Shailesh Rajpal – Being Your Own Best Intervention

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    People who apply for jobs with a section of the job posting called "Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities." The people who write these job postings usually assume these three words are essentially synonymous and that some lawyer designed the form and used three words to be complete, comprehensive, and all-inclusive in their language. They just drop in a list of things the potential applicant should have studied or done to be successful in the job. However, knowledge, skills, and abilities are really fundamentally different things, especially when it comes to facilitation.

    Mr. Shailesh Rajpal explains, “the two steps To improve our facilitation;

    • We have to determine how to better leverage the strengths our Self brings to facilitation and how to overcome its blocks to effectiveness. The first step in this process is to find out where you are on the social sensitivity and behavioral flexibility continua. You must identify where you are blocked and where you have natural strengths. There are many ways to do this. The first is to ask yourself: to be honest in creating a self-description. This will include asking your friends, co-workers, and colleagues. Take what they say with a grain of salt: their own social sensitivity and behavioral flexibility will affect what they are able to tell you. But if you ask enough people, you'll start to get a pretty accurate picture. For many of us, more formal methods of self-learning are needed.
    • The second step is to work with the Self information. There are at least three strategies. One is to adjust your work to match your Self. Some kinds of facilitation, some objectives, some groups and group expectations you may find to be a better fit with your strengths and blocks. The second is to compensate for your blocks. You can work with another facilitator that complements you, having strengths where you have blocks and vice versa. Or you can look for secondary clues that help you diagnose things in groups that your blocks won't let you see directly -- looks or tones of voice or awkward silences that tell you, ‘Something's going on here, what am I missing?’”

    Part of compensating for your blocks may be learning to value them. In any given meeting, there are millions of times and ways to intervene. Only a few of these reach our consciousness: our unconscious blocks narrow these down to a manageable number that we can choose from based on more conscious, rational diagnosis. Before we try to overcome a block in our behavioral flexibility, we should check out with others whether maybe it's a good block.

    Another, tougher approach is to work directly on the Self to improve your own best intervention. Once issues and blocks have been identified, books, learning labs, and personal-growth courses are available. The facilitator has to bring what they are to facilitation. And sometimes what they are is not a facilitator: then someone else needs to facilitate and the facilitator wannabee needs to be something else.