This post is designed to help you deliver successful hybrid facilitations through a ‘back to basics’ encouraging tale that links effective hybrid facilitation to the foundational facilitation and facilitation-design skills that created success prior to Covid. What I mean by this is to build an inclusive and engaging facilitation - you have to first think of what makes you inclusive and engaging as a facilitator.

I can guarantee that what makes you engaging as a facilitator is not the toys, tools, or technology that you employ. They are but useful aids in bringing your engaging and inclusive nature forward, but they do not carry the load for this. You do.

If you care about teaching, learning, development, and building more skilful teams, then please read on.

in this audio-cast - I talk with a friend of mine, Dr Shyam Barr, in relation to how we teach and how we learn. His research is relevant to anyone who wants to make a more conscious effort to learn in their life.

The cast is only 28 minutes long, perfect for a commute, and filled with insights on how to lead through a lens of learning, as well as some tips and tricks to make your learning more insightful.

If you resonate, don’t forget to ‘like’, comment, and subscribe!

This post is there to encourage other men to be more involved in being a Dad… but is also there for any parent who yearns for a better connection with their child.

Being a parent, a Dad/Step Dad, specifically, is something that I cherish. It gives me a sense of ‘vividness’ and magic in my life. And I don’t think I’m unique in this regard. Of my male friends, so many of them are actively thinking about how they parent, and how they could parent better. Being the best Dad I can is a part of how I define myself. I’ve spent many, many, many hours in thinking about what kind of Dad I am going to be. Before I even had a partner let alone a child, I thought about what kind of things I wanted to help my kids discover.

Many of my clients raise a question you may be having right now;

“how do I know which approach to take for the best possible outcome? ”

— those on the Insightful Path

The short answer is, you don’t.

However, there are many valuable frameworks, philosophies, and approaches that you can use to find out how you can uncover what path your best self would take.

“The progress of humankind proceeds by a winding, rising, and falling path - like a temperature chart... it rises and then falls again - very far. But in the long run, it does, after all, rise...”

— Alphonse Mucha

As a professional coach, I work with leaders to help them connect with their inner strengths as they face organisational challenges. And I’ve seen the direct power that my clients can access when they connect with their inner self, which enables them to find a skilful way forward. This doesn’t mean it is not without turmoil - for every path of insight has turmoil. But it does mean that leaders who can look inward can find ways to carve out their authentic identity and use this to thrive in work and in life.

Men’s health. It matters. Yet the influencing factors on every individual’s health are complex and multi-faceted. They include environmental influences, genetic influences, and even socio-economic influences.

This week (Monday, 10 June, 2024), marks the start of International Men’s Health Week. It is, as the Australian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF) says,

“...an opportunity to highlight the importance of men’s health, and to promote and support the health and wellbeing of men and boys in our communities”

— AMHF website: Men's Health Week 2024

…It was only a second, but I remember his eyes as they refocused on me. He looked at me as though he was trying to push an idea into my heart… As though there was a sense of urgency in his expression.

‘We said, you defend the crest! You… are a…. a Public Servant!’. The man was ‘on fire’ with a belief in something that was far larger than he was. He believed that public servants were noble stewards to an institution that serves consecutive governments, and through this, the people of Australia.

When was the last time you invested in educational experiences not directly related your profession?

This past week, I was given the opportunity through a course of interest to find a piece of my story, and through this - feel more unashamedly and authentically me.

How this helps my business in helping others… I don’t yet know. But I’m hoping that by sharing it here, it can encourage you to invest in your own growth - beyond just the professional education, and through this - find ways for you to thrive.

Within any profession there are a whole realm of skills and tools that not only are unique to the profession, but unless practiced, are very difficult to do. This post is intended to help, to provide a little guidance on how, as a faclitator, you can work to help educate your clients, and how you can build support for some of the things that will help you deliver even more effective facilitated events.

Having facilitated hundreds of workshops, across public, private and not-for-profit sectors, I strongly believe that part of your role as a facilitator is to help advocate for the profession, and what it takes for the profession to thrive.

In this post, I:

promote a local Canberra attraction; and

promote a connection to the natural environment; and

encourage you to find poignant meaning in the world around you.

It is an incredibly easy thing to visit a local area of natural beauty (in this case the Red Rock Gorge of the Murrumbidgee River). What is more difficult is to hold loosely your sense of identity, loosely enough to walk a path toward new insights.

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation. During our reorganizations, several commanding officers were tried out on us, which added to the discontinuity.”

1957, C. Ogburn Jr., Merrill’s marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure,

Harper’s Magazine, Vol 214, No 1280, pg 32-33

“It is a significant risk, for the project, for the Department, and for the Minister” my coaching counterpart, a mid level executive and subject matter expert, informed me.

”Yet, [the Senior Executive responsible] just won’t listen. They keep saying, that this is what the Minister wants, and so this is what the Minister will get, and we have to make the Minister happy…but I’ve been here before. And seen it ‘blow up’. And all the signs are showing that this is happening again.”

The long weekend went by all too fast, and already I feel the pull of the chores, stresses, and obligations take me from the calm I felt in the mountain. If I’m not careful, I will let myself slip beneath the tasks of an ‘over-civilised’ life, and forget that I am not ‘domesticated’, but rather belong in connection with the grounding pace of life. That like the wild horses, the ‘brumbies’ of the Snowy River country, I have a wild freedom within me.

If I am skilful enough, I hope to help those in my life, and in my work, connect with their inner self too. I know that, like me, it will help them to thrive. It will, hopefully, help them to connect with the larger values for which makes life worth living.

If we believe that the ‘what’ or the form of what we create should follow the ‘why’, or function that we want that form to create, then returning to this idea can help guide how we build things.

It can help us to create better processes, workshops, interventions of all sorts. It can even help us to create better cultures and shift the system to more accurately reflect what we value.

This is true in leadership as well as in facilitation.

While the video started off as a short video of me looking for a new pair of glasses... it is a sort of silly metaphor for finding one’s 'identity' and hopefully one that empowers you to explore the idea of guiding how you develop your individual identity across contexts.

The work I do with Leaders (at all levels) helps them to explore how each context they find themselves in requires a different leadership style, a different element of ‘who’ they are to most appropriately address what they need to do.

A great experiment you can do to illustrate beginners mind is to think of your home town. When was the last time you saw it as Magical? Beautiful? Interesting?

If you are like most, it’s been a while.

However, the wonderful qualities of your home town are there, and if you can see it through the eyes of a tourist, if you can become tourist in your own home, you can make it feel like the first time you’ve been there. You can experience ‘beginners mind’ again. Take that feeling and now experiment with ‘beginners mind’ in other areas of your life.

The insightful path is all around you, if you know where and how to look. If you are looking to reconnect with your inner best self, to find the insights that build connection, resilience and thriving, then reach out and contact me today. While your path will be your own, there are countless micro-skills that you can learn to help you stay to your course.

My friend had a philosophy which he shared with me (and many others) which, I think, for most things, he used as a guide. He was always reminding me that when minor irritations arose, to put these into perspective and not to get any more upset than I would if I merely burnt my morning toast. He encouraged those around him to see these events as an opportunity to practice patience. With life, with others, with our selves.

If you find yourself in a fast paced, and pressurised environment, where, when you do, finally, get the chance to ‘come up for air’, and you get a sense of a vague memory that you were someone else, at some other time… Well, you too may benefit from taking some time out, connecting with someone who knows you well. And connecting within the power of the present moment in nature.