Deep Facilitation

Grow facilitation skills from the inside out.

Why

?Your personality – your total way of being is the bedrock that shapes every facet of you as a facilitator. Being able to connect and shape your bedrock with your facilitation approaches allows you to take your facilitation to the highest level. 

Basically we have the belief that for the majority of really skillful facilitators the next level of development is to enhance their ability to shape and connect their facilitation skills to their personality in a deeper way.

Old and new approach

The consequence is that we have moved focused away from the classical teaching and content of facilitation techniques. We don't focus on your body language, how you plan the story line, your slides, flips, games, the layout of the room or the didactic consideration etc. With the highly skillful facilitators we move away from the approach that skills and competencies is something that you can fill up like you fill up a car with gasoline.

We focus on your personal setup and how that impact the facilitation that you are doing. Insights and familiarity with the inner setup enables you to connect different in the facilitation situation and also to shape your self towards others and still remain being yourself. We work with 6 dimensions that together form the basis of deep facilitation.

Flexibility – Change, remain open and relaxed. 

Movement – Direction, trend, drift, wing and course.

Silence – Vibration, resonance and noise.  

Focus – Centre, focal point and attention.

Courage – The heart, dare and transgress.

Fear – Danger, harm and withdraw

We see that working with these six dimensions from the inside out helps to achieve a deeper and more profound facilitation.

Just to give one example

On a regular basis we meet skilled facilitators who know and does everything the right way. But they still have challenges when they are derailed during a presentation in front of steering committee or doing a workshop on team collaboration and performance. When the situation and/or people does not follow the plan or agenda things go wrong for some of these facilitators despite their vast experience. When these facilitators connect and learn to shape their inner flexibility, courage and fear their actual facilitation in similar situations change significantly. Another valuable side effect is growth in personal resilience and giving more room and acceptance of people with different views than one self.

Our approach

We strive converge classicals learning theories with evidence based clinical therapeutic approaches, what happens in front of us, personal embodiment with the experience we have gathered from more than 20 years of experience. It is not easy. Actually it is a constant struggle to find and do what works well. We owe a lot of our basis to these lighthouses:

Emotion focused therapy by Les Greenberg & Robert Elliott

Person centred therapy by Carl rogers

Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin

The emotional life of your brain R. Davidson

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace by Amy C. Edmondson

Theatre of the oppressed by Augusto Boal

Bioenergetics by Alexander Lowen

Experiential Learning by David A. Kolb

Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and, James Macanufo.

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Adult education and adult learning by Knud Illeris, et al.

We are humble, careful and stubborn in our constant search to improve. Feel free to come with ideas, critique, changes, support or what ever you see fit.

Scratching the surface

This text is merely scratching the surface of the landscape of experienced and highly skilled facilitator that engages with deep facilitation. We would love to see you, if you fit the profile, in our 4 day workshop in London in 2020 or for you to engage in dialogue with us from sharing your opinions or as an subject matter expert giving us further insights.

Deep regards,

Nels