hey I'm Jonathan CEO of ajn smart and facilitator docomo training you could be coming from a Facebook ad you could be coming from an Instagram ad you could have come from anywhere so I want to give you a tiny bit of context before we jump straight into the training number one I created this training a couple of years ago and I had absolutely no idea how much impact it was going to have over 130,000 people have taken this training and countless people reach out to me every week to tell me how much it's changed their lives now believe me I had no intention of doing any of this lifechanging stuff I just wanted to tell people about facilitation and about how to fix meetings but one of the cool things that has come from this is that people have realized I can be a facilitator I can take this passion for helping groups and teams work together and I can turn that into a full-time career and that's something I'm super proud of so the training you're about to watch is our most popular training ever and the idea originally was just to say hey this was my journey from being an employee and then a designer and then a facilitator and then this is the career I can do but the results of it have been really really inspiring to me so you know I'm recording this after the fact you'll see in the video that I have different haircut and I'm not wearing glasses I'm the same guy though and it's just one of these things which I which completely exploded and we just didn't expect here at AJ and smart number two what is this training about a little reminder it's a training that shows you how to help teams go from collaboration chaos broken meetings people not being able to get stuff done and solve problems together how to take that and how to add skills the skills of a facilitator to help these teams get more done and by doing that you put yourself in the position at a company or as a consultant as someone who can actually dramatically improve teamwork and dramatically increase the amount of efficiency for group collaboration and that's one of the most important things at companies even today even in the age of artificial intelligence people still need to come together whether in person online and make decisions about what they're going to work on and that's where facilitator comes in number three if you're watching this on your phone which you likely are if you came from ads or you came from YouTube I would recommend moving over to a laptop or a desktop or somewhere where you can sit down watch in peace and take notes if you just copy the link on this page you know paste it into your desktop or bookmark it and then open it up on your desktop or we've also sent you an email with a link to this video so you could just go to your email on your laptop on your desktop and watch it there this is going to be a 1hour training and it's quite in depth and you might want to take notes and you might want to pause and all that kind of stuff so I would recommend watching this on a desktop it's just going to be much more comfortable for you okay so that's it let's jump into the training I'm super proud of this I'm excited for you to to potentially discover your future career as a facilitator even if it's just something that you're going to add on as a skill to what you're already doing thousands and thousands of people have watched this video and completely changed career paths so I'm really really excited for you at the end of the video you'll also have a chance to talk to my team if you want to get further career advice for free and that's it let's jump in it's actually pretty weird for me to be here giving you a training on facilitation I never planned on being the facilitation guy and I definitely never planned on starting a company that now trains thousands of facilitators per year I am where I am now a high day rate facilitator running a company that trains facilitators and does facilitation because I was super pissed off I was really pissed off with the job I was doing so I was a ux designer I started a company called AJ and smart a couple of you might have heard of AJ and smart but if you didn't product design studio and and it was going financially fine and we were growing but there were these things that were really starting to wear me down basically every project seemed to have the same problem and it didn't matter which client we were working with you know we'd start off we were super excited about doing this work for the client the client was excited we were excited I was excited I was going to get to work on this cool product with the product team the man product managers whatever we'd start off we do the first kickoff meeting Vibes would be good we're excited about where it's going we'd have this the second meeting and now things started to get a little bit more misaligned a new person has just joined the team who we've never talked to before and they've maybe been onboarded not correctly and now the project is slightly off track so a couple of meetings in the team would start getting misaligned with themselves misunderstandings would start coming up and they would start getting misaligned with us and overall tension built up and the vibe started getting worse and worse and honestly a couple of weeks in no matter how cool the client was and no matter how amazing the kickoff was we just kind of wanted to get out of the project and we were just like here we go again and internally at AJ and smart myself and my team we started to call this collaboration chaos that's what we just coined the term internally every time we started a project we were wondering when will this sort of collaboration chaos kick in and there were really you know when we would jump into a meeting with a client there were really only two things that were going to happen the first thing the first outcome and this is really the best case scenario is that we would talk in circles nothing would get decided and the only outcome of the meeting was just to have another meeting so you know we'd all sit together we're looking at the app and you know everyone's kind of misaligned and people are arguing and everyone's talking and this one hour meeting is extended to 2 hours and at the end of it it's like okay we got to do another meeting because we got nowhere and somehow that was also a relief it was like oh the meeting's over we can go back to doing what we actually want to do the second outcome was actually a bigger issue and this would be where a new person would join the meeting who we haven't met before and this is maybe someone higher up and they come in they see let's say the app we're working on or the service we're designing and they're like no this isn't what I was expecting this isn't what we were talking about because maybe this person had been talking to other people nobody really knows and this person comes in and potentially destroys a couple of weeks or a couple of months of work just with the decisions that they make in that meeting and they would kind of destroy the team's motivation they would destroy our motivation and you know afterwards we would just have the options either a we ignore what just happened in that meeting you know just pretend it never happened or B really go back from scratch and start working on this whole thing again but the problem was you know a new person would come in next time or this person would come back into another meeting in the future and they would still be misaligned with the project and still forget what they said in that meeting so it all started to feel really pointless here's the thing though I kind of stuck with it for a few more years as then I stuck with the fact that these meetings just suck and it somehow it just has to be like this because well one we thought someone else was going to fix this problem you know we we were designers we were product managers we were product owners it wasn't really our job to fix the company's collaboration and communication issues and we kind of thought like there's going to be some coach coming in or someone will come and fix this problem two we were getting paid anyway right so we were getting paid the team working at these companies were getting paid and there was this kind of feeling like well you know these meetings suck but well I mean we're still getting paid and and actually for us as cons ANS the projects went on even longer and therefore we would get even paid more if the projects went on and on and on and on and if the meetings were bad we would actually get paid more so weirdly we were incentivized for all of this system to kind of suck and then the third thing and that's maybe the most important is that we would talk to other people who are years ahead of us in our career and the feeling was meetings and get togethers like this were sort of the tax you had to pay to do the actual work you wanted to do and it wasn't just designers it was everyone working in these companies it was the developers it was people on the marketing team you know we'd get together after these meetings and the vibe was yeah that's how it always is and it's not just this company it's every company and I was looking forward I was looking at like where is this all going and I was talking to people you know who were seven eight years ahead of me and I started to realize and I saw this image actually and it really recently really like it struck with me like when you start you're so excited about getting into your field like whether it is ux whether is UI was yeah ux in my case and a couple of years into it you're just like oh God and that like this image it's yeah it's a joke whatever but if you look for memes of any type of job like it really doesn't matter what it is there's always this thing that people start off excited about it and then the client or the boss basic basically makes them hate their lives and it's it always comes back to meetings and miscommunication as well it did eventually wear me down though and basically it was this moment in 2015 you know we were a couple of years into AJ and smart many years into well actually exactly 5 years into running the business and I I just started to realize maybe actually this is not going to get fixed I was sitting in a meeting I was there with an external consultant not from the AJ and smart team the tension was so unbelievable ably high in this meeting and one of the Consultants just broke down into tears and he even smashed his laptop on the table broke it and left and I was sitting there in the corner just like sheepishly awkward uh at this highle meeting just kind of unable to do anything there was nothing I could do about it I was I was a designer it wasn't my job to solve this problem but after I left this meeting I realized either I need to just get out of this world like corporate uh product creation World The Innovation world or I have to do something about it and that was really the trigger for me that moment was the trigger for me where I realized you know either I need to figure this out maybe no one else is going to try to figure this out for me or I need to get out of this industry but the problem is this industry was kind of everything it was every collaboration situation that I was seeing at every company it didn't matter whether it was a startup a small business a corporate it the topic also didn't seem to matter it seemed to be that this collaboration chaos thing was a disease that every company had and for me it was that trigger was that meeting and and and and that moment of realizing there was these two paths for me that led me to create what I'm going to show you today and that is the 516 method what is the 516 method well it's just a catchy name catchy title that represents the five steps that you can take to become a top 1% facilitator and make six figures while doing it and what does six figures mean in this case well it means you're able to make a minimum of $100,000 per year actually I would say that's the absolute Baseline doing facilitation work for companies and clients and teams and on top of that believe it or not this trigger this this meeting and then the journey afterwards led me to the point where I am today where I actually love meetings I actually get excited when I have some sort of a group session coming up because I know how to deal with them I know how to lead these things and it's really also a superpower and no just in case you're thinking it the 516 method is not some getrich quick it's actually my compressed learnings from the last decade of extremely hard work of trying to figure this stuff out so it's not something where at the end of this training it's like boom now you're making six figures but I'm going to show you the path I'm going to show you the blueprint and that's really what the 516 method is so who the hell am I and why am I telling you stuff on the internet hello my name is Jonathan I'm originally from Ireland I've been living in Germany for the last 12 years and after trying to do full-time jobs at various companies in my early 20s I realized this is not for me and I started AJ and smart with my co-founder Michael in my bedroom in Berlin this is a beautiful shot of my bedroom in Berlin I wasn't even really able to get to my bed because of our desk it's very very beautiful and over the last 10 years we've grown we've become a global company and we've been insanely lucky to work with the coolest brands in the world worked with companies like eBay like Twitter the New York Times the United Nations world food program we've helped companies get Google best apps of the Year Awards Apple Design Awards all that good stuff and that's just the tip of the iceberg of the companies we've had the chance to work with over the years it's it's been really really amazing oh we also worked with Lego that was really cool we also run one of the biggest design product and facilitation YouTube channels on well YouTube we've got almost 200,000 subscribers and we've been making videos on there for like the last 4 years super fun if you ever want to get deep into that whole producty topic make sure you check out the AJ and smart YouTube channel we also run worksh shopper.com which is the number one website for facilitators and coaches who want to run workshops it's an amazing amazing resource that's workshoppers dcom and that's basically just the main website of all of the sort of facilitation training stuff we do I'm also the co-host of the Jake and Jonathan podcast which is one of the top rated and most downloaded podcasts in this entire facilitation and product space it's also very silly and very funny if you ever just want to like numb your mind with random this voice and someone else's voice you should you should check out Jake and Jonathan finally I also wrote one of the most popular books on this topic of workshops and facilitation called the workshop or Playbook this book has been read by over 140,000 people and physical copies of it over 255,000 physical copies of this book has been sold and besides all of the Consulting work and all of our kind of content stuff I've also personally trained thousands and thousands of facilitators over the last 5 to 10 years who are now you know either working in corporates or working in companies or successful full-time facilitators themselves it's really weird to me again I mentioned it so many times but none of that was really part of the plan okay so that's me that's AJ and smart that's work Shopper I'm just getting that out of the way because you know you might have come here from some ad and you don't really know who who we are so I'm just telling you like we're we're a real company we're real people uh this isn't just me standing in my bedroom uh although this would be kind of a weird bedroom I don't know maybe I should redesign my bedroom so back to 2015 the first thing I did when I wanted to figure out this whole collaboration chaos problem you know I was a designer so I took my research skills and applied it to solving this problem so what I did is I Googled the problem so I Googled how to improve meetings and I found a lot of stuff a lot of interesting stuff a lot of weird stuff like how to improve meetings held in The Sims 3 don't know but the journey the journey over the next few months was really interesting because what I decided to do is just sort of spend my way out of the problem I bought every course I could on the topic I I hired as many coaches as I could for you know collaboration public speaking facilitation different types of workshops I travel the world I got to do a lot of really interesting things and and through this I was able to just learn all of these different exercises and when I would learn them I would come back to Berlin try this stuff with clients and just see what happened and like I said we got to travel the world we got to go to Google 30 weeks in New York City and Ideo in New York City they were showing us how to design thinking we learned user story mapping in Portugal nothing to do with the fact that the weather was amazing and you can hang out on the beach I read every single book on the topic I figured out like okay these there's these key words that I need to look at collaboration meeting Improvement facilitation workshops work sessions all of these things I would figure out the keyword and then I would try to figure out how to get trained on that topic over the next six months six 12 months I spent my team and I spent over $200,000 just educating ourselves on this topic how do we solve this collaboration topic and keep in mind I wasn't trying to solve this topic so that I could become a facilitator I was trying to solve this topic so my company AJ and smart could actually do better product work for our clients again there was like my my intentions were never even slightly around this whole facilitation thing that word wasn't even very clear in my mind and to be honest if you search like facilitation course or any of this stuff it's mostly very boring looking stuff with stock photos of business people uh it just didn't interest me at all as someone running a creative studio and I'm a bit of a weirdo so it it just it just wasn't something that I was interested in so just just to get that point across anyway 200k 6 to 12 months of learning lots of different coaches I learned a lot I learned a lot of really valuable stuff the problem is it's still the collaboration chaos was too strong it was too potent too powerful and meetings and collaboration and any any situation where a group of people got together and try to make decisions or solve problems still sucked it still really sucked I think I improveed things a little bit by learning you know business model canvas all of these amazing things from strategizer like there there was all these pieces but it still wasn't solving this sort of core underlying issue that we were having with this collaboration problem especially near the start of projects and I was really starting to lose any hope of solving it and you know my co-founder and I were at this point where we were just like all right well you know like like I said everyone we knew just accepted that this is how it is this is the tax of being part of just working on stuff and so I was really getting to this point where I was like well maybe I just want to don't maybe I just want to like work in a place where you don't have to work with people maybe there's something I can do where I can just be on my own and not have to think about ever collaborating with people or maybe I can just kind of you know crush it all down and ignore it and just you know do what everyone else does in meetings and just doodle and try to hope that it's over soon and I don't know I I I was also feeling I was I I think the the this collaboration thing was starting to really also burn me out in hindsight I didn't know what burnout was back then it was less of a popular term but now when I look back at it I really think I was getting to this burnout phase just because of the constant hatred for meetings and how pointless it all felt so anyway it was 2016 and my co-founder and I were flying on a on a plane to our client Lanza we're going there to to do some work with them by the way I love you Lanza but I was very nervous about this meeting because I had the feeling it was just going to be chaotic waste of time and I brought a book with me I kind I was I was almost finished like I thought I I was done with this topic now because I had I I solved it as much as I could but I did bring a book with me and this book was called Sprint uh Sprint if if any of you don't know it's this uh process that was designed at Google it's a 5-day process for validating Big Ideas in in a short space of time um I bought the book didn't think anything of it because I'd read so many books on this sort of collaboration topic uh in the past and also this was very product focused which was what I was hoping for I read this book and it actually changed my brain reading this book on the plane I realized that everything I learned in the last 6 months in the last 5 years previous this was the thing that brought everything together and I'm not saying that I shouldn't have spent that 200k and this book would have solved everything for me I'm not saying that but this book had the formula that I was looking for so when we got back to Berlin after a meeting with Lanza who by the way agreed to try this process with us thank you so much Lanza much appreciated they agreed to try this process with us and so the first design Sprint we ran was with Lanza and it was an amazing experience from start to finish from us and at least you know apparently also from Lanza and this was a this experience of running the Sprint with them this 5 day stepbystep process it actually solved this collaboration chaos problem seriously it was a crazy moment today J and smart we realized like this like all of these things we've been doing over the last few years just looking back at them we were shaking our head like how did we do projects like this how did we just think about going into a room and having a random meeting like we would never ever do this again the Sprint really changed the entire thing for AJ and smart and for myself so I was obsessed with the Sprint process I wanted to know everything about it I became Darkly obsessed with it and for me the only Next Step was to meet the guy who wrote it Jake knp I wanted to meet him I wanted to sit down with him I wanted to understand how he came up with this I wanted to understand what his thinking was behind the Sprint process so I sent him an email uh I was kind of shocked that he replied to me because he's a New York Times best-selling author and I was just some random Irish guy hanging out in Berlin and he replied to me I flew to San Francisco I sat down with him and we planned a basically a world tour together to travel the world and teach the Sprint process to as many people as possible and over the next two years that's exactly what Jake and I did we traveled the world we ran so many of these boot camps so many of these design Sprint boot camps I don't even remember remember how many were we also ended up creating an online course for design Sprints we thought thousands and thousands of people this process uh we're still even kind of doing that up till today and you know AJ and smart my company became known as the design Sprint company we were getting calls every day from companies all over the world hey can you run a design Sprint for us can you run a design Sprint for us and you know the cool thing is we went from this company that was just executing work based on what we were told to do to a company that was part of now more the Strategic big picture of things that were happening at other companies and this was super super cool and for me to be honest that was it I was done that was the end of the road problem solved my design agency works fine now we can grow we started growing like crazy from 2016 2018 um we grew like 35 people down from I think it was like we went from like 5 to 35 people that was its own chaos that's another story but we grew we got to travel the world we got to work with the coolest companies in the world and for me it was that was it I'm I can go back to being a CEO of a design agency let's focus on making our design stuff better now let's always use the design Sprint as the starting point of workshops or starting point of projects and we're done but there was there was just this one issue and this one issue not necessarily an issue like we started getting we would do I would run a design Sprint for a client or a design Sprint training for a company and afterwards people would come up to me and say this is amazing like I can see how this would change everything but my company doesn't have five days to run something like this every you know every week and I want to use these systems in my normal meetings and they would ask me like can you run a Leadership Retreat for me and I would say yeah sure can you run an innovation day for our company and I I was like okay can you run a marketing workshop can you run a halfday product feature organiz like all of these things that were asking me to do I just kind of out of curiosity just said yes to everything and I ended up in very strange very cool situations like this one I ended up in Tokyo getting flown to Tokyo to run a 3our alignment meeting for the sea level of Lego this is like one of the coolest moments of my entire life but I was getting asked to do all of these cool things and I started to realize like this could be something like us and and you know me and my team members being called to do these super custom Things based on like the underlying things that I learned with the design Sprint and everything I learned previously there seems to be something there but I don't even really know what it is and the cool thing is I didn't have to think about it I was just getting dragged into it and so you know we started work Shopper uh which was our like customer face side of AJ and smart where we're saying okay let's actually teach people how to do these things that I know like these three years or four years or five years of just learning every single method plus the design Sprint plus doing all of these Retreats and events and all of these things I remember doing like a 1, 1500 person uh startup Innovation week at Microsoft all of these things I was just able to do them without having to think much and without much preparation because I had just learned all of these underlying principles and it was really amazing so I then started teaching other people how to do that who then became High day rake facilitators and that's also another thing is that it was you know for AJ and smart me going to run a one or two day retreat was sometimes bringing in more money than us doing like a two-month project and so I was really starting to get to this point where I was like okay this this this has to be a very important part of our business from now on and and you know that's where we are today AJ and smart and and work Shopper we're a company we still do product stuff we still do product work but we're much more on the strategy side now much more on the collaboration side now and that's where I like to be and that's what I love to do um it's a mixture of it's fun I love it it's amazing it gets me excited plus it pays really well and that really all of that combined is what brings me to this 516 method everything I've learned is in this 516 method which I'm going to show you now just a reminder what is the 516 method it's five steps that you can take to become a top 1% facilitator and earn six figures while doing it that's the 516 method I could have just called it five steps to getting more money but 516 is maybe a bit more memorable and catchy so before we jump into that what do I actually mean by a 1% facilitator because that sounds kind of weird and maybe elitist well the 1% facilitator is quite literally somebody who's better than 99% of other facilitators and there's a lot of definitions of what better means I I'll go into that in the 516 method and the other thing is that they get paid more than 99% of other facilitators making more in one day of facilitation or running a workshop then most facilitators make in one month or two months or three months in many cases and that's where I am today that's where the people I train are at today you know I know people who they do like two days of facilitation per month because they don't want to work so much and that's what they want to do and that covers all of their expenses and actually gives them profit and that that's the beauty of this thing is that it doesn't have to be this full-time working all the time thing it's it's super flexible I like to work a lot but you know most of the time I don't want to be I think I do like three facilitation things three workshops per month that's more than enough for someone like me who has other Hobbies other interests anyway I'm getting too far down that's what a 1% facilitator is so let's jump straight into the 516 method this is a good point to get your pen and paper out there's not likely to be a replay of this video it's kind of hosted on this private page so get your pen and paper out there's going to be some real nuggets in here that's going to help you get to this point if you want to of being a 1% facilitator okay let's go straight to step number one of the five steps in the 516 method a top 1% facilitator needs to know how to design any workshop for any team regardless of the brief or constraints this means you need to be able to run a 2-hour alignment Workshop remotely a two-day leadership event in person a two wee product road map in session it doesn't really matter no matter what comes at you you need to be able to run it the top 1% facilitator isn't Bound by needing to do specific types of workshops like the design Sprint they're not worried or Bound by constraints like how much time the client has or how many people are going to be in the room and they're also especially not bound by subject matter and that's an important thing so for example if a pharmaceutical company comes to you and says hey we want to run a decision-making Workshop we only have 1 hour now you don't know anything about the pharmaceutical Market or business you still need to be able to run this Workshop without having to get to know the entire business and that's the beauty of being this 1% facilitator is that you're unbelievably flexible it doesn't matter who calls me I go to every type of company I help Silicon Valley companies with their Tech products I help pharmaceutical companies I have it really doesn't matter to me what the specific subject is and the reason why is that I design workshops based off first principles not based on hey this specific workshop and what is a first principle well a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption okay I I also don't really know what that means well what first principles means to me is that you learn the underlying rules and Bill building blocks of a workshop rather than the surface level parts of a workshop or facilitation an example of that an easy example or an easy way to understand that is the TV show Salt Fat acid and heat these are the underling elements of how cooking works and because a Michelin star Chef understands these underlying principles these underlying elements when they're coming up with a new meal or something special they don't have to look for recipes they don't have to think okay well what did this other person do they know the underlying principles of how this thing works so they can do it on the Fly they can improvise that's the beauty of knowing first principles versus just knowing F surface level things and honestly that's the best way for me to recognize whether a facilitator is talented or not or experienced or not does this person only know how to run a certain amount of exercises only in a specific subject matter area or can I send them on a flight to anywhere in the world to any client with any amount of time and even halfway through the workshop they can change things because they understand these first principles now there's a lot more to this than I can teach you here in this amount of time it would take me hours to go through the entire first principles but I want to show you some of the underlying first principles of building a workshop so that you have an idea of what I'm talking out here and these are not fancy scientific these are super basic so here are first principles of workshopping and facilitation number one discussions are sequenced this means and you know in a normal meeting discussions are all over the place people are talking in any order that they want people are talking over each other in a workshop that you're facilitating discussions are sequence a b c a b c or a c b you're telling people when they can speak You're facilitating the conversation and step two principle number two is that then discussions are visualized and this is one of the keys to a workshop you know the space I'm in is one of the workshop spaces here in Berlin uh at AJ and smart and what you can see is that there are Post-its everywhere this is not just so that this scene looks nice although it does actually kind of look nice with all these colorful Post-its but these poits if you've ever seen that sticky notes whatever that's just how we visualize group conversations trying to store all of these discussions in your head is impossible it's pointless but if you can visualize a conversation with sticky notes or however you want then people can remember hours later what the discussion was earlier in the day so discussions are sequence number three we work alone together this is an interesting one and it's something I stole directly from the design Sprint book and this is basically the idea that when you have a group group when you're facilitating a group many times during the workshop you're asking people to work completely alone isolated from each other even though everyone's working towards the same goal why well this is a great way to ensure that people have unique ideas that don't blend into each other until the time is right for that to happen often meetings are a place where people just someone says an idea someone else says an idea someone else says an idea and it's not like the best idea gets through it's just like what was the last idea or who's a better presenter with this we work alone together principle even the shiest people in the room get to have their ideas out there and that's really one of the beauty of this principle finally there's always a decision remember earlier when I said the best case scenario is that the meetings would happen and then there was no decision just another meeting when you're facilitating a workshop and when you understand the underlying principles you know how to get a decision out of that meeting you know how to really end a meeting properly so that people leave feeling like they've actually accomplished something and that's really why they'll want to have you back over and over and over again and these are the underlying principles of workshopping and facilitation and these learning these and getting accustomed with these underlying principles rather than the surface level exercises are really the first thing in your journey towards becoming a 1% facilitator okay let's move on to the second thing number two a top 1% facilitator needs to have mastered 10 core exercises allowing them to create custom workshops easily and be flexible when they need to change things it always happens you're in a work session you're in a workshop you're facilitating a group you've got it all planned here's how I want to do it I'm going to use the business model canvas I'm going to do this I'm going to do this I'm going to do this and then you realize this is probably not going to work it's not working something's wrong now a normal facilitator might freak out at this point they might realize oh my god i' I've created the wrong session I'm this is this is going to go horribly and I know this because I used to be an amateur facilitator and these situations used to freak me out quite a lot when I realized what I put together was just not the right thing but today I'm not very worried about that because I've got 10 exercises these these 10 exercises that I know inside and out that I've perfected I call them core exercises and and by the way there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of exercises out there there are entire books like gamestorming that are just full to the brim of with exercises every company has their own exercises every training has its own exercises and what I've done over the last like five to 10 years is just learn them all try them all over and over and over and over and over again and I figured out the 10 that works so well for me and for AJ and smart to just have locked into your mind so that whatever comes up you're always ready to improvise and also 80 to 90% of the workshops that I build use these 10 exercises on repeat now one of the cool things is that I've categorized these exercises into four categories I call these the four C's in my workshop or Playbook doesn't really matter for now but these are really the four category ories that a workshop needs these are the four sections of every Workshop of every good Workshop you have exercises that collect information you have exercise that help teams choose what to focus on you have exercises that help teams to create Solutions and generate ideas and you have exercises that help a team commit and decide this is what we're going to do this is what we're actually going to work on and and and move to the next phase and have having these 10 exercises means you know I can be in the create phase of a workshop realize oh my God the ideas so far today do not look good like this this exercise just did not work this Workshop is not working and for me I know these exercises so well so inside and out these are I I see these exercises essentially as ingredients these are my the ingredients that I know so well inside and out I can just swap it out for a different ingredient something that's going to work better for this overall Workshop or this overall recipe and so really having 10 exercises again like I said for me how I found the exercises that work well for me and my team at AJ and smart and a lot of the facilitators I train is simply by obsessively learning and trying every single exercise you're really having your 10 that you can put into these categories collect choose create and Commit This is going to make you a much more flexible facilitator these exercises are so important to learn and you really need to also know why each Exercise Works and all of the variations of these exercises as well so that's number two you need to have mastered 10 core exercises so that you can be extremely flexible in any Workshop that you're running number three a top 1% facilitator needs to be able to confidently facilitate any group and needs to be able to handle troublemakers and curveballs so pretty much you can guarantee that if you make facilitation your career and many of you will know this if you're a facilitator or a coach or a trainer it never really goes to plan because there are humans involved and humans are inherently unpredictable and that's also a good thing the problem is if you haven't really learned how to confidently facilitate people things can go off the rails quickly and you can lose the room and there's so many things that can go wrong you can just make people bored there could be someone in the room who just wants to like and wants to undermine you putting you on the defensive for the entire Workshop or you know something completely unexpected could happen like a key person just doesn't turn up and now you've got a totally different group dynamic and the beauty of being a 1% facilitator is to you none of this matters you've got everything under control it doesn't matter how unpredictable the group is or the setting is you are able to keep control of it so what do you need to know what do you need to learn to become this confident facility Ator well I've diluted it down to six laws I call them the six laws of Master Level facilitation and you know there's a million facilitation books out there which I've read and I've I've learned a lot of amazing things but these are really the six key things that I've learned which for me separate the 90% 99% of facilitators from the 1% best facilitators and I'm going to talk about one of those laws here the reason I'm not going to go through all six is because those six laws on their own would take many many hours to teach you and you'll even see that this one will take me a little while but I want to teach you one of my favorites and this law is be the guide not the hero so many of you know gandal from The Lord of the Rings he's a 300 or 500 year old hairy Wizard and he's one of the main characters of The Lord of the Rings but the weird thing and I remember watching The Lord of the Rings for the first time the weird thing is he's this you know crazy powerful wizard but he doesn't help very often in the story he doesn't really get in there and solve problems for Frodo and the Gang well the reason is that Gandalf is playing the role of the guide he's not playing the role of the hero Frodo is the hero of Lord of the Rings and this means that it's Gandalf's job to Simply give guidance and point the way so that Frodo can go through all the trials and tribulations and you know finish the story feeling like a hero feeling accomplished and actually being the main center point of the story you see the same thing in Star Wars with Obi-Wan he's the person who's like you know the greatest Jedi of all time he can do all this cool stuff he doesn't really help Luke much in the story though why because their roles are clear Obi-Wan is the guide Luke is the hero and and this is what you need to be as the facilitator in a workshop even though it is totally counterintuitive to what you might think you need to do for me especially as you can maybe see in this video I'm pretty extraverted I like to talk I like to express myself and the first few years as a facilitator I would try to be the hero I was you know really excited if I could come up with ideas if I could put in my thoughts during a workshop or during a facilitation session I was trying to be funny I was trying to be Lively and what I realized is this was really the wrong approach I was taking away the spotlight from the people who are in the room because I thought that that's what they wanted and the issue is when you play the hero you also have a lot more expectation on top of you which you'll never be able to fulfill especially when you're working with clients or team now taking this role of the guide really allowed me to build a lot of trust with my clients because they saw me as someone who's really there to help them not just there to help myself it allowed me to facilitate in any company in any industry because I was coming in there with the expectation that I'm the guide hey I'm just here to help you through this Leadership Retreat I'm the owner of the process would you all have the ideas inside your head you've booked me to help you get those ideas out so that you know when I'm going into this pharmaceutical company and I know nothing about the industry they're not expecting me to solve the problems for them they're expecting me to guide them through finding the solutions themselves and finally but actually most importantly the participants of the workshop felt amazing at the end of a workshop with me because they they're the ones who got all the attention and got all the appraise because I would make it clear even if I did put in my own ideas is I'd make it clear hey you're the ones who did this all I did was helped get some things out of the way so you could find the PATH and you could finish it so on a project when they would finish a project with me or a workshop with me they felt like the heroes and therefore they felt good and therefore they kept booking me compared to the facilitators who try to take credit for things and and try to be the center of attention so what's a actual practical thing you can do to pull yourself out of this hero role and into the guide role well here is a counterintuitive answer to that don't give advice instead of giving advice to you know your participants in the room lead them to the answer especially if you know it let's say you know the answer to something you should lead them to finding that answer themselves rather than saying I think you should do this ask questions what do you think would happen if we tried this hm interesting what would you think it would happen if we tried this interesting so which one of these two things do you think would be more interesting for the business get good at figuring out what types of questions to ask rather than constantly jumping in and giving advice and immediately moving yourself to the role of the hero which is not where you should be as a facilitator just really remember you're the guide you're not the hero it's a super important part of learning how to master facilitation it's just one small part of it but it's a huge mindset shift that most people would never figure out and I hope just if you take one thing from this training it's that really focus on being the guide not on being the hero number four a top 1% facilitator needs to know and needs to have mastered Three core workshops or recipes as I call them at AJ and smart so what I mean by this is you when you have some friends coming over you usually have like this one or two or three meals that you know you can nail for me it's a lasagna I know I can make a really really good lasagna every time without having to deeply think about it it's a crowd pleaser so as a facilitator or a workshop or whatever you want to call yourself or as a coach it's really amazing to have around three relatively complex robust recipes that you know you can always pull out and are always crowd-pleasers you know when you get a call from a client and they say they want to do a 3-day Retreat you don't have to start from scratch you can start with one of your amazing crowd-pleasing recipes and customize it along the way so there are three recipes that I teach my team here at AJ and smart and I teach other facilitators because I think these are a pretty robust set but there's lots of different ones one is the design Sprint and we have our own custom version of at AJ and smart the other is a strategy Sprint you know strategy is something very Broad and can be applied to a lot of different things and and one is kind of very focused on our company itself and it's a product strategy Workshop I'm not going to go into the differences between all of those things but you know sometimes I teach people a Leadership Retreat template or an innovation Workshop template or ldj one of our most famous workshops this is you know a problemsolving recipe so the goal here find your three crowd-pleasing recipes your favorite recipes the things that you know inside and out better than anybody else so that no matter what comes at you you can start with these templates and you can mix and match as you go this has been really killer for me just knowing these three to four uh core recipes that I can always bring out I call them Master recipes at AJ and smart and honestly if you have like three of these and you have your ex exercises the ingredients from earlier there's nothing you cannot run when a client asks you that that's really the the beauty of it I'm this is a short section just going to show you that one I think that's important really having these you don't have to have a hundred of these like 3 to five is more than enough number five a top 1% facilitator needs to be able to sell workshops to their team and or their clients so I'm sure you agree at this point or you know if you watched this far into the video that facilitation is a really interesting career path it's even a huge career Advantage you can add it to other careers you can add it to other jobs it's a fantastic fantastic skill to have but what's any of that worth if you're not able to sell it or convince other people that this is something valuable and the problem right now is that this work shopping or facilitation topic is so new and this category of this person who can run anything is so new that 90% of organizations don't really know what it is and so they also don't really know what to look for and for them new equals scary you know for me I tried a lot of things to raise awareness and to get work you know I gave talks all around the world we have you know our YouTube channel we we really did a lot but there were these two fundamental problems that I kept coming up against one people didn't know what workshops were or what this General topic were it was just it was just all too abstract for them and number two I didn't have a system to turn strangers into clients and I think that's really the key how do you turn strangers into clients and for me it took me a long time because I wasn't a marketer it took me a long time to figure out like how dides this all work and so it became a new obsession marketing and sales became a new obsession for me and you know you're watching this video if you've gotten this far you're part of the marketing system that I've built essentially for this specific thing so what I did is I finally hacked together a system with my team here at AJ and smart that not only brought me a steady stream of clients but also did 80% of the convincing work for me and this was pretty nice so what is this system this system is called a sales funnel and that's even even that terminology is something that most facil cators don't even know about they just wait around for clients to come to them and it sort of happens sometimes and then it sort of doesn't happen other times and you have this feast and famine thing but if you want to be confident that you actually get qualified clients people calling you and setting up calls with you and emailing you you have to build a system and that systems for us is a sales funnel it's a simple step-by-step system that turns strangers into clients through a series of landing pages and Lead magnets it's actually relatively simple to set up it's it's not rocket science at all you know for AJ and smart what we do one of the best ways we get clients is we create a Facebook ad uh around this you know product topic that leads to a download and that download sends a series of emails that leads to someone getting excited about the topic and jumping on a call with us you know this whole marketing topic for me became an obsession to the point where you know myself and my team ended up getting this uh marketing award at one of the biggest marketing conferences in the world for building one of these sales funnels that was producing over $1 million worth of sales per year this is again something I completely didn't expect and honestly similar to the facilitation thing I just realized you know what if I want to start making money from this I also have to become good at marketing and another thing people usually ask me when I tell them this is yeah but that doesn't work for getting corporate clients because corporate clients aren't on Facebook they're not checking ads it absolutely does work for getting corporate clients all of AJ and Smart's clients are corporates like you know eBay like all these companies they are corporate clients like they come through these funnels for us they come through these sales funnels warmed up and ready to get on a call you know in our group in one of our facilitation groups you can see people posting every day about closing deals like what is this uh design Sprint deal closed here's what I used from AJ and smart you know they're taking making these simple systems and these these systems learn from many many years of marketing and applying them to Consulting applying them to getting facilitation work and that's really one of the beauties of building these automated funnels and automated systems it also means you don't have to get like super ruined by social media you don't have to build a personal brand you don't have to be posting on Instagram every day you don't have to be making YouTube videos every day we do that stuff as a sort of addition to our funnels but it's the funnels the things that you can build you know in the space of a week and then just maintain them those are where we actually get our leads from which is really really really exciting because I don't even use Instagram or any of these things anymore because I find them way too distracting and also they're just kind of depressing but what about if you're working inside a company what if you're an internal facilitator does this work too well you don't need to run ads but a funnel helps turn people in your company into Advocates as well so that's something we also teach people in our programs is how do you build internal advocacy so that essentially people buy your facilitation skills and you move up the career ladder that's also a huge part of it still a sales funnel just more of an internal sales funnel and really that's it you know building a sales funnel building something that predictably turns strangers into clients rather than focusing on Word of Mouth I say to the people in our programs word of mouth is not a strategy then you're always waiting around for people to book you and it's it's just not the way to go you have to be in control of how the leads are coming to you and that's why I teach that in our programs that's why it's such an important part of our programs you know this 516 method if you're able to look at these five steps as a blueprint and and take these things and start applying them you can turn this facilitation skill into a business into six figure income and the cool thing is that you're also going to help companies with one of the biggest problems they have and this is a global problem collaboration chaos is a global issue across every company on the planet no matter how organized they seem from the outside it's always chaos when it comes to collaboration and they're going to be looking for people like you over the next few years it's starting to go into a golden age of this facilitation thing but only for the people who are really in this top of the pile top 1% who can run any type of workshop for any type of team at any type of company facilitate any type of situation but also find clients and convince people that this is a useful skill and that they should book you and that you deserve this High rate so what can you do now well there's two options option number one is you do what I did and you spend the time taking the programs getting coaching reading the books trial and error trying these things out with your clients and you'll eventually if you have the motivation and of course you'll have to spend a lot of money you'll eventually get to this point where you're one of these 1% facilitators and you know maybe you're a world class and like I said this it took me years it was difficult but I did do it and I did get there so that is an absolutely valid path there is a second option and that second option is to essentially take the shortcut and turn mine and my team's decade worth of trial and error reading books taking coaching basically learning everything we possibly could about this topic growing a business training thousands of people turning an entire decade of that into days for you through our program work Shopper master so let me tell you a little bit about work Shopper master and I got something special right after this for you so Workshop or Master is the synthesis of every single thing I've learned about Workshop building and facilitation and in my opinion and also in the people who've joined the program's opinion it is literally the best FastTrack option for becoming this 1% facilitator it is the fastest and best and also most entertaining way to do it so so what actually is this thing well it's detailed strategies on how to become a top 1% facilitator it's the exact framework and resources you need to design any workshop for any Challenge and of course for any team we've also got sections in there on how to convince your employer or clients to run workshops for the first time second time third time also going to show you how to build your first funnel to attract clients on demand like I talked about earlier that's one of the most difficult things for our facilitators and it's going to just make facilitating workshops and building workshops feel less stressful take less time and just actually feel enjoyable overall you also get trained on our three and now ever growing Master recipes that we use at AJ and smart and at work Shopper and we'll also teach you how to figure out which one is the best for your client and not only do we teach you how to run the workshop we also tell you how much we charge for this workshop and we share the sales deck to show you how we sell our workshops and our facilitation services to our clients which is kind of amazing we're completely open about that in this program and we teach you how to facilitate any type of situation with the the six laws of Master Level facilitation it really teaches you every scenario you could ever possibly be in as a facilitator so you can be super confident that you're never going to mess up or if you do or when things things get weird you know exactly how to deal with it we also give you every client getting resource and cheat sheet that we have at AJ and smart and how we do our marketing our marketing cheat sheets templates everything and we give you our Workshop building materials and resources so that's the the video program which is over 8 hours of super high quality video and that's just the start of what you get in the program the next thing is kind of my most favorite thing and that is you get access to four live calls so that's four Zoom calls per month so every Tuesday different time zones with me are one of my AJ and smart certified Workshop or Master coaches who know everything about everything that you could possibly think of when it comes to facilitation and coaching and on these calls you know they're 2 to 3 hours long you can turn up to these calls whenever you like you get 12 months access you can also watch the reping of all these calls if you miss them on these calls you can ask us anything about hey help me run this Workshop hey what should I do with this client hey how much should I charge hey my team doesn't want to do like you really can ask any question to people who have really got the experience behind them and it's also a fantastic place to meet facilitators from all over the world high level facilitators people wanting to get to this 1% it's really an amazing Community speaking of community you'll also get full access permanent access to our private online community this is a curated Community you'll see that it's not possible to just join this program by going to our website and clicking on it we curate every single person who joins this community and this community is an amazing place to find Workshop recipes you know how to sell workshops different ways of doing it there's meetups it's really the best best possible online community for this Niche you could possibly imagine I really really really love it finally and this is pretty cool when you finish the program you also get certified by AJ and smart that's my signature on the certification and you can show this certificate you can show this on your LinkedIn you can show it on whatever channels and this certificate which is going to be relatively rare is going to show your potential employers or clients that you're the type of person who can run any type of workshop for any type of team in any subject matter and we think this is going to be something that employers start asking for after a while and it's an amazing thing to have now there are some things we ask of you before applying to join this program and there's really just three things one is that we want people who really believe in the power of facilitating and running workshops so we're not here to convince anybody about that and and that's super important you you already have to believe that this is something that you want to do and and that it's valuable and that it's worth doing as in we want people who believe that running workshops and helping teams solve problems and making decisions is a good thing and is a valuable thing number two you must be willing and able to run and facilitate workshops within the next 3 months if you're not already doing it because most people who take this program within that amount of time are ready to go and really we're not looking for people who are just dabblers and just taking a look at the program and ah whatever I'll maybe I'll do something next Year we're looking for people who want to start this fast soon because this is also the time where the opportunity is the best and finally we're looking for people who will actually put in the work like becoming a facilitator is this is not some getrich quick scheme or something you know we're going to show you the way we're going to guide you but you're the one who's going to have to put in the work in real life to make this work so if you're excited about becoming a facilitator about becoming a 1% facilitator and you're willing to really put in that work then this is the right place for you so to really make sure that you're a good fit for this program and this program is a good fit for you what we've done is we've made our calendars available for the next few days so myself and the career coaches at AJ and smart we've made our calendars available for you to jump on a career coaching call with us this career coaching call is 45 minutes long and it's really to get to know you to get to know where you want to go with your facilitation career where are you today and we'll also tell you more about the program and answer any questions you have now this isn't some regular sales call and it's especially not a pushy call where we're going to tell you you have to buy this program people who take this call say this 45 minutes was the most useful 45 minutes they've had in a long time the people who are taking these calls at AJ and smart including me we've trained we facilitated we know this industry and this 45 minutes might even help you figure out what you want to do next in your career so this is a 45-minute career coaching call how you book it is there's going to be a button down below maybe it appeared maybe it was already there I don't know how my team's going to do that but there's going to be a button down below and if you click that button it's going to take you to our calendars it's going to show you some open slots hopefully if if it's not already booked out and that is also the only way so setting up a career coaching call is the only way to enroll in work shop or master and find out more about it just to be super clear this isn't some pushy sales call where my team is going to try to force you to buy this program there's no obligation this is really a way for us to get to know each other and you know for us to figure out where you're going and if that really fits with what Workshop or Master is and the other thing is I would really ask you is if you book The call please turn up to it this is not something automated literally I will be sitting there in front of my computer on Zoom waiting for you to join this call you don't need to prepare for this call we would just ask you that you're not like walking around somewhere um just like be at your computer be somewhere quiet that's kind of the only thing you need to prepare for and it's also a good idea to to book that call right now because you won't have another chance to book that call outside of where you are right now and also usually when we put these videos out these calls book up fast so book that career coaching call hit the button down below you can learn more about Workshop or Master we can figure out if it's a good fit for you and I think you're going to love the call either way so as a final reminder about Workshop or master and what it is it's over8 hours of video that's going to teach you everything you need to become a 1% facilitator how to build any type of workshop and any type of work session for any type of company how to facilitate like a master and handle any situation and really the exercises that you need so you can forget all the other exercises and not have to read every book and Google everything we've got everything in there for you and we also teach you how to sell workshops how to talk about workshops to people who wouldn't understand them we also teach you our Master recipes our Master workshops so that you can already start with some amazing templates and speaking of templates we give you everything we give you every single template in keynote file and everything you would possibly need on the career coaching call my team can go into that in way way more detail detail you also get the four coaching calls and these are the four open Q&A coaching calls every month with me or members of my team who can answer any question you have you know when you're going through the program or you know something with a client comes up and you have a question you can jump on one of those Zoom calls with you know only only a couple of people and ask whatever you like those calls can be two to three hours long and you also get access to the private Community where the best facilitators in the world are the people who want to be the best facilitators in the world are hanging out who you can meet up with you can connect with and maybe even build a career together with it's an amazing place to network with the top facilitators on the planet and we only leave 20 people into this program per month that's why we do these calls we we want to know who's coming into it and and that's how we keep it curated that's how we keep it exclusive and that's how we keep it super useful for everyone and finally you also get the workshop or mask certificate that you can show to your employers or your future clients and essentially proves that you are really at the top of your game when it comes to facilitation and that's really it if you're interested in this whole facilitation thing it's really a no-brainer to jump on a call with one of my team members or myself 45 minutes career coaching call buttons down below do that if you want to chat to us don't do that all good thank you so much for your time I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you had some takeaways and have a lovely day see you later bye