Hello Facilitators👋 I'm really curious about where everyone is from. I'd love to make this a mega post where we can see how diverse the Facilitator Club community is. Who knows, you might find a lot more people in your area than you thought! Once I have lots of answers on this post, I want to make a nice graph!

I'm a bit all over the place when it comes to getting things done. I do my best work in short bursts of high-energy sprints. The rest of the time I’m resting, consuming interesting content, and thinking about what I want to do next. This is exactly what I’m doing right now after completing an intense film shoot for a new online course we’ll be releasing soon. My time is split into 80% ‘rest and consume’ mode and 20% ‘produce and execute’ mode (which is kind of perfect for facilitation I think). One of the greatest thinkers of our time, Naval Ravikant has come to the same conclusion when it comes to working. He calls it “Working like a Lion”. He says: “The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is to sprint as hard as they can while they feel inspired to work, and then rest. They take long breaks. It’s more like a lion hunting and less like a marathoner running. You sprint and then you rest. You reassess and then you try again. You end up building a marathon of sprints. Don’t work like a cow grazing on the field all day.” Source: https://nav.al/work-hard So work hard, then rest hard instead of trying to sustain a constant “mid-level” state. Or... don't! I don't know, that's just my brain! Cheers, Jonathan P.S. I also liked this video on living a chaotic life: https://youtu.be/A2sS00egAzg

I'm facilitating my first discovery workshop as part of a new flagship mobile application we are adding to our existing desktop product stack (needless to say I really need this workshop to deliver some results) I have been given the option of having it either remotely or in office, bearing in mind we have colleagues working in different parts of the world. Remote might save the company some money but in office might yield better results - I'm not sure. I'm curious to hear your thoughts?

A couple of years ago I had an accident and suffered brain trauma , this caused me to loose my speech, reading and writing (not that I could spell to begin with). After a long rehabilitation I can speak and read somewhat normal again(still can't spell) some days are better that others. I still struggle with pronunciation, I take pauses when I try to process words, I read really slow and normally I would have to read everything more than once. This made me very self conscious speaking in meetings, presenting and facilitating workshops. Here is how I deal with my anxiety. 1.I own my shortcoming, I make it part of my story. 2.Start with a joke (usually at my own expense) the response of laughter immediately puts me at ease. 3.I stopped assuming that everyone knows more than me. 4.Silences are ok, whenever I lose train of thought or I'm processing for the right word I pause, normally the pause is much sorter than I feel in that moment plus there is always that one person in the crowd that loves to help me out. 5.I prepare for the topic and prectice and practice and practice. 6.I focus on eye contact. 7. I picture a successful outcome I wonder if there are some of you with a similar problems and how you deal with it?

Need some tips from you expert on how you keep you workshop participant engaged and participating while facilitating a remote workshop. As soon as the cameras are off it seem that some participating stops contributing (especially in long sessions). I know this because I'm one of those people 😅 Asking for a friend, thanks.

As facilitators, I am sure we have all been participants rather than the guide... What are some of your "Never would I ever..." experiences. I was in a teambuilding workshop at the end of day one... the facilitator asked us all to come up and stand in a circle. Then they told us that we all needed to take turns and talk about one person's contributions and say what we liked about it... that I was good with... but the cringe moment for me was they then said... "Okay now once you step back the rest of the group will rub their hands together and say "yes, yes, yes!" 😳 I couldn't find the exit fast enough...

If you really knew me, you’d know that… This is a powerful exercise I like to run with teams to get team members to know each other better. Here’s how it goes: “In the next few minutes, I want you to pair up with someone, just the two of you, and one person at time will finish the sentence ‘if you really knew me, you’d know…’ keep sharing one at a time until the time is up. Let’s do 3 minutes”! Although I never listen to the actual conversations as these are private to the pair, I’ve received feedback from people who despite having worked together 10+ years still find out new surprising things about each other with this simple exercise! Let’s give it a go in the comments ? I will start 😀

I'm South African living in Edinburgh UK, looking foreward to learning as much as I can so expect a lot of question.