15 modules of rich experiential education:

1. Introduction

Orient to the The Authentic Facilitator course, and set yourself up to get the most out of it.

1. Welcome to the Course
   Introduction to the heart and the why of The Authentic Facilitator (formerly Foundations of Facilitation)
2. Platform Walkthrough
   An introduction to the Kajabi course platform, and how to find everything you’ll need for the course.
3. How to Learn
   Four lenses for listening and learning that can enhance your understanding in this course. And, when not to listen to your teachers.
4. Logistics and Key Information
   A written overview of the logistics for following along with the course.
5. Introducing Your Instructors
   Each of the teachers introducing themselves. Not required, but return to this as you watch course videos if you want to know our backgrounds 
6. Why Lead?
   Each of our instructors talk about their motivations for leading groups and events. What is yours? 

2. Core Concepts

 Understand and contemplate leadership and facilitation as we'll hold it in this course.

1.  Leadership vs. Facilitation
   What is the difference between leadership and facilitation? Our instructors each give their definitions on the distinction.
2. Leading From Behind
   Shawn’s best tips on following the heart of facilitation. Lead from behind, be prepared to replace yourself, show up with real humanity.
3. The ART of Facilitative Leadership
   The core model we'll be using to frame our facilitative method, in this course, is ART: Authentic, Responsive, and Transparent
4. ART: Authentic Leadership
   Authentic Leadership is self-directed, self-aware, and self-accepting. 
5. ART: Responsive Leadership
   Responsive Leadership is about sensing and responding to what is happening in the group, where the most aliveness is, often instead of sticking to your plan. 
6. ART: Transparent Leadership
   Transparency is about letting people into your process, not just the product. It can empower others to step in as well.
7. The Value of Vulnerability
   Vulnerability (Rule 0) is a key part of ARTistic facilitation. Why it matters, when to use it, and how to avoid the “Vulnerability Olympics”.
8. What is Authentic Relating?
   An overview of one of the core practices we'll be using in this course.

3. Ethical Power

Consider how to practice facilitation with awareness of self and systems.

1. Power, Authority, and Status
   There are three different forms of direction through which leaders can impact a group: power, authority, and status. How to address and use these as a facilitator.
2. Social Power Differentials : Ethical Use of Power
   What power differentials may exist between participants, how they may show up, and how to address them (in ourselves first).
3. SPD - Restoring Connection: Before
   Structures you can set at the start of an event to reveal and address power differentials
4. SPD - Restoring Connection: During
   How to pause when you're noticing a power differential that is negatively affecting a group, and work with it in the moment
5. SPD - Restoring Connection: After
   How to follow up with participants after a power differential has shown up in a negative way, to clean up impact and improve for future
6. Models of Power
   When we don't feel we have power, we perform it. Ahran talks about her journey in navigating the shadows of power and finding her own expression.
7. Assume Positive Regard
   Attempt to understand where people are coming from, and assume that they are acting in their own and often others' best interests, before you change or direct their behavior.
8. Actually Care About People
   The most important factor in therapy is the relationship between the client and therapist. Some people are easier to love than others; empathy takes work. 

4. Designing Outcomes

Research and construct goals that get groups where they need to go.

1. Why We Gather
   There are 7 main reasons people gather in groups, each of which requires a different session design.
2. Doing Your Homework
   Doing your homework equals researching the groups you plan to lead. Learn your audience, be able to speak their language, and be able to address their concerns.
3. Facilitation Fails: Missed Homework
   Sara’s story about what happens when you DON’T do your research!
4. Languaging: Modifying Norms
   When working with a new group, pay attention to the ways they dress, act, speak, and interact. If you don't know these, go slow.
5. Languaging: Translating Jargon
   How to translate Authentic Relating/"conscious" language into business-speak, with examples
6. Listening for a Language
   How to read a group and feel out what words and language to use
7. Build Relationships
   Building relationships takes time, but if we want honesty, we often have to do it even before asking a group what they need.
8. Leadership Stories: What It Takes to Build a Culture
   The incredible power of integrity and consistency in repairing a broken culture.

5. Style & Application

Identify the facilitation types and areas in which you wish to practice, and assess your facilitation skills.

1. Skill, Style and Situation
   Skills can be gained, everyone has a different style, and situations require different styles and skills. Stories about how these affect our facilitation, and how to navigate your own discovery.
2. Methods of Leadership
   Polarities a leader can embody: directive-responsive, yin-yang, teaching-eliciting, cognitive/rational-emotional/intuitive. Find your style!
3. Top Tips: Do It With Style
   Finding your style as a leader may be one of your most important tasks in your first few years, even if you have to lead a lot for free to identify it.
4. Making Money as a Facilitator: How We Found Our Favorite Gigs
   Sara and Meg share several stories about how they built the relationships and reputation that led to their careers. This is a webinar recording.
5. The Certification Rubric
   A walkthrough of the items on Authentic Revolution's certification rubric

6. Session Design 1: Options

Design consistent and powerful events that fulfill their goals.

1.  Do a Walkthrough
   To decide how you want to build an event, first imagine people's experiences. Identify shared group intentions, your own desires, and what you want other people to experience.
2. Meeting Individual Needs
   Although there are main group intentions (covered in Why We Gather), people come in with other desires as well, which you need to address or meet.
3. Choosing and Adapting to a Theme
   Choose event themes based on your own interests or what's happening in the world. Tips for using the theme to promote and deepen your event.
4. Brainstorming
   Sources and tips for finding event options, exercises, and practices.
5. Keeping Participants Engaged
   People respond to variety and surprise, as well as repetition and review. Also, always let them know what is going to happen next.
6. Vulnerability Variability and Psychological Safety
   How to navigate and plan for different preferences in how open people in a group want to be. Feeling like your preferences are welcome creates psychological safety, which is essential for group health.
7. Top Tips: Long Live the Love
   Make sure people feel like they’re not alone. Make sure there are spaces where they feel like they belong, where they’re cared for, where their voice matters.

7. Session Design 2: Decisions

Be able to narrow down the most useful and impactful exercises for your time and goals, and to create clear copy.

1. Narrowing Down the Options
   To decide on a plan, frame your actional and emotional goals. Consider group norms, resources, your own inspiration, and time. Decide who gets to decide.
2. Skills of a Timelord
   Examples of how to modify exercises for different lengths of time
3. Planning an Event Example
   A sample event planning session, using teaching empathy to a Montessori school class
4. Top Tips: The Plan Never Works
   Always have a plan…but hold it lightly.
5. Earning Trust Over Time
   Especially with people who have had adverse experiences, take time to build relationship. And be consistent with anything you promise.
6. Creating Compelling Events
   5 principles to use when designing copy for events
7. Creating Compelling Events: Walkthrough
   An interactive explanation of creating event copy

8. Creating Clear Containers

Create cultural containers for participants that balance power, inclusion, and consent

1. Opening the Event
   Create safety by sharing knowledge (logistics, norms, and purpose) and connection to self, other, and/or facilitator
2. Creating Flexible Containers
   How to assess needs, needs vs agreements/rules, and the role of a facilitator in supporting rather than creating a container
3. Establishing Norms and Agreements
   How to create agreements that are aligned with a group's culture, create the culture you want, and will actually be followed
4. Relational Agreements
   An example of agreements set within the Austin Authentic Relating community
5. Ethics and Escalation
   An example of agreements and policies set around sexuality and escalation within a training course
6. Set Boundaries
   Why boundaries are important in leadership: responsiveness and responsibilities. How to tell if a boundary has been crossed. Implicit vs explicit boundaries, how to set and re-negotiate boundaries
7. Top Tips: Practicalities
   A bunch of Meg-tips, including how to keep agreements solid, how to pivot if your plan isn't working, and why you should never hire subcontractors in Delhi sight unseen.

9. Inner Work

Become more trustable as a leader through seeing yourself honestly

1. Clarity and Congruence
   Congruence: saying, doing, and being in harmony. People notice incongruence. Practically: follow through, know yourself, and make sure your internal and external worlds are aligned. 
2. Relational Reveal
   Micah and Sara call each other out on places where each of them are not clear or congruent
3. Superpowers and Kryptonites
   How to find the strengths and weaknesses that define our leadership. Superpowers and kryptonites are often flip sides of each other. Ask for feedback about them, and be transparent with others about them when you lead.
4. What are Shadows?
   What is the shadow? Why is it important, for good or ill, in life and leadership?
5. Embracing Your Dark Side
   How to see our shadows, in the moment and after the fact. Plus, tons of examples of what these look like from Jen and Sara's lives. Get ready to get real.
6. Facilitation Fails: “You’re Not My Mom!”
   Carrie's story of alienating the top leader at a company, who was creating a bad culture, by mothering him too much

10. The Steps of Facilitation

Use core techniques and a flow for introducing and managing activities and events

1. The Steps of Facilitation
   Communicate the what, why, and how. Give options, check for understanding, do a demo if necessary, and debrief after the exercise.
2. The Steps of Facilitation: Example
   Example of the Steps of Facilitation
3. Consent in Leadership
   It’s important to get consent because there is an inherent power differential between leaders and participants. Tune into the body, give options, and let people know exercises are by invitation.
4. Facilitation Fails: First Time for Everything
   Sara used a Sociocracy practice she hadn't really understood to try to get people in a leadership training to make agreements. It went TERRIBLY.
5. Why the Why
   Directing people is faster than enrolling, but enrollment is at the core of transparent leadership. It creates shared humanity, empowers others to negotiate, and brings you back to the intention when that's lost. Enroll by giving a "because..." for your own benefit or theirs.
6. Using Demos
   Demonstrating exercises shows people what you are asking of them, creating quick clarity. Make sure your demo reflects what you want people to do and be in the exercise.
7. Leadership Stories: The Demo Duel
   Scott and Sara have to practice fighting so they can demo conflict resolution at an Agile conference
8. The Elegant Finale
   Close events by reflecting on the past, present, and future: reflect on what's happened, brainstorm ways to integrate it or connect ongoingly, and create a present-moment closing ritual. Then, do any followups you promised to after the event.

11. Technological Fluency

Pick up some useful tools and skills for facilitating online, and make the medium your own!

1. Facilitating Online
   A broad overview of differences between in-person and online events, and how to leverage each "techno-geological feature" to its greatest effect.
2. Teaching Online for All Ages
   Using media, breaks, tours, co-teaching, and more to keep online events engaging, whether you're leading for kids or for adults.
3. Virtual Introductions
   Examples of how to begin an event powerfully and creatively online
4. Facilitating for Different Sized Groups Online
   Balancing information and intimacy in the planning, facilitation, and role division in groups of 1-6, 7-16, or 17+ participants online.
5. Who You Need: Online
   The uses of a co-facilitator in online events.
6. Virtual Consent
   A few tips for establishing and maintaining consensual spaces online.

12. Group Mastery

Develop core facilitation tools such as taking shares, managing time and space, and moderating breakouts.

1. Leadership Perspectives
   Four points of view facilitators can use to get information about the group, and adapt their actions to what they notice.
2. The Vulnerability Dial
   When, how, and why to share vulnerability as a leader
3. Taking Shares: Including and Deepening
   What is "taking shares" and when can you use them. How to get the most interesting and useful information, and how to respond to what you hear.
4. Taking Shares: Skill Points and Practices
   Seven tools for responding to participant shares in a group, in powerful and clarifying ways.
5. Facilitating for Groups of Different Sizes
   How you need to change your facilitation and plan based on group size (1-6, 7-16, 17-50, 50+)
6. Giving Everybody a Chance to Speak
   Our teachers share their best tips for making sure everyone has a chance to speak
7. Getting People Quiet
   Our teachers share their best tips for bringing a group to silence
8. Top Tips: The Wisdom of the Group
   Think you're smart? The Group knows best.

13. Responsiveness

Be able to follow and dynamically respond to the truth in the room.

1. Reading the Room
   How to gather in-the-moment information about what participants are thinking, feeling, and needing. Key tools for responsive leadership.
2. Integrating the Information
   What to do with information you've gathered, implicitly or explicitly, about what a group wants or needs
3. Following Aliveness
   Aliveness is about the delta: the difference between how someone usually is, or what you expect, and what you see. How to work with the delta in groups and individuals.
4. How to Get Great Feedback
   How to solicit feedback in a way that builds group trust and event quality, including specific survey questions to ask.
5. Debriefing in Groups
   How to run a post-event debrief for the facilitators
6. Top Tips: Using Feedback
   What questions you can ask to get really useful feedback, how to notice and use feedback in the moment, implementing feedback trustably, and failing fast.
7. Feedback to Equalize Power
   Feedback, and the leader's willingness to receive it, returns power to the group or to individuals when there has been a perceived rupture or misuse of hierarchy. 
8. Leadership Stories: And Then Everyone Was Crying
   An amazing story about what happens when you are responsive in leadership, and your mom is in the room…

14. The Power of Conflict

Address conflict from a place of openness.

1. Facilitation Fear Lab: Introduction
   This is Fear Lab, where all your greatest facilitation fears come true.
2. Fear Lab: Corporate Vulnerability Fail Pt 1
   In this episode, Ruben addresses a very difficult corporate crowd.
3. Fear Lab: Corporate Vulnerability Fail Pt 2
   Sara tries her hand at Fear Lab, and fights a boss battle with HR Manager Kan.
4. The Pufferfish and the Hermit Crab
   Under pressure, we usually either puff ourselves up or cede power to the group. Examples of what this looks like, and alternatives to use in the moment.
5. Welcome Everything
   How and why to welcome experiences, feedback, or parts of people that conflict with our values or desires. 
6. Practical Tips for Welcoming Everything
   Curiosity and slowing down are key tools for welcoming. In systems, we need to balance welcoming with safety.
7. Tools for Conflict: Addressing Needs
   How to prevent conflict through taking actions before the event, and creating new 1:1 containers during it. 
8. Tools for Conflict: System and Self
   Working with conflict as a means for transformation
9. Naming the Elephant
   Calling out what is unspoken in the space releases tension. Using "we seem..." and other tools for speaking the elephant.
10. DARE
    Daring is pausing, interrupting, and taking other socially norm-breaking interactions, in order to hold the container against disruptions and/or create opportunities for deeper connection. How and when to do this.
11. Stories of Conflict and Empowerment
    Sara and Meg tell stories of how they have navigated moments of intense conflict in groups

BONUS Content

Integrate.

1. Self-Care Tips for Facilitators (9 videos)
   Each of our leaders share their best self-care tips for before, during, and after leadership
2. Self-Care Meditation
   Shawn leads a powerful guided self-care meditation
3. Leadership Stories: A Happy Ending
   Sometimes, facilitation takes you exactly where you need to go. This is Sara and Geof’s story of falling in love through leadership.