How to manage your energy as a facilitator
Yesterday, I facilitated a full-day workshop with a team I didn’t know well. We started at 9.00 am and finished at 4.00 pm. Some people kept their energy and engagement high up until the end, while others had a harder time getting back into the game after lunch.
This was not new to me as a facilitator. I threw in a couple of energizing exercises in-between our activities and made sure there was a lively group dynamic happening. I had my focus completely on this group. I didn’t notice any fatigue myself. It felt like a smooth facilitation.
After the workshop, when the curtain dropped, and the show was over, driving back home, that familiar feeling of satisfaction combined with utter exhaustion took over. Some wishful thinking led me to believe for a few minutes that I could still finish a couple of important emails when I got home, but I realized quite quickly there wouldn’t be any energy left for clear thinking. Even today, the day after, I still feel a bit of recovery is necessary. The facilitator’s hangover.
5 ways to manage your energy level as a facilitator
In the beginning, I didn’t notice that facilitating workshops wore me out, but after a few years, I recognized a pattern. Especially after full-day, intense workshops, I would feel hung over. So I started investigating the potential causes of this feeling of exhaustion and discovered several things. Let me explain them, beginning with the most obvious ones. After that, we’ll get to the less obvious ones, too.
1. Lower your caffeine and sugar intake – and remember to hydrate!
Drinking too much coffee is obvious, but at the same time, a hard one to manage. We drink coffee because we want the increased alertness that comes with caffeine. This makes sense when you are about to facilitate.
It also somewhat increases levels of dopamine, which might make you want to drink it more often. Although your first cup will give you a feeling of being more awake, the more you drink it during the day, the less effect it has on your alertness and the more it will make you feel exhausted. For one, it delays the effect of adenosine, which slowly builds up from the moment you wake up in the morning, to make you feel sleepy again when it is time to go to bed. By delaying that effect, you will temporarily feel less tired, but it will hit you all at once when the coffee is metabolized.
Drinking coffee after 2 pm can affect your sleep quality, making you more tired the next day.
Drinking a lot of coffee may even have a dehydrating effect, and it will definitely increase your nervousness (see Point 3)
To be clear, the caffeine in coffee causes you to feel tired in the end, not the coffee itself. So, you are likely to have a similar effect drinking highly caffeinated energy drinks or even certain kinds of teas.
Water carries nutrients to your cells and helps with getting rid of waste. Even the mildest form of dehydration has been shown to impact energy levels in men and women. It causes tiredness, headaches and poor concentration. Water is, therefore, still the best choice to keep hydrated.
More than half of the workshops I facilitate have some sweet treats in the afternoon to boost participants’ energy. For some reason, we believe sugar will give us a boost to get through the afternoon, and some of us even crave sugar when lacking decent sleep or feel stressed out. And workshops can stress people out (right?).
In truth, sugar can make us feel very tired. Orexin neurons stimulate wakefulness, and increased glucose levels block the activity of orexin neurons. This is one, probably oversimplified, way of explaining the fatigue that results from eating sweets. Sugar also decreases your sleep quality and ability to regulate your stress response (see Point 3).
New habit: Next time you are facilitating a workshop, enjoy that one tasty cup of coffee in the early morning and choose water or other non-caffeine and non-sugar beverages to keep you hydrated. Look at the sweets with a smile. You know better by now: high blood sugar levels will cloud your sharp mind and kill your great energy and vibe. If you’re hungry mid-afternoon, have a handful of nuts or any other source of proteins. Proteins will prevent the after lunch dip. Especially if your lunch had sugar in it.
image by Lilla Bardenova
2. Privilege single-tasking over multi-tasking
Multi-tasking is a myth. You can’t do multiple activities at the same time. What you are really doing is switching quickly between them. And this frantic switching comes at a cost. It decreases the resources in your brain necessary for focused work. It makes you feel tired and, above all, increases your stress levels (see Point 3). In other words, we waste a lot of brain power by trying to do several things simultaneously compared with focusing on a single task.
When we are tired from multi-tasking, a lot of us reach again for caffeine to give us a boost, while caffeine only blocks our adenosine receptors and contracts our blood vessels, potentially even decreasing blood flow to our brain, increasing our nervousness (see Point 3 – everything comes back to Point 3! 😊).
New habit: Next time you are facilitating a workshop, be disciplined about focusing on one thing at a time. Yes, facilitators manage a lot behind the scenes but avoid frantically trying to do everything at once, watching the clock, stressing about the output, managing personalities, dealing with tech difficulties, and worrying about too many things at the same time. When you give the group a break, give your brain a break as well. Take a walk and let your mind wander. Empty your mind and stare for a moment into the horizon. Take a quiet moment without any social interaction. I make it a habit to never have lunch with the group I am facilitating. Instead, I create some quiet time before I return to the workshop.
3. Manage your stress around time and results – keep your “Zen” in check
Stress hormones put your body in overdrive. Some excitement can help with being more alert and energized. But multiple cortisol spikes caused by fears and concerns during the day will obviously wear you out completely. The intensity of those moments will also linger in your mind, leading to restlessness and potentially less qualitative sleep.
Step 1 is to avoid any unnecessary jumpiness around your stress response caused by Points 1 and 2 above (caffeine, sugar, multi-tasking). When you have that covered, the next step is to manage your thinking.
Although we all know this in theory, avoiding stress when you feel responsible for the outcomes can be very challenging in practice. The most common sources of stress people talk about in our facilitation trainings are time and results.
As a facilitator, time is both our friend and foe. Time is the fabric of a moment that people share; it is the fluid and uncontrollable flow that makes up our reality. You either resist it, or you work with it. How you deal with time as a facilitator will heavily impact the time experience of your participants. Working with something uncontrollable that heavily impacts the workshop experience often generates considerable anxiety among facilitators. This makes sense.
A similar type of anxiety is often felt around the workshop’s content. As a facilitator, you have to trigger thought processes with tools and questions, but you can’t take part in them. Like time, you can’t control the content of the thoughts and conversations; you have to work with what the group produces. You can feel stress when you notice that the content is going off-topic or the conclusion will eventually not satisfy the key stakeholders.
Both time and results can make a facilitator feel out of control. In general, people feel stressed about not being in control, even if they never were in the first place. It is perception of control, or the loss of it, that will wear you out.
New habit: Next time you are facilitating a workshop, let go. Release your attachments to outcomes and ideal scenarios. Trust that whatever emerges will lead to the right next steps as long as you keep the group connected to the purpose of your workshop. It is your job to navigate the storm, not resist it.
4. Breathe through your nose – even while you speak!
A few years back, we didn’t know about the detriment of breathing through our mouths instead of our noses. These days, it appears to be becoming common knowledge again.
Chronic mouth breathing leads to all kinds of problems, like sleep disorders, early ageing, high blood pressure and facial deformities. Even temporary mouth breathing causes tiredness and a decrease in productivity. The Bohr effect explains how mouth breathing leads to blowing off too much CO2 from your lungs, which causes your red blood cells to have more affinity with oxygen, leading to less oxygenation.
What does this mean?
Suppose you facilitate a workshop where you have to give a lot of instructions, explaining or talking a lot. In that case, you will likely be breathing in through your mouth. Most people don’t consciously take the time to express their words so that they can slowly breathe back in through their noses. We tend to speak quickly, especially when there is some anxiety. We try to keep up our speaking pace by gasping air in between our words. Because of the Bohr effect, you will experience less oxygenation in your body and brain, which can lead to brain fog after a while. Salespeople and people who need to talk or present a lot in their professional lives experience brain fog and headaches at the end of the day. This is often caused by excessive mouth breathing.
New habit: Next time you are facilitating a workshop, talk like Obama. When you explain something, use silence and speak slowly, allowing yourself to inhale through your nose and keeping a breathing rate of 3 to 4 seconds in and out. Breathing in through your nose and maintaining a slow breathing rhythm keeps you in homeostasis. As a result, you will better regulate your stress response and remain properly oxygenated. At the same time, you will come across as more trustworthy and confident. People will also understand you better, particularly those who are not native English speakers!
5. Put your own oxygen mask on first
When you facilitate a workshop, you are giving. You are giving your full attention to the participants, to their dynamics, their struggles, and their sense of safety and security, among many other things. You are maintaining a safe space for them, making them feel comfortable so they can open up to co-creation.
This can be energy-draining.
Facilitators have to pay close attention to their boundaries and manage their energy investments well. There is an energy exchange between people during social interactions, and these exchanges aren’t always uplifting. Instead, they can drain your energy, especially when you are “giving” as a facilitator, the designer of this moment of co-creation, people might “take” too much. These are a couple of examples of situations you have to watch out for as a facilitator:
Someone hijacks you in the middle of the group conversation because they think, “If I can convince the facilitator of my point, I will get it through with the group.” They express an endless cascade of reasons why they are right while addressing you directly, not the team.
Someone uses the workshop to express their frustration by leading every conversation back to their single-minded view of an issue. When noticing that you steer it away from their points, back on track, they become critical of the workshop and the activity at hand. You get sucked into this hopeless effort of trying to keep this participant happy.
During a break, someone holds you captive to continue the conversation with you and express all their opinions and even anecdotes. You don’t get a moment of rest and have to keep “giving” attention and care, so this participant feels listened to.
If you facilitate well, people will trust you and probably see you as a safe and caring person who will understand them. If you come across as trustworthy and likeable, certain personalities will try to take advantage of all the attention they can get. The difficulty is to remain trustworthy and, at the same time, practice your boundaries.
New habit: Next time you are facilitating a workshop, practice ending a dialogue between you and a participant smoothly and quickly if it doesn’t serve the team or the workshop. Another tactic is to stay out of the line of sight of a participant who is sharing their opinion or making their point, seeking your approval or attention. That way, they need to look at the other participants and address them. Finally, practice remaining disciplined about breaks: avoid situations where someone can seize the chance to take up all your attention while you need to recharge. Pro-tip: Some facilitators I know excuse themselves to the bathroom or a “call they have to take”.
In sum …
Being a facilitator means you are bringing the best version of yourself to a workshop or gathering. A lot of variables in that event may impact that best version. Your energy level can drop heavily, leaving you impaired to lead the workshop with vigour and with the full trust of the team. Your lack of energy can even impact the energy level of the group of people you are facilitating. They need your liveliness and enthusiasm to get them through the work.
So, to manage your energy as a facilitator:
Manage your energy level by hydrating and laying low on sugar and caffeine.
Be fully present and give your full attention to one task at a time.
Let go of any resistance related to time or output; there is no need for control or stress.
Talk slowly and use silences to breathe through your nose.
“Give” while consciously practicing your boundaries during social interactions. This last one is particularly important if you identify as an introvert, which, ironically, most facilitators are. 😊
If you are interested in learning more about how to manage your state as a facilitator and how to avoid “The facilitator’s hangover”, check out our ‘Manage your state’ training in June 2023.
Happy Captaineering is managing your state,
Alwin
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