Facilitation is Humiliating

And sadly also essential

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here. ✨

did you know that so many aerobic videos are just free on youtube??

Sometimes I look back on times that I facilitated something and experience a cringe so bone deep that it can only be compared to that feeling of looking back at middle school poetry. That “who was I doing an impression of?” feeling. Or worse, “it felt so right at the time, but now, with eyes cleared by hindsight, I can see that I am, in fact, too embarrassing to keep going.”

It happens for me at random regardless of medium or size; these feelings descend on me like an acid drizzle after facilitating something as small as a team meeting or bigger, like a tour of a space or large group activity. It mostly doesn’t matter. 

Nothing changes the fact that no matter what, getting in front of a group of people and saying or doing something, or leading them in doing something is just a very goofy thing to do.

You have to laugh at your own jokes! Believe your own hype! Demonstrate little activities before the group does them! Riff. Fill space. Invite participation. Never falter. Maintain the bright-eyed belief of a possessed disciple.

But facilitation – or hosting, or teaching, or whatever word that describes your version of organizing a group of people – is also, unfortunately, essential when doing something that involves more than just yourself. It’s sort of a core competency to develop if we’re serious about this business of transforming our individualist condition into a more collectivist comfort.

Even as we do whatever we can to decentralize our communities from a top-down structure, even if 90% of the time and space is animated by others, there will still be some small moment in some gathering that requires facilitation.

Maybe it’s starting a round of toasts at your hot dog dinner party. Or walking through a challenge before sending groups into brainstorms. Or hosting a panel, or discussion circle, or mediating dialogue.

And if you’re doing it right, you’re also creating a dozen opportunities for others to step into facilitation. You’re now asking them to do something humiliating!

If we can just admit this, I think it could break a sort of spell that seems to take hold when someone speaks in front of other people.

Facilitation requires so many mini-skills that are terrifying in their own right: public speaking, eye contact, improvisation, memorization, active listening. Remembering names! Navigating Zoom and/or sound systems and/or slide decks and/or markers you pray haven’t dried out.

We do our best impressions of the people we’ve seen lead other people. Maybe we accidentally mimic our 4th grade teachers? Or TED Talks? Maybe we use a voice that we use in no other context? Do we speak with our hands?

look at that facilitator HAND OF MINE!!!! humiliating!!!!!

I think this mostly happens because organizing other people, just like so many other skills that help us engage in community, are not something we practice on the regular. We are so much more often on the receiving end of a presentation or lecture, often from authority figures and experts and bosses, than we are given our own platforms to organize other people. 

When we finally do get that chance, maybe we expect it to be as easy as it seems for those people we’ve been listening to for so long. And we feel like failures if it doesn’t happen that way.

But what becomes possible if we admit that facilitation is humiliating? That none of this is easy, and most of us are not born good at it but we will all have to become brave in trying it? 

It might open the door for a kind of interaction that is more forgiving for all of us. That allows us to be human, forget what we were saying, break the fourth wall, mess up as we count off groups of three. The kind of trust that gives other people a chance to step in, cheer you on, do the counting for you. That normalizes co-hosts and it taking a village and the importance of a collective memory so rich that it feels like there is a whole other brain in the room made up of lots of individual brains.

I want to be in the sorts of communities where we are all generous with each other, fill in each other’s gaps, and tag in like a reflex.

Because we know, at some point soon enough, we’ll be the one facilitating too.

What if you shared this with an amazing facilitator or facilitator-to-be in your life?

🇵🇸 Continuing the call for Ceasefire Now. Aid into Gaza now. I hope you will join me in continuing to call our representatives, showing up (many actions this Friday), immersing in as much context as possible, letting our hearts break open, not turning away.