Easy Songs

Easy songs can be used in a very wide range of ways for almost any facilitation need:
opening or closing a ceremony
forming bonds amongst a group
soothing hearts after conflict, tender sharing, or grief
empower participants, put them in touch with their power & energy
meditation or contemplation
and more!

Setting your Intention

The purpose of Setting Your Intention is to clarify, both within oneself and within the group, what each person’s aim is.

Round of Gratefulness

The purpose of the Round of Gratefulness is to practise the attitude of gratefulness. This brings deeper peace, greater well-being and an enhanced capacity for joy and self-empowerment.

There are five guiding principles that can serve as touchstones to support the practice:

  1. Life is a gift
  2. Everything is a surprise
  3. The ordinary is extraordinary
  4. Appreciation is generative
  5. Love is transformative

The tuk-tuk game

The tuk-tuk game is an activity in pairs which aims at giving the participants the sensation of trust: receiving trust to lead and giving trust to be led by someone else. It has different levels as it can be carried out by people who have known each other for a long time, or it can also be tried out in a group where the participants have only been working together for a short period of time.

Group Input

This tool comes from the Kaospilot school for creative business design and social innovation. It was used when students pursued their final projects, working individually on their chosen topic. The class came together weekly to support each other. The input from others helped to maintain a feeling of being part of a bigger cohort, even if everyone was working individually. Even when used with strangers it can elicit much gratitude towards the group.

Deep Listening

The originator of Deep Listening, Warren Ziegler, describes six modes of Deep Listening. An experienced listener can weave them together or dance between them, for the beginner it can be good to practise them one at a time. They are:

  1. Be silence – Do not respond in any way to the talker, either with words or with body language. Look away. No eye contact. This is not something you do, not a task but a state of being. Thus, be silence throughout your whole being.
  2. Give attention – This is an early form of the sixth mode, emptying. Focus your entire self on what the speaker is saying, to the exclusion of all else. Their words are the only reality.
  3. Be empathic – This is a grand act of the imagination through which spirit lives. Enter the talker’s story and live it as your own. Feel it in your body, your mind, your spirit, as if you were living her story with her.
  4. Be non-judgmental – A difficult practice when the talker offers images (values, ideas, intentions) in conflict with yours! But essential if you are to allow the other to come to the fullness of their images before judgement is rendered, whether their own judgement or yours.
  5. Nurture – This is an advanced form of being empathic. Enter into the talker’s story and help them search for elements they may have missed. Remember: it’s their story, not (yet) yours. Ask a question only if you must ask it in order to clarify what the speaker means – a ‘compelling question’. 
  6. ‘Empty’ – Put to one side (‘park’) your present: your longings, knowledge and experience, hopes, dreams, problems, visions. When you do that, you will find your way to deep listen to your creative side without any limitations. Basically you’re in meditation mode, focusing not on your own breathing or your mantra but on the words of the speaker.

Reflection Fishbowl

After a program, course, or project, the organizing team can use this method to reflect on each person’s roles and effectiveness. Reflection Fishbowl is a powerful tool for internal use amongst a team that has worked closely and trusts each other.

System map

This method is based on a systems thinking approach to problems. It is particularly useful in the case of sustainability since dealing with modern global problems always involves complexity. Systemic approaches helps to see a bigger picture and understand the connections among environmental, social and economic aspects, creating the possibility to not compromise any of them while planning problem resolution.

Sensing Journeys

PRINCIPLES
A deep-dive sensing journey requires engaging in three types of listening:
1. Listening to others: to what the people you meet are offering to you.
2. Listening to yourself: to what you feel emerging from within.
3. Listening to the emerging whole: to what emerges from the collective and community settings that you have connected with.

Go to the places of “most potential” (the places that provide you with new perspectives). Meet your interviewees in their context: in their workplace or where they live, not in a hotel or conference room. When you meet people in their own context you learn a lot by simply observing what is going on. Take whatever you observe as a starting point to improvise questions that allow you to learn more about the real-life context of your interviewee.

Observe, observe, observe: Suspend your voices of judgment and connect with your sense of appreciation and wonder. Without the capacity to suspend judgment, all efforts to conduct an effective inquiry process will be in vain. Suspending your voices of judgment means shutting down the habit of judging and opening up a new space of exploration, inquiry, and wonder.

Life Share

Every participant will ideally go before the entire group and present facts that they consider relevant about their life in chronological order. Think of it as telling a condensed version of your entire life leading up until now.