How to Facilitate Rituals and Icebreakers
Regardless of whether this is your first time facilitating or not, we have a few tips and tricks for ensuring that the experience goes smoothly and you have fun, too!
📋 To begin, take the time to adequately prep for facilitating this experience:
- Read through the instructions a few times, and practice saying them aloud. Try to guess what questions attendees might have and make sure you can answer them.
- If materials are required, make sure they are fully prepped and printed a few days before the workshop. Procrastinating until the last minute adds unnecessary stress!
- Set an intention for yourself as the facilitator. Do you want to enjoy yourself? Is your focus on feeling connected to your team? Do you want to practice a certain skillset during this experience?
- Consider asking for support. If it would feel good to co-facilitate the exercise or have support with logistics, ask someone you enjoy collaborating with or a coworker you admire to join in on the fun.
🔎 Keep these tips in mind as you facilitate this experience for your team:
- Avoid talking too much — It’s easy to feel nervous or flustered when facilitating something new, and it’s common to compensate by using more words. Work on clearly stating the intention of the activity and the structure…and then pause for questions in case you missed anything.
- Use generous authority — The most memorable experiences are ones that invite people to get out of their comfort zones, and they need you as the facilitator to hold the line. Avoid setting the bar too low and accepting “whatever” happens. Instead, apply encouragement and enthusiasm to get folks engaged and moving in the right direction**.**
- Prepare for the unexpected — Regardless of how much prep you do, hiccups and mishaps are sometimes inevitable. People will look to you as the facilitator to see how you react and handle the unexpected, and it’s important to stay calm and grounded. Take a deep breath! When you don’t know what to do, invite the group to share new solutions and ideas. Let go of the need to control, and empower everyone to be a leader.
- Let the timing flow intuitively — We provided timing for each of the steps in an exercise, but it’s okay to allow some flexibility here depending on the group’s response. For example, if the more people in the group want to share during a final debrief of an exercise, you can let the dialogue continue until momentum slows. Lean into your intuition and use the total amount of time you have allotted to determine when an exercise should be longer or shorter.
When in doubt, trust yourself and stand tall in your intentions to be of service for others!