Art of Remote Connection Masterclass

Welcome to a bit of a video masterclass in the Art of Remote Connection. I am Chad Littlefield. I'm the co-founder of We and Me and the author of... the co-author of this book, "Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter," and builder of this lovely little connection toolkit that is designed to help leaders and educators amplify connection, belonging and trust and so in it, there's a couple card decks and resources. Anyway, all that, this is my context. I get to help leaders and ed

ucators do some really awesome thing and this video is designed to help you do some really awesome things in an all remote context. So, the way this masterclass came to be is a little bit unconventional. Most of my videos or video tutorials where the title is a question that an actual client or leader or educator has asked and the video is my response to that question. Often involving some other thoughts and perspectives from research or stories or actual experiences with clients. What I did he

re for this longer form video is I wanted this to be something that you could even listen to as a podcast. You could pop it in the car and listen as you go and tune into visuals if and as needed, but I combined 11 questions and 11 episodes into 1 giant masterclass focused on how do we best connect in a remote context. And so, the questions that we'll get to unpack in this episode will start with how do you start a conversation in a group virtually, right? When that first moment happens and peopl

e click the link to join the meeting, how do you get started in a really lively and meaningful way? And then we'll dive in to what do you do for team building activities and we'll unpack questions like how to build trust in a remote team and so on and so forth. In fact, if you look at the scroll bar on this video, this video is chunked by questions. So, you can feel free to listen to the whole thing or you can scroll through and find the question that you most care about and just tune in and jus

t listen to that one. As you're listening or as you're watching, if you see something that you really like and you want to steal, I would just simply invite you to like this video. It will help share it with other leaders and educators. That's why I create this content. If you love a particular topic or concept, all of these episodes are individually broken up into highlight videos across our channel as well. And so, you can click to the channel homepage and check out those as well. For now, how

do you start a conversation with a group, let's get into it. In this video, we're gonna answer the question, "How do you start a conversation in a group virtually or in-person?" So, how do you start a conversation in a group. I'm actually gonna show you how I started a conversation in a group of 282 people. Real quick before we cue up this footage from Zoom, directly from Zoom, directly from me starting a conversation, little bit of context. So, 282 people hopping in, we had the waiting room en

abled on Zoom and the first thing that I did and the tip that I want you to pay attention to and just see what happens is... and to be honest, I was kind of... I've been experimenting with this more and more is in-person, even in a group of 1,000 people, if I'm speaking, I always look to make a few small connections. Just have... you know, there's no way I can connect with everybody at scale before the presentation, before a workshop. But what I can do is have a few quality interactions. And a c

ool thing that happens is at the end, those few people that I connected with are always the ones who are more enthusiastic to raise their hand or feel a little bit more comfortable to take the risk of sharing and contributing to the group. So, here we go. Let's meet Ginger and Nicole. Hello, Ginger! Hello, Ginger. Hello, Nicole. I let you both through... we're gonna let a whole bunch of people in in a minute but I let you both through because y'all should connect so look at each other's names, m

aybe pin each other and make sure to connect on LinkedIn and that's all I'm gonna say before we get rolling here. 117 people in the waiting room. All right, lovely. So, I'm not gonna fast forward. The workshop went on for another 90 minutes. I'm not gonna cut to the end but you'll see it when we do a Q&A and an ask me anything at the end, Ginger and Nicole were 2 of the heaviest contributors in the group. And I think part of the reason is that they're connectors but the other part of the reason

is that... and I did this with an intention because I felt like and I thought that they were special and I had known, I had email exchanges with a couple of them before but letting them through before we were in this session with, you know, hundreds of people, there was some really magical thing that happened that throughout the entire workshop, it felt a little bit more personalized, a little bit more meaningful just to them. So, now, what's about to happen in the video is I'm about to undo the

waiting room and let everybody flood in and so, I want you to just watch the first few minutes of that and see what I did to start a conversation in groups or to welcome people and create some sense of connection and community even though we are in a group of a lot of people. In fact, I want you to count how many times I use people's names. Names are like an on-switch for our brain, right? My theory is when we're in a group, the more we can use names or using names as much as possible, as organ

ically as possible increases the sense of connection is a really great way to start a conversation in a group to acknowledge individuals in that group. What you want to avoid starting a conversation in a group is anonymity, right? What a terrible way to start a conversation in a group is by saying, "How are you all," right? It's the... in psychology, there's a thing called the Kitty Genovese effect. It's kind of a gruesome conversation or study but the study was essentially, there was a woman wh

o was walking home, I believe, not leaving, I think she was walking home and she was outside of her door in an L-shaped or U-shaped, rather, apartment complex. So, the doors are right at my thumbs here and as she was in, she was actually stabbed. And I think estimated, apologies to the psychologists to the world if I get this number slightly wrong but I think there were 27 people that saw this happen. They were looking out their windows, they heard Kitty Genovese's screams, saw this happen, but

no one called the police. And what that is often referred to is the bystander effect. It's the, "Oh, someone else will do it so I'm not going to." So, you're driving down the street and you see a car accident and it looks like it's happened a while ago and there's a ton of traffic and you're like, "Oh, somebody else is gonna it. Somebody has already called. I'm not going to bog down the police." And that might be true in that specific incident, but also when the bystander effect shows up, it's t

he psychology of passivity. It's the psychology of why we stand back and don't speak up and do something. And one way to decrease the anonymity and create a more cohesive community in a group is to use people's names. So, I think that's enough framing, just count how many times I used names in this quick little clip. I'm gonna let everybody flood in so, I see you, I love you, I'm glad you're here and I'm gonna let 120 more people in. All right, hey. Welcome, welcome. Hi Jack, hi Melissa. Oh, it'

s good to see smiling faces. Suzanne, it's nice to see... Suzanne, is this like our 3rd Zoom like we did the annual conference at the beginning like... we're going at it, I love it. Isaac, you're cheering. Did you... were you Kickstarter supporter? Nice. Hi Stacybud, good to see you. Hi Jen Cassarcy, good to see you. I totally butchered your name there, Jen Casir. Now, really important reminder is I'm not just sharing people's names with no intention. You saw there was a few times that I had per

sonal contact. So, I knew, you know, I had... there were clients on that call, there were people that I'd worked with in the past, people who I exchanged emails with, people maybe who have even left comments on YouTube videos if they liked the video. And so, I was making personal connections rather than just saying, right, like the trick is not... it's not a trick to begin with, but the idea is not to say, "Hi! blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" and just rattle off a bunch of names that you see on Zo

om gallery view. That doesn't really create connection, if anything it might actually create that separation. So, as much as possible, as organically as possible; and depending on your group size, that might only be 3 or 4 names but it still breaks down that effect of anonymity and says, "I see you." And that's where I want to go and unpack the 2nd rung or the 2nd layer of this Ask Powerful Questions pyramid, I see you. So, if you can look at this pyramid, this would be really cool. If you had a

magic wand and your goal was to start a conversation in a group virtually or in-person, it would be really convenient if you could do it in a way that just said all at once, "I'm willing to know you. I see you, I hear you, I get you, I'm with you," right? That would be a convenient, maybe over the top but it would be convenient to be able to just snap your fingers and do that. Not possible and so, what we've developed, what Will and I have created is this how-to pyramid that unpacks and helps c

reate this impact. And so, at this level of "I see you," names are one part of that but a bigger part of that is our own natural genuine curiosity. When we are naturally curious about other people, it's obvious. When we're asking questions out of obligation or we're not genuinely curious, it is also obvious. And so, one other really great way to start a conversation in a group virtually is to be curious about one very specific thing in that group. So, you can start a whole flood of connections i

f you just say, "Hey, Joe. I saw that post on LinkedIn that you did. What's the story behind that?" So, asking that question and hearing Joe's response... connections are kind of this exponential thing that when somebody shares something, everybody in a group is inclined to see themselves in whatever's being shared. So, when Joe answers, it's likely that somebody else will be, "Oh me too," or "Oh, no way. What about this?" or "I didn't know you lived here," right? There's gonna be all these conn

ections that jump in and so, the path to start a conversation in a group might just be 1 specific curiosity, 1 question. So, you're inviting contribution from 1 person, you're kind of facilitating that as opposed to the anonymous way of "How are you all doing?" If you've got a really engaged group, they might answer that but it's really easy for the critics and consumers to sit back and be really passive in that conversation. So, if you really want to invite everybody in and create this culture

of connection, belonging and trust and inclusion, ironically, one really great pathway to start is curiosity about just 1 person. When they answer, everyone else can see themselves and comment how they see themselves in that response. And you can help facilitate that along. This entire video was based off of like a first 1 minute of a 2-hour workshop of an entire series on the Art of Remote Connection and several activities, exercises that we did breaking down that. So, you can check out the lin

k in the description and these videos right here are really great follow-ups if you enjoyed this content, want to dive a little bit deeper, want to be a better connector in the world. I'm Chad Littlefield, have an awesome day. What to do for team building activities, in-person or remote? I've got a really cool secret right here that I'm excited to share with you. This happened right at the very beginning and I called it the Unofficial Start. This is a brilliant idea and term that I got from a gu

y in Australia, a good friend named Mark Collard, the founder of playmeo.com, an amazing resource with hundreds of different written and video tutorials on team building exercises, collaborative learning exercises but this... anyway, this idea of an unofficial start is something that actually begins a few minutes before the official start and goes a few minutes after the official start and in my terms, it's designed to immediately and purposefully engage people in whatever you're doing. And so,

I was leading a workshop focused on the Art of Remote Connection and so I wanted to start with some connections. So, what I did was... for those of you who have no context for who I am in the world and just found this video through Google, I'm the creator of this deck of We! Connect cards and they're being used in organizations and universities all over the world and this is the first uncut sheet of We! Connect cards ever printed. We launched them on Kickstarter 8 years ago or so and this was th

e first sheet that ever came off the print. It's kind of cool to have this and I figured, I gotta use it in some way and so what I did... and by the way, while you don't have this sheet, you can still do what I'm about to do with the link in the description. Weand.me/free. You can access these questions for free and do a very similar thing either through screen share or printing them out, holding up the single questions to the camera screen. What I did though for this group as you'll see is a li

ttle bit of a slide show but really why am I describing this? Let's just jump to the actual live workshop and meet some people, here we go. So, gonna... uncut sheet so I'm gonna do is just wave this around the camera slowly enough so that you can read questions and whenever you see a question that you would like to answer, go ahead and just unmute and say, "Hi, I'm ____" whatever your name is, and answer the question that you're choosing to answer. And just as a way of like connecting at scale a

nd think about there's a lot of people on here so like quick answers, 30 seconds or so just to hear a little bit of voices that's not just me or Will. I always... this is Ginger coming from Talent, Oregon y'all, great to be here. Thank you, Chad, Will. Woohoo! I love my pack of goodies, Chad and in, fact here it is. I always misplace my freaking hanky. I did it again today, I'm totally old school. I can't find my hanky. So, paper towel will do. I love it. Hey everybody, Marianne from Durango, Co

lorado and I'm just gonna go with what I always lose which is lipstick, strangely. I don't know why so I buy a lot of 99 cent lipstick and I find it everywhere and occasionally I find it in the dryer which looks like a murder scene. Not good. Hey, I am Kate. I am coming to you from Treaty One Territory, Winnipeg right on the center of Canada. The thing that I lose every single day is my phone, at least twice, and I run around going with, "Someone else in the family, please call my number." They

just roll their eyes. I love it. It's kind of cool, right? Kind of cool to see that happen live and see... and you can see with every time that somebody unmuted and chose to answer a question or share, we could have dove deep, ask more follow-up questions, I could have extended the conversation by inviting somebody else on the call to listen to what each person said and then follow... unmute and follow-up with a question rooted in their curiosity to take it a little bit deeper, right, and made i

t interactive in that way but in my mind, the best team building sometimes is really just being deliberate about asking really great questions. Because building a team largely happens through interpersonal trust and interpersonal trust develops through conversation and experience together. And one way that you can accelerate experience together is by sharing and unpacking experience from somebody's life, right? We all carry around this live... I'm going like this because we carry on this library

of, you know, years and years of ungoogleable life experiences, stories, moments, philosophies, perspectives etc. And when we take out files and we share them with other people, it actually builds and establishes this culture of rapport and connection and trust with the group that does build your team. And so, while you can go do trust falls in the middle of the forest to build your team, you don't always have to. Sometimes you can actually just be in really good conversations with each other.

So, if you were to lead this yourself and you want to spend 0 dollars, go get the printable version in the link in the description. If you want the actual deck shipped to your house, that's cool too. It's a deck of 60 cards, they're color coded so green questions tend to be fun and light, blue questions tend to be a little bit deeper and purple questions, we included to give a big hug to the introverts in the world and they encourage a level of self-reflection, right, because a lot of team build

ing is very extrovert-friendly and not very introvert-friendly. And so, one of the exercises that I would do with purple cards in particular is I might put up a purple card, invite people to actually take a 2 minute walk, even from their... if you're doing this remotely or in-person, take a 1 minute walk in one direction and that might just be down your stairs, around the corner, out the block and then... but 60 seconds only, and then walk back up and share the response. I call the exercise "Me

to We" and the idea is I hold up a question invite people to take a 2 minute walk to ponder their own answer and response to give people time to actually reflect on what they want to share and be deliberate rather than just favoring extroverts who think off the cuff. And then invite the group back, maybe split out into breakouts depending on group size and share after people have had some time for reflection on a given question like this. Because some people can't answer this question with 5 sec

onds of prep, but 2 minutes usually does the trick. This idea of just a rolling, question, slideshow, I've really enjoyed because it replaces organic connection with more intentional, deliberate connection. Organic, unfacilitated chit-chat is usually the slowest way to connect with someone. And the reason is as human beings, we always take the path of most comfort. And so, we always talk about how we're doing and where we're from and what we do and how the weekend was instead of what are your ho

pes for what the future holds for you or what's made you smile in the last 2 weeks or what are people usually surprised to find out about you, right? These are questions that accelerate the cadence of connection without putting people too on the spot or making them too uncomfortable because you're involving a lot of choice. In particular, this exercise where I was just rolling through saying, "Unmute at any point in time and answer any question," offers a lot of choice for how and when and what

people share. If you like this video, we turned this 2 hour Art of Remote Connection workshop into a whole series and you can find a couple follow-up videos right here which you might really enjoy. And if you want to be a part of a live workshop in the future, find the link to download these questions for free and we will let you know the next time we're hosting an opportunity that you can get... jump into. Every once in a while, we host free workshops for the leaders and educators we serve even

though the bulk of our work is private paid training with organizations, universities and schools. I'm Chad Littlefield, have an awesome day. I have discovered a really cool way on how to make virtual meetings more interactive. Tentatively, I'm calling this idea "Start Art." Really quick context, this happened for 3 minutes into the workshop. So, we did a quick little unofficial start and then this was an additional unofficial start that happened and you can see I'm like kind of fumbling throug

h giving directions a little bit because this is an experiment. I'd never done it quite like this before, check it out. Our first experiment, I have no idea how this is going to go. Actually, Will, do you want to share where this art of connection originally came from with our work with Conscious Capitalism? So, we were working with Conscious Capitalism and they wanted to do some connection in really a unique way. And so, what we did is we created this large mural in which everybody got to parti

cipate in and so you can see Chad standing in front of it with a reporter and a cameraman there and what happened is everybody... in order to fill in part of the mural, had to grab a card that looked like this and there was something for them to do something on the one side. After they've done that, then they filled it in. So, these were the directions that were hanging out here. Anyway, to make a long story shorter, we decided can we... is it possible to turn this into a little bit of virtual c

oloring? And so, we're messing with this idea of unofficial start art and so you'll see that there are dots here that have colors in them and so go ahead and find annotation tool and we're not going to do a tutorial on annotate so if you can't find it, don't worry about it just enjoy the chaos that's about to ensue. But my invite is for you to color in every square. So, pick a color and go ahead and color in that box with that shape and you can maybe use the highlighter tool, figure out, remembe

r that you can undo as well. And just see if you can color this entire thing and see how fast 200+ people can fill this in. I love it. So, the experiment here is 200 people... we've done this with like 12 people, a color something, but 200 people all working together, I don't know, this is kind of cool. I'm digging it. As the host of a Zoom meeting, you have the power to erase everybody's work. So, just a heads up, work a little bit more quickly because I'm about to clear it and invite you into

challenge number 2.So, here's the challenge. What I would love this time is the intention of this, in-person originally, was to be a visual... actually, let me see if I can hold up the artist statement for this, but the collaborative mural was designed to be a little bit of a visual representation of the connections being made in this live conference space. You know, people were doing these actions on the cards that Will were holding up and they were only coloring in that box if they did that ac

tion that made that connection in the live space. And so, we're just doing like the little mini baby version of this, but the idea was that as people colored in the wall, the words "elevate humanity" would actually show up, they would emerge. And it wasn't actually visible until everybody colored in the wall. And so, this time, this graphic's a little messed up because there's some dots in the letters. This time be a little bit more perfectionist, right. Now, that we've added like a practice rou

nd, be a little bit more perfectionist and if a few people can take on the role of highlighting the letters in black maybe so that they pop out, give them a little bit of a drop shadow. So, let me give you annotation powers back and go ahead. As as quickly but as accurately as you can, and if a couple people want to take on the role of black marker or black highlighter, feel free to do that. Oh, I love it. Okay, if you want to... this is cool. I love it. Can we just set this as our intention for

the next hour or so? Can we elevate humanity, right? You're all in a different context, you're all amazing like, I think you know this if you've watched any of the videos we've been putting out like, everybody on this call is a pretty awesome leader or educator who is making the world a splash better. The fact that you're here means that you're infusing a little bit more into a... connection into a world that needs it. And so, feel free to save this if you want to. I'm gonna stop sharing in 3,

2,1. Look at all the loves. Oh, this is good. All right and pause. So, that was an experiment enough that maybe, personally in this moment, my learning from that experiment was this is cool and maybe we should hire a designer to make some more unofficial start art to make available for download for you all. So, maybe thumbs up if that sounds interesting to you. Yeah? Some more unofficial start art? Okay, sounds good. Who knew that Zoom annotate tool which was actually developed right along with

Windows 1998 could be used for something positive? I love it. How cool was that? In 90 seconds, 282 people completed this collaborative mural. So, the idea here is for start art to help people create a collaborative mural. You can leave it totally open, right. So, you can start this blank canvas and I've seen folks do that, but it always ends up looking like Microsoft Windows '98 paint and a bunch of 4 year old's just like got on it and went crazy. There's something really cool about having this

paint by numbers or where there's colored dots that cued everybody. And so, 1, you can make one yourself. You literally get a blank coloring book template, you could even get your organization's logo or a message that you want and just get the outline of it. And then just put a color dot in each of the segments, right? That's as easy as it could be. And if that's still too hard for you, I think by the time this video is published, we'll actually have a bunch of unofficial start art available fo

r purchase related to connection and engagement. So, you saw this message was "elevate humanity." So, we'll pick a number of templates for download that serve as great start art, unofficial start art and you can slowly build a mural with your group over time. One idea, and I'm just sharing this live in the moment in the video, that perhaps we'll create and weave into the start art pack on our website is wouldn't it be cool if you had, let's say a monthly meeting. Wouldn't it be cool if we took t

hat 1 mural and divided it into 12 different sections and you started each monthly meeting by just having the group quickly go in and collaboratively draw this exercise. By the end of the year, you would have completed all 12 segments and you could potentially have it printed out and put on a wall or something like that. I don't know, just brainstorming out loud on the internet. Part of the reason this channel exists is to help leaders and educators make connection and engagement easy. I trust t

his start art idea will spark a whole bunch of thoughts and creativity for you. Feel free to go to Google, download some images, get outlines of your logos, create some message templates that are just a blank outline text, have your group color it in. Feel free to use the paint by numbers method of dots or feel free to just experiment with this with yourself. So many possibilities, you can also include conversation prompts, right, like it could be that as you're drawing, somebody has to be shari

ng something or responding to a question maybe you prompted the group with beforehand. And so, as you're drawing, people are just unmuting and answering the question, "What's something that made them smile in the last 2 weeks?" or "What are people usually surprised to find out about you?" or "What is something kind that someone has done for you recently?" All these things help make virtual meetings more interactive. For some, this might be uncomfortable because it adds this layer of structure to

what we wish could just be a totally organic flowing meeting, but if you want your meetings to be interactive and involve more contribution, you've got to add a little bit of structure to get rid of consumption because by nature, virtual and remote meetings and gatherings are designed for consumption, right? Everybody's on mute, 1 person's talking. So, you've got to design a structure for people to come off-mute and go on-mute in order for those meetings to be more interactive. I'm Chad Littlef

ield, subscribe to the channel for more ideas. Have an awesome day. Collaborative calculator. I am really excited to share this method. It's a simple but profound answer to the question: "How to keep someone interested in a training or conversation?" So, how do you keep people's attention? Attention is the currency of the world that we are living in, right? There are so many places that our attention could go at any given moment. And so, in order to really capture somebody's attention, you've go

t to have an amazing hook that brings people in and says, "What's in it for me?" And so, mine right now, in this moment, is by the end of this video, you will have a method that you can use with 0 preparation that will, in the first 60 seconds of any conversation or meeting any group workshop setting, presentation that you can use to capture everyone's attention, loop them into your context, your purpose and have people totally tunnel vision, tuned in to what you have to say. Let's get into it.

So, collaborative calculator. What I would love for you to do is open up the chat, use only your number pad and think about the month of March which is fastly approaching and just drop an estimate of the amount of time that you will spend in virtual or hybrid meetings or gatherings. So, in the month of March only, can you drop an estimate... and take a second like do an educated estimate and can you drop that number in hours into the chat? All right. Yikes, 150. This isn't a competition, just so

you know. Romy, good to see you and 200+? What! So, I learned was... and I meant to, before the session, look up the actual research. Maybe somebody can drop this in the chat if they know the source of this, but I heard one so warning, this is potentially not true but I think it is. I... but it's not really that of great consequence so, I learned that when you guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of M&M's in a jar to win a prize or something, you're probably gonna be wrong. Bu

t if you ask a thousand people and you take the average of everyone's answer, the average is generally almost exactly correct. I think I read that in a book called "Group Genius," but that's kind of cool, right? So, number 1 calculation that I want to do is can somebody just unmute, from looking up through the chat, just like collaborative calculation, what do you think the average is of all the numbers that we're just typed in? 85. 70 to 90 is my best guess. I didn't... I didn't catch you said

85, but 75 to 90 we're like... whoever said 85, so you said that was such conviction that we're just gonna accept that as reality that is truth. So, the average time that we will spend in virtual or hybrid gatherings in March is 85. Can somebody else do 227 x 85 on their calculator real quick? And if you look down at Zoom, that's the amount of human beings on this call. 227 x 85, and when you as soon as you have that answer, unmute and share it 19,295. 19,295. Will and I met working for an... wi

th an organization called World in Conversation. One of their internal mottos was "a tiny act can have profound effects." 19,000 hours. If you all take 1 little gem from this, we have the bet... we have the option to make the world 19,000 hours better just in March. So, my invite is tune in and don't miss what's about to happen in the next bit of time because something really cool could end up in your toolbox that you also carry way beyond March too. Amazing, right? One, just to get like a simpl

e number you could see, and I don't know if you tuned into this, rewind if you didn't, but you could see people's reactions and faces like, "Oh!" right? There was... you actually facially saw little light bulbs go on in people's heads and I would say those light bulbs were like, "Oh! This matters." "Ooh! This is actually about..." right? You want to create as many "Ooh!" "Ooh!" as possible in the first few minutes of a training or conversation. And if it's a longer event that you're designing an

d a virtual conference or in- person, you want to create those context hooks and those attention resets multiple times throughout. Because as soon as people start to see that maybe this isn't for them or there's nothing in it for them, they're going to be more likely to jump off. And so bring people back to purpose with context hook. Collaborative calculator is 1 method that I happen to really like that I think works great at the beginning, but if you want to keep people's attention throughout,

A, you should maybe consider checking out this video on... where I unpack 5 essential ingredients for virtual engagement from the particular lens of how do I encourage active participation in conversation. So, that video is linked up here in that little i thing. I'm not sure what that little link embedded thing is in YouTube but it's linked up there. If you choose to open up that video and watch it later, ingredient number 2 is this idea of a context hook. And the idea is how can I... I don't lo

ve the word "hook" because like fishing of a hook, it's a little bit like, violent. I think about it more like a Little Bo Peep's staff like the little hook to like loop a sheep in like gently guide somebody over toward you and invite them into your context because if they're already in the same space with you, they probably would benefit greatly from being in your context, they're just not yet, right? They're actually just not there because they were thinking about this, that and the third and

they weren't actually concerned and tuned in and paying attention to what was happening live in the moment. An exercise like collaborative calculator, a really great and compelling intention statement or anything else can help people... loot people into your context. And that alone will help people tune in for the rest of the time. If you made it to this video, I suppose I have learned something about how to keep attention because you're still here. Thank you, you're the kind of people I love ha

nging out with. My name is Chad Littlefield, have an awesome day. In this video, I'm not just going to tell you how to build trust in a team, I'm actually going to show you how to build trust in a team. In particular, my co-founder at We and me who also wrote this book, Ask Powerful Questions Create Conversations That Matter, together is going to facilitate this exercise, In fact, in like a handful of seconds, I'm going to cut to a live workshop of Will actually facilitating this activity with a

group that you can immediately steal and take and apply to build a level of trust in your group. Let's let Will get into it. As a little bit of a background, so there's this activity that really shows up on Zoom a lot that people are using, they're picking up as a tool and they're using and I think if we just make it just a few degrees different, we can create a very different context. So, a little bit of background. As Chad went off into the woods one time on a silent retreat and he came out a

nd he said, "Will, I'm excited to share with you that I found my life's purpose: to gently eradicate small talk on the planet." I was like, "I'll sign up with you on that. Let's do that." And this next activity generally leads to small talk but if we shift it just a little bit, there's a way that depth shows up with it and those of you who know me know that I want to have conversations that have meaning and that have depth. And so that you might know this activity is, 2 truths and a lie. And you

might have done this activity which is cool, but when the activity is over, what have we discovered? Who the good liar is. And that becomes more important than what we just learned about each other. And so, a slight modification that I developed a few... I don't know, too many years ago is 2 truths and a dream. So, instead of talking about a lie, you talk about a dream. 2 truths and a dream. Now, there's a trick with this. You play it like 2 truths and a lie but the trick is when you speak it,

you need to speak them all in the same tense because you're doing a little bit of backwards and a little bit of forward. So, you got to figure out which tense you want to speak in. I tend to speak in past tense, but you could speak them all in forward tense, it doesn't matter, future tense, I guess is what English majors call it. So, what's gonna happen is you're gonna have an opportunity to come... some silent time to think of what you might share that is true for you and that is a dream for yo

u. And when we go off into breakout rooms, you'll get a chance to share. Now, we've got a lot of people and Chad and I have discovered that when we have about 350 people, that we tend to break breakout rooms. It doesn't actually work. You only got 50 breakout rooms. So, Chad's gonna look at the number of people that we have here and make a best guess when we go off into breakout rooms and when we go to breakout rooms, you'll start in alphabetical order just because it's easier and you're going t

o have a bigger room. There'll be more people than you typically would do this with. It's really good to do it with 3 or 4 people. You might have more than that and you'll have roughly 7 to 10 minutes somehow, we'll look at the time and make a decision somewhere about that amount of time. But right now what I want you to do is to listen to my example. Chad might come on and try to guess with me and then you'll have some quiet time to come up with your examples. So, Chad here's... you think you k

now me but see which one of these is my dream. I opened up a spiritual.. helped facilitate opening up a spiritual center in Southern California, I helped facilitate an all women's retreat in New York and I helped political leaders facilitate a climate change conversation in Switzerland. I think your dream is to help facilitate in Switzerland. It is true, I facilitated a healing retreat in Switzerland and in Italy but not political leaders. and I think that would be so much fun. I love it, okay.

One of the experiments I wanted to try is to try to break Zoom a little bit so I am gonna do the max amount or almost the max amount of breakout rooms which Will and I have found about half the time break Zoom. So, I'm gonna... I just keep wanting to find out if they're gonna be better and when a client pays us a lot of money to lead a live virtual conference, I don't want it to break then, but I'm okay experimenting now because you've all accepted the role of guinea pigs for a moment. So, we're

gonna try 49 breakouts which will be 4 to 5 people in each breakout rooms. 2 truths and a dream. Chad before you hit send, how much time are we giving them? You tell me because we wanted to actually experiment with how long this exercise took organically. So, let's call... based on where we're at with time, let's call 6 minutes in these rooms which might not get you all the way through but we might ask you when you come back how many people you got through. No need to rush, the intention is act

ually just to connect and to connect with yourself here too. The experience of actually sharing 2 truths in a dream and actually verbalizing that is kind of an interesting exercise in and of itself. And so, notice how this might shift if you've ever played 2 truths and a lie, notice how it shifts in the room. And so just be present to that and see how you might show up differently and give yourself roughly a minute each and try to keep it passing on within that minute. All right, Chad, remember

try to do it in alphabetical order so you don't have that awkward like, "Uh, who goes next?" Better than cross your fingers, look at the camera really close and cross your eyes and 3, 2, 1. I am, oh. Here we go. It's working, it's working, it's really working. So, I think everybody's being portaled back now. There's the dynamic always with breakouts that when you're doing with such a large group and smaller numbers, that it's a little bit of a dice roll of who's going to end up in what breakout.

And so, it's super important to do something to turn all those clicks and all those hopefully good but potentially not great experiences and pull them all back into the collective. And so, Will's going to debrief us and bring us back right now. So, welcome back. Generally, when we teach people how to do connection before content, we say, "When you bring them back to the group of a whole, ask this question: What struck you?" And what struck you is a great conversation because it allows the think

ers to respond from their brain, it allows the feelers to respond from their heart and you get a whole picture. Another way to do it is to complete a sentence, so you start the sentence and allow them to complete. And so the sentence we would like you to complete is "What I learned about myself is____." What I learned about myself is... and then you get to complete that. Because I'm partial to other people who have names that start with W, if your name starts with W or end with X, Y and Z and an

ything at the end of the alphabet, go ahead and unmute yourself and share with all of us what's something that you learned about yourself in participating in that. I learned that your heart speaks when you're still enough to listen to it. Nice. Thank you, Nicole. That's beautiful. That should be on a bumper sticker. I'm going to write it down so I remember. How about... something like that phrasing a dream like a fact kind of feels like lying. Yes. I learned after the activity, I wanted to lear

n more about everybody else. I wanted to know where everybody was from and what they do and wanted to go deeper. You found your curiosity turned on and you wanted to follow it, beautiful. I learned I'm more adventurous than I think I am. I learned no matter how alone you think you are and wanting to do good, there's a lot more people out there trying to do a lot of good stuff. Nice, it's nice to hear that. Yeah, is it... like this is the best news station, right? Get your news from right now. Th

is is what's happening in the world. Especially when our intent is elevating humanity and amplifying connection, belonging and trust, right? Let's hear a couple more. Go ahead, Wendy. I learned that everybody has dreams and you need to remember that. I learned a few more items from my bucket list. Nice, she added to her bucket list. I love that. Some of the dreams phrased so positively, it was like a positive affirmation. I felt like, you know, some of the dreams I heard were definitely going to

come true someday. Nice, Dana. And so, one thing about 2 truths and a dream is it in many ways makes it so the group feels compelled to actually help each other move toward reaching what those dreams are. When I have a conversation that's around lying, there's a way like, "Oh, I know who I want to negotiate with," but when I have a conversation about a dream, there's a way of like, "Oh, I want to help you in some way even if it's just listening to what your dream is and being curious about that

that," helps elevate and push us forward. Simple, subtle but extremely powerful, right? If you enjoyed that, your brain will explode in a good way at all the other resources and videos on the channel. If you're interested in really concrete tools to build connection, belonging and trust, we created this box specifically to amplify connection, belonging and trust. It's got a copy of our book, Ask Powerful Questions, along with 2 card decks that are really practical tools for leaders and educator

s to use to help make connection, engagement and trust really easy. I'm Chad Littlefield, have an awesome day. How do you create a fun working environment s what we're going to explore today in this video. And in particular, I'm going to share a method that I have loved to use, that I use for all my clients that I encourage and coach my clients who are leaders and educators around the world use in their own contexts. By the end of this video, you'll have a strategy that I call the "Experiment Me

thod" that you can implement and share with your team and actually crowdsource to weave in more fun into your work environment. So, before I share this kind of hilarious exercise and experiment with you, the experiment method, in a small nutshell, leans on the definition of adventure for me. So. typically, we associate adventure with fun. Maybe we're stretching outside of our comfort zone a little bit too, but adventures are typically fun. It has a positive connotation most of the time. A teache

r of mine once defined "adventure" in a really kind of neat way. He said that it was embarking on a journey where the outcome is uncertain. And so the experiment method leans on this idea. If you can create journeys or invite people in a work context, in a work environment or in a learning context, if you can invite people into a journey where the outcome is unknown and uncertain, it'll be more fun. People will actually be more tuned in, they'll pay attention, etc. You can see this in all sorts

of examples in life, in fact, like when there's a sign that says "wet paint," the reason you can't help but be like... right? You just can't help but touch it. Maybe that's just me, maybe you don't like to touch wet paint but I would say that some part of every human being's brain is designed to fill curiosity gaps; to say, "I don't know what's going to happen. I want to know what's going to happen, curiosity gaps; to say, "I don't know what's going to happen. I want to know what's going to happ

en, let's keep going." This idea of creating a series of experiments embedded within your work can increase fun. So, let me just cut to this example, show you this video from a live group. This is a brand new experiment, I had never done this exercise with a group. You'll see me frame it up and share that it might totally flop, you'll see the results of it on people's faces. So, after this clip plays through and you see this exercise happen live... "live" in the moment with the group, I'll come

back and we'll debrief and I'll share a few other really practical methods and ideas for you to make the experiment method come alive the second this video ends. And so we're just gonna... before I frame any of it, we're just gonna do an experiment. On my son's bookshelf, I found this book, "Making Faces." So, we're going to give credit to the author and this exercise is going to be called Making Faces and this is either going to go really well or really not well. But what I'd love for you to do

is make your head about the size of my head on your camera. So, you've got your head about the shape of my head, what I'd love for you to do is make 1 of these 3 faces, go. And now, just make this face. And now just make this face. Just like, "Wha-" And how about this one? And let's get a little... not so good. Jen... even some of you wearing a mask, you can totally see that you are not feeling it right now, you're sad. One more. Actually, wait. Not one more, we can't end on that, let's do... A

nd then actually I don't know if I made it to the end of this book before Otto's attention span ran out so I didn't realize there was a mirror in it so there's a camera and screen very distorted there. So, I'm gonna hold up the mirror to you in this moment and invite you to create your own face right now that represents... we're only... depending on what time zone you're in, we're probably only about halfway through Friday and so what I'd love for you to do now, one more round, I want you to tak

e 10 seconds in your head and think about what is your intention for the rest of the day. The word "intent" comes from the Latin root meaning "to stretch over the needs of others." So, what is your intention for the rest of the day and I'm going to give about 10 seconds for us to think about that and another 10 seconds, I would love for you to convert that intention into a facial expression. Not that you're going to carry that facial expression for the rest of the day but just hold it, don't mak

e it yet. And then I'd love for you to do is get super close to your camera, don't look at gallery view, look right into that black hole and in 3, 2, 1, make the face represented by that intention. I love it. All right, we're back to live... not... or not live, back to debriefing what just happened. So, one of my pieces... this is my adventure hat by the way. It actually was acquired by my wife on an adventure to Panama so I suppose it truly is an adventure hat. One of my key learnings or pieces

of feedback for myself after leading that exercise with the group that I think is a core essential ingredient for making this experiment method successful is making sure that it's also intentional, right? Experiment... like, activity for activity's sake is not usually fun unless you have a really, intrinsically engaging exercise or game or something. Usually activity for activity's sake is like people want to know why, especially in a work context. Like, "Why are we doing this? What's the point

? Why?" And so, what I would have liked to do had I had more time with this exercise and with the group is really tied that into intention more. Probably right after that, carved out 5 minutes to write intentions, share intentions, maybe split out into breakouts, get clear on intentions for the week, the quarter, their team etc., would have done something to deepen that exercise The idea was that made the workshop and the experience and the Zoom call a little bit more fun is that we tried someth

ing new that I had never tried, that they had never tried. And that is your secret as a leader: do something that you have never done and they have never done altogether. And people will find it fun even if it flops because they're on an adventure where the outcome is uncertain. And so I really... I told you I was going to share a really practical way to roll out the experiment method with your group is essentially, and you could share this video with them if you wanted to, but you essentially s

ay, "Hey, this is kind of intriguing. Can we weave this into regular staff meetings?" "Can we weave this into.." fill in the blank, your context, right? "Can we weave this into here and can we assign 1 person for each week or each month to lead a different experiment?" And whether that's searching other videos on this channel or the internet at large, finding some experiments that they haven't done, that the group hasn't done to try something new at least once a month. And that, I guarantee, wil

l increase the level of fun that's happening in a work environment, it'll be something that people look forward to. It might even become a cultural embedded value of seeking new experiences which has all sorts of spin-off benefits of sparking creativity and innovation and higher morale and deeper engagement etc., all from this little tiny idea which is experiment. Go on adventures, adventures together. I'm Chad Littlefield. On the channel, there are hundreds of experiments and ideas and adventur

es and so, if you liked this and you made to this point and you're not already subscribed, consider that. And if you liked anything in this video, go ahead and like the video so that more people on the planet get to see it. Have an awesome day. How do you facilitate learning in a classroom, meeting or event? I love the brain. I love how it works. I love knowing how to optimize the way that we actually facilitate learning, in particular collaborative learning. So, one of the things that I teach o

n how to maintain a good cadence and energy for learning is always going to be really deliberate about the way you end any given class, meeting or event. Because the way that you end either a session or a day or a specific moment or class shapes the way that people remember day 2 or meeting number 2 or week number 2 etc. And so being really deliberate in closing. So, the closing exercise that we did was this collaborative live journaling. Admittedly, I broke my own advice and I didn't leave quit

e as much time or space. And so, I think it was a little bit hastily or messily facilitated by me, but I want to include the footage because I wanted to just include this raw, this is exactly how it happened with a live group and it worked, right? It ended up working really, really well, probably just could have given it a little bit more time and been clearer and crisper with instructions. But even in this imperfect example ,you can see how this can create really meaningful and facilitate reall

y meaningful learning. So, we talked about using the chat for sips versus gulps of connection, what I'd love to do right now is there's still a lot of people with some really brilliant stuff going on. I'd love from your context, I'd love to know one like "aha," something that you discovered in this time that you're really excited about that you'd love to share and I'm going to queue up that 2-minute timer again and would love for you to take the next 2 minutes to live journal in the chat to ever

yone. Live journal in the chat what your takeaways are, what some discovery is that you would love to share with everybody else here. So, if 180 people write a 100 words, we've got like 3 chapters of a book from people's collective brilliance and who knows? Maybe we'll have... ask Eliza to turn all of these responses into 3 chapters of a temporary digital book and send it out as a follow-up to this. So, just go ahead and journal some of your takeaways, "aha's," things that really struck you that

you think might be valuable to the rest of the group, but don't hit enter. So, write them in the chat, don't hit enter. There is a catch to this. We're not just going to leave them in the chat either there's like a catch that something is going to blow some of your minds because it blew my mind. And so, type it in the chat and when you're done, also copy it. Make sure that you copy it, you might even want to type it actually off Zoom so you might even want to open up something different real qu

ick a note or something. Type it off zoom and make sure that you can copy it and I can reset this timer so, don't get nervous. I love music and sometimes, in something like this, silence is a really lovely ingredient to infuse into this experience. Just pause, everybody copy what you have and hit enter. Copy what you have, hit enter. Holy smokes! I love it. And now, I'm going to screen share this. There's this really cool site called futureme.org. What I'd love for you to do is go to... and mayb

e Josh or Will, if you can put that link in the chat: futureme.org. Paste what you just typed in and then go find some other brilliance that somebody else typed in the chat, copy what they said and then come paste into futureme.org and what you get to do is send an email to yourself in the future at a time when a reminder of this "aha" or learning might be really useful. So, you paste that in, you can pick if you want to send it in a year or you can choose a specific date like, "Oh, I've got a b

ig meeting in 3 months and I want to remember all the stuff right then. 2 days before." And so, you pick that date. You can do it private. The coolest thing about this is you don't get added to a list, you don't get any marketing. It's totally free for everybody. futureme.org. It's a lovely way to end and anchor some impact. I'm gonna queue up that timer one more time and we'll just go another 2 minutes to actually paste. 2 minutes with some music to read through what people have got, paste it i

n your future letter to yourself and send it and then as soon as this is done, we're gonna share how we're going to do this "ask me anything" and even if you don't have a question, you want to be a fly on the wall, feel free to stick around as well. Beautiful. Hope you loved and enjoyed seeing that live moment and all of its imperfect glory. Now, what I want to do is share 4 lessons or learnings, variations that you can immediately take in this exercise and deepen it with your group. 4 ideas tha

t you will leave with to be a smarter, better leader, educator, facilitator, trainer. Number 1, be really, really clear of the purpose. I think I did an okay job of this, but be really clear about the purpose of why you're asking people to do this and what is in it for them, right? So, you heard me say, "The idea is to, at the end of this, to mine some golden nuggets and gems have you teach each other etc." This is also a really great way to review something at the end of a class too if they're

sharing and you want group to share takeaways etc. So, number 1, share purpose. Number 2, I would be really crystal clear and just simple about what the parameters of the exercise are. So, for me, if I were to redo it, I probably would have condensed my instructions to "We're gonna have 2 rounds. 1 round, 2 minutes of journaling quietly with this instrumental song playing in the background and then when that song ends or when this timer ends, then we'll switch gears and have 2 minutes to read th

rough everybody's answers and mine for value etc." So, right there, just make it really clear of like those are the distinct timings, 2 different songs, right? So, one might be quiet, thoughtful thinking, one might be upbeat. I would make them instrumental because you don't want words playing while they're... people are trying to read words, just too much for the brain. And you can also adapt that time. You could say, "I've got a 3-minute song and then I've got a 5-minute song. 3 minutes to writ

e, 5 minutes to read." Depending on your group size, you can pick those times but just be really clear in what you're doing and that there are 2 designated rounds for both writing and reading. And the reason I would do that is I really want people in a collaborative live journaling scenario to write like several sentences, a paragraph, maybe even 2 paragraphs. I want them to go a little bit deeper than just like, "Here's a little nugget or take away, 1 sentence," because that's how the chat is u

sually used and I think we can use the chat for gulps of connection and learning rather than just sips. Now, all of this can happen in-person, quick aside, all right, with... not sticky notes but 8 and a half by 11 pieces of paper. Say, write big, maybe write in this size font and fill the page. And then tape them up all around the wall and you have people journal at their seats first and then you have a museum gallery walk of people walking around reading people's responses. In a conference roo

m, in a board room, in a classroom, like really cool to have people's learnings literally tangibly pasted up on the wall not in a sticky note bite size format. Learning lesson number 3 is there's so much gold there that I would consider doing this... if you're doing it virtually, I'd consider doing it not in the chat in Zoom which is kind of hard to. You can download and save it but it's an ugly format, it's kind of hard to access. I'd consider opening up a Google Doc or a Google Jamboard or hav

ing people record this in a way that's saved in a little bit more distinct, easily digestible format rather than a really rudimentary online conference chat service. And if you really want to go deep, number 4 is there's enough gold and enough meat when you do this that could spark some really great collaborative conversations. And so, I would also really consider having everybody journal individually first, then read what everybody's written, and then break out into small group conversations to

digest and unpack and share what they thought, ask questions about each other, get really... get even more practical with the examples or takeaways or advice that they have, ask questions to the group etc. And so, I might just create that open breakout time for a group at the end to dive a little bit deeper. That was really fun. If you're still here, this video on how to promote cooperative learning is really cool. It's got 8 specific ways to start. So, this was an ending, a closing exercise to

facilitate learning, this one has 8 really great ways to grab people's attention right in the beginning, came from Ohio State University. I'm Chad Littlefield, have an awesome day. How do you build a connection quickly but effectively? This is a really fun video that was inspired by a question that somebody asked during an "ask me anything" question and answer time after a live workshop that I led on the Art of Remote Connection. I'll let the video speak for itself and then I'll come back at th

e end to add some golden nuggets and gems that didn't get recorded live in the moment in this Q&A but I think you'll really enjoy just the live answer that came from me and Will in the group in response to Danny's question. Let's get into it. All right, Chad, quick question for you. I am a learning and development specialist for a consulting company and so when we bring people in for training, we only have a little bit of time to take them through a training session but we want to build connecti

on. How do we do it quickly and still effectively? It's going to be an off-the-cuff answer but Will and I are both going to close our eyes for 3 seconds and then offer some thoughts. How many people do you have, Danny? I usually have about 20, 30 people in the training session. Okay, the way that I would connect with people as quickly as possible if I only had 60 seconds or less but I wanted to spark some meaningful connection that could last a little bit longer, I would pick the format of sente

nce completions, but I would go a little bit deeper with my sentence completions. And so, rather than, you know, sentence completion like "One fun thing I did last week is ____," right? That's really light. I might do something like, "If you really knew me, then you would know ____." That prompt alone, you can have 30 people answering the chat in 30 seconds and then you got another 30 seconds for people to read some responses and connect with each other and that 60-second activity could be turne

d into a 60-minute dialogue where people follow their curiosity and dive much deeper into those responses, but it offers... fill in the sentence offers an immense amount of choice in the types of answers that we share, while also giving people the latitude to share something that's deep or really shallow as well. It keeps it really open-ended. Awesome, thanks. Danny, what I would say is an answer that you probably don't want to hear and that is go back to your design and see if you can find 10 m

inutes in the beginning to actually make it so that connection can happen. And I think Chad and I, when we work with organizations and we're helping them to design an event or a day, we're always having to advocate taking that time. But when we take 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of something, there is a way that people are much more learning and focused and they are willing to give to each other in a place in which they're contribut... contributing rather than consuming. And so, when you des

ign with "How can I get people to contribute?" Your structure and your agenda begins to change and you look for ways in which you can get that to happen. Now, saying all of that, if you can't re-design, I would say encourage people to show up early to start the connection before the top of the hour. So, say if you were starting at 9:00, you've got the room open at 10 minutes to 9 and as people are coming in, you ask them curious-based questions about their context. So, you might ask about the el

ephant, I might ask about the guitar that's behind you or the string instrument and suddenly there's this personable piece. And so, getting people to ask each other questions while we're waiting for it to start is a really beautiful way to make it personalized and real so they're homosapien... sapiens with humanity Okay, Will, I'm looking at you. I don't know which side you'll be on, I'm looking at you right now that was lovely and you hit on something really wonderful and Danny, I'm looking bac

k at you and what I want to say to both of you is... and everybody watching is that connection before content doesn't take time. It saves you a whole heap of time in the future. And what I mean by that is organizations who are really good about doing connection before content and building into the fabric of what they do, right, people quit less. People are way more incentivized to really tune in and engage and contribute because their leaders have taken the time to say, "I care about you" or may

be "I'm willing to know you. I see you. I hear you. I get you and I'm with you." People that work for organizations like this or students that attend classes with cultures like this don't leave and they learn a lot better. I shouldn't say they don't leave, everybody leaves. Leaving is a good thing sometimes, but connection before content, while it might take a little bit of time, and so just totally echo what Will said about if you want to connect really quickly and you don't have a lot of time,

the best possible answer is create a little bit more time. The word "priority" when it came over into English was singular. And now we live in a culture where there's way too much to do in too little time and so we have a million priorities and we have trouble cutting ones because they're all equally as important. And I think when we pry it, when we don't have enough time for something, it actually just means that we're not making it a priority and I would just invite from my observation and fr

om working with organizations, I've noticed when we don't make time for a connection, it creates a heap of time trying to figure out how to hire somebody new on the back end or how to catch this student up that's failing etc. Now, obviously I don't want to make it seem like a connection before content is the only thing and it's just like the silver bullet to fix all problems, it's not. But it's a really really good medicine to take if you want to be healthy over the long-term. And I'm much more 

interested about the long-term. While I enjoy sharing like little tactics and activities and other things on the channel, I'm much more interested in the overall impact and creating more of this in the world and gently eradicating small talk. All right, I hope you enjoyed that live, off- the-cuff in the moment answer and an invite into, you know, what a Q&A at the end of one of my workshops or keynotes actually feels like. One golden nugget to add to all of this, and I think it's an essential id

ea that is really often missed, when we consider how to create a connection quickly with someone, right, I think we underestimate the value of describing the world as they see it. And that particular tool, actually, is the most specific and concrete way that Will and I, Will being my co-author for "Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter," the last chapter is on empathy. And in describing the world as they see it, as whoever you're trying to connect with, as they see it, is one

of the easiest lowest hanging fruit tools that we teach in how to mechanically create empathy. And I don't mean mechanically like mechanically, but for some people, empathy comes easier than others. And so, for somebody that tends to be really logically minded, that's not really in tune with the emotions and experience of somebody else, just paying attention and imagining and describing the world as that person sees it can be really connecting. Because I don't know about you, but I haven't met a

nybody that doesn't have a desire to be seen, heard and understood in some way. And so, if you can do that by describing what you think their experience to be, either you got it right and they'll feel connected to you or they'll correct you and you'll learn something about their world and be connected with them. Now, if you liked this video and you want to know how to keep a conversation going, you'll love this video on how to keep a conversation going with a stranger. I'm Chad Littlefield. I pu

t out these video to help leaders and educators make connection and engagement really easy. Lovely hanging out with you. If you liked this, feel free to check out the rest of the channel. I put out really frequent video tutorials answering questions that actual people ask me. Have an awesome day. How do you create engagement when attendance is mandatory? This is actually probably the most frequently asked question that I get by the leaders and educators that I work with. When people have to go t

o something, whether they have to go for credits, whether they have to go because their parents said they did, we're talking about an education setting, whatever the reason is that someone has to be there in whatever the reason is that someone has to be there in mandatory attendance of a workshop, learning, meeting etc., how do you create engagement in that context? How do you invite the critics and the curmudgeons into the world of contribution? How do you invite their engagement? That is what

this video is designed to answer and it's going to answer it in a really cool way that I think you're going to really love. This question was actually asked by somebody who, I think her name is Monica who attended a workshop that I was leading with Will, my co-founder, on the Art of Remote Connection. I'm gonna bring in 3 perspectives of actual leaders, actual educators that are on the ground answering her question and then I jump in with my thoughts about how you can create engagement and when

attendance is mandatory rooted in a whole mountain of experience. So, at the end of this video, you'll have some really concrete practical tips to steal and apply into your own context. Yeah, so I work for international nonprofit. I'm the director of learning and development and so we do a lot of training and onboarding type of things that are kind of required experience... experiences for our people and so we get varying levels of enthusiasm for those experiences and just, you know, as people c

ome in, their expectations are sometimes not what we want them to be and we think this is the most important thing of their hour and they don't always think that way as well. And so, how do we engage people and kind of draw them in so that they see the time as valuable and also enjoy it so that it's not just a painful required thing? So, everybody ponder what Monica just said. We're gonna answer that question. Monica, one of my many answers to this question is the more real you are with a group,

the more likely they're going to be invited to play whatever game you're playing, not literal game but to be on board with whatever you're doing. And so, I'm going to be with real with you in this moment. I was so focused on the fact that the camera was recording and I wanted to be head-nodding and listening that I didn't hear a part of what you said. And so, can you go back and share who we're talking about here. Who are the people that are not engaged that you would love to be engaged and are

working to create invitations for them to be contributors, not just consumers or critics? Yeah, so I think the people that are not engaged are if they're told that they're required to be in a training environment then they're kind of checking a box instead of actually getting out of the experience everything that they possibly could and seeing the benefit of it for their own growth and learning. And so, that's kind of the context. So, Chad, how do I create engagement in an environment where peo

ple are required to attend a training or an event? I love it, okay. Let's crowdsource some answers. We got 100 plus brilliant people gathered on Zoom right now and so go ahead and get your un-mute ready and go ahead and popcorn out some responses to that question. How do you create engagement, meaningful engagement, when attendance is mandatory. Okay, something that really helped me with this workshop. I knew it was going to be fun, I knew it was going to be engaging but the little video that yo

u sent out beforehand got me prepared for what to expect. I was like, "Oh, this is going to be fun. Sweet!" One of the things that we do at my organization is we play... prior to the meeting starting, we open it up with music and so we have a playlist that allows people to kind of get relaxed and and get into the music but at the same time, we're posting comments and checking in with each other so there's a lot of jokes so we might say, "Hey, put your favorite joke up on... in the chat and so we

're already creating that that engagement by telling jokes while, you know, prior to the meeting starting so it's been a good good tool to get people engaged . Grace, that is lovely and if I can take a quick pause before Isaac shares, I'm going to "yes and" what you said about music and add... referring to something I said in the beginning of this workshop which is starting.. I could have started with music and in fact, the reason I didn't is the copyright free music that I found was a little to

o intense and I didn't have time to find better music, but sometimes, other people's voices are the best music that offers the most healing and connection possible in that moment. And so, sometimes in addition to music, holding up questions like this or like this and inviting people to answer with their voice over the music can add to the music if you will. Isaac, you got something delicious for us? Oh, it's going to be savory, you're going to need to grab a fork and a knife, this is good. So, e

veryone loves streaming TV services so for like my group staff chat, I'll ask them what's your favorite tv show and to take a screenshot and put that as their virtual background and that kind of can kind of open up a conversation because everyone loves a good TV show that's either out on some form of streaming service. So, they want to know what's the next best show to add on to my list. So, that's also a good way to kind of pre-start a conversation as things kind of get in so as you see that ba

ckground pop up at the same time, everyone then, that way can generate conversation. And I'll do that in a second. And Isaac, what's beautiful about that is you're acknowledging that you're competing with Netflix or whatever that is right? And so, when you're doing programming that is required, know that you're competing with technology in which it's consumer-based. And so, by sending a video and a message prior or expectations prior to say, "These are the expectations so that we can have full e

ngagement." All right, let me take a quick pause. If somebody else has an answer they want to share, feel free to in a moment. Let me give maybe I can... my just like 4 sentence, who knows if this is gonna be 4 sentences, oh boy, 4 sentence answer to your question Monica which is can we... let's do this real quick. Isaac, I realized... so virtual backgrounds. I'm going to add something to Isaac's on my view, speaker-view, Isaac just kept showing up big because I'm the presenter and so my speaker

-view wasn't showing up big and I was like, "Wow. I don't think I can record any meaningful content while I see Isaac's head bopping with a pizza on in the background." So, one of my invites for virtual backgrounds is to think about using them temporarily, not permanently. So, if you use them permanently, fine, whatever, but you think about how you can use virtual backgrounds to say, "Hey, unofficial start. Go find a picture of something that matters to you or something that represents the curre

nt state you're in and upload it as a virtual background." And depending on the tech ability of your group, especially if you're an intact team, everybody can... I shouldn't say everybody many people can do that in a minute or less, right? They can find a picture, find its location and upload it. It's not like a day-long project to get a virtual background up and running. So, I love these practical tactical things. My response to you, Monica, is in terms of how do you invite engagement from peop

le who are required or mandated to be there is you don't manipulate them. And sometimes when we do activities or we prompt engagement, it's viewed as manipulation which is really trying to get somebody to do something without telling them what it is you're trying to get them to do. And so, my and Will's answer to that is the bottom of the Ask Powerful Questions pyramid, is intention. And here's what I'll say about that in a few sentences. Very rarely as human beings, do we pause long enough to a

ctually even get clear about what our intention is. Even if we do that, sometimes it's not other- centered. Even if it is other-centered, we seldom share that intention with the people that it affects. And so, the tool here is to get crystal clear about your other-centric intention and share it with that group. And if I have really empathized with the mandated-required-people well enough, my intention will reach them in a way that's like, "Ah, he gets me and this might not actually... not actual

ly be crap," right? And so, let me try an example right now and I'd love... I mean, Will if want to add anything in a moment or anybody else has an example of an intention that they share, I've shared this one on repeat now because it seems to have worked. So, I was working with a bunch of very unwilling, required, mandated executives in a big insurance company and my invite for them... I did this collaborative calculator, I asked them how many hours they were going to spend in meetings over the

next month, it was a huge number, right, especially for executives. And then I looked out to them and said, "Okay, my intention is to be a painkiller for the next 100 plus hours of virtual meetings that you have." So, even the most curmudgeon-y and even the most critical people that were required and mandated to be there were like, "Well, I am required to be here and I could really use a painkiller for the next 100 hours of Zoom calls that I'm going to be in because I'm exhausted at the end of

the day usually." And so that intention... do you see how that wasn't... it had nothing to do with my agenda or the content I was going to share. It had everything to do with what their reality was in that moment and offering something that I thought would be meaningful that they might want to choose to be a part of. That was the one sentence, I did expand on that a little bit more but that is an example for me of, you know, if I'm trying to engage people who are mandated to be there, I'm starti

ng at the foundation of things, I'm not starting with, which is for me intention, I'm not starting with like activity, I'm not starting with connection before content because anything I do or ask them to do is going to be viewed as manipulation. And with manipulation, it's trying to get them to do something that they don't want to do without telling them that's what you're trying to get them to do. And so, if you're really clear with them to say, "I'm... for the next hour, I am trying to give yo

u some tools that will be really useful for you and I want you to contribute as much as possible." So, you design it in such a way that they're contributing to that information in that context. They get a chance to bite into it, taste it, experiment with it, share it with others, see how it feels for them and as much as you can get that contribution to happen, rather than just consumption. Because if it's just consumption, send them a video. They'll watch it at 2 times speed and it's all that, s

ave a half hour. So, knowing that you're competing with the Netflix and the 6 hours of content they got boiled down into a 3-minute little commercial, you can't compete with that but you can't... well you can, the only way to compete with that is to get people to actually contribute to each other and contribute to whatever you're creating. It takes a little bit of time with design. All right, I'd love to type in if that's okay. Sure! You know, one thing in my class is... I'm a facilitator and a

trainer in our organization and one thing that I found worked really well for us was to speak in terms of what your attendees are getting out of it, not necessarily just your organization or what you're trying to get them to do as opposed to what... how they can benefit even in their personal lives, you know, kind of back up and look at your content and say, "Okay, well how can I help people rather than just give them the information and, you know, act like Ben Stein moving forward," so that, yo

u know, they they are engaged throughout, so they're saying, "What can I get out of it?" One of the... when we actually designed the 2nd version of the We and Me website, we hired a copy editor and he gave me a really cool project which was make it... open up a blank Google Doc and write verbatim, all of the things your clients who actually paid you money, write down in their exact words what their problems are, what their challenges are, why they were hiring you, what they were aspiring to for

what they were hiring you for, make that whole list and I'm gonna turn that list into the copy of our website because if you can better... if you can articulate somebody else's problem or to McCall's point if you can better articulate what somebody wants to get out of something, if you can articulate somebody's problem better than they can, they'll automatically trust you to solve it, which is super cool but also really dangerous because then it's your responsibility to actually be able to solve

it, right? There's... and that's one thing that I don't love about marketing is we say, "Oh, come and like buy our software and it's going gonna make all your attendees engaged," and then you get it you're like, "I don't know how it works and everybody's still on mute," right? And so, you can market whatever you want, you can describe solving people's problems as much as you want, but it's then your responsibility as a leader or an educator to solve it. Will offered the definition for me one ti

me of leadership, you remember this definition, Will? Do you actually want to share it in your own language? I think the one you're pointing at is leadership is making something happen that wasn't going to happen anyway. Making something happen that wasn't going to happen anyway. Wasn't that sweet to grab a bunch of perspectives from the group? It was so fun to record that live, to answer that question live in the moment. I trust you've got lots of value out of those ideas if you've made it to t

his point in the video. If you want more, there's a link in the description with a bunch of free resources. We've created these tools, this deck of We! Engage cards, deck of We! Connect cards, they're all packed into this connection toolkit and there's a free digital version in the link below. And if you want the actual boxes shipped to you, they're really practical resources designed specifically for leaders and educators to help make engagement happen even when attendance is mandatory. My name

is Chad Littlefield, I hope that you have an awesome day. How to have difficult conversations in large groups at work? Believe it or not, this is a question that I answer on a weekly basis with clients and somebody, Dawn, who you will soon meet asked a really beautiful question and we just gave this live response and I thought that sharing the live, in the moment response would be really useful to you. So, if you stick around to the end of the video, you will be equipped with some really practi

cal strategies and tools and methods to host difficult conversations in large groups at work. Well, thank you for the opportunity. Truly loved sitting in, I haven't been able to be on screen because I'm multitasking but I'm in higher ed but I do a lot of community engagement and working with some... starting to work with some difficult conversations. So, my question is when you have large groups of people, not quite as large as today, but still extra large, more than 20 or 30, how do you effecti

vely connect or create the connections that allow for people to not only be intentional and engaged, but also vulnerable with so many people with such large groups even in the breakout groups? That is a brilliant question which I know will help a whole heap of other people. In a large group, if you want to create space for authenticity and vulnerability, write on a giant piece of paper and pin it to your wall, a phrase that goes like this, "Challenge by choice." That phrase, that idea challenge

by choice originated like the experiential adventure education land but this concept is everybody has full and complete autonomy over what they do, what they share, who they are in that moment and throughout every bit of the experience, no matter what my prompt is, no matter what my breakout is, I'm reminding everybody that you have full and complete autonomy over how you answer that question, over what you share in that conversation, on what you choose to hide in that conversation etc. And I em

power and remind people that they have that full choice so that nobody feels even a hint of force and everything that's shared comes from a place of consent. So, that's number 1. Number 2, a little bit more specific. So, let's take... you know the deck of We! Connect cards is color-coded so green questions tend to be fun and light, purple questions encourage a little bit of self reflection and blue questions tend to be a little bit deeper. No matter what level of question I ask or prompt or diff

iculty or topic of conversation, even if I ask you a blue question or even if we change this question to "What is a strong political belief you hold?" Oh, let's just jump right in. Let's just get really polarized, right, So, even if the question is that, I'm reminding people that when you answer this question, you have... questions are like a key that unlocks something inside somebody's life experience but the cool part about the key is it's like a master key that unlocks many, many doors in peo

ple's life experience. And so, inviting people to choose what they want to share and in this moment, as the leader in the moment, I'm going to say my role is to assume some of the social risk for people by inviting people to be authentic and to share things that are real for them no matter what level of depth that is. And, you know, I'm here maybe to invite you to share something a little bit deeper than you might typically share, but just that little invitation is one way to create a lot of cho

ice, a lot of empowerment, a lot of reminder that you're not being forced into a conversation about race relations, long-term conflict, politics, sexuality, religion etc. right? You have choice in this conversation. You don't have choice of what people share but you do have a lot of choice in how you respond. So, Will, do you want to share like where we met at World in Conversation and this work a tiny bit before you share what you're going to share because I think that might be relevant because

it's informed the book, "Ask Powerful Questions," and a lot of our work comes through this lens of actually having difficult conversation also. So, we were training people to walk into a room full of strangers and talk about things that nobody wanted to talk about like race and gender and long-term conflict and climate change with no agenda. Just... let's just talk about it and see what happens when we actually listen to each other. And so, fundamentally, the question invites us to really be in

a place where we're giving people a voice and choice where they can show up in such a way that they can answer the question in a way that serves them and serves the listening too that is also in the room. And so, it comes back to design. If you've got a large group, how do you design it in such a way that you can break them off into small groups, they can have a conversation where they get to express their voice and have some choice about how they're going to listen and about what they're going

to say. One of the things that Chad and I have found effective in that is if we're going to send them off into a breakout room and we're inviting authenticity and vulnerability, we just call that out. You get to choose to be as authentic and as vulnerable as you like and we might model it first. And so, we might push it beyond our comfort zone a little bit about what we would like to say, that then gives people permission to go, "Oh, okay. This is the kind of conversation that we're having," an

d invites them to do that. When you bring them back from breakout rooms, you also have to honor the fact that they were in those smaller groups, in the conversation and you didn't get to listen to that but they did get to listen to each other. And so, one way to honor that is to say, "What struck you about those conversations?" I don't need a report out, I don't need to know what you talked about but I would love to know how did it strike you? What did you notice or what impact is it having on y

ou now? And then that, once a few people have shared, creates a sense of community. It creates a sense of connection and then you're able to go into the next bit of content with another breakout room that has a really great question that gets them going. Asking 1 crisp, elegant question, dropping it in the chat box, we like to use the analytical as much as we can rather than just PowerPoint so they can see it, see it in the chat box because once they go into breakout rooms, 50% of the people wil

l go, "What was the question again? I was still thinking." And so, they need to look back under the question if it's in the chat box, they can look at it and answer it. So, one thing I'll say, when you ask the question like, "What struck you?" or "What you notice about those conversations?" It's inviting the group to reflect on a difficult conversation by talking about the process of how things went and what they notice rather than the content, right? Content can create combat in difficult conve

rsations. When we talk about the process and what we notice and what we learned, it highlights all the good that comes out of... and the bad, and the hard stuff that comes out of difficult conversations. And so, one thing I'm realizing back here, I think one of the reasons that we don't... we choose not to ask powerful questions is because there's fear of what will happen when we spark those conversations. And the best way to stunt growth is to be driven by fear. Yeah, it might be hard driving a

hard conversation or difficult conversation at scale with a lot of people, but by not doing it, you're ensuring that everyone's just going to stay absolutely stagnant, right? So, even movement, like life is not about agreement, right. So, even conflict creates movement and ideally, with a great facilitator, you can help guide that movement towards some forward positive progress and growth as well. When dealing with a difficult or a tense topic and large participants, when utilizing breakout roo

ms and wanting to engage vulnerability and authenticity and great connections, what is some advice people could give? One thing I do is frame it and let everybody know it's a safe space, which I'm guessing you do, getting that feeling and let people know that we're looking for positive constructive progress. Really simple, that's the guardrail. And bouncing on that, I would add like set expectations at the beginning so even just like explicitly saying, "Assume positive intent," or whatever guide

lines that can support the conversation. And I would love to add in, in addition to maybe assuming positive intent, take a little bit of time at the beginning to create a positive intent. And so, whether that comes from bottom up or top down, saying, "Hey, in these conversations, we have one intention and one goal and it only is to better understand the people that you're with. It is not to get your point across or to make sure that everybody thinks you're right, right? The only goal is to under

stand a little bit more about the people in your groups, in your breakouts, in your team in your etc." And if you set that intention and maybe even... if you want to go really all out with it, can you have everybody give a thumbs up or a yes in the chat or answer a poll of like are we on board with that intention, right? Share whatever you'd like and know that ultimately that we're always going back to that intention of the intention is to skip headlines and skip opinions and skip what the world

tells you you should think about this and just seek to understand what that person has to actually say in that moment. Try to understand who they are, not just argue with the facts or the data that is coming out of their mouth. If you love the answer to this question on how to have difficult conversations in large groups and how to create and amplify connection and trust, you really, really love this book, Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter. That's me, that's Will, we wrot

e this book to help leaders and educators amplify connection, belonging and trust and accelerate the rate at which that happens. I mean, it's rooted in our work with this group called World In Conversation where our job was to facilitate really difficult conversations. Some amazing lessons there, you can obviously buy the book wherever books are sold. You can get it through audible, on audiobook or kindle and also a free version in the link below. A free digital snippet of the first couple chapt

ers if you want to just dive into it there. Thanks for spending your time with me and Will and this group in cyberspace. Have an awesome day, even with your difficult conversations. How to improve communication among team members. I'm going to share 2 particular methods, insights, ideas that you can immediately take and apply in your own context to improve communication on your team. Teeny little micro bit of context before we bring you into Zoom, into this conversation, f you go to our website,

on the big splash home page is, "Communication and connection is hard and we help leaders, educators and events make it easy," right? So, that is what I get to do on the planet and so I've thought a lot about this question and I really love how the insights were distilled and came up live in the moment with the group. They fall under the big buckets or categories of narrative writing and narrative connection. The 2nd one actually came live in this Q&A. Anyway, let's just get into it and cut to

this clip with the group. I just had this thought I've been thinking about a lot where like, you know, like there's this kind of popular tongue-in-cheek thing where people say where it's like, "Oh, that meeting could have been an email." So, I've been thinking and in large part based on like your videos and stuff, I'm thinking like what if it was always like, "Oh, I wish this email was a meeting," like what if, you know, I think it's like what if we designed meetings that people wanted to attend

to instead of being like, "Ugh," you know, like that. Like it's so cool now to just be indifferent and annoyed all the time but like that's not how my brain works. I was like, "What if..." so my thing is like what if this email could have been a meeting, you know, like this is something I've been thinking about. It's like how to flip it on its head and make meetings that people want to attend and want to participate in. Josh, important distinction that was given to me many years ago by a collea

gue of mine said, "Email is for information. Telephone and in-person is for communication." Oh, okay okay. Yeah, I like that. So, thinking about an email being information and thinking about in-person interaction being communication, there are so many meetings that are information downloads which people then say, Oh, that could have been... I could have read that in an email or I could have watched that in a video." And so our job as connectors is then to go, "How can I make it so that this info

rmation can be interactive and so that we can contribute and create something together when our bodies are together and we're thinking about it all together at the same time?" So, that distinction is useful for me and maybe it might be useful for you when you're then sharing that with a leader who's like, "Okay, we're going to bring them all together and I'm going to tell them the state of the union for 45 minutes," and you're like, "Okay, yeah. Can we start with some connection first?" Right? W

e've got all these valuable people together. One thing that's showing up for me is I love that idea, that framing, Josh of not that I love let's have more and more and more meetings but what if we make the meetings that we do have or maybe even trim them down but then make them really really matter. So, Will's saying that emails are for information, meetings are for communication, Amazon's figured something out about this. I was working with some folks at Amazon and one of the women on the works

hop that I was working with teaches... her whole job is teaching narrative writing at Amazon and they have a whole team of people that teach narrative writing because as you get higher up in meetings, in leadership at Amazon, up to the first half hour of a meeting could be spending complete silence reading a narrative description of what they're reading... what they're going to be talking about, what they're going to be meeting about. And so, actually combining the best of both worlds of what if

we actually made... if most meetings, like Will said, are unfortunately informational and there's not much communication or consensus or collaboration or decision-making happening, what if we just leaned into that and recognized, "Hey, there is information that we need to share, let's put it in writing and play some nice classical music for 10 minutes and have everybody read the exact same 3 pages which is a really fast way to digest information much faster than a verbal back and forth or prese

ntation," right? We can read a lot faster than somebody can speak sometimes. What would happen if we actually just started off our meeting in silent reading time and then shifted gears into discussion once everybody was on the same page? Ginger, what you got? Chad and Will, so freaking amazing. Okay, like that thing at the power plant, right. Anyway, narrative connection just came up for me. How would you two, maybe that's a term you already use but narrative connection, I mean this is totally m

y wheelhouse too so it's so wonderful. Will and Chad, how would you define narrative connection? Connection through story, not synopsis. Number 1, most of the time we speak in synopsis. It takes a little bit more intention for those who aren't natural storytellers. It takes a little bit more deliberation to... is that the right word? Takes being a little bit more deliberate to be sharing information in stories and connecting through stories. So, one thought that came up for me, I finally found t

he source of this quote. I've been saying this because I love this idea that specificity is the soul of narrative. Sometimes synopsis really general, story gets really specific. And I think that's part of the reason that stories light up people's brain. It's part of the reason when I'm, you know, pre-Covid, was standing in front of an audience of 8,000 people sharing content, sharing ideas which I was super passionate about, sharing with tons of enthusiasm. Some people were like... some people w

ere like, "Ooh," glued in but when I shifted and I started telling a story, I could actually visually watch 7,522 people lean forward. I actually watch it happen. So, you read whatever research you want on synopsis versus story. I watch people's bodies move when I tell a story as opposed to when I'm sharing an idea. Maybe even now in this moment, as I'm talking about speaking with 8,000 students at the University of Wisconsin and seeing them lean in, right, a bunch of 17 to 22 year old's who hav

e plenty of other things on their mind in that moment, watching them lean in when you tell a story. And I think the reason for that is... and Will and I, one of the tools that we teach at the very top of the pyramid is to create empathy. And I think when we tell stories, it allows people to see the world as your world as you describe it and then to compare their world and parts of it and it actually creates a Venn diagram. And so, narrative connection is your narrative here and somebody else's n

arrative here and there are 2 little "me bubbles" floating around in cyberspace and when narrative connection happens, those 2 little bubbles become a Venn diagram and there's a little sliver of shared experience and I would call that maybe a connection in this moment. Was that so good? It's such a good live conversation the way that it came up starting with, you know, how can we avoid meetings that should have been an email and kind of flip that dynamic on its head and make people look forward

to meetings. Channeling some wisdom from Amazon and this idea of narrative writing and then followed up with Ginger's perspective of just thinking about narrative connection, what does that mean? Didn't expect all that to come out but I hope that both the narrative writing and the narrative connection ideas and component help you be better storytellers, better communicators on your teams. If you want help doing that, that's what all our video tutorials on the channel are designed for. And I get

to work with universities and organizations and lead workshops and events and so, if you want to reach out, booking information is below as well. Have an awesome day. How to collect and use feedback on a presentation. in this video, I am going to share 3 really simple clever ways to collect feedback on your own presentations. Method number 1, ask people. Duh, you already know that to get feedback, you have to ask people. But what I want to add to this is a very important lens because when you as

k everyone, you will get all types of feedback and that, ironically, isn't actually super useful. And here's an example of that. So, when I created this deck of We! Connect cards, simple deck, they've got questions, simple but powerful deck. They've got questions on one side, actions on another. There are a whole bunch of ways to use them in groups with exercises that help make connection and engagement really easy. Here's the thing though, when I created that deck and sent thousands of them all

around the world, I got a lot of feedback, all right. I got people from... I got a pastor from a church saying, "Why aren't there any questions about God?" I have somebody who's a huge disability advocate wondering why I don't have any of the stick figures... why any of the stick figures aren't in wheelchairs on the back of the cards. I got a rabbi asking me to make a Jewish version and on and on and on and on and here's the thing. I actually value all feedback, but I don't implement and use al

l feedback because if I did, this deck would have a whole bunch of crazy features off the side that wouldn't make it as useful as it is. It wouldn't make it as simple and practical for so many leaders and educators. So, the invitation I want to offer is ask people, but when they send their feedback, catch it right here and look at it and make sure that it fits, make sure it's something you want to implement and then choose what you adopt to implement because ultimately, it's you presenting, righ

t? If someone's giving you feedback that would change who you, fundamentally. who you are, don't take that feedback, right? Because the best presenters are 100% themselves and authentic in the moment. And so, if you tend to be a really hyped up presenter, then you're hyped up presenter. If you tend to be a really flat presenter, then you tend to be a flat presenter. And you will learn things from people's feedback without losing yourself, how to adapt to that person's particular style of learnin

g, etc. The 2nd method is through an activity. So, if you want to collect feedback from other people, I would actually turn it into a closing exercise for your presentation. So, one example I often do is one of my favorite exercises I learned from a facilitator named Nate Folen called Group Anthem where basically, invite the group to make a series of closing statements that begin with 1 of 3 phrases, either "I am..." "I believe..." or "I will..." That's a really cool way to collect feedback beca

use if you're inviting the group, "Hey, based on the last 60 minutes or based on the last... based on this presentation, we'd love for you to make a closing statement. Has to begin with "I am," "I believe," or "I will." It could be about something that you learn, something that you took away, something that you're still wrestling with, something that you're a skeptic about, something that made you angry, right. Whatever it is, it's just gotta begin with one of those 3 phrases." And when you do t

hat, you get a lot cleaner feedback, right? People begin their sentences and speak clearly because feedback is a 4-letter word for a lot of people and so giving it is uncomfortable. This makes it really comfortable because it... or I should say it makes it more comfortable because it gives people the first 2 words that their feedback starts with. It's the psychology of like a foot in the door. When you have a... when you take one step, you're infinitely more likely to take a 2nd and a 3rd and so

, I'm just getting people starting that feedback. So, that leads me to an adapted version of this which is Sentence Completions. So, another activity that you can do is create a sentence and ask people to just fill in the blank. So, it could be, "If I was leading this workshop, one thing that I would have emphasized is ____" and what you get there is what people's main takeaways are, what they cared about most, what was most valuable to them and that is great feedback for your next presentation

to focus and emphasize on those components. So, somebody might give you the feedback of, "Hey, you shared 58 minutes of statistics, but the thing that was most compelling was the 1 story you told about Cassandra," right? Emphasize the story. Super useful because now, you can take that time of your presentation and the story can become front and center and the stats and data that you're sharing can support that story. 3rd, sometimes people don't like sharing verbally in an activity and you want t

o collect feedback from everyone even if it's a little bit uncomfortable for people to share and so, my favorite way of collecting feedback there is with Typeform. So, you... or Typeform, SurveyMonkey, whatever you want to use, Typeform happens to be a client of mine. I love their tool, it's way more beautiful and conversational feeling. But what I do, you can upload videos to Typeform and so I'll upload a video and I'll say, "Hey, I'm looking to make this talk better," or "I want to make this p

resentation better. Can you watch any portion of it and just give some feedback below." Anonymous, you just get one... leave 1 box for people to type feedback, they hit submit, it takes less than a minute or 2 for them to do, or depending on the length of your presentation, maybe a few minutes you're asking people. But it's great to create that written flow of feedback as well. As promised, I'm gonna queue up this clip. This happened with Remy at the end of a live workshop where one of the magic

al things about asking for feedback live, which is typically pretty vulnerable for people, when you give an open floor for people to share and say whatever they would like, you get some really amazing feedback and sometimes very surprising feedback. So, just as a little spice to your day, check out this moment where I realized this crazy connection was made at the end of this workshop. Is this... I guess I'm assuming because of your presence that this is still useful for you. I actually want to

do a gauge though because if you want this to turn a different direction and you don't want Chad or Will to like get up on a pedestal. I mean, we want to have more of a conversation, can we just... is this working for you right now? Is this time serving you well? On a scale of yes to I've got some way that I want to change it up a little bit. Okay, I'm seeing mostly yeses and I'm recognizing that my word count is getting a little bit high and so I'm gonna try to reduce that word count a little b

it even though I really like being in this space with you all. Remy, I think you're off-mute, do you have something you want to jump into? Well, actually I met you and I know your mom and Milton and I was wondering if you remembered me. Oh my gosh, wait, at the Apple store? Yes! What in the world? Wait, Remy, how did you end up here in this moment? I've been following you and this was a thing I said, "Oh, well I'm gonna see what Chad's up to and I can benefit because everybody's Zooming now." So

. I figured I'm always willing to learn and what you said is very interesting so... and Will, not counting you out, Will. But you met me and my mom? God, isn't that so awesome. Did you see? I don't know if you need to rewind to see this, did you see my face when I realized, "Oh my gosh, I met you at the Apple store, Remy," right? It's like this total shock. That feedback is really really helpful to get on presentations. And my final tip, my final invitation is be mindful of who you get feedback

from. Don't go to your harshest critics and the biggest curmudgeons on the planet for feedback because guess what? Even before they saw your presentation or even before you asked them for feedback, they were already cranky and, you know, public speaking and presenting is most people's number 1 fear. You don't need to pile on unnecessary negative feedback that's mixed up with somebody else's baggage and crap. And so sometimes, not always, I think critical and constructive feedback can be very, ve

ry, very valuable and sometimes, I ask for positive feedback. And so somebody for example, I'll give a keynote somebody will come up to me at the end and say, "Oh, that was so awesome. I really loved it blah blah blah," they just want to come up and talk and I love that. And when they say, "Oh, this was so awesome and I really loved it," I don't ask them, "Hey, can you tell me what's one thing I can improve?" I asked them, "Oh, what did you really love about it?" And then they speak to this thin

g that really blew their mind or that they really struck them or whatever else and that is just as important as taking constructive feedback to grow and be better is the feedback that gives you the self-confidence to present again and again and again with a little bit more confidence. Woo, if you made it to this point, either, you just skipped an hour or more of really delicious content or you stuck with me through these 11 questions and this little masterclass on the Art of Remote connection. A

nd if you're here now, you are my kind of people. One, I would love to give you some free stuff and so I'll link in the description, there is a free digital version of our connection toolkit with printable versions of our cards and the questions that we were using throughout. And so, feel free to download that. That will also add you to our interactive weekly learning letter where I send out 1 highlight video each week with a tip or a tool to help leaders and educators make connection and engage

ment easy. I am Chad Littlefield. It was lovely hanging out in cyberspace. And if you watched any of the endings of my other videos, because we had 11 videos embedded all in one, I will say today, have an awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome day.