Falling Up

In my last post, I put in writing that I was determined to make some progress on my final project this week.  Happily, progress has been made!  I still have a lot to work on, but here’s what’s happened:

1:  I finally finished my needs assessment, had it reviewed and am sending it out shortly.  You know, in all of my Adult Learner courses, we always talked about how important it is to know what the learner wants to gain from your efforts.  In my situation here, I’m faciitating some workshops soon where I won’t have the chance to assess my learners first.  I don’t know what their goals are or what they do or don’t know about conflict.  That’s tricky.  In fact, it’s MUCH harder than you’d think.  I am grateful for my professors drilling into my head the importance of needs assessments, because when I tried to plan without one, I really felt like I was drifting around without a clue as to what these people might want to discover about conflict.  Now, even though my exact learners are not completing the assessment in some cases, I hope to have enough feedback to tell me where many people stand in regards to conflict.  And, it’s a brief assessment, so in flexible presentations I can even use it at the beginning to engage in some learner-directed conversations.

Next, I finished several more books, including a great little book called “The Coward’s Guide to Conflict” by Tim Ursiny.  This is not a particularly scholarly book, and really I thought it seemed a little cheesy, but I was pleased as punch to find it, yes, an easy read, but surprisingly CHOCK full of information, questions to ask, skills to learn and teach, and much more.  If you are a bit afraid of dealing with conflict, you might check it out.  Plus, the best part of conflict resolution books is that they are loaded with these great anecdotes that many of us can relate to.  So it really was quite a helpful book both personally and for my workshop planning.

I also read a book on Extreme Facilitation (by Suzanne Ghais) that refreshed my memory on some of my previous coursework (program planning, consulting skills) as well as offered good insights for dealing with particularly sticky conflicts and being able to ‘beat the heat’ of the conflict.  Two very good reads this week!

Most excitingly, my supervisor has assigned me to 3 different workshops in the next month where I’ll be able to present my Conflict workshop.  Each opportunity is different in terms of size, length of the workshop, audience, and more, so I’ll be tweaking each one to provide the right content, activities and skills.  For 2 of the events, I’ll be working with someone else with more experience, but have been co-creating the plan for the event.  This has led to some great idea-sharing and mentoring that has helped immensely as I try to figure out if my ideas will work.  Always nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of, right? 

Even though I wasn’t done planning the workshop, having the deadlines has made it much easier to move forward and I’ve gotten almost all of the program design laid out and have found many new activities to try.  I still have a lot to do, but finally feel like I got passed the mental block (writer’s block?) I had hit.  Hooray for that.  In 2 posts or so from now, I should be able to give an update on the 1st of my 3 engagements…