 Hi there, are you a facilitator struggling to maintain your participant's energy in your online workshop? In this case, this video is for you. In this video, our colleague Amer shares his effective and easy tips on how to manage energy in your remote workshop. I promise you, if you follow those tips, your participants won't be falling asleep in that remote workshop. And if you want to learn more about workshopping and facilitation, join our free facilitation community called Facilitator Club, where hundreds of facilitators share their tips, insights and experiences. Link is in the description below. Now over to you Amer. So energy is a really key component of remote facilitation. Now of course, it also holds true for in-person facilitation, but the difference is that your energy does not carry over exactly on a Zoom call or remote call in general. And the other thing that you need to be aware of is that it might be natural for you to just slip into the mode of having a remote conference call, which is very, very boring and will disengage people very quickly. And so the first point is that a workshop is not a meeting. Now, this is not something that you necessarily think about in an in-person workshop, just because everyone knows that, you know, we're in a workshop room, we have all these post-its and whiteboards and all that, but it's very easy to slip into a regular meeting kind of pace and tone when you're running remote workshops. And so a workshop needs to feel different than a remote call. You should expect your clients to be in calls all day long and you don't want your workshop to feel just like another very long call. Instead it should feel energetic, it should feel exciting. It should feel like they're making progress and doing important work. And so what you need to do in this case is bring more energy than you would in an in-person workshops because, like we said, some of that energy will get lost over the call, it will not carry over exactly. And so you need to exaggerate it a little bit and this will feel strange at first, but you will get used to it and it feels especially strange when other people are muted or if they have their cameras turned off, which we do not recommend. It'll be hard for you to see a feedback from other people and it'll feel like you're the only excited person in the room and you might think that you'll need to match the tone and the energy of the room to be a good facilitator, but that's not true in remote facilitation. You really need to bring the energy and while it might feel strange on your side, on the participant's side, it'll feel very energizing and it'll come off naturally. And the trick with this that will help you bring more energy is to actually genuinely excite yourself about the workshop before it starts. And so instead of bringing over like fake enthusiasm or fake energy in order to achieve this principle, what you can do is actually look at the challenge, think about how you're going to be helping your clients do a lot of work in a short amount of time and genuinely get excited about the workshop and that will feel a lot more natural and it won't feel like you're putting on this fake persona and you can do this even if you're an introvert. I'm an introvert myself, but when I'm facilitating workshops, I bring a lot more energy than I normally would in my normal conversations, in my in-person facilitation, just because that's what I need to do in order to deliver a great workshop. And yes, it means that I might be tired after the workshop, but that's okay as long as the workshop itself goes great. So there's really no excuse to not bring more energy. Again, it will feel weird in the beginning. You just need to get used to it, but this is definitely an important part of facilitating remote workshops. And a couple of important tips when it comes to the energy in the room is one to start off the workshop with a warm-up exercise, an ice breaker. Instead of just plunging everyone straight into the workshop, like people come into the call and you're like, all right, let's get started right away. That might be a little too much for people to handle, because they're changing context from whatever they were doing first. Remember, when this is not an in-person workshop, they don't have the time of like going from a place to another place to do the workshop where they get to like disconnect and put themselves into the mindset of the workshop. They're probably jumping in from another meeting or another task. And so it's useful just to give everyone some time to warm up, some time to get comfortable with the tool, and that will help keep the energy up and like slowly ramp it up in the participants instead of stressing them out by immediately starting with an exercise. And so we like to use an ice breaker that's essentially asking people what their first job was and talking about one thing that they learned from it. There are tons of ice breakers you can google them, choose which everyone feels, you know, most fun and natural to you. Something that you yourself are interested in or you feel like your participants might like. You can change these up between workshops, but it's just a good idea to have one instead of immediately going into the workshop and that will help you manage the energy in the room better. And a warm-up exercise is actually a really good way to start to instill the principles before you actually start. And so we do the warm-up exercise in a together alone fashion. And so we actually make people experience what together alone feels like and then later on we say like, all right in this sprint in this workshop we're going to be working together alone. And then we refer back to the warm-up exercise to say like, remember how we all took some time to ourselves and we thought about what we wanted to write and then we presented to the group that's how we're going to be working. And so a warm-up exercise is a great way of introducing the principles in a tangible way before you actually call them out. And then when you call them out people already know what that means. And the last thing related to managing energy is having some workshop music. This is one thing that's easy to forget when you're on a remote call but it actually really, really helps. And in our experience clients really love having music because that's not something that they're used to in their regular meetings. And when you don't have music the silence can get very heavy and the workshop can get very serious. Especially when it's all about you know making important decisions and having discussions and people disagreeing. The music when people are working in a together alone fashion really helps everyone just like relax, have a little bit more fun, get the creative juices flowing. And we often have people just complimenting you know the music that we play for them and they feel like it's a much nicer way to work. And so if you're using Zoom you can actually share the audio of something like Spotify or another music app so that you can play workshop music to the workshop or you can buy some dedicated software that will route the audio of your computer into the workshop call itself. And there you have it. Now you have some new tricks to manage energy in your remote workshops. If you want to learn more tricks about workshopping in a facilitation join our free facilitation group Facilitator Club. The link is in the description below. Oh by the way we have another video about making your remote workshops even better. Click right here to see it. Thanks for watching and see you next time.