Suspend Your Passion
Physicist David Bohm.
More on him later.
It's been a minute since I've released a newsletter and even longer since I've released a children's booklet. I've also not commemorated some important dates such as MLK Day or the beginning of Black History Month. This is in part because I don't want to comment on a topic unless I've had the time to refine my ideas into something thoughtful and worth your time. But also, because I've been quite busy with something else recently that I'm going to start discussing here as well: my facilitation work.
For more than 15 years I've been doing facilitation of everything from inter-agency collaborations between Medicare and Social Security to organizational capacity building workshops to anti-bullying Forum Theatre with youth. Most recently, I've had the honor of facilitating three interactive workshops on Refugee Services Intersectionality and Best Practices with Lutheran Social Services as well as collaborating with Hannah Garber to facilitate an Appreciation, Purpose, and Action session at Unmatched Athlete's board retreat. (These are both wonderful groups you should support!)
This space is thus becoming a place where I look at the overlaps between my youth work, parenting, children's books, and now my facilitation work and how those areas of work influence each other.
At the Unmatched Athlete team retreat in January.
So what is a facilitator?
As I continue to pursue work in this area, I've recently been thinking again about the best way to communicate what I actually do with people in sessions and the many different contexts I've done it in. After all, "facilitator" can sound a little bland and pointless. Saying I "co-create impactful experiences with groups of humans that build skills and shift perspectives of what is possible" is another way I've thought of it. But, unless you've been in a session with me, you may not know what that means and feels like in practice. It may even just sound like a lot of verbal fluff.
While this may sound counterintuitive, one of the important aspects of being in a session with me is learning to suspend your passion. Not kill, stop, let go, ignore, suppress, or give up on your passion but to suspend it, if only for a couple moments.
Checking myself
This is something I recently realized I needed to check myself on and do while I was driving to the last session with Lutheran Social Services the other day. Part of my work with them is to write a tool documenting what we learned in the sessions for later reference. This involved collecting of a variety of evidence-based best practices for refugee work. In full social science nerd mode, I became super excited when I realized I could integrate them into one framework using a Critical Realist Laminated System.
I was so hyped driving to the session where I was going to tell them about the framework but then I realized I was physically, emotionally, and intellectually in a very different place than where I normally am as I prepare to enter a facilitation session. I realized in that state, I wasn't going to be ready at all to listen to anyone in the room. I was only going to be able to talk about what I was excited about.
Approximately where I was when I realized I needed to suspend my passion.
Suspend It, Temporarily
Sharing your passion with others is wonderful and I strongly encourage it. But, as Physicist David Bohm taught, we also need to learn to be able to temporarily suspend it when needed so we can be present with and listen to others in the room. This is true for:
a software engineer explaining what they think is the best design pattern for their feature
an organization’s founder’s talking with the team about how they view the organization's mission
a scientist sharing their research with a community that it impacts
a participant of an intergroup dialogue on race talking about their personal experiences with race
a parent sharing their passions with their children
All of this is to say, there will be time to share your passion – one of my jobs as a facilitator is to ensure that for everyone – but there will also be times to suspend your passion so you can listen to others' passions and what words they use to express them. My more important job as a facilitator is making sure that your passion is heard and understood by the others in the room and that there is as much space for the normally loud people as there is for the normally quite people. Only with that mutual sharing and listening can we work together to build something better – whether it be in an organization, a community, or a society. At that point it is no longer just your passion and their passion, that mutual appreciation and understanding of connections between the passions makes it our passions.
Parenting with Passion
As I mentioned in the list above, this is also an important reminder as a parent. I definitely share my passions with my kids, but I also work to suspend them so I can listen to what my kids are passionate about. Sometimes they share the same passions with me but in a different way and sometimes they have passions that are completely different than me. And in that situation, both as a parent and a facilitator, I'm honored to be able to fully listen and learn to appreciate our passions together.