony.
Leanne: It's like, yeah my husband says if he meets anyone that ever says that introduces themselves as easy going but you've got to watch out!
Sean: Yeah, it's overcompensation.
Leanne: It is overcompensation.
Sean: Yeah.
Leanne: So what is some advice that you could give to people that are starting their journey in facilitating and leading workshops in their own context? What would you tell them Sean?
Sean: Well, I think the main thing is that they have to get very comfortable with themselves and that's quite a journey. It's got nothing to do with the audience, it's got everything to do with how much authority you have in that space. And so if you look at say Photoshop, well, no one has the authority in everything in Photoshop but maybe in masking and then maybe in the sub subset of masking. So what you want to do is you want to be comfortable, you feel like you're in a safe space and any questions that come within that space you can talk about it.
Then the second thing that you want to do is you want to take that little subset or sub subset and then expand that so that say, you could cover that material I don't know half a day. Well, you don't have to go for three days, you have to be really confident to take a half day material for three days but let's say you said, “Okay, we'll do this in one day or one and a half days.” Well, now what you have to do is you have to go, “Okay, I have to explain in one third of the space. I have to get them to work in half one third of the space and then I have to get them to build exercises or do something like that in one third of the space.” and then the clients go, “Yeah. So I learnt it, I practiced it, I made mistakes and I fixed it.” and now you have one and a half days. When you get more proficient at it, well, now you can go “Okay, we've got three days I've got more examples for you. I've got more activity for you.” and I don't feel any fear that our tea break is going for 45 minutes.
Leanne: Yeah. That's a black belt status for facilitators being that comfortable and confident to do that.
Sean: Right. Because you also have to know like when we went to Brussels for instance. The stuff that you guys covered in the first day, they hadn't covered in the first day but they were a much larger group and it seems like, “Oh damn, I haven't covered. I'm going to get into trouble.” And you have to be I think as a facilitator, you have to be comfortable in your own skin. So you have to be comfortable that you're going to goof up 50 to 60 percent of your early days before you start getting to do the comfort level. But breaking it up is always a good way because once you're confident then you don't have to overcompensate and you don't have to be “I'm the boss here and you're just minions.”
Leanne: Yeah, that's right and just “Respect me because I'm the one that's standing up in front of the room.” It's actually the respects coming from what you're giving them in terms of the skill and your authority.
Sean: The best way to do that is to get them to tell you what you've already told them and if they can do that, well, now you've given them slides.
Leanne: Yeah. That's an excellent point to finish on. Sean, thank you so much for your time and I know that you're known as “the online marketing” kind of Guru. We've spoken about a topic though that I think you're going to grow through in terms of bringing out your book and you're going to be another expert on talent as well. So you've got three hats. Yeah, I talked about your Singapore workshop in a previous podcast and told everyone I'd bring you one so I'm sure they're all looking forward to this. Where can people find you if they want to sort of follow up and see what else that you do?
Sean: Well, we're at PsychoTactics, I don't know if you can spell it but Google can so look up PsychoTactics and that PsychoTactics outcome, that's where we are.
Leanne: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sean. It’s been great having you on the show.
Sean: You're welcome.
Episode 20: Turn up early and read the room with Tyson Young
Tyson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, a digital application that allows your mechanic to provide you with your cars visual service history. In this episode, we talk about using humour in your deliver, adapting to your audience and using different tools and strategies to be a better facilitator. Tyson provides practical tips on calming those nerves before a big presentation and also shares a neat challenge he's been pursuing for the last 400+ days!
Tyson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, a digital application that allows your mechanic to provide you with your cars visual service history. In this episode, we talk about using humour in your deliver, adapting to your audience and using different tools and strategies to be a better facilitator. Tyson provides practical tips on calming those nerves before a big presentation and also shares a neat challenge he's been pursuing for the last 400+ days!
What you'll learn in this episode:
What Tyson learned from his first pitch
Things you should avoid right before a presentation
Why it’s important to read and understand your audience prior talking to them
Tools and strategies Tyson uses
Why Tyson is mindful of time keeping and respecting people’s time
Advice for a first-time facilitator
Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally!
Reach out to Tyson on LinkedIn.
About our guest
Tyson is not only the CEO and Co-Founder of Carisma, he is an accomplished MC, speaker and facilitator who incorporates humour into his presentations and adapts his style by effectively reading his audience.
In his teens, Tyson joined the Army Reserve, he then graduated from the Queensland University of Technology, where he studied business and creative industries, advertising and communication design. Tyson claims that each opportunity leads to the next.
His start-up, Carisma is on a mission to become the leading authority in a new, transparent automotive industry. This application allows you to see exactly where your hard-earned dollars are going.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotes of the episode:
"Turn up early and read the room, walk the stage, do whatever you can to feel comfortable in the environment. A big part of that for me is actually speaking with the audience".
"People have this misconception that if it's corporate, it's like, 'Oh, it has to be serious'. At the end of the day, people are still people. People still want to laugh and engage with you".
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator transcript with Tyson Young.
First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Jane Anderson (Episode 21)
Here is the episode transcript from my interview with Jane Anderson on Episode 21 of the podcast.
You can listen to my interview with Jane Anderson on the First Time Facilitator podcast.
Leanne: Please welcome to the First Time Facilitator Podcast, Jane Anderson.
Jane: Thank you so much for having me, Leanne. I'm really happy to be here and feel very privileged to be part of your show.
Leanne: Oh, that's lovely to hear. You’re extremely impressive! So I was just reading your biography, you've worked with over 50,000 people, you've written five books, you have your own podcast, you’ve worked with some huge global clients now living in Brisbane. I see you and your brand everywhere.
Jane: I’m stalking you know…
Leanne: Yeah you probably got some remarketing cookie on me but for those listening around Australia or possibly haven't seen your brand or globally, can you just explain a bit about yourself and how you entered the world of personal branding and helping others in terms of building their influence capability?
Jane: Yeah sure, so I started, how I never thought that I would probably be doing this but when I started, I started working with personally branded businesses when I was 14 years old. The very first experience I had, I don't know if you remember growing up but whether you had bought shoes from “Mathers” shoes, like maybe your mom made you wear “Clarks”.
Leanne: A “Clarks”.
Jane: Yeah, but Clarks was a fact came from a personal brand, it was someone who founded the Clarks brand. Then I saw Robert Mathers and the Mathers’ family, the people who founded Mathers. Sir Robert was knighted for his services to the business community and they were my first mentors in my life and they were like family to me. I worked for them for twelve years and then I went on and did a marketing degree and then Tom Peters had this concept called “Personal branding” when I was in second-year uni. and I was like, imagine having like somebody say “I want a personal brand and here's my credit card.” and I was like, “this is…” and that was long a bit like the internet hadn't even been in store.
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: I just remember thinking “Imagine people doing that!” I have always had this love, I did a marketing degree but I ended up working in HR for working sort of between those two fields which those two connected are all about influence. So it just sort of evolved that way and I worked for the Mathers family as I said. I also worked in government and worked in large organizations but I kept coming back to. I always had an interest in people's personal branded businesses like I worked for Tony Ferguson the Weight Loss Company, Rotary Weight Chemists as part of that whole branding and then worked in for Super Retail Groups, Supercheap Auto, BCF. The CEO of that company had an incredible personal brand, he's very humble, his name is Peter Birtles and he won CEO of the year.
I was really drawn to people who had strong personal brands and it was just the value of who people are and not just about the organization brand but the individuals that work there. All those people who have had the courage to put their face on the shingle out the front and say like I always found it fascinating that the people I worked for had the courage to do that. I was such a behind-the-scenes kind of person. I was like...
Leanne: Oh, no way!
Jane: Yeah, I think I just was always in awe of what they could. That they had so much courage to put their face out there and it was something though I never had the courage to do so I was like “Yeah, I'll support you whatever you need done, if your face is on the shingle that's great as long as mine is not.”
Leanne: Isn’t it funny how times have changed?
Jane: Yeah, well that was what happened, you know we had a change of government in Queensland in 2012. I had started my business but a 70% or 80% of my contracts went overnight with the change of government because most of my contracts were government work. I was sort of hiding behind a brand because I just didn't have the courage to put my personal brand out and then I went, you know what, actually I have to change something and I have to change something very fast and I thought “Okay, I can see now why personal brand works because of social media.” because I just noticed that all the things I was doing with helping wasn't just businesses but I'd also spent five years working in career counselling and helping market people for jobs and I thought “Okay, I've danced around it long enough, I've helped everybody else and now I have to do it for me.” It’s not something that I've ever started up feeling comfortable with. I've always been a cheerleader in someone else's corner and but you know one day the time comes where you've got to do it for yourself and you know you just got to “step-up and let's do it!”
Leanne: It's really fascinating! A couple things I want to just to point out was I liked how you talked about the intersection of marketing and HR. That's my background as well as I was in marketing before I moved into HR, studied HR though but I think the similarities are that you are influencing over people you've got to sell ideas you got to persuade them particularly around culture change. Great to hear that you've got that intersection but also around having to step-up as well and have that courage, you use the word “courageous” quite a lot there which I really like. I think with our first-time facilitators a lot of them are getting their step-up by doing a lot of facilitation internally with businesses which is a great way to hone your skill and a lot of this podcast has been focusing that how you deliver those workshops but we have never really spoken about let's just say you actually get really good at this and you want to go out on your own. How do you transition and how do you create that step? and so I got your book “EXPERT to INFLUENCER” and I really wanted to point out there's one thing I was like “Oh, this is brilliant and haven't heard this word used before.” and you're talking about how do you develop trust with people because that's how people buy your brand, buy your credibility and everything else and as a facilitator we need trust in our workshops to get the great outcomes.
Now, what I thought there was under personality. You're talking about the twelve pillars of trust, an item there was called “remarkability”. How remarkable are you? I love that word! Can you just explain a bit more about that or how we actually can start finding “What does make us remarkable? What does make us unique?”
Jane: Yeah, when you think about “Why would you want to do that? Why can't I just keep doing what am I doing? Why can’t I just keep facilitating on contents that's already been out there or their stuff it's out in the market?” I could keep going with Covey’s Seven Habits forever and it's amazing and I love Covey's work so it's not saying that there's anything wrong with that but it's more on how do you make this leap and what you've got to do is be remarkable. Seth Godin talks about this with some in a lot of his work and you actually need to be the artist. What happens is when you're the facilitator, if you're using or you're working with other IP or you feel facilitating your strategy day, there's some kind of framework or context that maybe you have learned. It might be maybe you've learnt pro-side principles or maybe you've learnt add car models or maybe you're facilitating around some kind of someone else's IP and to make the transition yourself is you actually have to be the person creating the ideas. I know that's like- “How am I supposed to compete with like Myers-Briggs or DISC Co.?” All that stuff's out there, I have nothing else to add. But you have insights and experiences and knowledge that no one else has and it took me a long time to get my head around this because I went inside up for every certification possible and now because I was like “Good, I don't have to create this stuff, you've already done it. Great!” and those things still serve well in fact, I've created my own certifications for other people. But if you really want to stand out, what happens if you don't, if you want to stand out the benefits are particularly if you're making that transition now, the difference is in, first of all, what you paid. So there's a very big difference in your day rate and what you will be paid by clients because they need to see the value in what you bring and you can still bring in some of those things. So for example if it's like DISC Co. or Myers-Briggs, I might do it as part of what I do but it's not my whole practice otherwise I'm the same as everybody else and then what happens is they're going “Oh, we need a Myers-Briggs workshop.” and Myers-Briggs is great by the way, I'm not saying it you know I've done thousands of my not-wise Myers-Briggs profiles. I followed about 6,000 people.
Leanne: Wow!
Jane: Yeah, it's been a lot.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: But what happens is that people will say “Oh, we need a team-building thing, why don't we do that Myers-Briggs thing?” and they go out to market and look around and all the pricing is pretty much the same. So you have to be even more remarkable to try and get that work because otherwise what happens is you're like a “toothpaste on the supermarket shelf” where the customer's standing there going “Well, I don't know which one to buy so I just buy the one that's on special.”
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: So you're competing on price now, so the problem is if you're not remarkable and the problem is we've got this “Tall Poppy” thing so we don't think we're very much remarkable at all and in fact we are. I find everybody fascinating that it's we're too close to our own stuff to think that we're “I'm not good enough or maybe I don't really know anything.” but you know that was what my problem. When I realized that I had this problem, I had this commoditization problem and so I realized that actually I'm competing on price with people and how am I differentiating myself or how am I articulating my value so that I can say something other than “You just need to buy me because I'm better!.” or “You just let me do it because I'm better.” but then you got to have a bit more than that to be able to get that over the line and so it's that fine line isn't it between the cocky and arrogant and trying to sell yourself and you're like “You look at these other people I go. How did they do it? How on earth are they’re so busy? How are they doing all this amazing work?” and so you spot on the difference. The remarkability is what makes you easy to buy and unique.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: And if you find out what that is then you're well-positioned and you can start to unpack your thinking and your ideas and what your experience it is. You know I've got some clients who have done you know PhDs and they get very cranky because when I work with them and they say “Are you telling me that you do this with people who haven't had to go and do a PhD and they are earning more than me?” and I said “Yes!”
Leanne: Yes. I mean isn't it interesting like ten years ago, if you wanted to be paid more I think the default response as well- just go to another course. It's so different nowadays.
Jane: Yes, but you don't need to.
Leanne: No.
Jane: You really don’t need to. If you can solve people's problems and you can help them have the insights and have the empathy to help them understand their own challenges and you're able to care. If you know how to care and run a tribe, if you know how to do that and you can solve problems, you don't need an MBA, that's just not needed anymore. But if you know your customers, if you understand them or the people in your rooms whether your customer is within an organization or outside if you're making the move. I always say the person who understands the customer the most is the persons whose business grows the fastest.
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. I love that you talk about what you said about we're so close to what we're thinking because it's in our own head so of course we take it for granted and we just assume – “Everyone thinks this way.” “Everyone would have the same response to that.”
What I like about your book though, it's you've got all these questions where you can articulate what your responses would be to different things like your values and things like that. I can totally imagine if you had thousands of people complete your book not one person would have the same answer to any of those questions, it’s like combination alone, if you put it to some paper and talk about logic we're all completely unique. So I hope all of our listeners get that and find the importance of what you're talking about because it does seem like nowadays you hop onto LinkedIn and it seems that everyone is a speaker, a coach, a facilitator so you have to get through a lot of noise.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: Yeah and what you spoke about it's important about knowing what the customer wants. So I'd like to hear that in the context of facilitating a workshop. I mean you've run, you’ve worked with 50,000 people, what do you do beforehand to find out what they need from the day that you're there? What kind of tactics?
Jane: Great question. I wish so many people would ask that question so much more. I would say, if anyone said to me “Why do you get booked so much? Why do so many people work with you?” and it's because I spend the time on this and if there's anything that I would say that makes the big difference and this is where I’m with my clients, this is where I spend the time. So for example, let's say you're walking into a room of workplace health and safety or a consult teams in the mining industry. I've worked with lots of mining, oil and gas and so I know that getting them in the room is the first challenge.
Leanne: Big time. Hello to all my colleagues who’s listening. Yes it is, we all know it is. Time-poor. Yep!
Jane: Right? Time-poor is the first challenge. The second challenge is that you're in a highly reactive space so if something goes wrong, if you've got a mind shut down, if you've got, you know there's so much volatility and safety is a number one. So if there's something that goes wrong onside and particularly if you're dealing with workplace of health and safety, they're in a highly reactive role so then I go, “Okay!” So empathy and understanding is like dude. If you can get that then I can connect so I'll say “Okay, so what's going on for these people right now? What's going for on for them not just in their role?” so you've got what I call “Higher and lower order problems”.
Higher order problems you know they're going through a restructure, you know this particular mind sets has been going through. It's in a shutdown at the moment or there's lots of specific volatility that's happening in that specific role or there's a lot of compliance issues.
Lower order problems, they're still relevant which is around being time-poor that’s across all industries. But if you can take the time and I do this for keynoting as well so I do a lot of research. I have a research team so I get them out to go and find out. One of the specific challenges I've got the clients problems that I'm talking to them about but then I'll go and research what else is going on in the industry so I have them find out.
So for example, I spoke at a keynote I remember it was a couple of years ago and it was about working with young female lawyers like it was early career lawyers and it was particularly women and I was like “Okay, well I'm not a lawyer and I think I've got a bit of an idea.” but you can always assume too much so you've got to know that you've got a natural unconscious bias and assumptions. So I put it on Facebook and I said “Here's an early career female lawyer, you need to be in this age group. I'll pay you for your time. I need to interview you.”
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: So I say to them “Whatever you charge for client, I don't expect you to do it for free. Whatever you charged for a client you can charge me, I have a few questions.” and I usually take up about a half an hour of their time and I'll do it over the phone and they can bill me that's no problem because I know that builds my understanding not just for that client but I think I've worked something across 52 different industries now. So being able to know those problems that those different industries are facing and that's how you end up getting the work because I know that you can solve that.
Leanne: Yeah.
Jane: So I think it's worth…one of the things I find like I had a client just recently and he's done a PhD in this amazing management theory and I think there was sparks coming off him and I had so much stuff. He was amazing and I said to him “What problem does your customer say that they have?” this is after three hours of explaining his whole mission philosophy branding journey life story. I said “What problem does your customer understand that they have?” or “What problem does your customer say they has?” and he said “I don't know, that's my problem.”
Leanne: Wow.
Jane: So otherwise, it's you telling them that they've got a problem and that's like calling someone's baby “ugly”, isn't it? It sounds like “You know, you’re problem is?” So it comes from huge compassion and empathy and understanding and then only then it's like trying to land a plane- you got to clear your tarmac! You can't get anything through and you can't create change in a room and you don't have to regurgitate back to them everything that you've read. But you've got as a facilitator you've got to ask the right question and if you know the right questions to ask, the value you bring to the room is that's your job as the facilitator, isn't it? Your job is to change the room.
Leanne: Yes.
Jane: If you can have that understanding, it's not necessarily you’re being an expert in that person's job but if you can know the right questions to ask they've got the answers as you know. It's then that's really how and then that's when the value they see the value bring.
Leanne: Yeah, it's just being comfortable with the language that you're using as well and making sure that is relevant to that industry because you also talk about credibility in your book and I really I got this quote out that I loved. It's a John C. Maxwell quote that you've used in your book:
“Credibility is a leader’s currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it he or she is bankrupt.”
It’s so important to be credible! I mean I guess you've been doing this for some time since you were 14 years old you've got this bank of clients you've worked with and got such a great reputation. For someone starting out, how do they create that credibility? I can't imagine, I know I'm very uncomfortable walking into a room and saying “Yeah, this is the stuff that I've done.” I don't really want to talk myself up again, the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” but it's really not about me anyway. But you want them to trust that you are meant to be in that room, you deserve a spot. How do you create that?
Jane: Yeah, great question. So trust, there is a difference between trust and credibility. Credibility brings trust, sorry, well credibility builds trust so I say there's three things that will build trust and this is some other new IP I'm working on. You saw the 12 pieces to building trust but I've really got it down to what are the three key big things that you need to be able to do to build trust.
One is authenticity, you've got to be just you, you've got to be your best self and you know that means knowing what you're trying to do, your mission, your clarity about what, who you are as a human being and just to be your most authentic self and I know that's easy to say, that first part is authenticity. The second part is empathy and empathy is that understanding that I've got an understanding, whether it's around, whatever the challenges that audience has or the team or the group or customer, whatever. If you've got those two things, so first of all its authenticity and then empathy which is what your challenges are on your world and then the bottom one is credibility so if you can get those three things the authenticity, empathy and credibility. If those three things come together you get trust because now you suddenly “I have more confidence in you; I can see the confidence in what you're saying; I can see you have conviction.” so that empathy is what actually makes you do go deeper in your knowledge.
Leanne: Yeah and like you said I mean you gave the example before of putting out a call to lawyers and then getting billed for the time. Not a lot of people do that. No, they don't! And especially with keynotes because you think “I've got this speech. It's all packaged up. I've spent a lot of time developing it. I can just go into any kind of industry and deliver this.” and I think that's where it does fall flat so what you're doing is as part of that research contextualizing it for that audience which is amazing!
Jane: Absolutely!
Leanne: So the three things that you talk about authenticity, empathy & credibility. It all talks, we're talking maps in the facilitation context but that is really what leadership is about as well.
Jane: That’s right.
Leanne: So that's what I love about doing this podcast about facilitation. Everything I'm hearing about people in terms of the great skills facilitators bring in terms of having empathy, showing up caring for people, taking that time. All of those attributes what makes a great leader.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: So if you're becoming a great facilitator, a side benefit is you'll probably also be an amazing leader as well.
Jane: Absolutely, you know James Hume, he was the speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and he said “Whenever you're presenting and facilitating is the same thing you're auditioning for a position of leadership.” So you're in front of a room, you're already in your… I think sometimes we go out- “I'm a facilitator; I'm a trainer; I'm not a leader, I just run training programs.” but you know if you're in front of a room but even when we're branding and positioning people and around to give that credibility, we will look for photos where they're standing in front of a group. So it doesn't matter if you've got three people, if you're the one in-charge of the room, it's your room and you're the one holding the space for everybody, you're the leader!
Leanne: Yeah, you have a leader. I love that. I did read it in your book about when you are given the opportunity to present, try and document that. So this book, I have to say I love the practical nature of it. You can read a lot of books at a very theory and you're like how does it supply but I think it's great for facilitators that do want to start stepping out of their companies. One example you gave was “Before you're traveling to a workshop, take a selfie at the airport or before you hit the road.” Like that's just something so simple but that immediately what that tell people “Well, I'm on the road, I've been asked to go somewhere else to run a workshop.” such a great little hack!
Jane: Yeah and even if you are trying to show people that you don't just work in your local town so you know when I started, my problem was because of the changing government you know 80% of my business went overnight so I realized that actually half my problem is that I have a business that is very focused on clients in Queensland so I said “Okay, I actually need to build not just a national but an international brand so that if anything goes wrong at any time I can pick up. I can go somewhere or I can work with clients. I can reach out and I'm not going to be affected by local government challenges.” and that was what happens to a lot of businesses here in particular Queensland because of our volatile government so what I did exactly that I said “Okay, every time we go check in, airport; Facebook post! So it was around building the brand to be and the communication strategy that went with that and of course people go “Oh my God, you're everywhere, every time!”
Leanne: You are!
Jane: And it's very deliberate and so I've probably settled down on a bit now. But when I first started, it was very deliberate because I had to really send the message that you know if people; “I won't worry you because you're in Brisbane or you're not in Melbourne or you're not in Sydney”. I needed to open it up and create access so people would instead say “Oh, when you're in Sydney next or when you're in Melbourne next.” so I was in Sydney or Melbourne most weeks so it was just opening it up to say “I'm prepared to get on a plane. I’m prepared. “Yes I'm in town!”
Leanne: Yeah absolutely. I want to talk about a bit of travel and environment because I know you're running a workshop at Peppers at Kingscliff.
Jane: Yes.
Leanne: For anyone, for those of you that have never been there it's absolutely amazing. It's very relaxing, this beautiful beach, the town is just if you get there and all your stresses pretty much dissolved. I would like to ask you yet just about that. Was that a deliberate move to create a strong environment for you workshop? Why did you pick that spot to run your one day workshop?
Jane: Well, it sounds like I won't be doing very much.
Leanne: Yeah, cocktails by the pool but that sounds like a perfect day.
Jane: Yes, exactly. White boards can be wheeled out to the Spa.
Leanne: That's a really good idea. You should get into hotel design and thinking about conferences and things like that? Why not?
Jane: That's right! Yeah you know one of the things that I've noticed, I'm a mentor in Thought Leaders Business School and my mentor who was the founder of Thought Leaders Business School. I’ve been in there for five years and his name is Matt Church. It has this mantra, you want to get to a point where you do work you like with people you like or love, people you love the way that you want. He said to me “If you could have a program that runs any way that you want, how would that work?” and that takes a while to build up to that so yes I was running around the country and I was running programs everywhere and I said you know like Kingscliff dope I grew up around that area so it's like home to me. The beach is like home because I live in the city now but the beach is where I reconnect, it's where I get off the treadmill and so when he said “What would that look like? What would work you love, work you like with people you love the way you want?” and I thought “Okay so what I would love is I would love to be able to have a be at a point where my business had grown enough and my brand was strong enough that people would have the courage to you know maybe not stay in Melbourne get on a plane and come and disconnect to reconnect a little bit.” but it's branding work you know you're really connecting with people's identity and the core of who they are that's quite hard to do in a corporate battleship grey office.
Leanne: And they're battling traffic to even get there on time.
Jane: Yeah. You know you've got to kind of get grounded I know because I grew up around that area maybe I'm a bit of a hippie at heart but you know it's those things that you really have to consciously stop and reconnect to who you are to actually make some of these decisions that you're making and go “Oh wow! Yeah I do, do that.” But what I had to do was create that base for me to work in to help other people so that they could see that for themselves and so that's the challenge I often start to pose to them; “What would your version of this look like?” and so there's one lady that I know that has done. She's a fantastic coach and she's a beautiful cook so what she does is she cooks in her coaching sessions so you go to her house and you sit up at the kitchen bench and she coaches while she's cooking. So she cooks, she bakes so by the end of the session so she spends the first few minutes you know putting all the recipe together and whatever. I'm not a very good cook but nothing like she’s like.
Leanne: I’m a terrible cook!
Jane: Microwaves, come in very handy sometimes. You know by the end of the session then you have that by the time she's finished cooking and then you sit down you have the meal together and so that's the end of that coaching session that goes for I think an hour and a half or whatever it might be. So you know hearing some of these stories of how people do it and its part of how they love to do it that's part of their brand that's what she's known for and that's what creates the remarkability.
Leanne: Yes. I was just that word was just coming up. I mean how many people would talk about that afterwards and that is something that's completely unique to her and I love that you know because we think of workshops and we think we're boxed in a room we've got them for half the day there's going to be pretty average catered lunch, we need to have PowerPoint slides but she's completely just gone- No! This is the way we're going to do it and but then by doing that she's attracting the type of people that she'd want so it's like hitting those three things that you spoke about earlier that's such a cool quote.
Jane: Yeah you stop trying to conform but having said that when you first starting out, you've got to be easy to buy and it's hard to buy you if you set something like that up straightaway. You haven't got enough trust, you haven't built up the credibility and all that sort of thing so you still kind of got to do the hard yards initially but build up your database, build up your relationships and once there's some you'll see in the book there are a few metrics that we look for to be able to know at what point if I did. Because people are scared to do things like that so there are certain metrics that I work with people in their businesses to say “Okay, yes you've got these numbers of certain people on data bases, certain revenue, customers types of programs” and then we say “Okay, yes now is the time to do it!”
Leanne: Yeah it's a calculated risk rather than just going “I must give this a Go!” and to be completely disappointed when no one buys it. Where did that go? Why did that fail?
Jane: Yeah you've got that trust and the relationship with those clients, they'll follow you, they'll go where you want and then because they wouldn't necessarily look for something like that but when they go, the fact that you're the one running it so you create, one is actually matters that CEO of Thought Leaders said, he said “Business is changing from the business of ideas particularly with facilitators. If you're in this space, you're working with your ideas and what your worldview is and how you articulate that to get the best out of people based on your experience.” but he said just recently that “It's not just about the ideas.” Because I can go online, I can find those ideas, I can read your blog's. It's actually the experiences you create that how those ideas are applied and how do I get to connect with that which is the whole remarkability. “What’s the essence of you that makes that experience?” because yes I can get the knowledge from you but I don't want to sit and read a blog, I want to hang out with you for a day. I want to know “Oh yeah, look at my stuff, yeah give me some attention. Look at me for a day and I want to be around your energy in the space that you hold.” and that's the real value.
Leanne: That’s what would attracts me. Yeah. I'd like to talk about energy as well, sorry I'm just coming up to like a keynote or the workshop that you're running down at Kingscliff. I've been really interested in listening to a lot of podcasts recently about the morning routine and what different people do. What do you do to get sort of psyched up or do you have to calm yourself down before you start delivering one of these?
Jane: Yes and its interesting, isn't it? Like keynote and facilitation as such different modes of delivery of ones thinking, ones “tell versus ask”. So you know you've got different energy spaces that you're working with but facilitation kind of got it. The thing they have in common is you've got to meet the room where they're at. You can come in, managing your state is everything so if you can manage your energy that's for sure. I have to fire myself up a little bit because I'm actually my natural state is mentoring so I'm very introverted ironically most people don't realize that but I'm more introverted than I am extroverted. And to facilitate in groups or to keynote and I keynote every week so it's not something that comes naturally to me, it is tiring. So I have to make sure I've got myself pumped up so it'll be things like make sure I get sleep, just eating well particularly when you travel because a lot of these conferences and things are interstate so I will never I always travel the night the day before. I also will go into the room the day before so if I fly in that afternoon if I'm the first or second one on in the morning, I'll go into the room because I need to know the energy or the space of the room. I'll do it just a quick practice on stage just so I can get a sense of how it works and it's funny I spoke at an event a few years ago and I was on straight after. I didn't know that the person who was speaking before me was going to be running a meditation session.
Leanne: Hard that to follow.
Jane: I had my headphones on and I had like you know right against the machine on and I was so fired up and then I went in and it was like “Okay.”
Leanne: You could feel that mood as “Woo!”
Jane: “Okay, we’ll slow down”. But you know you get even much the energy and then bring it out but you've got to bring, there's so much energy that comes to a keynote and to being able to prepare for that and it's knowing your stuff so that you can be present to the room and serve the room and connect with the room like things like what will give me energy is I'll stand at the door and greet people when they come in. It’s also clear that to them that “Oh, she must be somebody who's working here.” or “Oh, that's right. She's the lady that maybe she's on the hand out garden.”
Leanne: Oh yeah, and she's approachable as well which is great.
Jane: It's not me saying “I'm not coming in going right. I'm the speaker, I'll have my blue M&Ms. Thank you.” You've got to connect with the audience, my job is to change the room while I'm there so you just got to do everything you can to get that energy in connection, don't you?
Leanne: Yeah I love that my job is to change the room while I'm there. Gee! That’s pretty impactful, that's going to be the quote of the episode, love that! But I think as well, I'm entering I love seeing the room as well even the day before because then it helps you go to sleep at night because he's not wondering what does the room look like and you want to have like most your questions answered before you have that sleep so you can have a restful you know eight hours or whatever it is that you need.
Jane: Yes and unique to them. You know I've had things like I've fallen off the stage, technology hasn't worked every age.
Leanne: You’ve fallen off the stage?
Jane: Oh, you name it! Like when you do as many as I do, everything goes wrong but you know you've got to know your keynote forty-five minutes inside out back to front, if anything fails what are you going to do. You know I've had that happen before. You’ve just got to know plan ABCD and E.
Leanne: Have any times where like something's happening you're like “I just can't continue doing this, what am I doing?” Have that ever crossed your mind or you like “No, just get on back on the bike and let's just keep going.” You must have been talked at times.
Jane: Yeah there was one particular time it was actually really early and when I started speaking and I got booked for this keynote it was at the Gold Coast and it was Royal Pines. I don't know if you've ever been to Royal Pines but the meeting room is massive. It's like a nightclub like they're stripe lights, it was like a rock concept this thing.
Leanne: At the golf club, that's not, now I wouldn't have thought that but…
Jane: Yeah it's got a really big, it's really popular for conferences. It's got a great massive room so there's about a thousand people at this conference and I walked in the room and the A/V guy was there and I saw my presentation on the computer and I thought it looks a bit different though and so I went over to him and said “Hi, my name is Jane Anderson, I’m on this morning.” and he said “Yeah, marked me up.” and then I said “Can I just ask you? I think there's a slide there, I just looking at that presentation, it looks a bit different than the one I had to send through.” I had send to his head two weeks prior and he said “Ah yeah, you can have a look.”, so look through and it but there were slides missing, there were things I'd never seen before and so I was on in 20 minutes I couldn't change anything and so I said “Okay, all right I'll just work with that.”
Leanne: Gosh, well done.
Jane: “Have you got a whiteboard? and he said “Yes, I think there's one down at the back.” and so I thought all right I know where my where the breaks are I think in the content so I was like “Okay, I can work I think with it.” and then he said “Just so you know, you know the remote?” so he said “With the remote, just so you know it doesn't go backwards that only goes forwards in it.” so I said “Okay, so what happens if I have to go backwards?” he said “Oh look! I'll be at the back, I'm the A/V guy, you just yell out.” So of course I started the keynote and the slides started moving. I hadn't even touched anything and I thought “I should have known when he said that. How would he know that?” Anyway, I got it, I said on to Mr. A/V “Can you come back to the first slide again?” and so I started again and they just started moving in and I thought “Okay, I'm not touching anything!” so I just turned them off and I was in the first five minutes. Anyway, I got through it but I was kicking myself because I thought “What have I done wrong, I can't…” you know because everyone's looking at you that you're the problem so you've just got to work with. Anyway of course I got off the stage and the coordinator came running up and said “Oh my God that was amazing. I don't know how you did that but what you didn't know is that your remote was connected to the room next door and theirs was connected to yours. That was fantastic, would definitely get you back next year”. I can’t do it, I can’t do this thing!
Leanne: Oh my gosh! That’s up there! There were some of the worst stories I've heard. Wow! You handled that so well. But you wouldn't have been able to pull that off if you haven't prepared. There's no way I mean you could have, you can wing things for certain time but not for 45 minutes. Oh my gosh, well done! High five! I was getting goose bumps when you're telling me when you're framing that story that is the worst scenario and if that ever happens though at least we know “Hey, what's going on next door, I think we need to swap.”
Jane: Exactly, it’s a good tip for facilitators.
Leanne: It is really a good tip. Speaking of tips, are there any tips or words of advice that you can offer our first-time facilitators listening in?
Jane: Yeah I think if I think back to. I remember the first time I facilitated I was terrible. So I would, allow yourself to you know just be- know that you're not going to be perfect straight away and this still days where I like not very often but sometimes you just have an off day. It doesn't mean it's like your whole career is destroyed. If you have a tough day that would be the first thing is to know it's just a tough day. If something goes wrong that's all part of learning and part of growing. The other thing I would say that has made the biggest difference and I wish I did this much earlier was find your tribe, find the people who you need to be around, who are doing the same thing as you or trying to do something similar. But you want to also work out find your mentor and often the mentor will be the person leading that tribe so if you want to get really great at like it might be at training activities then find the expert who is the expert in training activities. Do some mentoring with them but work out as well- “Who are other people who are trying to solve that problem as well?” or “Where do other trainers hang out?”
So for example, I have a program which is called the “Women of Influence” and we have this power up program and so these are all women who are facilitators, trainers, coaches, speakers. So I lead the tribe but they're all trying to do the same thing but they're all different at what they do. Some do leadership, some do personal branding got three in there that do personal branding, we've got others that are business coaches but they do a lot of facilitation for businesses. Everybody's so different but to work out we'll you know particularly I think for women as well you know for women, we don't naturally get out of build the networks the blokes tend to. So find your tribe, go and ask around if it's you know whether it's the AITD may be there's some members in there if it's training, the Australian Institute of Training and Development. If you're a coach but you also include facilitation in your work maybe you do group coaching it might be that kind of space. Look at the ICF professional speakers if you're a facilitator and you're wanting to include more speaking, you'll be like this plenty of speakers who also do facilitation. So look for your associations, find your tribe get around with the right people and find a mentor.
Leanne: Excellent advice, brilliant! Jane, I've loved our conversation today I could easily talk to you for another couple of hours. I think we've just kind of touched the surface but I've learnt a lot already. A lot of what I picked up free reading your book which I will recommend to all the listeners especially if you want to start differentiating yourself in a crowded market I think it's really useful. But also hearing, you’re very authentic and vulnerable when you came out with some of those stories and I think that cheers the audience that it's okay to mess up and you need to stretch in order to develop at the end of the day. Finally Jane, where can people find you?
Jane: Yeah thank you. So they can jump on my website so its jane-anderson.com, you're welcome to jump on there and of course there's all LinkedIn and Instagram and those places so I'm always around like you said.
Leanne: Everywhere!
Jane: I’m kind of everywhere. You’ll be sick of me probably. But one of the things that you can do is when you go to the website. This could be useful actually for your listeners and you'll probably notice on the book it's got where you can do take the “Influencer Score” so I created a diagnostic to help people to understand like just the communication channels and just you know you don't have to try and do all of them immediately but just to know where to start and so you can go on it takes three minutes to fill out so you just go to the jane-anderson.com website, if you scroll right down the bottom it's actually a little bit hidden and because otherwise you go to the shop and you'll pay $80, so just go!.
Leanne: Wow that’s so cool. Okay!
Jane: There’s a little link its right down the very bottom and it's called the “Lead Generation Indicator” so if you're starting out or if maybe you're thinking about making the move or you have made the move out of corporate and you're starting to do this yourself. It gives you a seven page personal report of exactly where you sit now. I'm based on what you've got to do so you know your gaps on what and where to go from there.
Leanne: Oh that's perfect and we'll definitely link those in the show notes for sure.
Jane: Oh thank you! Yeah better, right!
Leanne: Lovely. Thanks, Jane. You've been awesome!
Jane: Thank you very much.
Leanne: Have a great evening.
Jane: Thank you.
Leanne: Well done!
Episode 19: Creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun" with Dana the Trainer
In today's episode I talk to Dana the Trainer. Dana promises bright ideas and electric training, and likes to do things a little differently in her training environment. Her philosophy is really about ensuring that people learn the skills they need to learn, while having a really great time.
In today's episode I talk to Dana the Trainer. Dana promises bright ideas and electric training, and likes to do things a little differently in her training environment. Her philosophy is really about ensuring that people learn the skills they need to learn, while having a really great time.
In the show you’ll hear about how she prepares for her workshops and how she creates a fun training environment. Listen in to her response when I ask her to reflect on a time where things didn’t go so well in one of her workshops and what she learnt from that experience.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Ways to make facilitation more fun, colourful and engaging
How to balance or lift your energy levels when required
What to do when things don't go to plan (hint: prevention is better than cure)
How to create content for new workshops
Key skills that take you from being just a normal training facilitator to being a next level one
Facilitation tips for first-time facilitators
About our guest
Dana James-Edwards is a dynamic professional in Corporate Training, Coaching, & Development. She provides technical and professional training with colour and enthusiasm, creating a learning atmosphere of “serious fun.” She develops training that moves from the practical to the theoretical — translating to learners’ day-to-day lives, and making business processes more effective and productive to propel work environments that are healthy and motivating.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Quotes of the show:
"There are so many things that you can do to bring learning, to bring a classroom alive to make things not so painful for people".
Even when you know the content and you're familiar with it, you’re still thinking, 'Who's going to be there tomorrow?', 'What if this exercise doesn't work?', 'What do I have as a backup for this?', 'Did I pack this thing?'
'You cannot be rigid, sticking to your lesson plan. The classroom is a place of surprise. The best facilitators pull the learning out of what is happening in the room, instead of sticking to the script'.
Episode transcript
View the First Time Facilitator episode transcript with Dana the Trainer.
First Time Facilitator podcast interview with Tyson Young (Episode 20)
Leanne: Our guest today was recommended by a mutual friend, Stephanie Yeo. I'd like to read the introduction that she sent me. These are her own words. Tyson is a CEO and co-founder of Carisma, a digital application that enables your mechanic to provide you with your car's visual service history. Outside of his work at Carisma, Tyson is an amazing facilitator, emcee extraordinaire and speaker. He's wonderfully humorous and an amazing active listener who adapts his style based on effectively reading his audience. Welcome to the show, Tyson Young.
Tyson: Thank you so much for having me. That reminds me I'm going to have to pay Steph to write all those lovely things, clearly lies but–-
Leanne: How does it feel when you read a description-- someone in your audience wrote that about you, how does that make you feel?
Tyson: It's super humbling to actually have engaged the audience and one person in particular and especially from someone like Steph who is incredible. It's amazing.
Leanne: I hope you’re listening out, Steph. Yes, we both got some very positive things to say about you. Absolutely, for someone not only to think about that and then to reach out and say, "Leanne, you need to interview this guy. It's -–" Yes, well done.
Tyson: Thank you, thank you.
Leanne: How did you stumble upon the world of training, facilitation, speaking in general?
Tyson: I mean probably it depends how far back I go. I did debating in school and I'm sure that's just because mum wanted me to redirect my energies into arguing with her with other people. I started doing public speaking but quickly dropped it out when I learned you had to do preparation beforehand. Debating was great because you could just go and you would wait for them to do that a little bit and then you'd argue the point. I think that was good a little bit of high school experience. After that, I think that the pivotal moment for me was the QUT international business Case Competition.
You would get presented with these cases. You'd go overseas and you have-- depending on the timeline. It would be like 24-48 hours crammed in a hotel room with way too much Red Bull and putting together this business case and then presenting it to the audience and a panel of expert judges. That was really good in terms of learning how to develop some kind of cohesive train of thought and a message and then deliver that in a high-pressure situation.
In addition to that, I joined the Australian Army Reserve when I was 16. I did that for 10 years and I think there is a lot of training and a lot of facilitation again in relatively high-pressure situations, so that was good and good for the maturity maybe at a younger age. Then from there, just every gig seems to lead to another one and then here I am talking to you.
Leanne: Absolutely. Let's talk about those high-pressure situations. Do you remember that first pitch that you did overseas? Could you sort of reflect on that and what have you learned from that first pitch compared to now>
Tyson: So much. I think I always joked that I was the PowerPoint guy, because I wasn't fantastic at doing the talking. I wasn't fantastic with coming up with the strategies. I knew how to move some pixels around, so that's how I snuck into the team. I was like, "I've got design skills." That was good for so many reasons, but I think working with a team especially, because you couldn't just go and do your own thing. You still had to make sure that your lines worked in with everyone else's and you were kind of vibing off one another.
I think what I learnt from that is there are, in a situation like that, often many different personalities and it comes down to compromise both from your end and their end. You end up generally with a pretty happy team. What else did I learn? Not to have too much Red Bull for a presentation. No, but it was good. I think it all came together in the end and just to enjoy the experience.
Leanne: Part of Stephanie’s feedback is that she said that you adapt your style based on reading the audience. Can you give examples of doing that? Was that something again another skill that you've honed?
Tyson: Yes, like anything, I think you do hone skills over time. One thing that has helped me, and I think this actually came from dad giving me this advice because he's done a bit of facilitation himself. He also had 20 years in the military. It's to, first of all, turn up early and read the room, walk the stage, do whatever you can to feel comfortable in the environment. A big part of that for me is actually speaking with the audience.
Steph was one of the amazing conversations I had beforehand. It's just having that genuine human connection which really puts you at ease. Then you start to feel as though you're understanding who your audience are before you're actually talking to them. Because I really hate going in cold and just talking at people. It's great to already have, oh, like you feel as though you've got some friends before you even start.
Leanne: Yes, I was given that advice as well before, like a big speech. You're kind of conflicted because sometimes you just want to be backstage getting yourself psyched up or doing whatever it takes to psych you up. But at the same time, you see the value of that you're no longer delivering to strangers. You can actually find out why you’re in this room and then somehow relate that to the person.
Tyson: Oh, it's like you feel as though you're having a conversation with people. It would be the same if I had to do this interview but you couldn't talk for 40 minutes. I'm just kind of I don't know what to talk about, just making stuff up. Whereas, when you have that back and forth engagement even if that engagement is simply them laughing or just inquisitively on looking, I think that helps bring out some of the good stuff.
Leanne: Let's talk about getting laughs. Steph mentioned that you were-- We're talking a lot about you, Steph. Wonderfully humorous, is that just your personality that you just bring into your role as a facilitator?
Tyson: I don't know if that's my personality. I mean I've often had people tell me that I'm a joke. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Now look, I'm incredibly impressed by comedians to start with because they have to get up there with the expectation that they're going to be funny. If you kind of get some laughs as a comedian, I imagine that's probably not a good thing. You want a roomful of laughter. As a facilitator, your job isn't there to be a comedian. But if you do get a laugh and people are like, "Ah, funny guy," it's a very easy one. Even if you get one joke-- I think for me it's more about going in with the expectation that there won't be any laughs and not waiting for applause or for laughter.
Leanne: Waiting for the cymbal crash.
Tyson: Yes, if a joke doesn't come off and it's -- me personally, I never deliver something with like this epic punchline. It's just if people laugh and then, ah, okay, I'll pause and I'll let you have a laugh and continue on. It feels good, it feels good for them too.
Leanne: Great. What other kind of tools and strategies do you bring into your facilitation that may make you different from the other facilitator next door?
Tyson: Look, I wrote some things down because just before this. I guess that's the first one doing a bit of research and putting some notes down. Doing a little bit of research to understand who your audience is helps a lot. Again, that helps with the kinds of jokes that are going to land. If I make lots of startup related jokes at a maybe a corporate event, they might not understand it. They won't be empathetic to that kind of humor. The next one is I'm a big fan of self-deprecation clearly. I've maybe take it a bit too far sometimes and people think I actually just hate myself but not all the time, only after a big house party. Talking with people beforehand yet walking the room, and I think remembering that it's okay to smile and laugh.
People have this misconception that if it's corporate, as soon as they hear that word "corporate," it's like, oh, it has to be serious. At the end of the day, people are still people. People still want to laugh and engage with you. What else? Find your own style. I think it's great to have inspiration but it's also okay to realize that you can be different to other people. I'm certainly not-- I wouldn't even say I'm a great facilitator, just over time I'm learning how to do it a bit better.
Leanne: Same as me.
Tyson: Yes, and I've listened to your podcast and I think they're fantastic.
Leanne: Thank you.
Tyson: Your guests are great. Hopefully, I can you have to stand with them. Just in terms of a few other tips, I'd like to write down notes like handwritten notes. Oh, just lost power. [laughs] For those--
Leanne: For those listening, we’re recording face to face and the light just went out. It went completely dark. But that's kind of-- I mean that can happen in a workshop-
Tyson: Totally.
Leanne: - where we've sort of facilitated in previous episodes, where they've said the biggest thing that ever derailed their workshop was the technology not working. How do you -- but look, that was out for half a second and we've recovered.
Tyson: I know. I started sweating profusely. I was a little bit scared but we're here. I think in terms of not just the notes, I try and avoid a lot of caffeine maybe just because it's the type of person I am. I still get quite nervous before anything like any kind of presentation. I use those nerves because anxiety and fear and excitement, for a lot of it I think it's the same physiological effect. I do use that adrenaline to keep me amped up a little bit. I don't want too much other stimulants in my system. The final one I think is just water, just making sure I'm hydrated and have a relatively clear throat.
Leanne: Well, most good tips are water and caffeine, interesting as well. Because, I've also heard there's a podcast I listen to, it's called Steal the Show by Michael Port. He always says don't drink anything with dairy in it, even the night before that you're running like a big presentation because the dairy in your system can like clog up your lungs or something along those lines.
Tyson: I don't eat dairy so that's a good stuff.
Leanne: There you go. You’re all good. For anyone else listening, I always go a Long Black in the morning of a big presentation just so it doesn't those up. You've really come a long way from preparing compared to what you're like in high school, where you just kind of wanted to wing it with your debating team now which is fantastic.
Tyson: Look, there is a certain element of preparation, but I still wing it for the most part. I absolutely hate written speeches. There are many amazing orators in the world and I think Barack Obama is one of them. I nearly said president but unfortunately some things have changed. People that can deliver a really well-structured presentation, I love watching that. I am definitely more of the style that I’ve got my key talking points and the general structure and then I’ll talk through.
Again, we don’t have written speeches when we have conversations with one another. If you were at a house partying and you're talking with someone, if you were like, “Oh, I missed that point. I’m going to have to talk about this,” it’s not natural. Again, I’d like to feel as though I’m having a one-on-one conversation even if there's 300 people in the audience, trying to finish a point looking at someone and then moving on.
Leanne: Yes, absolutely. Now, you are actually probably the youngest facilitator. Well, you’re not probably. You are the youngest facilitator we’ve had on the show today.
Tyson: I grew a whisker especially for this. It took me a month but I got there.
Leanne: Well, well done. I’d like to hear about facilitating workshops for the people in this side of community, who are generally from a younger generation and not-- like you said, you're not comparing startups to corporates. What are you doing? Do you do anything different with the startup audience? What do they want more? I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Tyson: Yes I think, again I’m not super, super experienced with facilitation or presenting or even with startups. My brother and I have run-- we ran a digital agency for about five years, Lloyd and I. Then Lloyd and I teemed up with a good friend of ours, Yohan. He is the CTO of another company we’ve got. I think over the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve gained a little bit more experience in startup lens, not just business.
People generally like to hear some of the experiences we’ve had and then they feel as though they can resonate with those stories and understand that we truly are empathetic to some of the challenges they experience as well. Startup people are, I don’t know if forgiving is the right word, but we all understand that you’re iterating quickly. You’re trying to find work and it’s the same with presenting. I don’t always have the perfect response but it’s engaging them the best way I know how.
It’s a bit of a misconception that startups is just for young people because there are many people, I think the most successful startup founders are in their 40s when they start. Life experience is actually quite good.
Leanne: Yes, they say they have been through two or three different companies that haven’t done so well, then they hit their strides in their mid to late 40s, which is so important.
Tyson: That’s my excuse currently the next one probably is a success.
Leanne: Fail three times and then you’re on to a winner. Have you ever had a time where things haven’t gone so well during a presentation that you can share with our audience?
Tyson: A time that hasn’t gone well. I’ll talk about how I got into one of the gigs that I currently do and how that nearly didn’t go so great. I got a call from the business school at QUT. I’m in the back of an Uber. We’re in Melbourne at the time and we’re heading off to this meeting. I take this call and they said, “Tyson, Bill Prad has recommended you for this new session we’re doing. It’s called, The Business Leaders Talks, where we interview successful alumni.”
I’m like, “Oh, me, successful? I didn’t actually think I was that successful, but continue.” She said, “We were wondering if you wanted to be a part of it.” I was like, “Look, totally.” They said, “Because we need someone to interview the successful people.” [laughs] I was like, “Oh, I got you.” That has been a fantastic excuse to meet amazing people. That's been running for about three years now, the QUT BLT.
I just remember the first time I ever got up and this was the first time I really ever emceed anything. I’m okay when someone else is running the workshop or whatever it is and I just can get up, grab the mic and do my little bit and sit down. This was the first time that it didn’t dawn on me until the music stopped, that I had to go to the front and actually run the workshop or the talks.
I just remember I felt as though the colour had drained out of my face. I’m in a full suit. Again, this is when I didn’t really know what my style was. I’m wearing Nikes now but I was wearing a suit and probably even had a tie on at the time, walk up to the front, it's dead silence. I can feel the eyes on me. I didn’t even know if it was that hot on the day, but I’m sweating and the sweat start to get worse. I’ve got the paper in front of me and again the things you learn, if you are going to have notes at a lectern, make sure it's really large font and it’s broken into this visual areas where you can really quickly see.
I had basically an A4 page which it felt like point seven font and I’m staring at it. I am looking at the page and I’m looking off at the audience and looking back down at the page. I swear there must have been crickets. I can feel my voice starting to tremble a little bit and I’m starting to get tunnel vision. I can almost feel the same thing happening now retelling the story. I start the first line. I've probably made a mistake already and I just look up and my first-- [laugh] I don’t know, am I allowed this way?
Leanne: Yes, that’s all right.
Tyson: My first thought as I look up at the room, I’m like, “Fuck it, I’m just going to walk out.” [laughs] I was like, “Just stay with it because you will never ever leave this down.” I was just like, “I’ll just push through.” I did the acknowledgment of the traditional owners and I’m like, “That will be right, I’m probably going to stuff this up and it’ll be really disrespectful and no one is going to want to have me back.” Anyway, I felt as though I did a fairly average job, but I think we’re always quite self-critical.
It’s good to analyze yourself and your performance after the fact, but not beat yourself up too much. Pushing through, that was probably the best thing I could have done, because by the time I got into it I really enjoyed it. It often happens, it’s really nervous at the beginning and then by the end of it I’m like, “I don’t want this to end. I’m engaging with the audience and I’m having such a good time.” It’s just gotten better and better ever since that.
There so, so much for me to learn and for me to improve still, but if you enjoy something and you take that with you to the next experience, it will just keep getting better.
Leanne: Yes, that’s hilarious. I actually had a very similar story last week. I was emceeing a big event for the company I work for over at the convention center. It was very dark, lights came up and that was me and I was on. I thought my notes would be on the lectern ready to go, but they weren’t there. I think in that moment when you pause, you feel like it's gone for an hour and just time really slows down. You get two options really. It’s like never apologize, it's I was going to keep this going and make sure improve it or--
Tyson: You’re right. You shouldn’t apologize, but I am the sort of person that like if someone throws a ball at my head, I’ll probably apologize for being in the way. [laughs] I just apologize at the drop of a hat. I can’t help it. Yes, you know you’re right, just pushing through. It’s like the pain is, this is a no-- 99% of the audience is never going to know. Yes, I know it’s good advice.
Leanne: Yes. It’s so funny when you hit your stride towards the end of it and you’re sort of in your element now and thinking, “Oh, I wish this could go on forever because I love this!
Tyson: The problem is maybe you are enjoying it so much that you forget your audience is there and it’s like-- the startup hatch is a great example. I'm pretty sure that ran an hour over time. I didn’t know if it was because I was getting up with quips in the middle of every presentation or if I just should have hurried it along, but yes, another thing I need to improve on. [laughs]
Leanne: I would love to talk about the differences between just presenting. You said it yourself you realized when you were emceeing, as you’re getting up to open it, that there was a big shift between facilitating a workshop with a group and actually setting the standard and emceeing and getting the audience involved. What are the things have you learned from-- or the differences between those two roles in particular?
Tyson: Look, I wouldn’t say I have facilitated as many days or anything like that as I have presented. I think I took for granted how easy it was just to get up and grab a mic and do the talking when someone else has done all the facilitating for you, whether it's printouts or time management or like the event details. I was basically the guy that just got to rock up, take the mic and really take the credit, but it's people at QUT like Julie McMorris and Rebecca who did all the hard work and probably so many other people that I can’t name.
They are the ones that generally make you look good. In terms of facilitation, timekeeping is a big one and respecting people’s time. As much as I do want to wait for everyone to get into the room, I’ll generally try and start it the time it says that it starts. Then from there, a big one for me is making sure that the person who looks maybe the shy-est and like they're retracting into their shell, they’re typically the ones I want to hear from first.
People like me with a big mouth, they’ll always get their say, but I think it’s those that are quieter who maybe spend more time in life observing than they do speaking, that have more important or more interesting things to say and trying to bring that out of them.
Leanne: Yes, that’s really important. Thanks for that. Now, knowing all this, what’s the best advice then that you could give to a first time facilitator?
Tyson: Well, get involved and I guess if you are a first time facilitator you already are. I would love to see more young people doing this. It's really common for the person at the front of the room to be the older wiser one, which is fantastic go along and see those. I have met some really incredible younger people doing this, people like Scott Millar. I think he just turned 18. He is currently the Creative Enterprise Australia Collider accelerator.
I don't want to say kids even but younger people are doing amazing things. I would love to see them facilitating more workshops for each other and all growing through that experience. Maybe even older people rocking along for those and getting the perspective of younger people would be great. Other advice, I think I like to watch presentations of people that inspire and motivate me. Simon Sinek is a great one. Trying really hard to step away from just passively watching a presentation.
It happens even with me, like I'll get sucked into it just because they're great. But, observing how they move, how they talk, how they change their voice and tone and how they pause, it's a big one and it's something I need to get better at it. It's like what you said, time just stands still and it feels like it can be an hour. Pausing is one of the most effective tools I think any good presenter has.
Leanne: Definitely to get attention.
Tyson: For sure.
Leanne: Because they're wondering, is this on purpose, has she has gotten the lines, what's going on? I need to reflect on what she just said. People really start paying attention the second you pause-
Tyson: Totally.
Leanne: - which is kind of counter intuitive if you want people to listen, you don't say anything.
Tyson: Well, I mean if you've been talking with verbal diarrhea for half an hour and it just all becomes the same but you pause and then something changes. You look up and you're like, "Oh, what's going on?" One of my favourite techniques with PowerPoints especially, I know we're probably talking more about the talking aspect over the PowerPoint, for me simplicity is key in a PowerPoint. You are the focus. I don't mean that from an egotistical point of view. People are there to maybe learn or listen to what you've got to say. They're not there to read what you've written on a slide.
One of my favourite tools with a PowerPoint besides just being simple is a blank slide. Because the moment it's blank, people, "Where else do I look?" They look at the presenter. Sometimes people will think that something is missing from the slide but if you continue to engage them, it becomes really clear.
Leanne: I've never heard that strategy.
Tyson: I love it. It's one of my favourites.
Leanne: Is it just a black slide?
Tyson: Yes, it can be black or it can just be the word disappears off whatever colour background you have.
Leanne: Nice. I’m going to start using that. That's really good, thank you.
Tyson: Yes, it’s cool.
Leanne: I'm interested to hear how doing all the stuff that you're doing at QUT Business School, the interviews that you're doing, how that's played out and helped you in your business life. You've created this or co-created this app for mechanics. My husband's a mechanic.
Tyson: Yes, awesome. I have to have a chat with you afterwards.
Leanne: Definitely. Talk to us-- I'd love to hear more about the app how it started. Then have you noticed that your skills in this area in terms of negotiating with other people have improved because of the communication, your skills that you're developing at the University? How has it played out?
Tyson: Yes, I think they probably feed into each other. For a long time, I like the concept of being a bit of a chameleon and not just, ah, they put their hands on their hips. You put your hands on your hips. I think it's a bit more subconscious than that for me of trying to emulate how people are. Maybe it comes down to whether they're engaging with you and being a bit attuned to that and trying to talk you know on the same level. I don't mean like if someone's not as book smart as you, talk like them. It's just the case of finding what is of interest to them and really diving into that.
I'm probably giving a terrible answer to this. For me, when it's been out there with the workshops, it's definitely been challenging for sure, as at different markets what we're expecting. I don't actually know how to give you a good answer for that one. In terms of how it started anyway, mum and dad have been running Ultra Tune Capalaba for the last must be 12, 13 years. Dad's background, as I said, 20 years military and then basically government jobs since then but then got into private enterprise.
They didn’t quite realize how bad the reputation was of the mechanic industry. I'm sure you know it all too well. Dad being dad, just thought of innovative ways to change that and started taking photos of absolutely everything they did. He would have with the mechanics on the floor digital cameras and he would be taking this onto the computer. When any customer came in, then he would just be showing them the work that that actually done and build that trust and transparency with them.
It wouldn't matter if they're a young dude who was a red head and knew everything about cars or a young female who maybe wasn't as sure. Dad would just treat everyone the same and still does. I think he's the only mechanic that I can find that has nearly 100 five-star reviews on Facebook.
Leanne: No, that’s incredible.
Tyson: A lot of it comes down to that trust that he's been able to build. He was going through this whole digital process but it was a pain because you'd have to get the SD card out of the camera, then you'd have to archive them once the photos were too much for the computer and then dig them up for the archive. They were kind of disparate. They were all over the computer, different hard drives. I was like, "Well, dad, we're nerds and we need something to work on. We'll build an app."
We've kind of learned that maybe dad is the exception to the rule. Maybe that's one of the challenges with the app, finding independent who have the time and resources and inclination to be as transparent. We turn into an app and we're almost daily getting people, like the people that have their cars serviced, signing up so that they can keep their visual history. We don't know where we're going to take it yet. We've had some really interesting conversations with car manufacturers and some larger dealer groups. It's still going to be a long journey for us. But the results from car owners themselves has been really fascinating.
Leanne: So like a really great challenge as well.
Tyson: Yes, always a challenge with staff.
Leanne: Yes, and kind of reminds me of I've got some friends that I work with that have kids in childcare. They're often getting photos sent to them during the day. I think it's the same kind of concept that develops that trust in a way.
Tyson: Transparency will be the norm for sure.
Leanne: I'm comparing kids to cars. I probably shouldn't. Yes, it is, transparency is the new norm. I think you’re absolutely right. The automotive industry, going for something and you come out and it's $3,000, and you think, "I don’t know. Was that worth it? Did I need that"
Tyson: Maybe it helps remove some of that buyer's remorse when it's like, okay, well I knew I had to pay and I really believed that I had to get brake pads. You can have someone that needed brake pads but it wasn't communicated in the same way. They're going to give you a one star because of a miscommunication. Whereas, I believe we're big on the communication piece. I often say we're not workshop software, we're transparency and communication. It will apply to so many different industries and I think we've just started with automotive.
Leanne: I wonder how that would work in a group facilitation kind of setting. If you're running a two-day workshop, you're taking-- I do it anyway and I know a lot of facilitators do is kind of document photos of activities they've done. The group loves it because I get a souvenir of the time they've spent together.
Tyson: Totally.
Leanne: I guess your client would also benefit because they can say, "Oh, wow."
Tyson: People are engaged.
Leanne: Is there anything else that you want to share with our audience about facilitating? Actually, the other thing I want to talk to you is about something we touched on before we hit the record button. This is just an interesting thing. It doesn't actually relate to facilitation but it relates to challenges. You mentioned that you've spent, what, over 400 days just having a cold shower every day. I'd love to hear more about that. Can you share why you do that with our listeners?
Tyson: Why I do that? Because I'm weird. No, so it started as a way to break complacency. It was a bit of a challenging time just with the wrapping up of one business and starting another one. At first, it was just a way to break that complacency to get in the shower to-- it's that mental break of like-- it really snaps you out of just the mundaneness of the morning maybe. It was a reminder for me that if cold water was the worst part of my day, then life isn't too bad. So it's just cold water. Saves massively on the bills as well I want to say.
The challenge was it was a bit of accountability to my co-founders was that I would do it until we were profitable because cold showers suck and I say that in jest. They're great for some things but when you're tired and cold, they really do suck. I said, look, until we're profitable, I'll have cold showers. Then after a period of time, especially through the winter months and I could see the balance sheet, it was clear we were not going to be profitable, not in the near term.
I just said, I'm going to set a new milestone that is still I think admirable and I'll do 12 months. Then I got to the 12 month mark and I built up such a good streak and I was like-- I continued to do this for myself. I pushed the goalposts. I said, well, look, I need something to actually give it some finality. What I'll do is, after Spartan Race which is another challenge from abroad that I just completed, after Spartan Race I'll have a cold beer and a hot shower, because I also took four months off drinking at the beginning of the year.
Basically, did that and then it always like, oh, look I've done Spartan Race but maybe I'll just go till the 400 day mark. Then after a while, I realized that I well surpassed it. Last week, I had my first hot shower in a while. It was amazing. Especially, like I think San Francisco was the hardest period because I was sick and it was winter, and yes, I'm an idiot. But I got through and it was one of those things, it's really not bad.
Leanne: It’s character building.
Tyson: It's certainly the character building.
Leanne: You had a few of those in the military as well I'd imagine.
Tyson: Yes, I mean you know being at bush especially on exercising Malaysia at times, back is covered in prickly heat. You've got the radio and all ammo and webbing on you. You're dehydrated and you're living
in torrential rain for weeks on end sometimes and you forget how much you appreciate porcelain when you get back to a bathroom.
[laughter]
Yes, character building for sure.
Leanne: Character building. It's been fantastic having you on the show.
Tyson: Thank you, likewise.
Leanne: I think you've got so many other stories to share, possibly that don't fit under the theme of facilitation, but it's really interesting character building stories. I've spoken to a few facilitators who always talk about the preparation and what they need to do to get them self focused. I haven't personally tried the cold shower, but maybe that's something that I will do. I love the hot and cold as a recovery method after playing sport, but I've never done it before. It would definitely wake you up I think -
Tyson: For sure.
Leanne: - if you hadn't had much sleep. Thank you so much.
Episode 18: Help! Suggestions needed for facilitating a two hour workshop. Listener Q&A
In today’s episode I respond to a listener’s question - I do these listener Q&A’s from time to time, to give you some practical insight into how I facilitate and approach situations.
In today’s episode I respond to a listener’s question - I do these listener Q&A’s from time to time, to give you some practical insight into how I facilitate and approach situations.
Today’s question is from Joanne Alilovic from 3D HR Legal.
Like me, Jo likes to do things a little bit differently.
In her business she takes her legal knowledge, combines that with her HR skills to help create tailored polices and procedures for individual businesses.
Her question is:
I have a client who wants to throw out their existing human resources manual and start fresh. We are thinking of creating documents such as a Code of Conduct, a performance management policy, complaints procedure etc.
In order to create something that is truly reflective of the workplace and the people who work in it, we decided it would be good to get the staff involved.
So we have scheduled a 2 hour facilitation session to discuss the types of policies and procedures they need, and the content for them.
Do you have any suggestions on how to run this session?
Do you have a question you'd like me to answer on the show?
If you have a question you’d like to send through, either tweet it to me @leannehughes or send me an email – hello@firsttimefacilitator.com.
Resources mentioned on the show
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Episode transcript
Episode 17: The 45 year group facilitation experiment (and how I'm still learning) with Bob Dick
Bob Dick is a change agent and facilitator who has been in the business 45 years. He believes that teachers don't teach, learners learn. In this episode we talk about the difference in process and content, the power of action learning, and how he helps his groups transfer learnings from a workshop, back into the real world.
Bob Dick is a change agent and facilitator who has been in the business 45 years. He believes that teachers don't teach, learners learn. In this episode we talk about the difference in process and content, the power of action learning, and how he helps his groups transfer learnings from a workshop, back into the real world.
Bob also shares his thoughts on how we can teach leaders the facilitation skills that are rapidly becoming a vital skill. The most inspiring part? After being in the game for 45 years he still experiments with his facilitation style and approaches.
What you'll learn in this episode
The difference between content and process and how you can effectively manage a group by looking at the process
How strategically arranging furniture can change your participants' perceptions of the learning environment
Why teachers don't teach, learners learn
Strategies to keep learning and improving as a facilitator
Why Bob doesn't use technology in his workshops
How to deal with conflict within a group
Dealing with your nerves before a workshop
The importance of vulnerability and authenticity
How to turn commitment into action once the workshop is over
About our guest
Bob Dick independent scholar, an educator, facilitator, coach, and change consultant. He has 45 years experience and started an Industrial Psychology for the Department of Labour. He helps people to change their work, learning and life.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Action Research and Action Learning for community and organisational change
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Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally.
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Show transcript
View the full podcast transcript from my conversation with Bob Dick.
Quote of the episode
Bob describes his safety net: "If the process isn’t working, I will drop the content and engage with the participants about why the process isn't working. I'll invite them to join me in figuring out what process will work better for all of us".
Episode 16: How to strengthen your facilitation by connecting, teaching and landing with Adam Mustoe
In this episode, we hear from Adam Mustoe – a Gallup certified Strengths Coach and second-generation pastor. He uses an assessment tool called CliftonStrengths to help people find the intersection of their unique talents and rewarding work.
In this episode, we hear from Adam Mustoe – a Gallup certified Strengths Coach and second-generation pastor. He uses an assessment tool called CliftonStrengths to help people find the intersection of their unique talents and rewarding work.
The CliftonStrengths assessment is based on 40 years of research by the Gallup corporation where it reveals 34 potential strengths- our natural ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Adam shares his story on how he found his strengths in 2009, how it changed his life, and how he is changing the lives of others – one workshop at a time.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How to bring out the element of “surprise” in your workshop delivery
How Adam developed his storytelling skills
Story of how he found his “Strengths” in 2009 and how this changed his life
His experience on some challenging workshops he facilitated and some practical advice for first time facilitators
The 50 mile rule and how, as a facilitator, you can use this to your advantage
What prompted Adam to get the Clifton Strengths accreditation
Adam shares his top 5 strengths and how it helped him in his career
How to use your strengths outside of the corporate world.
Resources mentioned:
Connect with Adam
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First Time Facilitator podcast transcript (Episode 15)
Leanne: Our guest today is a leadership and engagement coach, workshop facilitator, speaker, executive coach, and psychologist with a simple no-nonsense approach to building leaders and businesses. Her natural way of engaging with people means that she's just as comfortable in the boardroom as she is on the factory floor. That's a fantastic description. Welcome to the show Therese Lardner.
Therese Lardner: Thank you so much for having me.
Leanne: It's great to have you here. Now, Therese and I met each other as we were both speakers at Disrupt HR last year. I completely agree the way that she comes across is effortless and completely natural. Now, Therese that's I know a bit about you, but I'd love you to share with our listeners. How did you enter the world of this career in terms of training facilitating and working with businesses?
Therese: Sure. I started out straight from school, going into psychology. Not really knowing exactly what it is that that meant, and what that was going to entail, but knew that I always wanted to work with people and loved working with people. Fast forward through my degree and getting out into the workplace as an organizational development consultant, one of the first things that I was tasked with doing as a recent graduate was facilitating workshops and training. Which for a new grad was completely nerve-wracking, but I was still talking about topics that I really enjoyed.
Things like change management and leadership. Back then it was the multi-generational workforce, which is gained a lot of pace these days, but 10 years ago that was a really big topic. I was thrust into the world of facilitation you could say, [laughs] but have always enjoyed being with people and being in front of people as well. I don't mind being on a stage that's for sure.
[laughter]
Leanne: That would have been very daunting. Did anything in university prepare you for actually stepping up in front of corporate people and trying to communicate, or change their opinion, shift their behavior?
Therese: In small ways, yes. What I really learned in terms of the transition from university into the workplace is that I almost had to forget all of my academic training, how we would structure arguments. It was all around what will happen as opposed to what may happen. May is a big word in psychology.
[laughter]
We like to catch all kinds of things, but the language that you use presenting to a corporate audience is very different. As I said, how you structure the argument is quite different. I really had to navigate my way through that vocabulary and that structure to be able to connect with the corporate audience. I think one of the best pieces of advice I was given when I was starting out and facilitating, rightly or wrongly, was that you know more about this topic than your audience will. If you use a wrong word here or there, if you mark up the order that the content is meant to be in and you revised version three instead of version two, they're not really going to know.
What they're going to remember are the key objectives that you were going to take them through. The key elements that they had to walk away with, as opposed to a misstep here and there. That really took the weight off my shoulders as I was starting out.
Leanne: That's really good advice. It's all about what's the end goal here, and the journey, you might have an idea of what that map looks like, but I think you do find in facilitation depending on where the conversation goes or what stories are brought up with your group, instead of going from ABC, you might go AC through to B and--
Therese: It's absolutely okay. [laughs]
Leanne: I'd love to talk about the language. Coming from an academic background you talk a lot, might use some big words or talk about statistic. I really need to back up a lot of what you say with facts and evidence. It's a very evidence-based approach being a science. How did you lose that, not armor, but that vocabulary and switch over to more of the corporate talk where you could relate to more people?
Therese: I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you were talking about outcomes. It really is about what is it that this person will walk away with, as opposed to what will make me as the facilitator seeing the smartest person in the room, and what's the biggest word I could use to possibly describe that. In terms of what problem you're solving and the outcome that they need to walk away with, that's what you really focus in on when you're shifting that language away from the very scientific or the very academic.
Leanne: I love it. You've come from this background and now you travel quite interstate, to mine sites, construction sites, but you're also very comfortable in boardrooms. When preparing for the different types of audiences. Do you do anything--? How do you prepare for that? Do you dress differently? Do you come in with different approaches? What does that look like for you?
Therese: It will vary depending on the client and what it is that I'm doing. Sometimes I will dress differently. Particularly if I'm out on site if I'm out in a rural or remote area. If I'm wearing PPE, there's no use wearing high heels, it's just not going to work. [laughs] Sometimes I do dress differently. It's really about understanding what the drivers and motivators of my audience are?
What's important to them? What drives, what motivates them? What do they need out of the communication? Then, going from there. Sometimes that might mean me using slightly different language, different ways of explaining things, and sometimes in multiple ways of explaining things if I've got a wide variety of people in the room. It would just depend on who I'm speaking with.
Leanne: Now, you mentioned earlier that you're very comfortable on stage. That came across with your speech last year. You absolutely killed it. laughs]
Therese: Thank you.
Leanne: Have you always had that confidence? Have you always felt comfortable presenting in front of people growing up, or is it something that now that you're doing more of it, it's just evolved and now over the course of the years you've got this great experience under your belt?
Therese: A bit of both. As a fairly young child, I was involved in lots of choral work. Lots of choirs and voice work and singing. That just gave me a natural level of comfort with being in front of potentially thousands of people and that being okay. As a young kid I heard that, but then moving into the workplace you have this extra pressure of judgment that you don't necessarily have outside of that environment.
I certainly had to overcome what do they think of me or I've said the wrong word or I'm losing track of this. Certainly had to overcome that but have always had that level of confidence in terms of being in front of people to fall back on. There's always been a bit of a performer and me. [laughs]
Leanne: That is so cool. I never knew that about you. It's just fascinating.
Therese: There you go.
Leanne: I think the best thing about this is that it doesn't matter what industry you're from, there's always something to take away that will give you that confidence. Love that, Now, I'd love to talk about an upcoming trip that you have on. Would you like to share that with the audience?
Therese: I'm off to New York shortly to speak at a World Summit on positive psychology, mindfulness and psychotherapy. It's a very long title.
Leanne: Tell us, how did you score that gig? I'd love to hear that. Also, what are you sharing with the audience over there?
Therese: Sure. The story behind this is very serendipitous. I had started out in the land of Twitter, which I don't still really understand. I'm not big on tech, but I'm getting there. I had accidentally followed a conference. Then, they got in touch with me, obviously having seen my website and looked at some of my work on LinkedIn externally and said, "Would you like to present?" I submitted an abstract, they loved it and the rest is history. [laughs]
Leanne: Congratulations.
Therese: Thank you.
Leanne: I could virtually give you a high five now. Love to hear what you're sharing with them.
Therese: One of my biggest areas of passion is around employee engagement. I'll be talking through the future of employee engagement and how what we'll be doing for the last decade or so really isn't working and some different ways forward. I've done some very cool research and partnered with an organization here in Australia to do that and to trial an awesome app that has just come onto the market as well, based on my research so yes.
Leanne: Nice. Now, a lot of our listeners, they aren't actually full-time speakers, they all work in-- Well, the most of them that I've heard from, work in organizations, a lot of them and are in HR roles. I'd love to hear what's one take away regarding employee engagement? I guess that we've done wrong. That we can change for the future.
Therese: Yes. I don't know that we've done it wrong, but it's not working. If we keep on doing the same old thing, we're going to get the same old results. In my mind, the biggest thing is that we're focusing on head engagement. We're focusing on are we giving people interesting work? Are we giving them the right salary, the right benefits? Have I communicated a compelling vision? Which is all very important, but what the research is telling us and what we know from our experience as well, is that we need to engage people's hearts. We need to provide that inspiration.
We need to make sure that the work they're doing is energizing. That they have that sense of flow and connection to what they're doing in their team. That's the future of engagement is head and heart engagement. In the context of leading from an area of growth. Making sure that we're investing in our people. My real passion is that head and heart engagement.
Leanne: That is such great terminology. Head and heart. From what you're saying, I think you're absolutely right in terms of creating that flow in your work because you can work on some assignments and it plays to your strengths. If something isn't-- You're not losing time involved when you're actually working through it and time just seems like it goes on. It's gone so quickly. You're not actually structuring that work in the right way. That's really interesting. Are there any sort of practical takeaways that a leader, who's out at say a project or at a site knowing that, what's something that they could do to start bringing in the hearts of their staff?
Therese: It might sound very simple, but the simplest things are often the most powerful. It's having real conversations with people. Not the superficial stuff. Not the, "Hi. How are you going?" It's, "What's going on for you at the moment?" Really getting to understand some terminology that I used earlier. Understanding what drives and motivates them. What gets them out of bed? What puts fire in their belly? Because it might be their work or it might be something else.
Even if it's something else, you can't hope to connect someone to their work unless you understand what drives and motivates them. I think that's the essential part that's missing from engagement as well. There's real conversations that backs up all the surveys and all the steps that we do to really understand what makes people tick. How we can connect what they love into what we would love them to do.
Leanne: That sounds very similar. You recommended a book to me when I last saw you. That was Simon Sinek's, Find Your Why, the workbook. I have started reading that. It's very similar. I think he starts off with everyone has the right to wake up in the morning and feel motivated to do something that means something for them. Links it all really nicely. Now, you spoke about the practical tool which is shifting the language and saying-- Instead of asking, "Hey, how are you going?" You think something a bit more substantial.
That leads into the talk that you did at Disrupt HR last year which was amazing. We'll link to your video as part of the show nights for this episode. Can you share with our audience why you're so passionate about this topic? Why leaders of today need to really work on their emotional vocab?
Therese: Yes. At Disrupt HR, I spoke on this topic of leaders needing emotional vocabulary. The reason I'm so passionate about that is I see so many leaders who have the internal drive to have conversations with people. They know that they need to have these great conversations, but they don't necessarily have the vocabulary to have those conversations. They don't have the words to use. What I spoke about at Disrupt HR is if you track that back, it can go back to childhood. Not from Sigmund Freud, "Let's lie down on a couch" type thing.
We don't encourage even babies to express how they feel. We shush them up. We tell them that we don't want to hear they have to say. As kids grow, we're not, again, encouraging them to use nuanced language. Does a child know the difference between being angry and frustrated? A simple example, but that then translates in to schooling. That translates into the workplace. If we're not encouraging people to express themselves and we haven't given them the tools to do it, then they pop out the other end of high school, go into uni, go into the workplace and, all of a sudden, we're expecting them to have these amazing human conversations and they struggle.
I also know that the HR systems and trends of the '90s had a lot to do with that as well. When we're telling people to leave their baggage at the door, and not to speak about themselves at work, then we've created this whole-- Well, a range of generations who are in the workforce who can't be themselves. They can't be whole human beings at work. It's compacting in terms of not being able to express yourself. Not knowing how to express yourself. Then, it not being appropriate when you go into the workplace.
Leanne: Wow. Let's just say an organization has recognized the need for this and they've called on Therese to come in and help them, what is your approach to helping leaders and managers develop this vocabulary and really recognize how their feeling and how they should communicate?
Therese: Yes. I think a lot of it is actually breaking down the barriers that are there to having the conversations to begin with. That's the most uncomfortable part. [laughs] It's the part that lots of people like to skip over and "Let's just go and do the workshop. Let's get on with it." Unfortunately, you need to unpack some of that stuff and understand how it is that you've arrived at this spot of not being able to feel comfortable having those conversations. There is a certain element in--
That's done 101 because it needs to be done in a very safe, sensitive environment because folks are pretty vulnerable having those conversations. What you can then do is back that up with some group work or small team work around pure vocab. Introducing people to new phrases, new terms, new perspectives on situations. You also need to back that up with giving people an understanding of the physiological reactions and feelings that they have that connect to those words, so that when they start to actually experience them in their body, they have this new nuanced, subtle, lots of detailed language they can use to describe what they're actually feeling because again, one without the other is useless.
If you have the words without actually knowing what that attaches to, it's useless. If you go, "I'm feeling that my heart rate is going up. I've got a frog in my throat. I'm starting to get a headache, but I can't describe that." Again, useless. They need to go together.
Leanne: Wow. That's so fascinating. You do this 101 first, then-- That makes so much sense. Because it is, it's quite a delicate topic. You possibly are uncovering some things that have happened in their past which have led to that. Then, do you start to get-- I'm not too sure what you do. Do you get them to start thinking like, "If I was angry, how would I react?" Or getting them to think of a time where they think they were frustrated and what that felt like?
Therese: Yes. It needs to be very relatable because otherwise, again it's too theoretical and people just don't understand it. Emotional vocabulary is one very specific part emotional intelligence. It's a tiny subset of it. Recognizing that if you start then to increase emotional self-awareness, that has a flow-on effect to the other parts of emotional intelligence which is exactly what you're talking about. Now that I know this about myself, how does this relate to how I regulate my emotions? How do I manage the ups and downs as part of my day?
How do I use that information in decision making really effectively, in a way that makes sense for me and my organization and my team? How do I manage very strong emotions like excitement, passion, anger, in a way, that again, is appropriate? Because I've got this awareness to fall back on, it's the first building block that has to go down before the tower can start getting stacked on top of that.
Leanne: Such a fascinating topic. Your organizational psychology is also huge. It covers so many different things. What really attracted you to the emotional intelligence space when you could be working on motivation or team dynamics? What was it about this in particular for you?
Therese: I was introduced to emotional intelligence fairly early on in my consulting career. Number one, just found it fascinating. I find feelings and emotions fascinating. Another area that I had been involved in more recently though is working with the fly-in fly-out workforce. A lot around mental health in that type of workforce. Again, given that it's a male-dominated environment, one of the things that is really predominant in that type of work is helping, particularly males, to identify what it is they are going through and be able to have conversations around that, so they can either support each other or seek support for themselves.
That really prompted that passion again. Even more recently because I have two children, my first is a girl and my second was a boy. Lord help them both, they have a psychologist for a mother. I've recognized that how people were interacting with him and his emotional expression was different because he was a boy. I thought, "There’s something here." Then, I started to really look into, again, emotional expression as a child, and how we foster that as a society or we don’t foster it as a society. Then, it built from there, or in the last two, three years.
Leanne: That bit of a merger between what you're noticing in the workplace as well as family life. You could bring into the niche that you're now doing really well in and presenting in New York on. I love how that all integrates together.
Let’s just say, you come in, you’ve done some intervention work one on one, then in little groups. Let's just say then you have to lead the organization. How do you feel, how is learning transferred or embedded into their behavior change once they get back to work? Are there any great strategies that you could recommend or--?
Therese: Because as you and I know, the transfer of knowledge from pure classroom learning to the workplace is pretty ordinary if you don’t manage it really well. One of the things that I really like to do, again depending on the culture of the organization, is sustainability sessions. After the one on one coaching is finished and the small group work is finished, actually going back on a regular basis and holding sessions to allow people to brief and then debrief on what it is they are implementing.
They have an action plan. How are you going to implement that? How have you implemented that so that there's this ongoing check-in supporting their learning back in their workplace? As opposed to, "Here's an action plan. See you later." Best of luck.
[laughter]
Leanne: I love that action plans keeping everyone accountable, especially if you’ve got peer support and you've made these commitments to check-in following that. Nice idea. Love it. In your observation, what are the skills that every good facilitator needs?
Therese: That’s a big question, Leanne.
Leanne: It is.
Therese: Funnily enough, I think that one of the first things to cover off is the capacity to listen because folks think that particularly facilitation, which is quite different to presenting, facilitation is just talking. It’s not just covering off content because you need to be able to facilitate those back and forth group discussions. You need to be able to pick up on the cues of all the different people in that group to see number one, "Are they getting it? Are they engaged in the content? Is there a different way that I can explain something? Do I need to draw someone out a little bit more?"
The only way that you can recognize that is by listening and observing because if you just talk at them, it's about you and not about them. It’s a presentation and not a facilitation.
Leanne: That is such a great point. I think it really relates to what you’re doing in the terms of emotional intelligence space. Actually being aware of firstly, that you need to hold back and listen but also observe and say, "Okay, that person, their physiological response is this. I feel like they might be getting a bit nervous about the subject." As a facilitator, you really need to be aware yourself.
Therese: Yes. I think the other element of being a facilitator is just being switched on the whole time which can be exhausting if you’re doing lots of facilitation, which I have been recently. You do need to be present. You need to be switched on because the group or the team is relying on you to connect dots for them. Again, if you're just throwing content out there and you’re not connecting what Sue said in this morning's discussion with the piece of content that we're discussing this afternoon, then you’re not drawing them in and engaging them in that discussion.
You're not connecting the dots for them and helping them to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Being present and being checked in, I think is super important for facilitators. That’s where I see some fall down is that they just don’t understand the need to just be in the room and not thinking about everything else that's going on.
Leanne: It’s so hard but it’s also a relief to hear that other people are getting really tired after running a workshop because I thought it was just me. It really is. At the end of the day, you're like, "I need a glass of wine, I need to put my feet up, and reflect back on what could I have done there?" Every time it’s a learning opportunity, every time you’re in the room, I think.
Therese: Absolutely. I’ve had periods just recently where I’ve done a number of workshops, I’ve done recently four days of facilitation in a row. You’re right, the only way that I was able to stay present and mindful through that time is, as soon as I've finished, I put on my running shoes and went for a run. Even though I was exhausted, it still allowed me to disconnect from what had happened during the day, get some fresh air. Then, later on, come back, circle back and reflect, as you said, "What could I have done differently? What do I need to focus on tomorrow knowing what I’ve seen and heard today?"
If you don’t allow yourself that space and you just keep on pushing through and chugging through, you can’t be present. It’s just not physically possible.
Leanne: It is. It really is. A fellow facilitator I spoke a couple episodes ago said, "It is actually a really physical job." We can’t just remember it’s all just a brain, we actually have to prep ourselves. Physically, we're walking around, we're listening, we're focusing. It can be exhausting. Not to put any facilitators off because it's a great career field to head down. [laughs]
Did you find in those four days that you were actually modifying some content, like shaping it because you heard some things, or was it just quite structured approach?
Therese: A bit of both actually. It was two two-day workshops back-to-back. I had two different groups. I was delivering the same content twice to summarize. There was a certain level of needing to be able to get a certain amount of content across to both groups because there needed to be quite a lot of overlapping similarity in terms of what the two groups were hearing. I subtly took the learnings from previous workshops because I think that was the fifth time that I had run that particular workshop for that organization.
I was subtly taking the learnings from each one, and modifying as I went depending on who was in the room. How they were feeling. Were they very chatty? Were they quiet reserved? Skipping over content that I knew wouldn’t draw them out. Focusing on content a little bit more if I thought it'd be more engaging. That type of thing.
Leanne: That’s great. Great advice for facilitators on how to modify, or what you need to do to modify some of the content. Especially when you’re delivering to the same company’s similar workshop material. You’re just learning every time and going, "Okay, I think they know this, so the next group will.” Nice one. You've offered a lot of practical advice for first-time facilitators. Is there anything else you’d like to add as a piece of advice for them?
Therese: I wouldn’t downplay some of the fear that folks have around facilitating because not everybody feels as comfortable with public speaking as we do. What I would say is if you’re able to prep yourself, be mindful and in the room, what you might get out of facilitation can be quiet amazing.
You get such a buzz from being in a room with a group of people getting a message across and them just really getting it. No matter how scared you are, no matter how underprepared you think you might be, just give it a red hot go because odds are on the other end of that will be such an amazing feeling for you and a group of people who have learned something they've never known before.
Leanne: That’s very powerful. In fact, if I wasn’t a facilitator-- I'm already like, “Yes, I want to go and facilitate again.” It’s so true that amazing feeling that you get, the adrenaline, but also to know that you’re actually on that one-to-many ratio, just impacting so many people. When the lights switch on in their eyes, and they brighten up, and they start using the language through the workshop, there's nothing better.
Therese: Absolutely.
Leanne: That’s great advice to finish on. Now, Therese, where can our listeners find you?
Therese: Sure. You can find me by my website mindsetcoachconsult.com.au, or places like LinkedIn and Facebook, Mindset Coaching and Consulting or Therese Lardner on LinkedIn.
Leanne: Fantastic. Therese posts up some incredible words of advice, some wisdom on her LinkedIn page. I do recommend that all our listeners follow her on that. I love seeing all your updates. Therese, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. I've learned so much from you. I can't wait to share this chat with our listeners. I also wish you the best of luck. You're flying out to New York on Saturday morning. I can't wait to hear how that goes.
I think they've done really well getting you on the speaker card. This is going to be such a huge gig for you. Congratulations.
Therese: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a wonderful experience.