What are breakthroughs and how do you facilitate them?
Hello friends,
Greetings from Barcelona☀️ where I’ve been working on launching my 5-week cohort-based course called Breakthrough Facilitation. More on that below👇.
If you are interested in learning more about the course please add your email here.
Many thanks for your feedback on the last edition of The Quest. A special shout out to Jen in Chicago, Ez in Montreal, Michaele and Barry in Bracebridge, Joan in Mansfield, and Connie in Toronto 🙌.
If you are joining The Quest for the first time, welcome to our weekly exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning.
You can catch up on last week’s edition 💪The Power of Introverts and all past editions here.
This week we are exploring breakthroughs🔎
👉 What are breakthroughs?
👉 7 tips for facilitating breakthroughs
👉 4 takeaways from the Breakthrough Facilitation 30-minute demo
👉 More resources on introverts
👉 And more…
Let’s dive right in.
💭What are Breakthroughs?
Can you think of a breakthrough you have had in your life?
I remember one.
I was 10.
It was the first night of camp. I was one of 300 campers packed into a big hall. I felt nervous. I didn’t know a single soul.
Then 3 camp counselors jumped up and started yelling a cheer.
Some of the kids screamed with delight.
Not me. I felt like I was being forced to do something I didn’t really want to do.
After a month at camp, I had made up my mind. Organized group activities were not for me. And I avoided them like the plague.
It wasn’t until many years later that I started to learn more about group dynamics.
I took part in a 2-day facilitation training. It was led by a facilitator named Charlie Murphy. Within minutes he had the entire group enthusiastically immersed in the experience.
Over the course of two days, I realized that I loved learning in groups. I just needed to feel safe first. That was a major breakthrough for me. My physical aversion to group work suddenly melted away. I felt elated.
I was so blown away, I decided to become a facilitator. To this day I am grateful to my late friend Charlie who became a collaborator and mentor.
That experience and many more since then taught me about the power of breakthroughs.
A breakthrough can come to us in a number of ways:
A new insight.
A profound realization.
An aha! moment.
A moment of clarity.
A ground-breaking discovery.
A deeper understanding of a situation.
Finding a new solution to an ongoing challenge.
Life is full of breakthroughs. Big and small. And we have breakthroughs more often than we realize.
Breakthroughs can be life-changing because they are often come with a new solution or new course of action.
But when we don’t open space in our groups to the possibility of a breakthrough, we miss opportunities for deeper learning.
So how do we facilitate breakthroughs? That’s our Quest for this week. And it’s a question I’ll be coming back to in upcoming newsletters.
💡How do you facilitate a breakthrough?
As facilitators, teachers, and trainers we can’t create a breakthrough for our learners. But we can create the conditions for a breakthrough to happen.
How? Read my blog for 7 facilitation strategies that you can use to open up opportunities for breakthroughs.
How do you facilitate breakthroughs with your groups?
🥡4 Takeaways from the Breakthrough Facilitation Demo
Last Friday we ran our first 30-minute demo of Breakthrough Facilitation. It was a taster of a 5-week cohort-based course that I am creating through the OnDeck Course Creator Fellowship.
🙌Big thanks to the 20 people who attended the session including ODCC Fellows and members of The Quest. And special thanks to Chris Malapitan and Nadia Chaney for helping with the session.
It was the first time I had facilitated a session as short as 30 minutes online with a group.
Here are 4 takeaways that I want to share with you:
✅Start with 3 intro prompts in the chat. This gives the group a quick way of sharing something with the group and learning about others. Our 3 prompts were: your name, where you are based, and one thing you can see from where you are sitting that you hadn’t noticed before.
✅Share your session aim and an agreement. Even for a short session. It helps to get everyone focused and on the same page. Our aim? Experiment with Breakthrough Facilitation. Our agreement? Try new things.
✅Show don’t only tell. People learn way more from having an experience than listening to me talk for 30 minutes. We spent 15 minutes doing an experiential activity where we shared breakthrough stories with partners followed by a debrief in the big group.
✅Close well. For a 30 minute session, it’s easy to skip a proper closing. Big mistake! Even a quick closing helps to seal the learning from the session. Our closing? A one-word check out in the chat “how you are feeling at the end of the session.” And here were a few responses that took 12 seconds:
Do you have questions about facilitation? I’d love to hear from you.
Stay tuned for more opportunities to join experiential sessions and information about the 5-week course.
💪More Resources on Introverts…
Last week’s issue on 💪The Power of Introverts really struck a chord. Thanks to the members of the Quest who shared some follow-up thoughts and articles:
💪What introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. An Atlantic Monthly article on how we can benefit from learning from the experience of both introverts and extroverts during the pandemic. Thanks to Michaele Robertson.
💪Why Ambiverts are better leaders: A BBC article on the benefits of finding the balance between your introvert and extrovert. Thanks to Ez Bridgeman for the article and Jen Vermet.
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Until next week!
P.S. I loved hearing your comments on my new Creativity Kickstarter e-book. If you haven’t seen it yet you can download it for free here💥.
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