 In this video, I'm going to show you one trick that's going to help you become a better facilitator in just eight minutes. It's going to be a game changer if you're a facilitator or run any type of collaborative sessions with groups. What you're going to see next is a video from our course called Workshopper Master, which is basically a program that teaches people how to become master level facilitators. And this is going to be one of the six laws of master levels facilitation. And these are often the things that people who learn facilitation don't think about. So these are sort of uncommon or counterintuitive things that people often just forget about. And it sort of makes their workshops less interesting. Okay, I don't want to waste any more time. I want you to be a better facilitator eight minutes from now. Let's go. Law number three, start strong and stronger. This is one of the easiest laws to implement, but also the law that 90% of workshops forget. This law relies on two phenomena of the human brain. One is called the serial position effect. And the serial position effect basically means that people tend to remember the first few things and the last few things in a series. This can be numbers, this can be events, this can be a whole day at Disneyland. They generally remember the start and the end more than anything else as the first phenomena. And the second phenomena is called the peak end rule. And the peak end rule basically says that people don't remember an experience based on all of the individual moments of an experience. So for example, they won't remember the workshop because of all the individual moments. They'll remember one peak, meaning one high point, and they'll remember the end and pretty much nothing else. Two of these things combined mean that if you get the start right and if you get the end right, you've basically covered 80% of the things that people are actually going to remember about your workshop. And this is why at AJ & Smart, we try to make sure our workshops start strong, start memorably, and they end strong because they're going to forget everything in the middle anyway. And really the start and the end are the way you can really build in powerful moments that people go away with and think about forever. So to repeat, start strong, end stronger. This literally means the ending is the most important part of your workshop. The starts, of course, important, but even if you manage to mess that up, you need to stick the ending. People will leave feeling like it was the most amazing thing they've ever been part of, if you can get the end right. What happens if you ignore this law? Well, people are still going to remember the start, one peak, and the end. And if these were nothing special, then the workshop will feel like nothing special. They'll feel like it just passed like a blur. And even if you got stuff done, and even if it was really interesting, and even if you actually achieved your task of solving the problems and doing whatever you were asked to do, they're still not necessarily going to have interesting memories if you don't start strong and end stronger with your workshop. So let's have a look at some things you can do to actually make this happen. Tip number one is to end with a highlight session. So what this means is, generally, you just put up the agenda for the day that you just finished, just put it on a board, put it on a screen, whatever, just write up these are the things we did for today. Then simply point at parts of the agenda. So for example, if you ran the expert interview session in the morning, simply point at that and say, hey, this morning we started with expert interviews. What's something you remember? What's something you enjoyed? What's something that changed when you did this exercise? And you asked the group and always someone will put up their hand and say, actually, for me, it was really interesting to see that I was able to get all my ideas out without talking. And so what you've done is you've had someone in the group create a highlight for you and it feels good in the group. Then I'll go to the next section. Okay, we did the map. What's something positive that someone remembers from the map? What's something that stood out for you? What's something that was different from how you normally work? Someone put up their hand and they'll say, hey, this is what I remember from it. And the cool thing is by the time you get to the end of the agenda, people in the audience or your participants have basically highlighted peaks and interesting points during the workshop for you and for everybody else. And this leaves everybody going home with a really good vibe of the highlights and the memories and interesting things that happened during the workshop. And it also allows people who had special experiences during certain moments. It basically allows them to talk about their peak, which maybe other people didn't have. And that basically gives other people the experience of, oh, yeah, there was this cool moment that happened there. And it really locks in some really nice memories at the end of the workshop. So one great way to end stronger is to go through the agenda of the day of everything that you've completed. First of all, you know, hey, everybody, you know, we've gone through this entire agenda. Give yourself a clap. Now, what we want to do is just go through and remember some of the things we did today. In the first exercise in the morning, we did how might we use what's something you guys remember from that and just let them talk about it. So that first tip is really just asking people to summarize parts of the day for you and for the group. It's a killer way to end the workshop. It sounds boring, but it always works really well. Tip number two, and I really love this one and it's again focused on the ending. And this is really you showing the progress that happened in the workshop. We do this in a couple of ways. If we're doing an in-person workshop, we'll take a photo of the empty room before the workshop started and the empty room with the people in it before the workshop actually started. The walls are empty. There's nothing there. Nothing has happened yet. Then we'll take a picture of the full room with all of the workshop materials and I'll simply show that on a slide at the end of the workshop. And I'll say, when we got here this morning, how did you feel? You know, what did you think was going to happen? You know, we talk about what happened before and I talked to them. Like, what were your expectations? Then I showed them the picture at the end of the day and I really highlight how far they've come. When you came here today, you had all of these broad ideas. Right now you have something tangible. You're moving forward. You all did amazing work. Here's what the room looks like. Here's what the day looked like. So I essentially take pictures in an in-person workshop or I take screenshots of the Miro board for a remote workshop and I show them that at the end. Here's what the Miro board looked like just three hours ago. We had nothing. Now look how much progress we've made. Look how much we've moved forward. It's a really great way to lock in the feeling of progression at the end of the day and give people the feeling of pride that what they've created is something special. It's a great way to like put a cap on the end of the day because it really should feel like closure. It shouldn't just fade out because sometimes the last exercise in the day can be a tough one. You really need to close down the workshop properly and showing the progress that people have made. Like the previous step, asking them for the highlights but doing it visually is another fantastic way to end stronger. Tip number three is find the rituals that work for you for the start and end of a workshop. At AJ and SMART for example, when we're running in-person workshops, the start of the day is where the best coffee is. So at the very, very start of the day, that's where we actually make really good coffee from roasted beans with proper milk and everything. And then throughout the day, we kind of settle on just straight up pre-made coffee straight from a machine. So at the start of the day at AJ and SMART, one of the things in our rituals is coffee and that's how we started. Another great way that we start workshops is we use warm-ups that we know get people into the moment very quickly. Another thing is if you're running a remote workshop, a great way to get people excited, especially if you're all over the world, is really think about what could you get delivered to someone's house in the morning before the workshop starts to simulate this feeling of having some nice food, nice coffee at the start of the day. It's really about taking care of the fact that something has started and something has ended. And really so the best coffee, the best food for us is always at the start at the end of the day. Another thing we sometimes do at the end of a workshop is a little meditation. We'll do a little exercise where we have people write like where they wanna be in two years. It is all these little things, but really have rituals up your sleeve that you can test at the start and the end of workshops and don't be lazy about it. Seriously, the amount of workshops that just fade out and fade in, it doesn't make sense if these are the moments that people are going to remember. You have to start strong and end stronger and that is law three of master level facilitation. All right, if you liked that and I hope you did and I hope you got some value out of it, down below this video, there's a free training which will give you a much bigger insight into the different laws and all of the different things that we teach in our online programs around facilitation. It's a one hour free training and there's a lot more than you just saw in this video. So if that's your sort of thing, definitely check that out. And finally, let me know if this video was useful to you. We need to know that sort of stuff in the comments. It helps us figure out what other types of videos to put out. Thank you so much. And did you notice that I have braces now but I didn't have braces in that video? Did you notice? See ya.