Facilitation and Self-Leadership

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tomomi Sasaki and I sat down to talk in-depth about her journey of self-awareness and inner work as a facilitator.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We met at an advanced facilitation masterclass I ran for Google at their Sprint Conference, way back in 2018.</span> <a href= "https://twitter.com/tomomiq/status/1334244921574891521?s=19"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> She tweeted at the end of 2020:</span></a></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">I've been facilitating workshops for about a decade. The first few years were ferocious, needs-based learning. Workshops took a tremendous amount of energy to plan and run, and after each one, I'd faceplant onto the nearest sofa.</span></em></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Once things became manageable, I plateaued. I worked on plenty of facilitation assignments (and did a bunch of public speaking about lessons learned) but I was coasting and I knew it.</span></em></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Then @kaihaley and the @GoogleDesign Sprint Conference gave me the gift of a full day training from @dastillman, and I started to think of facilitation as a practice.</span></em> <a href= "http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2018/9/26/building-sprint-culture"> <strong><em>(you can listen to my conversation with</em></strong></a> <a href= "mailto:kaih@google.com"><strong><em>Kai Haley</em></strong></a> <a href= "http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2018/9/26/building-sprint-culture"> <strong><em>here.)</em></strong></a></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Building a practice sends a different kind of signal into the universe. This gives me watershed experiences that blows apart a door I didn't know was there. Behind each door is a whole new landscape to explore, and new friends to explore it with.</span></em></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">It happens consistently, once or twice a year. I don't know what's behind that cadence but it is an amazing thing. You *think* you know the