First Time Facilitator

Send Leanne a messageToday, you’ll hear from a guest with tremendous presence (and a matching tremendous voice!). We all know stories are important, but what’s the best way of eliciting those stories from our workshop participants?  My guest today is David Pullan, co-founder of The Story Spotters. In this conversation, David shares pragmatic details on questions and x-factor activities we can use in our next workshop, using the Story Spotter framework. He also shares a reassuring phrase we can use as facilitators, to help us relax a little bit (I’m looking at myself here!!). David is a fine example of someone who is excellent at building relationships, and he also shares his ideas on how facilitators make THE best facilitators. I never thought of it that way! David Pullan  is the founder of The Story Spotters where he helps leaders and teams use the power of story to build powerful connections one conversation at a time. We dive into the 4 elements of story spotting in this show. He has extensive experience in helping clients sharpen their spoken communications. He specialises in business development communication and key internal presentations, helping clients to unlock the complexity of messages that need to stick with their target audiences. David has been coaching senior leaders since 2005. Working in some of the world’s top organisations and SMEs, he helps clients adapt their communications for different settings from Board and Executive committee sessions, to town hall meetings and video conferences.  David was a professional actor for 20 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre, BBC and Paramount Pictures. He continues to work both as a broadcast voice-over artist and conference host, both of which keep his own communications skills at the sharp end. In this episode you will learn: The stories that you need to spot, shape and share stories: Listen to David share his valuable story-spotting framework How to make your workshops the best experience for all involved Some refreshing advice for first time facilitators How to connect people’s ideas to concepts and key messages How to extend the life of your voice, using the UFO technique What keeps David motivated as a business owner Resources mentioned in this episode: Join The Flipchart Facebook Group Click here for show notes Connect with David Pullan on LinkedIn If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a message Ooh - how’s this for a first time? It’s the first time we’ve had an L&D detective on the show and he’s here to answer the #1 question that plays on all of our (and our clients’ minds): “How can we measure the results, and the ROI of our workshops?”   Known in the global learning and development (L&D) community as “the L&D detective,” Kevin M. Yates answers the question, “What is the impact of learning?”   He solves measurement mysteries and investigates how learning activates performance and business goals using facts, clues, evidence, and data.   Kevin’s career in the learning and development profession includes over 20 years of experience in local and global roles for facilitation, instructional design, learning technology, program management, leadership development, impact analysis and more.   If you’re curious on how to measure your workshop results, setting measurable targets, identifying performance gaps and helpful questions you can use after your workshop, you’ll enjoy this episode.   Click here for show notes Join The Flipchart community on Facebook Support the show - shout the host a coffee! If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageYour workshops are amazing: So amazing that you’ve been asked to share your expertise in a keynote presentation! How do you convert your interactive group content, to something that can be delivered from the stage in front of hundreds of people? That’s the topic I explore today, where I share actionable tips on how I prepare for a keynote speech. Spoiler alert: The first thing I do when designing a speech is to step away from my computer, and go out for a walk! Thanks to Adele Spurgin, who asked the following question in The Flipchart this week: “Traditionally I am right at home facilitating so today when a keynote speaking gig in front of 750pax was offered to me, I just said YES & am now starting to workout the how! Any advice, insights etc would be greatly appreciated!!! As I haven’t done this size crowd in a while. Leanne Hughes I saw your LinkedIn post and although this is not an MC role maybe you could help shed some insights pls! I mean how hard can it be, right?” Listen in to hear how I design, prepare, rehearse and deliver my keynotes in this week’s episode. Click here for show notes Join The Flipchart community on Facebook! Love the show? Buy the host a coffee! Subscribe to Leanne’s curated newsletter If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageEnergy is the most important thing when it comes to your workshops, and I discovered this nice and early when I geeked out on an energetic conversation with today’s guest, Dana James-Edwards. This is a #bestof episode - I spoke to Dana back in 2018, when she called herself “Dana the Trainer”. Through a series of pivots and discovering her passion, she is now known as “Diversity Dana". Today’s conversation is as relevant as ever - you’ll learn Ways to make facilitation more fun, colourful and engaging How to balance or lift your energy levels when required What to do when things don't go to plan (hint: prevention is better than cure) How to create content for new workshops I want to share her website copy on her About page as a way of introducing her: "My favourite word is the F-Word – FUN (Wait a minute … what F word were you thinking about?).  Seriously! As you can tell I take an unconventional approach to learning focusing on fun, colour, enjoyment and making things as practical and relevant as possible to make sure that key learnings make it back to the workplace. What is it that I facilitate? Great question! I have my fingers in many pies, but my 3 core areas are *drumroll please* Diversity & Inclusion, Train-The-Trainer (or Coach) and Agile And if that sounds like an eclectic mix of things that shouldn’t go together and make no sense  you’re going to have to read the rest of my bio to find out why and how it all came about. To confuse you even further I sometimes even dabble in some Management & Leadership bits … but that’s a story for another day. Read the rest of Dana’s story here. What’s new with Leanne and First Time Facilitator? So excited to share that I’m partnering with Slido on their Online Meetings Revolution trend report. Come along to the launch and hear the interesting data + predictions to make your online meetings as engaging and relevant as possible. It’s on 14 April 2021, here’s the link to sign up.   Join the conversation when the show is over with 1300 facilitators from all over the world in our free group called The Flipchart If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageWouldn't it be cool if you could say to your client: "We'll practise those skills at Sir Elton John's Oscars party!". Today's guest has done that :)  Here's one of my #bestof episodes! I'm in deep work mode, working up a new program and busy attempting to pick my own brain.  My guest today is Steve Sims and he runs the coolest workshops I’ve ever heard of, no joke. And how does he embed learning at the end of these workshops? By making people practice the skills they’ve learn, when they rock up to Sir Elton John’s Oscars after-party. Steve is the man who created Bluefish, a company that makes once-in-a-lifetime events happen for the rich and famous reveals to the rest of us his trade secrets for making things happen.  With his help and expertise, his clients’ fantasies and wildest dreams come true. Steve is the author of the Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen, and he has a podcast of the same name. Steve has spoken at Harvard and the Pentagon, twice.  Getting married by the Pope in the Vatican, being serenaded by Elton John, and connecting with powerful business moguls like Elon Musk are just a few of the many projects he has worked on.   I really wanted Steve on the show to talk about a few key things - the assumptions we have about asking for things, how confidence; and your approach can take you far and (literally) open doors.  We also talk about the perfectionism beast. If you’d like to join the conversation when the show is over, join The Flipchart, a free community on Facebook for First Time Facilitator listeners. About our guest: Steve Sims Steve Sims Steve is the visionary founder of Bluefish: the world’s first luxury concierge that delivers the highest level of personalized travel, transportation, and cutting-edge entertainment services to corporate executives, celebrities, professional athletes, and other discerning individuals interested in living life to its fullest. Resources mentioned in this episode: Steve Sims Website The Art of Making Things Happen Podcast Steve Sims on Instagram The Distillery Grant Cardone & Tai Lopez rant video Like this show? Please leave me a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so I can thank you personally. Click here to let Leanne know your number one takeaway from this episode! Click here to tweet your thanks toIf you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageYou’ll often hear how facilitation is used in the context of workshops and meetings on this podcast. However, today’s guest, demonstrates how it’s an incredibly handy skill for life in general, to. In fact, she used the tool of facilitation alone to build an entire Learning and Development department at the company she worked at. She’s a tremendous example of how you can define what you love, and have the courage to go after it. If you want to build a facilitation career but have no idea how to take the next step, I hope that this conversation will help you find your courage to seek opportunities where you are. My guest today is Maria McDonald. As a Learning & Development consultant (as well as the L&D Manager for Geocaching), Maria is dedicated to helping leaders, businesses, and entrepreneurs intentionally shape effective, impactful, and empowered company cultures. In this show, we also discuss how her yoga teaching practice combined beautifully with her facilitation growth, how to demonstrate value-add for teams, how she used facilitation to create a role in her organization (that never existed before!), and how she deals with unpredictable moments in her workshops. Maria uses facilitation skills to demonstrate the value of continuous learning, improve collaboration across the company, clarify mission & goals, improve individual & collective communication skills, enhance brainstorming sessions, guide retrospectives, and mediate conflict.  About today’s guest: Maria McDonald As a Learning & Development Consultant, Maria is dedicated to helping leaders, businesses, and entrepreneurs intentionally shape effective, impactful, and empowered company cultures. Through customized consulting practices, Maria’s innovative and energizing techniques support you in achieving your business goals while proactively developing your people. Her vision is to shift each business into effective paradigms that inspire people at every level of your organization. Maria is also the Learning and Development Manager for Geocaching, where she formulates learning and development strategy based on organizational needs, and creates a culture in which continuous learning and improvement are encouraged, and where employees are equipped with the tools for self-help and empowered to teach and learn from each other. Resources Visit Maria McDonald’s website Connect with Maria on LinkedIn and send her a message, letting her know your favourite takeaway! Geocaching: Join the world’s largest treasure hunt Join The Flipchart community on Facebook Support the show and shout Leanne a coffee! If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageHere’s the scenario: You’re working with some new clients, and they haven’t used Zoom before. You pull together some slides, videos and helpful pointers and send them these beforehand. During the session, you dedicate the first few minutes to sharing features, and getting them to feel comfortable using Zoom. You’re happy with what you’ve created but then, BAM, Zoom delivers another upgrade, which means screenshots have changed.  As we know, it takes time and effort to update your Zoom onboarding calls.. UNTIL this week! Previous guest of the show, Jan Keck has pulled together an incredible resource for anyone who uses Zoom. As a facilitator, you can share this with your clients prior to your workshops - it will save you so much time! This week, I hopped on a quick fireside chat and brought Jan back on the show to talk through this cheat-sheet, how it will help us as facilitators, how his team put it together, and more. Don’t forget to reach out to Jan to say thanks for this piece of gold dust he’s brought us!! About today’s guest: Jan Keck Jan Keck is a community addict. He is the creator of ASK DEEP QUESTIONS, which started out as a deck of cards to help his friends connect on a camping trip and is now being used to facilitate meaningful conversations through sharing personal stories on every continent around the globe. Jan’s mission is to help people feel less alone, so by creating experiences, workshops and programs he is fuelling the movement for deeper human connection. Growing up as an only child he found his soul family at summer camp, in sports clubs and even politics. But when he moved from Germany to Canada in his twenties he had to re-create his community from scratch and learned that the fastest way to make deep connections is through meaningful conversations and experiences.  Jan now lives in Toronto with his wife Natalia (aka Cookie), his son Mika and you can often find him hanging out with his mastermind group, attending community events, or camping up north. Resources Grab it! THE ULTIMATE ZOOM GUIDE FOR PARTICIPANTS IN 2021 Visit Jan Keck’s website Connect with Jan on LinkedIn  Follow Jan Keck on Instagram Like his page on Facebook Listen to our previous conversation on Episode 156: Let’s have a conversation that matters Join The Flipchart community on Facebook Support the show and shout Leanne a coffee!  If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a message“It’s mandatory” - I hear those words, and I involuntarily shudder. Is that what we want our participants feeling before they arrive to our workshops? No! We really can’t control whether someone decides to come along to our workshop, or not, however we can absolutely do our best to influence whether someone wants to come along, and how they feel about joining our session. In this week’s episode, I share 15 tips and strategies you can use as preventative strategies to bolster your workshop attendance rate. It’s problematic when people don’t show up. We know it affects group dynamics, the way you’ve structured your session. If you’ve booked an in-person event, you’re paying for facilities/catering that no longer applies. If you’re external, you might even have to reschedule your dates, which can delay other business for you. I’ve also been the participant who hasn’t shown up. And while life happens, there are numerous other reasons I haven’t showed up to events in the past: I don’t have skin in the game, the session isn’t relevant for me right now, I’ll watch the recording later, I just don’t feel like it… The list goes on! What can we do about it? Listen in. But my #1 tip is to have a Marketing mindset in the lead up to your workshops. It’s an event, treat it like one! These strategies are applicable whether you work internally, you’re part of the Learning and Development team, or you’re an external consultant. Resources Episode 159: How to win friends and influence your online colleagues Episode 114 with Dr JJ Peterson from Storybrand Join The Flipchart community on Facebook! Love the show? Buy the host a coffee! Subscribe to Leanne’s curated newsletter If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageWhen did I realise I loved talking about group dynamics? When I was 16, at a netball camp, we did a team-building high ropes course together. Btw - I hate high ropes, but I loved the debriefing part afterwards! The reason I share this, is because this week’s guest Phil Brown works for an adventure company called High 5 Adventure, and he joined the High 5 team as a lead trainer in 2015.  Phil will  get you thinking about a lot of things:  What happens when we graduate from being a first time facilitator, where’s the career progression?  How do we define what we do to people who are outside our industry?  And he also shares a really great way of explaining work related to teams, and breaking these into three categories: Team bonding, team building and team development. Clever! Originally from England, Phil first came to the US in 2008 working as an Outdoor Educator and Challenge Course Coordinator at the New York YMCA Camp. It was here that his love for the Adventure Education field was ignited, discovering the joy and rewards playing and teaching inside and out alongside such a varied range of people, all who benefit from the experience.  His work in the realms of summer camp, outdoor education, and physical education give him an invaluable perspective for working with of High 5’s varied clientele.  Phil believes that each experience with every group member is a learning opportunity for him, no matter who he’s working with. He also has a podcast called Vertical Playpen, sharing tips on adventure and experiential learning. Connect with Phil Brown! Email Phil at pbrown@high5adventure.org Visit High 5’s website Listen to Phil’s podcast - Vertical Play Pen Other helpful links: Click here for show notes Join The Flipchart community on Facebook (it’s free!) Support the host’s ideas and buy Leanne a coffee If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show

Send Leanne a messageThings that are easier said than done: “Just be yourself!” Why is this so hard? Here are a couple of reasons: It’s sometimes hard to see the label when we’re inside the bottle and this creates so We’re scared to share who we really are with the world, in case we get rejected... My guest this week, Leslie Ehm helps people discover their uniqueness and release it into the world.  As a Former TV host and advertising Creative Director turned training guru, Leslie Ehm has spent decades travelling the globe with her award-winning company Combustion, working with executives and teams from top organizations like Google, Disney, Pepsico, TD Bank, Uber, HBO, Lenovo, and more.  Fuelled by her unrelenting passion for developing human potential, Leslie is now a Swagger Coach, author of Swagger – Unleash Everything You Are and Become Everything You Want, and a keynote speaker.  She’s turned technologists into creative forces, bankers into storytellers, and has brought a serious dose of badass-ness to boardrooms everywhere.  Tune in to Episode 160 of the First Time Facilitator podcast to hear how you can up your confidence and swagger!  P.s. Oh and that other easier-said-than-done-phrase, “Fake it ‘til you make it?” Leslie thinks that’s baloney! In this episode, you will learn how to: See people’s truth to help them to manifest who they really are The difference between self-belief and confidence Fundamental drivers of swagger How to discover your own swagger Resources Swagger: Unleash everything you are and become everything you want Visit Leslie Ehm’s website Connect with Leslie on LinkedIn If you're nodding along to today's First Time Facilitator episode, you're going to love my written companion: Work Fame — a weekly Spublication designed to help you stand out in your work, build your reputation, and get the opportunities others don’t.📝 Subscribe for free at work.fa.me See you in your inbox. Support the show