L is for... Life-Long-Learning
All the courses I've ever taken... and why I don't believe some course promises
Hi there! There are still more of you joining the list this week. In case you joined for the facilitation self-assessment - that went live last week and you can find it here.
If you are new to the list, we’re now getting back to our regular programming. We’re almost half-way through the alphabet series.
Every week, I’m posting a mindset shift I’ve made for a letter of the alphabet, which nudges me in a helpful direction in my business and my craft.
Let’s get into it.
Look beyond the marketing hype
There is no Olympics of facilitation, no objective standards by which we can measure ourselves. It’s not even that helpful or healthy1 to benchmark ourselves against others because the contexts we work in are so different.
Statements like “become a top 1% facilitator”, which you may see in the adverts of certain courses are, I’m sorry to say, meaningless marketing speak.
Which is a shame, because one of my personal values is mastery, so I am particularly susceptible to such promises. 🙃
That does not mean that the courses who make this promise are bad courses. Actually I have a lot of good things to say about some of them. I just deeply dislike the idea of making a promise which is fundamentally unfulfillable.
I wish a single course could bring me to the top of my game and make me the Simone Biles of facilitation.
I wish even any combination of courses could help me get to the top of my game.
I *love* doing courses, I love learning from other people. I have to work hard on not letting myself spend all of my money on training.
But I know I gotta do the work too.
Look beyond training
While writing this post, I realised that some of the best investments I made in my personal development weren’t training at all. They were conferences and communities.
I say this both in terms of things I learned AND in terms of what actually made me money.
I can directly trace a large chunk of my income back to specific events and communities, because I know who I met there and we now collaborate on real clients on real problems, learn real hard lessons and make actual money.
The Mindset Shift:
Developing as a facilitator feels to me like a pretty good example of the 80-20 rule.
If I have has a maximum potential of 100, where 100 is as good as I am ever going to be, the first 80% of what I needed to know to be a pretty solid facilitator, I think I learned in the first 20% of the effort I ever put in.
I grew by seeing excellent examples of facilitation in action, mentorship, doing a couple of courses, practising in different environments to stretch myself and joining communities.
From: Do this one course and you’ll be a world-class facilitator
To: You can probably learn 80% of the things you’ll ever need as a facilitator pretty quickly. Good training, mentorship and practice will support that, but it also takes work, making mistakes, growing in your self-understanding. That final 19.9999…% - that’s probably going to take the rest of your life, but that’s also where it gets really fun. There is no perfection, so don’t worry about chasing a perfect score.
As promised, the training rundown
Some of you joined because I promised to do a rundown of all the facilitation training I’ve ever taken and other investments I made that were directly related to the goal of improving as a facilitator.
My initial idea was to tell you a bit more about each of them, then I started building the list I realised how many there were and realised it would overwhelm both you and me. 😂
So here’s what I will do instead.
As the appendix to this post, there’s a list of all of the training I’ve ever taken & other investments such as conferences.
I will open up the Substack subscriber chat for you to ask anything you want to know about. See the appendix for information on how to use the chat.
Depending on what you ask, I’ll either answer in the chat, or maybe there is followup post to this one.
This will be my first experiment with subscriber chat. Let me know what you think :)
Here’s the list!
This list contains all of the financial investments I’ve ever made in specifically developing as a facilitator. I’ve focussed on training, conferences and communities where the primary purpose was developing as a facilitator.
What’s not here:
Free things - I pulled this list from my accounting software.
Some of the inner-work / self-awareness coaching / emotional support I’ve had.
Some of the investments on the business side.
Happy to do a followup on these if relevant. Let me know over in the subscriber chat what you want to know :)
2021
LEGO® Serious Play® Virtual Facilitation Levels 1&2 (Individual & Group Builds - Online Facilitation of LSP) - SeriousWork
2022
Workshopper Master - AJ&Smart
International Association of Facilitators Mentorship Programme
2023
Applied Strategic Foresight - Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies
IAF EME Conference Berlin 2023: Entering brave(r) spaces
Never Done Before Festival 2023 + Community
2024
Technology of Participation (ToP) Masterclass - Martin Gilbraith & Associates
IAF England & Wales Conference 2024
Group Facilitation Skills - Process Change - based on the book Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making
2025
Virtual Experience Masterclass - By Said Saddouk (aka the Facilitainer)
Facilitate 2025 IAF England and Wales Conference
Art of Hosting Training (As part of Strengthening Resilient Democracies project run by Commit by MitOst gGmbH
Experience Design Lecture Series by The College of Extraordinary Experiences
High Stakes Facilitation Lab - Jan Keck
Virtual Facilitation By Facilitation 101 & Perle Laouenan-Catchpole
Join me over on the subscriber chat to discuss (you should be notified - I think 😅- when I open it!)
Get Started with the Subscriber Chat
If you are new to Substack, think of it as an application with three doors.
1) The newsletter you are receiving
2) A twitter like feed called notes and
3) a subscriber chat - for direct communication. You do not have to use all of them.
How to get started
Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Mark Twain: comparison is the death of joy