If you've facilitated a training session or even a meeting, you know that running an effective session requires advance preparation. There also are times when you have to be prepared to switch things up on the fly to address group dynamics. In this article, I discuss 5 tips to help you level up your facilitation game and ensure you are always prepared.
Here are the 5 tips to level up your facilitation game:
No one wants to be in a hour session without knowing what it’s about. Thus making and sharing the agenda ahead of time is key. Making an agenda is also helpful to ensure there’s enough time to carry out the various activities.
It can be common to feel nervous or unsure ahead of a session and the best thing you can do to overcome that is to rehearse. You’ve heard the saying “Practice makes perfect”, right? Well, it’s true. As silly as it may seem to talk to yourself in an empty room or in front of a computer, it’s absolutely necessary (especially early on) to give you the comfort you need to facilitate with poise.
True facilitation goes much more beyond training and is not simply about pushing information out. It’s about helping participants access a deeper level of thinking by pulling information out of them. So it’s not about telling, it’s about asking. Only through those types of interactions can participant truly develop and grow their understanding and skills.