To get better at facilitating (or almost anything else in life), you just need to do two things:

1. practice
2. reflect on your practice

That sounds simple! But because lots of us find facilitation intimidating, we never even get started. I’m going to break those two steps down to make it more approachable.

Practice: find lots of opportunities to facilitate

You can’t improve if you don’t try, but trying facilitation feels risky! Having a growth mindset helps. Remember that no one was born being a brilliant facilitator. It’s a skill that comes with practice, which means that you can learn it too.

When you are just starting out, it’s helpful to lower the stakes. Facilitation feels less risky if:

• It’s with a small group and/or for shorter meetings
• You know and trust everyone involved
• The results aren’t high pressure

Think about opportunities where one or more of those things are true. For lots of people, team meetings are a really good space for this. It’s a small group of people you know really well, and you meet regularly so it’s not make or break in one meeting. This makes it a good setting to give things a go.

Once you start looking, you’ll find lots of other opportunities. Perhaps you have a project group meeting where there’s space to do something a bit different. Perhaps there’s a twenty minute slot in a wider meeting where you could use some facilitation skills. Or perhaps you want to try something that already has an easy set structure like a retrospective.

If you can persuade others that they want to grow their facilitation skills, even better.  It’s less daunting trying things in front of others who are committed to learning about this, and you can share advice and support as a group. Or even just saying at the start of a meeting that you are trying something new and you’re a bit nervous about it can lower the stakes. Usually you find that everyone is rooting for you to succeed!

Cofacilitation is another great learning option. Cofacilitating means supporting someone else in leading a meeting, usually by doing things like taking notes, theming ideas and monitoring the chat. Cofacilitating for a more experienced facilitator is a great way to learn from them. Observe how they structure the meeting and what sorts of questions they ask. Notice what’s in their facilitation plan – and where they leave the plan behind to adapt on the fly.

Over time, as you practice you will build confidence and find yourself able to take on bigger facilitation challenges. Soon the skills will feel like second nature!

Reflect: build in learning

Practicing lots is good, but you need to reflect on your practice to cement your learnings. There’s a few things I do that really helps me with this: noticing, asking for feedback and spotting patterns.

After every session, I take 5-10 minutes to write down anything I noticed about my facilitation. Perhaps I should have switched up the discussion formats, or allowed longer for introductions. Or perhaps I tried a new activity that really worked, or I asked some really good prompt questions, or adapted well on the fly… I capture anything like this in my notes file.

I try and ask for feedback within my sessions, especially if it’s a session I will repeat or a group I will facilitate with again. The trickiest bit about this is getting people to give you critical feedback! People want to tell you the good things, and need a little prompting to mention things to improve on. Make it easy for them by giving them prompts for both positive and constrictive comments. My favourite structure for this is to set a time limit for participants to add comments under “I like”, “I wish” and “I wonder”. Once they’ve given you a few things they liked, they are usually much more comfortable mentioning things they wish could be different!

Helpful feedback like this also goes into my notes file which I review every couple of months. Usually some patterns will emerge, and I can think about how to address those.

You’re going to muck up some meetings

There’s a saying in my household: you’re going to muck up some pizzas. (Our version might not be quite so polite, but you get the gist). It’s from an amazing pizza cookbook which has inspired many amazing dinners over the years… and also the occasional failure.

It’s good advice for pizzas and it’s good advice for facilitation. You are going to muck up some meetings and workshops every now and then. It’s an important part of the process! After many years of facilitating I still have the occasional session which really does not go to plan. But these are often the ones I learn most from, and they are almost never as bad as I think they are.

Remember that you are likely your harshest critic. No one other than you will know exactly what you had planned for a session. Plan thoroughly and adapt on the fly if you can – but also accept that it will go a bit wonky from time to time. Breathe, give everyone a break if needed and get through it.

How have you grown your facilitation skills? Share your advice in the comments.

This is part of a series on facilitation – subscribe to my newsletter to get a monthly round-up of posts.