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Head & Heart #34

July 20, 2018 By Clare Leave a Comment

My big baby turned 5 a couple of weeks ago! Ella’s birthday is always a time of much reflection and this year I’ve found myself considering how becoming a mum, and Ella’s mum specifically, has changed the trajectory of my life. Her arrival felt like an asteroid had rammed into me and thrown me from my orbit leaving me lost and spinning out of control. But now, as we traverse further into this new identity and relationship I feel more confident that this path I’m now on is providing me with the lessons and opportunities I’m meant to have. In the lead up to her birthday I also found myself filled with enormous gratitude for all the wonderful people that have come into my life that I probably wouldn’t have connected with otherwise – my mother’s group, working at YWCA Canberra, the She Leads students and facilitators, Lead Mama Lead, my new colleagues at the APSC…


With each birthday it’s interesting to notice how parenting challenges shift from the basic needs around sleeping, eating etc, to deeper ones around raising a decent human being. This post on fitting in vs belonging was one worth reading and will be something I try to remember as Ella gets older and continues to navigate friendships and social structures.


I love love love this idea! If you’re expecting a baby, or know someone who is, why not skip the baby shower and throw a post-partum party instead?


Recent favourite podcast discoveries that I’d recommend include Self-Helpless (3 comedians discuss various self-help topics/books) and Briget Shulte’s Better Life Lab (on the art and science of living a full life). I’m also excited to see that Jamila Rizvi’s new podcast, Future Women, is launching next week. I also really enjoyed this episode of Hidden Brain – The Edge Effect – which includes some fantastic stories about diversity and creativity.


Some people in my network who are doing great things and that I think you should know about….

  • My friend Zoya Patel‘s debut book, No Country Woman, is coming out next month! I’m so excited to read this and share it. Zoya is one of the smartest, most insightful people I know and her writing about race, feminism and identity always makes me stop and think. She’s doing a number of events over the coming months – including a launch in Canberra on 19 August, and the Melbourne Writers Festival!
  • Julie Boulton has an excellent weekly newsletter, The Greening Of, about her journey towards more sustainable living. I always learn heaps and I love her honest, engaging, humourous writing style.
  • Lead Mama Lead founder, Summer Edwards, is running the next intake of the Overcoming Overwhelm course in September. This is an online course for mamas who are struggling with and/or feel like they’d like to get better at dealing with feelings of overwhelm, guilt and exhaustion in their life. It’s a supportive, gentle program (designed to fit in around the lives of busy women). I’m about 2/3 through the pilot program and it’s definitely led to some increased self-awareness around the priorities and values in my life and the habits and practices that help and hinder my wellbeing. (You can also get 25% off if you sign up before 1 August).
  • A couple of months ago, my friend and former colleague Stefan Kraus from RGB Collective took some wonderful portraits of us (and did incredibly well to capture the easily-distracted and not-always-compliant kids). Getting some more family photos on the wall was one of the things I really wanted to do this year, now I just have to get them printed and framed…. (I’m also thinking about getting one turned into a custom illustrated portrait from Able & Game)

My feet (and pregnant belly) – 3 July 2013
Ella’s feet – 15 July 2018

On the topic of photos, Ella uses an old iPhone to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. She’s recently discovered the camera function and has taken (quite enthusiastically) to documenting her life and creating movies! It’s been fun to look through the pictures and videos and get a glimpse of what the world looks like from her perspective. There are lots of selfies and posed pictures of toys and hundreds of walls and windows and floors and ceilings (some quite artistic, some not so much).

I particularly love this one – mainly because exactly 5 years and 12 days earlier I’d taken a very similar shot (in almost the identical spot) as I paced my lounge room in early labour about 10 hours before we met Ella.


The other big news to share since my last H&H update is that I’ve returned to (paid) work following my maternity break. I’m pleased to be facilitating some of the core skills and graduate development training programs at the Australian Public Service Commission, and I’m also doing some freelance facilitation, coaching and training. Helping individuals and groups to learn and change and to see themselves and the world a little differently has been a pretty consistent thread through my work for the past 8 or so years, but facilitation has been a somewhat peripheral part of the various jobs I’ve had. I feel so excited to be diving deeper into this work and to commit to building my own skills, knowledge, experience and practice – it feels like the work I’m meant to be doing. I have some availability for work for the remainder of the year, so if you need some support with running meetings, workshops or training, please get in touch. All the details are over on the Sticky Note Consulting site.


Finally, I’m going to trial sending out Head & Heart updates as a newsletter which may make them easier to follow (for the handful of dear friends that actually read them)! If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. I’ll keep posting them to the blog too!

Filed Under: Head and Heart, Journal Tagged With: birthday, facilitation, motherhood, parenting, photos, podcasts, sticky note consulting, work

6 Tips for Facilitating Better Meetings

April 15, 2014 By Clare Leave a Comment

This morning I received this tweet….

Tweet

It got me thinking about what’s important in facilitating a meeting, so I’ve put together 6 of my favourite tips…

  1. Be organised. Send out any information/invites well in advance, show up to the venue ahead of time, and be prepared with any relevant documentation, materials or equipment that you need. If you don’t show respect for the other participants and the process you’ve committed to, why should you expect them to respect you?
  2. Take time to clarify – even if it feels like you’re stating/asking the obvious. Assumptions are always dangerous in meetings and can lead to much wasted time when you realise that participants had a totally different understanding of the topic under discussion. At the start of the meeting, clarify the purpose of the meeting and the structure and process you intend to follow. If there is anything said during the meeting that you don’t understand, or that you sense that others don’t understand, make a point to seek clarification there and then.
  3. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: facilitation, meetings, tips

Training & facilitation tips: My favourite ice-breakers

June 10, 2012 By Clare Leave a Comment

Photo Credit: Interact Egypt - Play Innovation

A couple of weeks ago, my friend and fellow TEDxCanberra organiser, Gavin, asked me to suggest some icebreaker activities for an upcoming planning day he was helping to organise. This was my off-the-top-of-my-head response…

  • One of the easy ones I like is to go around the room and ask everyone to share something interesting about their name. It’s easy and surprising how much you learn about others.
  • For something more interactive, the marshmallow challenge is fun but takes time and some equipment.
  • As a creativity warmup you could do the circles challenge (Tim Brown talks about it in his talk from the Serious Play conference on TED.com). You can read about the exercise and download the sheets with the printed cirlces here.
  • DIY name-tags? Where they have to make a name tag that not only says their name but has an icon/picture on it that represents something (their role in the team, branch, organisation for example).
  • Or a rock-paper-scissors tournament… this gets loud, but is lots of fun…. Everyone pairs up and plays a game of rock-paper-scissors (can be a single game or best of three). The winner progresses to the next round and plays another winner, while the loser becomes the biggest fan of whoever defeated them. They have to cheer and clap and rev up their winner. And so it continues on and on, until you have two people playing off against each other backed by two big teams of supporters.
  • Everyone has to line up in order of birthday (1 Jan at one end to 31 Dec at the other) without talking. You could also do variants of this…. middle name by alpha order, length of service in the organisation….
  • Another question that is kind of cool to ask is ‘If you were going to make a documentary, what would it be about?’. I’ve done planning days where I get people to write their documentary topic on another nametag and wear it for the day. That way it can continue to be used as an icebreaker throughout the day, during breaks etc.

What are your favourite icebreakers?

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: facilitation, icebreaker

Design Thinking – The Gift-Giving Experience

April 25, 2012 By Clare 2 Comments

A quick post (I’ve been putting it off for too long!) to share some observations, learnings and reflections from recently facilitating the Stanford Institute of Design‘s (the d.school) ‘gift-giving project‘ with a group of colleagues in the Australian Public Service.

I think that this session provides a fantastic, fun taster of what design thinking is all about and why building empathy, prototyping, seeking feedback and iterating are critical to reaching good design outcomes. But perhaps more importantly what I love about this course is that it helps people to uncover (or discover?) their own creative potential. People walk into the course thinking ‘I’m not a designer’, ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not creative’, but through the course they do design, draw and generate creative solutions.

The d.school make it super easy for facilitators by providing them with pretty much all of the materials you need for the course – facilitator guide, participant worksheets, and post-course handouts (which you can download and use for free under the CC BY-NC-SA licence here) . Note – the recently released virtual crash course makes it even easier as they effectively provide the facilitator too! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Journal Tagged With: d.school, design, design thinking, facilitation

Book Review: Gamestorming

December 18, 2010 By Clare Leave a Comment

GamestormingGamestorming by Dave Gray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a really great resource to have on your bookshelf. It describes a series of different facilitation techniques/exercises or ‘games’ that can be used in a range of different organisational settings. While I was familiar with many of the games (or some variant of the games) but it is great to have them described in a single book. It was enjoyable to read the book cover-to-cover, but it’s more of a reference book that you’d keep on your self and refer to when facilitating meetings/workshops to get some ideas about certain techniques to use.

Experienced facilitators may find that they already have several of the games in their existing ‘toolkit’, but it is a useful reference source for stimulating new ideas.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: book, facilitation, gamestorming, Goodreads

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