 We rented an entire mountainside village in Italy, invited 50 of our top students and created the most exciting, exclusive facilitation event ever. Hey, I'm Jonathan from A.J. & Smart. One year ago today, my team and I sat together in a beautiful mountain-top village retreat in Italy and we decided to do an event. The goal of this event was to take the top 50 students from our top-tier facilitation program and try to make these 50 people the top 1% facilitators in the world in terms of day rate, in terms of client caliber and also, of course, in terms of skill. But we didn't want to do a conference. I personally hate conferences. Nobody on my team really wanted to, you know, have these cheap tickets and have thousands of people coming to one of these big events with just all these generic speakers who have lots of Twitter followers. No, we wanted to do a completely curated, completely custom event for a small group of people, so they get the most out of it. I wanted these 50 people leaving and really immediately be able to execute exactly what they've learned at the retreat. I wanted these people to come to this retreat not just for inspiration, not just for some generic talks, but also to get exact tactics on what they should do to become the top 1%. If you go to LinkedIn today, you can see the results of it. If you just type in hashtag workshop or retreat, you can see people have been leaving this retreat, starting businesses immediately, immediately sending much higher invoices to clients and it's completely changed people's lives. People have also met lifelong friends at this retreat, which is not something we expected to happen. But it was just such a beautiful and stressful experience for us. And what I want to do right now, because of course, this was a one-off event and you could only get into this event if you were in our workshop or master program. So it's likely if you're watching this, you didn't get to come. So I'm going to tell you three big things that happened at this retreat that you might be able to take away and might get you excited about becoming a top 1% facilitator. Number one, on the final day of the retreat, I gave a talk that explained that the future of facilitation, the future of running workshops, the future of collaboration is going to be a combination of a lot of different tools and practices under one name, which we call workshopping. So we run workshopper.com. All of our programs are called workshopper master, workshopper pro. And workshopping really is an umbrella term for all of the collaboration tools you're going to need moving forward in an industry where companies are getting more and more and more complex. And collaboration is getting more chaotic because now teams are going remote, they're going hybrid. It's a mix of everything. So you're going to need to know not just agile, not just design thinking, not just design sprints, not just bits and pieces of game storming, liberating structures. You're going to need to know the underlying principles of all of these things. And all of these things fit under the umbrella of workshopping. So the things that we showed people at this workshop were not, here's how you learn this one individual thing. It's here's the principles that apply to everything in the space of collaboration, workshopping and facilitation. So if you're interested in becoming a facilitator or a collaboration coach or a workshopper, then you really need to be careful not to pigeonhole yourself into one of these recipes. We call them recipes at AJ & Smart or just one of these books or just one of these processes because you're going to be missing out on the overall fundamental principles of workshopping and collaboration. And if it's something you're interested in learning about deeper, go down below this video. There's going to be a free training and it's going to go into everything you need to know about workshopping and this umbrella term. But that's one of the biggest things that people came away from this event understanding that it's no longer enough to just learn one thing. There is this overall umbrella called workshopping, which everything else fits underneath. And if you learn the principles and the fundamentals of workshopping then all of these other things are going to become a lot easier to learn. And that was the first takeaway from this event. The second takeaway is that facilitation, workshopping is still something very new to the industry. And if you're sort of at home alone, you're an individual workshopper, you're really into design thinking, you're really into workshopping in general, you might notice that probably none of your friends are into it. So you might be pretty lonely, you might be this little island of workshopping enthusiasm and facilitation enthusiasm, and it might be hard to get momentum. At this event, what we saw was 50 of the world's top workshops coming together and just being able to lift each other up, just being around other workshops, just being around other people who want to do the same job and want to have success in the same way made people unbelievably excited about the future of their career. And not only that, they were able to share tips and stories about how they get clients, about the things they do for clients. And they even ran workshops for each other at this event showing, hey, here's how I do the AJ and Smart Strategy Sprint or here's how I take a book and turn it into a training. And honestly, just being in a community of other high level workshoppers is a complete game changer. For us at AJ and Smart doing this retreat, now what we want to do is do more meetups and more events so that we can bring our community together because there's really nothing like bringing people together who have similar goals, similar values and share the same passion for running collaboration workshops, facilitating and training companies on how to get things done in a much better and more efficient and more exciting way. So honestly, the second thing we took away from this, even though we really organized a lot of cool talks and cool workshops at this event, just bringing these people together was one of the most important parts of the whole thing. Like I said, people have come together and started businesses at this retreat. We said the next AJ and Smart, which is our company, the next AJ and Smart is going to be started at this retreat and I do believe this is going to happen. I think the biggest facilitation companies, the next big facilitators, the next big sprint book or design thinking processes will have been invented at events like this in communities like this. So for me, the second big takeaway is try to be around people who want to do what you are passionate about and who can push you to do better. If you're interested in joining a community like this, if you're interested in joining the workshopper community, the only way to get into it, once again, just watch this free training down below. At the end of it, we'll show you the way to get into it. We have an application process. It's just to make sure that you're actually on the same page and are interested in this topic, but there is no other way into this workshopper community other than watching the one hour free training down below. I know we make it kind of hard, but we want it to be an amazing, amazing community like you can see in the shots from the retreat because you might also end up at one of these events and we want to make sure you're right for the community. That's the second big takeaway from this retreat. The third and final takeaway that I'm going to talk about from the retreat and I know there was tons of amazing stuff happening here. We need some amazing speakers. They're all tactical things. And if you want to learn more about what happened at the retreat like I told you, go to LinkedIn, type in hashtag workshopper retreat and then you can see the more detailed things that happen at this event. I'm just talking about like big broad overall things that happened. The third big takeaway is that people's money mindset needs to be changed. A lot of people who get into workshopping, a lot of people who get into facilitation don't even realize how much they should be getting paid or could be getting paid per day or per hour for doing workshops at companies. I was telling people at the retreat how much me and my colleagues who run workshops or how individual freelancers are getting paid and it completely blew their minds. But one of the biggest mindset changes I like to help people get over is the fact that money is not some evil thing that's going to destroy their lives and the talking about money doesn't mean that you're greedy. Focusing on money as something that can help you, your family and your loved ones get what you need and get what you want out of life is a much better mindset shift than money is something that just helps you buy stuff and talking about it is evil and having lots of money is evil and charging too much to clients is evil. Clients need this work done for them. At the workshop or retreat for example, I showed our students how much money companies are losing by just not being able to collaborate correctly and even if you can just approve this by a fraction these companies can save millions and as a facilitator, as a workshopper you can go into these companies and over the space of two to three days you could help them kick off a project that would usually have taken six months and literally save the millions and just take a fraction of that for yourself. So what that did at the retreat is it took away the pressure from people who are worried about charging $10,000, $20,000 for a workshop because they now know the value that companies are actually getting for this money that combined with changing people's money mindset around it's not just greed and it's not just about collecting as much money as possible. It's about looking at what can money do for you. I did an exercise at the retreat where I asked people to write down what would you do and what would you improve in your life if you had a lot more money and we asked people to define how much more money that was and some people at the retreat came to me they came to me after the talk and they said I just don't like money I just don't really think it's something I need in my life and this is something that I really commonly hear especially in Europe because the money mindset in Europe is that money equals bad but the interesting thing is by the end of the retreat I would speak to the same person and they would say you know what actually if I had a cleaner once a week I would have a lot more time to spend with my kids or if I could charge just double what I'm charging right now then I could work three days less per month and use that time to read to learn and to get better at what I do. So what I wanted to do at the retreat was really shift people's mindset away from money is about buying cool crazy things and there's also nothing wrong with that like I also told people if the thing you want to buy is just luxury at least try it and see if that's something for you but it's also about improving your life and the lives of others and the lives of your loved ones in a way that works specifically for you so changing that money mindset but also understanding how much clients gain from you coming into the companies and actually doing these workshops really really change people's mindsets on money so a lot of other stuff happened you can see from the footage here it was a beautiful location it's really impossible to summarize all of the things that happened like I said go on to LinkedIn search workshop or retreat you're going to see all of the posts you're going to see the people who went to it you can talk to them about it the other thing you can do is down below this video you can check out our free training if you want to join the community if you want to see what we do and if you're interested in workshopping and facilitation and just want to see where that career can take you thanks so much for watching this I hope you enjoyed having a look inside the most exclusive expensive facilitation retreat on the planet and have a lovely day bye bye