Tag: facilitate

Being in the Zone to Facilitate or Lead a Team


George Mumford, Mindfulness and Performance Expert, maintains that effective facilitation or leadership of a team requires the facilitator or leader to be in the zone – a state of mind where we are hyper-focused and are our most productive, creative, and powerful selves. This state is often experienced by elite athletes, racing drivers and scientists – time seems to stand still, and exceptional performance/deep insight is achieved effortlessly.

The team facilitator in the zone

George, as a high-performance coach, spends much of his time working with elite sporting teams – helping them to achieve optimal performance. He makes the point that every team and location is different, and that the facilitator cannot pre-judge the situation. In his view, you can prepare for the facilitation, but you must be in-the-moment when working with the team.

This requires being in a listening and learning mode so that your response to what is happening is spontaneous and insightful – engaging what George describes as a “resourceful state of mind”. This state requires a person who has developed a mindfulness mindset through continuous mindfulness practice – not through a single daily act of meditation but a continuous process of seeking to be mindful, whatever the situation.

George maintains that everything is changing all the time – your own self-concept, as well as the self-concept of the team members you are working with. As you continuously attempt to achieve your own body-mind-emotion alignment, you are increasing your self-awareness, other-awareness and your self-regulation (so that your negative thoughts do not disable your capability).

I find that as an organisational consultant, the more I develop a mindfulness mindset, the more I am able to design innovative facilitation processes that assist organisation team members to have the conversations they ought to have and to achieve a higher level of performance. There are times when the way forward is clouded by anxiety precipitated by an unusual set of circumstances or mix of team members. Being in touch with these feelings through mindfulness can help to dissipate the anxiety and strengthen the insight, intention and faith (in a successful outcome).

The team leader in the zone

George maintains that you need to be a “mindful person” before being able to be in the zone and achieve optimal leadership effectiveness. Mindfulness enables you to achieve self-awareness, self-management and resilience and to influence others through effective active listening. It assists you to be-in-the-moment and to develop relationships that underpin any form of team effectiveness.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his TED Talk, discusses being in the zone as being in a state of “flow” – a state of “heightened focus and immersion”. In his view, not only does flow lead to effectiveness in whatever arena you operate, but it is also the source of creativity, sustained happiness and fulfillment. He suggests that flow is achieved when you realise a balance between challenge and skill – a challenge that is perceived as extending but manageable together with a skill-set that can be employed adaptively and creatively. Mindfulness helps to achieve the balance between challenge and skill by eliciting self-confidence in your abilities, managing the anxiety associated with new challenges and developing mental and emotional agility. Mindfulness will be essential for developing leadership capacity for the digital age – characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity, disruption and complexity.

As we grow in mindfulness through continuous mindfulness practices, we can be in the zone more frequently and develop optimal facilitator and/or leadership effectiveness. We can be open to the inherent spaciousness of our minds, freed from the anxiety and fear that limits the realisation of our capacities. Being in-the-moment, we are better able to respond adaptably and creatively to changing internal and external realities.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

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Lifelong Learning Through Mindfulness

In their book, Organizational Change by Choice, Dexter Dunphy and Bob Dick quote an anonymous author who provides a very simple, behavioural description of the way we learn:

To look is one thing

To see what you look at is another

To understand what you see is a third

To learn from what you understand is something else

But to act on what you learn is all that really matters. (p.120)

The wisdom of this way of looking at learning was brought home to me during one of Bob Dick’s MBA classes that I attended many years ago (32 years ago to be exact). Bob was introducing us to the art of facilitating groups and understanding group dynamics.  He formed us into groups and each person in a group was assigned an observation task to undertake while the group simultaneously discussed a controversial topic – in my group’s case, “Should people who drink and drive be jailed?”

We each had to look for and observe some aspect of the group’s behaviour, e.g. amount of eye contact, level of dissent in the group, non-verbal behaviour, the level of participation and how people built on other’s ideas.  As the discussion progressed, it became quite heated and one of our group was showing signs non-verbally that he was becoming distressed by the discussion.  However, the person who was supposed to look for non-verbal behaviour in the group was totally oblivious of this distress and kept on pushing his point that drink drivers should not be jailed.  The distressed person finally got up and left the group.  The person who was supposed to observe non-verbal behaviour, immediately asked the group, “What did he do that for?”  It turned out that a friend of the distressed person had been killed by a drunken driver.

This experience really brought home to me very starkly that you can look and not see if you stop paying attention and lose focus on what you intend to observe.  If you then do not see what is happening, you will be unable to understand another person’s behaviour.  If you don’t understand the interaction, you will not learn how to adjust your own behaviour.  In the final analysis, you will not act in a way that puts the desired learning into practice – in the case of my example, you will not be able to effectively facilitate group processes.

To look in a meaningful way requires focus, purposeful noticing and full attention.  It is only then that we see in a way that enables learning.  So while we may be looking at the same scene or object we will see different things.

Understanding what we see requires an uncluttered mind and the capacity to maintain focus.  It is only through sustained seeing that we come to understand what we are actually looking at – to realise the impact of something for our lives and that of other people.  Focused attention builds our understanding because we are better able to access our subconscious and realise the connections between things that we perceive now or have perceived in the past.

Learning from what you understand is another level of challenge in the quest for lifelong learning.  Having understood something impacting our lives, we have to be able to think through the behavioural implications – its meaning for how we should act towards our self and/or others.

In the final analysis, what really matters is taking action in line with our understanding and learning – translating our learning into practice.  As I discussed in a previous post, it is one thing to look for and read about mindfulness, it’s another to understand the benefits of mindfulness, but it is something else to learn from your understanding of mindfulness how you should behave and, all that matters, is engaging in mindful practice – taking action by being mindful in our everyday lives.

So, being mindful can help us to engage in lifelong learning – to look, see, understand, learn and act on our learning in our everyday lives.  As we grow in mindfulness, we are better able to focus, pay attention, gain insight and be conscious of what we are learning and what it means in our life.  Ultimately, we are better able to achieve congruence – to line up our actions with our thoughts and words.

Image source: Courtesy of Mojpe on Pixabay