In this solo episode, Beth Cougler Blom gives listeners a peek into the thought process behind effective facilitation. She discusses some of the key decisions and questions that guide her in managing time, scope, participant involvement, and her own engagement during sessions. Beth also addresses how she maintains focus and clarity, shedding light on the critical, but often invisible, aspects of being a facilitator.
Links from the Episode
- EP 31: Perfecting Timing
- Design to Engage: How to Create and Facilitate a Great Learning Experience For Any Group (Beth’s book)
- Lesson plan template (scroll to Free Downloads section)
Listener Creations for this Episode
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube
- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions.
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s services as a facilitator and learning designer
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
[Show intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
Welcome, to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.
[Episode]
Beth
Hello, thank you so much for being here. This is Episode 35. In this episode, I’d like to talk through some of the inner dialogue that goes on inside my head – the dialogue [laughs] I have with myself while facilitating – and try to shed some light on that so that I can both become more aware of that for myself, but also help perhaps some of you who are learning how to facilitate or you’ve been doing it for a while and you’re simply just curious about some of the inner dialogue that another facilitator has while they’re doing their thing.
I think the questions that I’m going to go through today are probably very useful if you’re a facilitator of process, of meetings, or if you are facilitating learning, such as workshops or courses. You know this podcast is ostensibly about facilitating learning but with this type of episode, it really does seem like it would be useful for both types of facilitation, so stick around if you’re either a group process facilitator or you’re a workshop facilitator, because a lot or all of what I’m going to share with you I think you can use in either type of facilitation situation.
When we learn how to facilitate, we often look at other facilitators and watch what they’re doing. And there are things that facilitators do that are very easy to learn from in that way. We can see people giving instructions, we can hear that happening. We can see sticky notes being used. We can see intentional decisions being made about using PowerPoint or markers or other types of supplies that facilitators can bring into a meeting space, either an online one or an in person one. But what about their thoughts? We can’t see what a facilitator is thinking as easily as we can see what they’re doing with their hands or with their mouths or with their bodies, or so on. So that’s what this episode is about, the hidden skills of a facilitator. The hidden thoughts, and what goes through our minds at certain points while we’re leading and facilitating an experience.
What kinds of decisions do we make as facilitators that the group will never see us talking about or sharing with them. We might even not share some of these thoughts with a co-facilitator because there are just things that we think about in the moment before we choose to do some sort of action or not. Sometimes it’s about inaction, isn’t it? Something that we are not going to do because of a thought, we just.
As always when I do these solo episodes, I think, oh, I’m never going to be able to give you everything that I think about when I’m facilitating an experience. That’s really not the point [chuckles] of what I’m trying to do here. But I’m going to touch on about six or seven different theme areas of thoughts that I have and questions that I ask myself, and hopefully that’s going to give you some basis to think about your own practice. And as always, I always ask you to reach out to me afterwards if you would like to share something with me that you really thought I’d missed. I’d love to hear.
So without further ado, let’s jump in to the first theme and that is the theme of time. I actually did a whole other solo episode on the issue of time, and that’s Episode 31 called Perfecting Timing. So go listen to that episode if you’re really curious about timing related decisions. Because I said a lot more in that episode and it was fairly recently done as well. But in this episode I’ll just say for time that I’m always asking myself, while facilitating ‘What time is it? Are we on time, overtime or under time?’ I am very aware of the time while facilitating a meeting or a learning experience.
Timing is something that I’ve thought through a lot ahead of time because I use a lesson plan and it has timings in it and so on. And so while trying not to be so overt about it with the group, I am keeping my eye on the clock so that I can figure out how we’re doing in terms of time, getting through the different pieces of the session and what I might need to do and the decisions I might need to make around the rest of the activities or content pieces or whatever it is based on the time and how long things are taking. So I think as facilitators we are always asking ourselves [chuckles] what time is it and are we on time, overtime or under time, and making decisions appropriately.
I will caution you that sometimes participants do not like when we overtly talk about the time. I can remember in the last couple of years I had someone write something on a feedback form that basically says stop telling me that you’re looking at the clock. [laughs] And I don’t know if that’s something that is just a pet peeve of that person’s, but I remember the feedback and I kind of laughed about it, because sometimes I do say something like, ‘OK, I’ve got my eye on the clock and I think we need to move on’ or something like that. So I guess there’s a question that I’m asking myself about what time is it and do I need to say something about the time to the group or can I just do something myself to address time without having to be overt about it and talk about it with the people in the experience.
Following on that is the category of scope, because scope and time are very related. Scope is basically a way to say are we on track with the content or the activity that we should be doing right now or have we somehow gone off track, out of scope, and we need to do something about that. So my question to myself is, ‘Is what’s happening or being said right now in scope or out of scope?’ And I kind of think about it as almost like a little thing that sits on my shoulder and whispers in my ear because it’s almost as if I have this little voice telling me, ‘This is out of scope. This is out of scope.’ ‘The thing that this person is saying right now or this thing that’s happening in the room that I didn’t ask to happen, this is out of scope.’ So it’s almost like a little person or a little warning bell that’s going off in my mind around something being in scope or out of scope. Or I guess we could say intended or unintended in terms of what we thought was going to happen in the experience.
The next question we have to ask ourselves around the in and out of scope question is ‘Do we need to address this thing that has just come up?’ So sometimes out of scope is OK because the group needs to go there in that particular moment, and sometimes out of scope is a problem and we need to shut that down because it’s going to waste more people’s time than it needs or it’s really only serving one person, or all sorts of reasons. So the first question, “Is what’s happening in scope or out of scope?’ And then the next question we need to ask ourselves is ‘Do we need to do something about it?’
A question that’s kind of related to that is, ‘Do I need to make any changes to what’s coming up next in my plan, because of what’s happening right now?’ So the question around do I stick to the plan or do I divert away from it – either just temporarily and getting back on track as soon as I can – or if the thing is so big that it really is going to derail us for quite some time or even for the rest of the experience. Who knows? So just that whole set and series of questions around scope is something that goes on very quickly in my brain when I’m listening to people in the room and kind of checking and balancing it against what I intended to happen at that particular moment.
Why can I do that? Again, because I lesson planned. I put an agenda together. I know what should be happening in terms of the process and likely the content, if it’s a workshop, I know what should be happening at every step of the way in a meeting or a workshop. And so that series of questions I just ask myself quite quickly as things start to seem like they’re veering off the plan. So, ‘What’s happening? Should it be happening? Do I need to do something about it?’ And if so, ‘What do I need to do?’ So those are kind of quick questions I ask myself all in a row around scope.
The next category of thoughts that I tend to think about when I’m facilitating is around people’s participation in the room. So I ask myself and have thoughts around ‘Who’s talking?’, ‘Who’s not talking?’, ‘Should I do something about people who are talking and not talking?’ in terms of hoping for that balance of participation. We’re never going to get everyone participating equally in a room, but it is a problem if we never hear from certain people. We want all voices to be able to participate in sessions, and so some of that we would have hopefully solved in the design stage for our session, because we would have designed in different types of activities that wouldn’t all be just groups talking in large group formation to each other because of course we know that some people are gonna not talk in that and that’s just never gonna happen. So we can solve some of that before the actual session happens, but still in the moment, as facilitators, we always should be asking ourselves and just noticing, ‘Who is talking?’, ‘Who is not talking?’, and ‘Should I do something about that?’
Related to that is an acronym that sometimes I’ve heard people talk about the WAIT acronym – WAIT. And that is ‘Why Am I Talking?’ This is a question that we can ask ourselves to help us break out of presentation mode, lecture mode, and not giving our participants enough time to share from their experience. So again, it’s kind of like this little voice that comes into our head, hopefully, we’re we’re asking ourselves, ‘Why am I talking?’, ‘I’m talking too much.’ ‘I need to let the others in the room say something. Stop talking.’ [laughs]
So it’s not all about us as facilitators. Our role is usually to bring conversation, bring ideas, bring sharing out of the people in the room that we are there to support. And so the question to ourselves, ‘Why am I talking?’, and ‘Do I need to be talking right now or talking for this long?’ is a really great one for us all to continue to to ask ourselves.
I always think it’s funny with these podcast episode recordings actually because I tend to think, oh, I’m not going to have a lot to say about that particular topic. And then of course, [chuckles] when I get right into it, I have a ton to say about a particular topic! And so if we displace me out of this space I’m in right now of recording a podcast episode and fly me over and put me down into a room full of people where I’m facilitating somebody through an experience, it is actually quite dangerous to be the only one talking for a long period of time. We need to question that maybe natural tendency in ourselves to share, share, share from our experience, ask ourselves why we’re still talking and stop and allow and enable other people to share as well.
So even though we might be trained facilitators – and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years – I’m still fighting against that ego or the need to give advice or the need to share from my experience. And and we all are fighting against [smiles] that all the time. So asking ourselves why I’m talking and who else needs to talk at this moment is really, really great to keep remembering.
Another thing that I ask myself when I’m thinking about people’s participation is what is happening with participants’ faces. I’m looking at them, I’m watching their faces. I’m looking at their body language, ‘What’s happening with their bodies?’ and ‘What are their faces and their bodies telling me about how they’re feeling right now?’ ‘How are they feeling about the experience?’ ‘How are they feeling about the thing that’s being discussed or the thing I’m asking them to do?’ So the thought that we have to have is ‘What is happening with these other people in the room and what is that telling us?’ And we could be wrong about that but we have to try to guess because they’re giving us nonverbal information that tells us something, and we can do something about that, but we have to notice that first. So asking ourselves, ‘What’s happening with our participants’ faces and their bodies?’ helps us be able to make decisions about what to do next. That could be something as simple as boy, it looks like everybody is feeling quite tired right now. Maybe we need to just break for a second here and do a quick energizer or make a different decision about who’s going to be working together in the next activity. Maybe I need to ask people to get up and walk across the room and have them work with someone else, which is going to re-energize them or other kinds of tiny decisions like that. So what’s happening with people’s faces and their bodies gives us information, and then we need to figure out what to do with that.
So baked in there was the thought of ‘How is the group doing energy wise?’ Any group is going to go through the highs and lows of energy as we work with them and that’s a great question to ask ourselves. ‘How are they doing energy wise?’ And again, ‘Do we need to do something about that?’ Some of this, of course, is just what we need to remain aware of in the moment and always noticing, and some of it again, we can get ahead of because we know that, for example, the after lunch period in a workshop is going to be difficult for people, especially if they’ve had a buffet pasta lunch or [laughs] something that just drags them down a little bit energy wise. So we have these natural slump times that we know happen in a facilitated session. So again, some of it is pre-planning and being intentional about what we’re asking the group to do at certain times of the day but then I’m talking here about the noticing in the moment and staying aware and present with what’s happening with the group, with their energy all along the way.
Another question I ask myself in terms of my own thoughts are, ‘Do I need to check in with the group about something?’ So this is just a catch all kind of question to myself, again because I have noticed something happening in the room. It could be that I’ve noticed participants looking at each other with confused faces, it could be that there’s been a couple of sharing things that have surprised me in the content of what people are sharing. And so I always have this internal dialogue going on in my mind that’s playing off the noticing that I’m doing and I’m asking myself questions about what to do next about it. So the question, ‘Do I need to check in with the group about something?’ directly is based on observations that I’m making during the session that I’m facilitating.
I can remember a time in the last couple of years where I asked this question of myself during a virtual session that I was facilitating with a very small group. I think there were only about four or five people in the virtual meeting and I was facilitating them through an activity that I’ve done many times before. And I wasn’t getting meaty answers from the people in terms of the things that they were saying in response to the invitation question that I had asked them. And I don’t know if it’s just a visceral feeling, it’s that question that we’re asking ourselves going, ‘What is going on here? This is weird. This does not normally happen with other groups.’ And so that question, ‘Do I need to check in with the group about this?’ definitely came to mind and I made the decision to yes, I need to tell the group that I’m noticing something strange here. And when I did, they basically said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re totally fine on this thing that you’re asking us. We don’t even need to be talking about this right now. Why don’t we actually talk about this other thing? And that’s what we really want to be talking about. That’s more useful to us right now.’
And so I was able to say, ‘Oh my goodness, thank you so much for telling me. Because, you know, your manager [laughs] told me that you really wanted to and needed to talk about X. And I noticed that was a difficult conversation, and you really didn’t seem to be wanting to talk about X. But now I’ve asked you about it. And you really want to talk about Y. So let’s talk about Y.’ And so I had to make a pivot in the moment because I was asking myself, ‘Do I need to check in with the group about this?’ and the answer I came up with was yes. I did ask the question of the group and they told me I was right on the money and we went and we had the other conversation which was very fruitful.
So there’s all sorts of questions that we can be asking ourselves in our thoughts while facilitating that have to do with people’s participation and what we’re seeing or not seeing happening in the room, and then trying to make decisions about what to do about that.
Following on that, another theme area is my engagement and what’s going on with me that the group might be seeing and how do I keep noticing what my face looks like, what my body looks like because it may be telling a story that I don’t want it to tell which is going to be problematic for some or the entire group that I’m working with. What do I mean by that? Well, it occurs to me that things like encouragements might come into this, or even microaggressions. So if somebody is telling me something and I’m looking at them and I’m smiling and I’m nodding my head and maybe I’m even writing down on the flip chart what they’re saying, then that’s an encouragement. I’m telling them with my body to please keep going. I like what you’re saying. This is good.
But what if my face is telling a different story? What if I have a frown on my face, or I have furrowed my brow, or I’m slightly shaking my head a ‘no’ sort of shake. Or I’m choosing not to write something down that they’ve said on the flip chart. My face and my body are giving the participants the impression that I don’t like what they’re saying. I’m disapproving of what they’re saying or I’m not agreeing with what they’re saying. It might not actually be the case, but it might be the case and I shouldn’t be showing that to the participant. Especially in a “neutral” facilitation situation, when we’re facilitating a meeting, it shouldn’t matter what we personally think about what is happening with the group, opinions that are being shared, whatever. So what is happening with my face, with my body, is something I really need to keep paying attention to with my thoughts so that I don’t sway the group in a certain direction, unintentionally or I don’t shut down someone from wanting to participate because they think that I am not interested in what they’re saying and on and on. There are so many reasons why I should pay attention to what my face is doing and what my body is doing now. Now sometimes it can be very benign and I’m not saying you should never smile at a participant, of course. I mean sometimes, you know, we are smiling at a a person. We are nodding. Please go on. Tell me more. You know, these are things we do want to use our bodies. I’m just saying we need to think about what our body is doing to see if it matches up with what we hope to happen. So if we smile and nod at one person, we have to smile and nod at everyone because we are encouraging them to participate. Now, sometimes people are actually wrong and so our face or our body probably has to convey that. So it is fine to use “negative” facial expressions or body movements that indicate wrongness.
When I interviewed a bunch of facilitators when I was writing my book, I remember Blessing Akpan specifically mentioned this situation that we as facilitators cannot just say, “Great answer, great answer, great answer” to everyone that says something in their room, particularly if we’re teaching a content and their answer is actually wrong. So sometimes we do have to use our bodies to say no, that isn’t correct because the group needs to know that it’s not correct. But I think the point I’m trying to make ever so ineloquently here, [laughs] is pay attention and use our faces and our bodies intentionally for what we need to do with the group and what they need from us.
The other thing I asked myself in the realm of my engagement and what’s happening with me is the question around, ‘Should I answer this person’s question, or should I turn it over to the group?’ So picture this situation: We are facilitating the group through sharing around a certain content area and a participant puts up their hand and you call on them and they look at you and they directly say to you, ‘What do you think about this thing?’ Or, “From your experience, what do you think happens there?’ or whatever. Some sort of direct question around what we think and the experience that we have, for example. This is an area where if you’re new to facilitation and you’re used to being an expert in your field and just answering questions that people ask of you, you would normally just say, ‘Here’s what I think. Here’s what my experience has been’ and you would answer that question and you probably wouldn’t think much about. But when we are doing more facilitation than training, for example, or more facilitation than making a lecture or making a presentation, one of the questions that we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Should I answer that question, or should I turn it over to the group?’ So we can kind of sidestep that question and say something like, ‘Well, I have something that I could share in response to that, but I’m curious about what the others in the room would say first.’ And so we can kind of redirect that type of question to everybody else in the group, which makes it not all about us and more about the group and the group’s experience. Chances are somebody in the group has had experience with that particular question the person’s asked about. So we don’t always have to answer every question that people pose to us.
So there’s just another little thing that we need to think about in the moment, and again it’s a split second decision. ‘Should I answer that question or should I not?’ Or, ‘Should I answer it after other people have had a chance to answer?’ So when and if we answer questions that are posed to us, is a really great thing to think about.
That kind of leads us into another category of questions that we ask ourselves, which is around focus and being able to focus around what our participants are saying. So a question I often ask myself is, ‘Do I understand what this person’s talking about?’ Because sometimes I don’t, especially if it’s in the topic area that I’m unfamiliar with. This goes for facilitating meetings, absolutely, because when I go out and do group process facilitation, I’m often in a situation where I don’t understand the content or the acronyms or some of those things that people who work together share and say to each other. So my inner dialogue with myself is, ‘Do I understand this?’ And then maybe, ‘Do I need to understand this?’ is probably the next question that I ask myself.
In a group process facilitation situation I might not need to understand everything that the group says and in fact, sometimes I say that to the group. And say, ‘I don’t have to understand all of the things here that are written on all these flip charts that you just worked on. But you all need to understand. So if you don’t understand something you have to say something.’ And I don’t worry as much about my understanding. If I’m facilitating a workshop or a course and I don’t understand what a participant is saying I do have to dig a little deeper and probe them more so that I can get more from them so that I understand. So I can ask them to say more about that thing, I can convey that I’m not quite getting what they’re saying and ask for help from the group or ask them to give me something in a slightly different way. So the issue of, ‘Do I understand what’s happening here?’ is something that we all think about at some point or another because we end up working in a lot of different types of situations, with different types of groups. It’s just normal to not be able to understand everything that’s happening in the room. So just be prepared to keep asking yourself that question as you pay attention and you listen and you’re present with the groups and then figure out those strategies that you’re going to do when you don’t understand something and what do you have to do about it, if anything.
Another question that is sort of similar to this one that I ask myself is, ‘Am I paying attention to what this person is saying?’ Because we absolutely, especially with long days or multi-day sessions or whatever they happen to be, we could lose focus and have our minds drift and wander and start thinking about what we’re gonna have for dinner that night, or I don’t even know. I’m just making a joke here. But am I paying attention to what the person is saying? I have to almost wake myself up sometimes in a small way, because I’ve realized that my focus has dropped. I really haven’t heard the last few seconds or, you know, 5 seconds of what the person has said. And I just have to keep giving myself that prompt to be able to maintain my focus on what the person is saying.
Facilitation is a draining job. It is very hard in our line of work to be able to pay attention for long, long periods of time. There’s so much information coming at us all the time, and I’m not just talking verbal information. There’s information coming at us when pairs are working together. When people are in small groups working together. There are all these things that we have to notice throughout the time that we have with the group, that is frankly exhausting! [laughs] Some of us have to go home at night and not talk to anyone else and just decompress to be able to kind of have the energy to come back and work with the group the next day or whatever it happens to be. That might be an introvert, extrovert thing, right? I love being with groups, but I need to regroup. So sometimes it is natural to lose focus. So the more we can keep asking ourselves, ‘Am I paying attention?’ And then to go back on the other question, ‘Am I understanding what’s happening here?’ These are two things that are great to remember to to think about as we’re working with a group.
This takes us to the last area I wanted to talk about, which is around clarity. It’s related to what I just talked about. You know, the clarity of do I understand what this person is talking about? But I’m going to flip it over to what the group is doing and what’s happening with the group. I ask myself, ‘Do people understand what they need to do?’ For example, after I give them instructions about something, I’m kind of looking around the group and looking at faces again and body language and I’m asking myself in my own mind, ‘Are they getting it? Do they know what they need to do at this moment for this activity? [chuckles] Do they understand what they need to do now?’ So that’s a great question in the area of clarity that we need to be looking out for and asking ourselves because we could see something happening where we realized no, they don’t understand what they need to do and we need to stop the presses and add something else in or ask them a question about what they need to ask about or whatever it happens to be.
Following along that is just the whole, ‘Have I been clear enough with them?’ So as soon as something leaves our mouth and we think about what we just said, maybe we realize, hmm, well, that didn’t really make much sense or that could have been more clear. And so that inner dialogue of ‘Have I been clear enough with what I just said to the group or what I just asked them to do?’, that’s a great question for us to keep asking ourselves. So we’re checking what’s leaving our mouth and then we’re watching the group to see it land on them and seeing if we need to do something different.
Again, I go back to lesson planning because often if we pre-plan the questions that we’re going to ask the group, invitation questions to get them working on an activity or something like that, then we can kind of solve the clarity issue a little bit more in advance. But there’s always those times in the actual session that we ask an unplanned question and so asking ourselves if we’ve been clear enough and if it has landed with the group and they understand what is happening is always great to do.
The last question in the clarity area that I sometimes ask myself is, ‘Do I need to help people visualize this?’ Sometimes if a group is talking about something and some people look confused, but some people seem to get it and I have a picture that starts to be painted in my mind about what they’re talking about. Sometimes I think, ah, this is a time when we could actually draw something on a flip chart, on a whiteboard, wherever we have that we can make something visual for the group to work with. That’s a great question that I I ask myself. ‘Do I need to help people visualize this?’ Because then I can just go and get a marker and go to the flip chart and draw something up and show it to them and say, ‘Is this it?’ or whatever. So think about the tools that you can add in that you hadn’t anticipated because you’ve realized that that extra tool or that extra visual can support the group in the moment. So always be ready with the tools of the trade, so to speak, to be able to respond to those questions that you’re asking yourself to be able to help the group.
So we’ve gone through the theme areas of time, scope, people’s participation, our engagement as a facilitator. We’ve talked about focus and we’ve talked about clarity. So all of the questions that I just shared with you fall under those categories. There are likely so many more questions that we do ask ourselves. So many more thoughts that bubble up in our minds as we’re facilitating a meeting or a workshop. These were some of the first things that came to mind for me, and I hope that you found them valuable as you’ve listened to this episode.
When I work with groups, teaching them about facilitation and how to do it, I often like to give them peeks behind the curtain, so to speak, and this is one of them. These are the things, as I said in the opening to the episode, that you don’t see happening when you go to attend somebody else’s workshop, somebody else’s meeting, these are things that are happening inside their head that you don’t get privy to. You don’t get to see that happening. But you know it’s happening. And the more that we can all talk about it with each other, then that helps people learn the skill of facilitation even that much more.
So if you’re learning facilitation or you’ve been doing it for a while and you want to just keep growing in your practice, just keep thinking about what’s behind the curtain that you don’t see going on when you’re sitting in somebody else’s workshop or meeting, and if you think you can have a chance to do it, ask them about. Ask them some of those decisions that they are making or some of those thoughts that were coming to mind as they were making decisions that you saw in the actual session. We all have thoughts that are happening all the time. Awareness and paying attention is a big part of being a facilitator and there’s just always so much to learn from each other to be able to do this really, really well.
If you’re new to facilitation or you’re not doing it yet, you can practice this when you’re interacting with your family and friends. Just have a conversation. Then think about what you’re thinking at the time that you’re having the conversation. This is metacognition in action. Metacognition is thinking about thinking, and as facilitators we are metacognitive beings, absolutely. So the more we become aware of our thinking, the easier it’s going to be, perhaps to be a facilitator and to make decisions based on what we see happening and what we need to do.
By the way, the title Think Like a Facilitator was almost the name of this podcast. When I was trying to figure out what to call the podcast, I gathered together a small group of people from my facilitators group who are friends and colleagues of mine, and we brainstormed together all sorts of ideas around names for the podcast and Think Like a Facilitator was one of the names. We didn’t end up choosing it, of course, because we ended up choosing Facilitating on Purpose. And I’m very happy that that’s what I ended up calling the podcast, love the name Facilitating on Purpose. But I went back to look at the names recently that were brainstormed because at the time the group said, ‘Beth, these could be titles for individual episodes, and you might be able to still use these.’ And that’s exactly what happened and what I did. So thanks again to that small group of people who helped brainstorm the name of the podcast with me. And yes, Think Like a Facilitator did give me lots of ideas about what to talk about and I had fun recording this episode for you today.
[Episode outro]
Beth
On the next episode of the podcast, I talk with Deborah Rim Moiso. Deborah is a freelance facilitator and she writes content on facilitation and workshop design for SessionLab, a company that creates software and resources for workshop designers, facilitators, and trainers. If you heard me on a couple of episodes back mention that this podcast, Facilitating on Purpose, was voted into the Top 5 Most Listened-To Podcasts in a recent report by SessionLab, that’s what we’re gonna be talking about: The SessionLab State of Facilitation 2024 report. Deb is the editor behind the report. And we’re going to talk about that project, which collected data on the facilitation world, and just generally chat about our craft in particular. So join Deborah Rim Moiso and I next time on the podcast. I’ll see you then.
[Show outro]
Beth
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
