103. Robert MacPhee: Great Speakers are Great Facilitators

Robert MacPhee is the Founder and President of Heart Set, Inc. in San Diego California. He provides interactive, experiential and fun workshops to organizations faced with significant changes, helping their people maximize their productivity in spite of those changes. He is the author and partner journal of the book “Manifesting for Non-Gurus, How to Quickly and Easily Attract Lasting Results.” Robert is a Founding Member of the Transformational Leadership Council and the Southern California Association of Transformational Leaders, and he is the former Director of Training for Jack Canfield.

What is a facilitator?

A facilitator engages her audience in a deeper way than a typical speaker or trainer. A facilitator first shares an idea, and then has the group interacting with an exercise: talking to each other, doing a physical activity, a game, mingling in the room, etc. The goal is to take the idea or concept and make people experience the concept. The final step, and Robert’s favorite, is the “de-brief.” Individually, the participants will say what the experience was like and what they learned. With this, people get the concept at a much deeper level.

Facilitation works the best in long-format talks or sessions. If you have only 15 or 20 minutes, it’s going to be very hard to use facilitation.

Great speakers are great facilitators

Great speakers truly want a lasting impact in their audiences. Facilitation helps speakers to make the learning experience really fun and engaging.

Speakers who want to stand out of the crowd can promote themselves as qualified to add effective facilitation skills in their gigs, besides the informative and entertaining elements. This will be an advantage in the competitive speaking arena.

Useful skills for facilitation

* Know how to control the audience. Be clear with the process. The best way to learn this is by observing how other great facilitators do.

* Create smooth transitions between the sections of a training session.

* Bring a bell. Tell people ahead of time “you’re going to interact until the bell rings.” Bear in mind the importance of setting this ahead of time to avoid confusions.

Examples of great facilitators

Jack Canfield

Scott Coady