By: Erin Henderson
As a facilitator, your skills are tested during forums, but with the skills I have learned and grown from, I can navigate productive conversations in my personal life and facilitations. Some of these specific skills include adapting to my audience, asking good questions, and speaking with confidence.
Being able to read a room, understand the needs of a group, and adapt your plan to fit those needs is a crucial part of facilitating well. For example, when I was leading facilitation and the group was closed off and not participating, I decided to stray from the plan and ask follow up questions about the topics that they were interested in, that wasn’t the main topic of discussion. In doing this I showed the participants that I cared about what they had to say, which made them want to participate more in a future discussion.
Facilitation also taught me how to ask questions that push people to think more deeply than they normally do. These are the types of questions that make people question the way that they view the world. The power to have people shift their thinking is one that not many people possess and thus sets me apart and grants me the ability to change the direction of a conversation to view an issue from a different perspective.
Possibly the most important asset that facilitating brought me was the confidence to navigate difficult conversations. Conversations that had the potential to lead to disagreement used to make me uncomfortable, so much so that I would avoid the conversation completely. However, I have since then learned that those conversations do not have to be difficult or uncomfortable at all. Furthermore, those conversations are very important; they typically bring about some much-needed changes.
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