 I've run thousands of workshops but also trained thousands of facilitators to run workshops and there's one thing that always trips up beginner facilitators and even expert facilitators. And when this thing happens, it means that their workshop doesn't go well, maybe they don't get good reviews at the end of the workshop, they don't get rebooked, some participants are irritated, maybe they don't get what they want out of the workshop. And this thing is not setting and getting expectations correctly. What you're about to see in this video is a clip from our course, Workshop or Master, which is our highest level facilitation course and it's in a section called the Six Laws of Facilitation. You're about to see Law 4 and it really is one of the things that's going to help you never have a bad workshop ever again. Enjoy and I'll see you at the end of the video. Law number four, set and get expectations. Let me repeat it. Set and get expectations. There are not a lot of things that can ruin a workshop faster than wrong or falsely set expectations. And expectations also sort of set themselves if you don't set them. A great example of this is there's an employee at AJ & Smart, their friend owns a pub, a pub for Americans watching, it's a bar, and this pub serves food. And it won Pub of the Year in terms of food in 2020. Because of this, people are coming from all over the place, from all over the country and they want to eat there and they're expecting this crazy high level of food. In fact, they seem to be expecting gourmet food. Now the reviews have gotten really, really bad and the owner is really sad that they're Pub of the Year because people are going, they're expecting like this crazy Michelin star stuff when it's actually just standard really good pub food. The expectation of the people going to this pub is this is gourmet, this is what I'm expecting and then what they're getting is normal pub food. Now if they were going to that place thinking they're going to get normal pub food and it turns out to be really good pub food, they're going to leave feeling that was a 10 out of 10. However, because they're going thinking this is gourmet, they leave feeling that sucked and I'm going to write an angry review. The interesting thing is the food is the same, the pub is the same, but the expectations going in are different and that's what can spoil a workshop for you too, if these expectations are not aligned. Setting and getting expectations at the start of the workshop, before the workshop, during the workshop, even at the end of the workshop is a fantastic way to make sure everyone's on the same page and that people don't have the incorrect expectations for your workshop and that you don't have the incorrect expectations of what you are being asked to do. Now, there's a lot of really easy ways to do this and I'm just going to jump straight into this. This one's less theoretical, it's just very, very practical. So we're just going to jump straight into some quick tips for doing this. Tip number one, before the workshop even starts, onboard the participants properly and one way to do this, how we do it is we do a quick call with each participant and we ask them, what are you expecting to get out of this workshop? And then we write that down and we can compare everyone's answer to that question. Right away, we get the feeling or if there are some misaligned expectations and we can call the people back who are not on the same page as everyone else and we can ask them, hey, you know, everyone on the team has this expectation. Can you talk to me more about your expectation about this workshop? And before you even start the workshop, you have a much better idea of what people's mindset is before they go into the workshop, which will allow you to organize and build the workshop and schedule the workshop around their expectations or at least bring these things up in the workshop so they don't feel like they're in the wrong place. So the first thing is really before the workshop, get expectations, right? Receive expectations from the participants. Tip number two, in the workshop itself, set and get expectations right at the start. Set expectations by telling people this is what the workshop is about, this is what the goal of the workshop is, and here is the agenda. Then, once again, in real time, ask people in the audience, what are you hoping to get out of this day? What would be the ideal end point of this workshop for you? And ask them to write this down on a post-it and then present it one by one to the room. So you, once again, can gather people's expectations, you're getting expectations from them after you've set them, and you can stick those up on the wall and throughout the day, if things feel like they're going off the path, you can point back to, you know, these were the expectations, this is what the workshop is about, I just want to remind everyone, this is what we talked about this morning. So this is a really quick way to set expectations right at the start, you saying, hey, this is what the workshop's about, you know, having spoken to you all, this is what I believe we're trying to achieve here today. Now I'd like to have one by one, each person tell me what their ideal end point for this workshop would be, then it's a super quick way just to make sure everyone's on the same page. If someone is not on the right page or on the same page as everyone else, you'll immediately find out and you'll be very quickly able to solve that problem right in the moment. So in the workshop, set and get expectations right at the start before anything happens. And what I do, if I feel like the team is sort of drifting, I'll do that exercise again after lunch. I'll say, hey, welcome back, we just have a reminder of the expectations that everyone has from this workshop just to get everyone back on track here. Does everyone still have the same feeling and then read out these things? It's just a very quick way of monitoring and checking in are the expectations still aligned on this workshop? It's as simple as that. One final thing that I really love to do in every workshop at the start of the workshop and even before each exercise is I like to show people an emotion graph of the day. I'm actually going to show you how that looks here. Sometimes I draw it on a flip chart. Sometimes I'll make a slide for it, but essentially for every day, so if it's a one day workshop, it's easy, but if it's a multi-day workshop, it's a little bit more complicated. But for every day, I'll pretty much show them something like this. So here's a really, really simple emotion graph on the y-axis. We have happiness on the top, sadness on the bottom, and this can be excitement. It can be frustration, right? I kind of walk them through it. And at the bottom on the x-axis, we just have the day, right? The time of day. And what I'll simply draw for them in real time is this is how your day is going to feel. So that they have this expectation up front and they're not wondering why they're feeling certain things and they're not questioning if they should be feeling certain things. A great way to do this for them is to just draw it out and then point at the peaks and troughs and talk about them. Let me show you how that would work. So at the start of the day, maybe people are going to be in the middle because they don't really know what to expect. And then we're going to go into the first exercise, how might we ease. And immediately, I think a lot of people are not going to feel so great. So I'm going to show them that on the graph. I'm going to tell them as I draw it. I'm going to say you're going to start here and you're going to feel a little bit frustrated. And then slowly towards lunch, we'll start coming up and getting excited. And then after lunch, we'll start again. It won't feel great. Then we'll do lightning demos. You'll all be excited. Then we'll create concepts. You'll be worried that your concept won't be good. And at the end of the day, we'll sort of end in the middle, not 100% sure of how you should feel because the second day is where a lot of things get resolved. Of course, because I'll also be following law three, start strong and strong. I'll make sure that this doesn't happen. I'll make sure the start and the end are really high. I just want to show you an average workshop. And now throughout the day, when we're at an exercise, I can tell people, look, we're here now. And that's going to be where you're feeling a little bit frustrated. That's totally normal. It's normal to feel frustrated right now. And setting these expectations throughout the day just allows people to let go. It allows them to let go and relax because they know they're not supposed to be feeling happy right now. And for you as the facilitator, as the workshopper, it's a godsend to be able to do this because you can just also let go and not worry if people are angry because they know they're supposed to be frustrated at this point. It's a killer way to set expectations for the mood that people are going to be in during the workshop. And it seriously takes a lot of pain off your plate. And that's tip three. So that's law four, set and get expectations. This one's going to really save you. It's going to save your workshops because it's the easiest. It's one of the simplest things that can kill a workshop is just the wrong expectations. Now, the best workshop ever, but if people don't really know what to expect, it might ruin it for them. So set and get expectations. So that was law four, set and get expectations. And I hope seeing a glimpse into the workshopper master program was useful for you. If it was useful for you, and if you're a facilitator who wants to run amazing workshops and also get paid to do it, and I've created a one hour free training, which teaches you the techniques that the top 1% of facilitators use to run great workshops, find clients and have an amazing day rate right down below this video. You can see a link free training, something like that. Watch the video. If you're really serious about facilitation and making that into your career, I think you're going to love it. Thanks for watching this video. Have a lovely day. Bye bye.