I wanted to talk to you about the energy that we bring in the room as leaders or even, as I’m training for facilitating, we also talked about how we have to show up as a facilitator.
And it’s also the same for leaders. When you enter a room, when you are here to lead people whether it’s online or physically, you have to show some kind of energy that will help people feel driven. So this is some kind of work that we need to do when we want to create the right energy for the people in the room.
What energy do we want to bring?
We need to ask ourselves beforehand, what will be the energy that we want to bring into the room? Is it something very profound? Is it something where we need creativity? Is it something where we need determination? It’s really up to the outcome and the results that you want to get. You first need to identify what is this energy that you want to bring and what is the results that you want this group of people to create.
When you have this feeling in mind, then you need to embody it basically. So the idea is that you create this emotion for yourself.
How do we create these emotions for ourselves?
Identify the feeling ahead of time
It’s pretty simple. You can visualize, for example, yourself leading these calls or these meetings or facilitating this workshop, and you are going to bring that emotion in your body. So you need to think first, how do I feel when I feel determined, for example? close your eyes. Think for yourself: when I’m determined, when I’m working on a topic on a subject and I’m determined, how does it look like in my body?
What is the kind of thoughts I have to embody this determination? This is the same for joy. This is the same for excitement. This is the same for creativity. How do I need to feel in my body?
Practice feeling the feeling
And you try to feel it and sense it into your body and try to identify which kind of thought, which kind of visuals you need to create for yourself in order to feel that way.
Some people when they are in front of others, they have this fear, so it might be tough at first. And is this something that you need to practice. You will first start to feel afraid because you are in front of people and it’s something that’s not comfortable. And also in order to create and bring this new emotion, this positive emotion for the room with you, instead of fear, you need to practice ahead of time. So you find this emotion, and you practice how to bring this emotion ahead of time.
I had one example, so I was supposed to take some videos few years ago for a friend of mine and we were doing a hackathon and she had asked me to create a video for the participants. And I was very scared of doing this.
It was one of the first video I was taking and I got coached to help me out and during the session she did something that I am using right now. And I’m going to give it to you because I found it was very helpful. I wanted to feel excited about this video. So the feeling of fear, the way I was feeling the fear in my body was more or less the same as excitement.
So she asked me to feel the fear from top to down in my body and then start to connect to excitement and to visualize myself taking the video, being excited about creating this video for other people. And then that start to create and feel the excitement from the bottom of my body, to the head of my body so that I can transcend the feeling.
So from top to bottom and to bottom to top, and I was, then I was able to come from fear to excitement and I started to do the video and that worked like a charm. Try that for yourself. And basically it’s a lot of about preparation and about being conscious about the emotion you want to bring in the room.
And you will see that when you come in the room being afraid, discomfortable and this kind of things. Being like, I don’t know, I’m not sure how it’s going to work. Am I going to ask the right question? Are the people going to play collective and give new ideas, creativity? And things like that. If you’re starting to be stressed out, be in that with your audience, you are going to bring negative feeling to the room.
Trust the power of the group
If you want to have something that truly fosters collective intelligence, you need to trust the people in the room as well. It’s about your energy and it’s also about your relationship towards the group and you need to trust that the group is going to bring wonderful results all together.
You’re going to trust them as a group to come up with many ideas, to come up with solutions, to come up with positivity. And it’s very important to put also yourself into this place. Not just managing your own feelings, but also making sure that you trust them and you bring this trust and safe space in the room for them. It’s really fostering the space for creativity to arise.
These are the two tips that I wanted to give you, so that next time, when you are going to run a workshop, when you are going to create a meeting and you want more creativity in the room, more engagement with people, you can start with that: one, identify which positive feeling you want to bring yourself and show up with this positive feeling and two, create the space for people and trust that they are going to be very creative and they are going to bring more solutions for the problem you are going to solve.
See you next week!
NB: The article is a transcript of the video.
