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Life Is Work - Ep 10 - Neutral Facilitation
Area of Work: Meaningful Meetings 

Co-hosts, Producers:

Danielle Stenger 
Cameron Navarro, LMSW 

Mel’s Mindful Minute: 29:32
Melanie Wilmoth Navarro, LMSW, RYT, TSTSY-F
Owner, Lead Instructor - Whole Moon Wellness
wholemoonwellness@gmail.com

Contact Info:
Website
Email
Twitter 
Instagram

Music:

Intro - King Must Die, by Picnic Lightning
MMM Transitions - Sur, by Picnic Lightning
Outro - Pa’lante, by Hurray for the Riff Raff

Neutral Facilitation

Result: To provide listeners an understanding of the basic tenets of neutral facilitation and be able to use them in their next meeting (whether you have a formal neutral facilitator present or not!)

• Definition
  • A key role to successful results-based meetings that requires at least one person in the room stay as neutral as possible in order to help the group stay focused on the result.
• Role clarity
  • If your role is to serve as neutral facilitator, it helps if you are not necessarily a content expert in what is being discussed. Select someone who is /most/ neutral to what the decision is exactly, and is more tied to moving the work forward
• Meeting engineering
• Result/agenda creation
• In the meeting
  • Open-ended questions (better than yes or no)
    • Examples:
    • “What questions do you have?” Is better than “Do you have any questions?”
    • “What am I missing?” Vs. “Do you have anything to add?”
  • Reflective listening
    • Repeat back what you’ve heard/understood
  • Charting/recording
  • Clarifying questions
  • Honoring agreements

Questions

• How do you keep people focused on the purpose of the meeting? Most meetings seem to stray into bizarre tangents and then when the participants realize time is short, they rush through the topics that were scheduled to be covered.
   

Mel’s Mindful Minute: 29:32

• Centering & Grounding Technique
   

We Are Always Students

• Equitable Results Based Facilitation Handout by us!
• RBF Workbook by Jolie Pilsbury
• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Sharing is Self-Caring

• Self-care - Start With You!
  • Self-care
    • If neutral facilitation - plan for 5 minutes prior to be “centering” time
    • Try to plan a built-in processing time to your calendar right after meeting time
      • Also allows time to rest
• Community-care - Taking Care of Others
  • Post-meeting processing/reflecting (After Action Review)
  • Ask for feedback and support during meetings (Be clear about what feedback you are looking for)
• Systemic/Structural-Care - The Wider Systems We Live & Work In
  • Host workshop about experience/tools as you become comfortable
  • Offer to facilitate different dept/org/hierarchy meetings

Reach Out!

• Website - lifeisworkpod.com
  • Find questions submission link
• Insta & Twitter - lifeisworkpod