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!

Hey there! 👋 Facilitator Club is THE community for Facilitators or those who want to learn the skill of facilitation, where you can… ✅ Talk about facilitation and workshops (like the Design Sprint!) ✅ Talk about facilitation careers and how to build one (and make $$$ as a Facilitator!) ✅ Share workshop/facilitation insights, experiences, and resources ✅ Ask the AJ&Smart team questions about facilitation & workshops! This document contains important information about getting the most out of this community, so please read through everything before you get started! 👇👇👇 💃 How to get the most out of the Facilitator Club community 🕺 Really happy to have you here, hope you love the community as much as we do! Lots of love, The AJ&Smart team 💛

I have previously shared how to use chatGPT to prepare for a workshop (link in comments). Now, I want to share how one might use it **during a workshop**. Just open the pictures and scroll through them :)) Some conclusions: ✅ ChatGPT as a co-facilitator you can resort to throughout the workshop. ✅ Prepare the robot beforehand and give it context, so it can help you during breaks ✅ Keep the chatGTP window open and have a two-way conversation, sharing back your own learnings along the way ✅ I cannot wait to see the amazing abilities AI will continue to bring facilitators How about you? What experiments have you been doing with AI and facilitation?

For about three years now, I have run most of my 2+ hour workshops with the assistance of SessionLab. I am not affiliated, just a happy user sharing a tool. Before SessionLab I would set up the agenda for the day in a table in Word, with notes and responsibilities, and more notes, but timing was always a pain, because I might change something and all my planning was off. I designed 18 day coach training like this. Then my colleague pointed me to SessionLab that does all this in the most natural way. It helps with timing, you can move stuff around easily, park items for later, assign facilitators, differentiate between break-out rooms, and dozens of other things that are really wonderful. Here's a video walk-through - also shown below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI6m2P2mZPY And when I was ready to do my first Design Sprint, I found an AJ&Smart 4 day Design Sprint 2.0 template that I could just work from - see image below for actual screenshot from the app. https://www.sessionlab.com/templates/design-sprint-2-0/ And the Lightning Decision Jam workshop is also in there along with dozens of other templates to inspire better workshops. https://www.sessionlab.com/methods/lightning-decision-jam-ldj My tendency is always to personalize wokshops to my preferences and style, but having the template and the fabulous design of SessionLab has really saved me time before workshops and allowed me to focus more on the people than the tools during the workshop. What tools are you using?

When I first started facilitating, I was lucky to get a lot of experience early on, but I always struggled with the unpredictable nature of the workshops. I wanted the workshops to come out as I had planned them, not how they went. When I later trained as a coach, we had an improv trainer in for half a day, and I went to do more training with him. Just another half day with him, but enough to allow me to switch my perspective on what works - and to trust that I could improvize. That was the single best thing I ever did for both my coaching and my facilitation skills. Improv allowed me to be in the moment much more - and to trust that what ever I would come up with would be the right thing for the group - and if it wasn't I could figure it out with the group. It helps me assess the group, the actual needs and to allow workshops to go in entirely different directions than planned. Mind you, I probably would do this (too much) in a Design Sprint, but a strategy session can become a team building session and an ideation session can become a concept building workshop if need be. I does take a tool box that allows you to improvize, but when you've done a few of each, - and you take a 15 minute break to re-evalute and align with the workshop owner, then you can figure out next steps. I found that it's always better to end up doing the right thing and not make it through all the exercises than to continue with the wrong thing and finish up on time. During my last Design Sprint, I realized that despite several meeting about the focus of the workshop, it turned out that participants had very different understandings of this focus and the project. Some knew exactly what the focus was, but a few were off topic. So we broke out of the room, and into a different physical room - we disassociated from the Design Sprint. Did a small workshop in there to align on the content and the focus, - and then we went back into the Design Sprint room and continued. We were 90 minutes behind schedule by lunch time, but the alignment helped us tremendously, and we caught up with the schedule by Tuesday afternoon.

Currently I am in the search for some inspiration for songs /tracks for making my own playlist filled with music that is chill but sparks creativity at the same time. If you have tips about genres that works well or other points that gives me inspiration on this topic I am all ear for suggestion 🙌🌟

All workshops are meetings, though all meetings are not workshops?...I'm wondering if/how to take get into facilitation-workshop mindset into all meetings.

Hello, I am hosting a Round Table on the Sprint process to our internal UX teams and am looking to do a mini workshop to make the session more engaging and also demo the process at a high level. Has anyone done anything similar? Interested to hear what you did / how you structured the session and what kind of problems / challenges you looked at. Thanks so much!

Fear of public speaking is surprisingly common, and we all experience it from time to time. In fact, some experts estimate that it affects about 77% of the population 🤯 (I'm not alone, woohoo!). But, if your job involves presenting to an audience, a fear of public speaking can feel like a huge, insurmountable hurdle. The idea of standing up in front of a crowd and delivering a speech, presentation or facilitating a workshop can be daunting and nerve-wracking (I know it is for me!). But why is it that so many people fear public speaking? 1. We fear being judged. When we speak in public, we open ourselves up to the scrutiny of others, and the fear of being judged can be overwhelming. We worry that we'll make mistakes, stumble over our words, or fail to deliver our message effectively. This fear can be paralyzing, and it can prevent us from speaking up and sharing our thoughts and ideas with others. 2. It requires us to step out of our comfort zone. We're often used to speaking with friends and family in casual settings, but speaking in front of a group of strangers can feel like a whole new ballgame. It can be challenging to adjust to the formalities of public speaking, such as maintaining eye contact, projecting our voice, and using body language effectively. So how can we overcome our fear of public speaking? Here are 7 tips (backed by research) to help you conquer your fear of public speaking: 1. Prepare 2. Practice 3. Challenge specific fears and beliefs you have about public speaking 4. Shift your perspective from “performance and evaluation” to “communication and value” 5. Get your body in a state of calm 6. Own your fear of public speaking 7. Hone your public speaking and facilitation skills Read more about these in our blog post. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. How do you deal with and manage your own fear of public speaking?