Leadership and Facilitation
Facilitation is about leading. If you think of facilitation as a dance, it is knowing when to lead and when to follow. As a facilitator, you need to know how to move in flow with other people while creating an energy system that gives meaning to your vision.
A facilitator has information to share, and facilitation is the process of waking people up to the possibility of this content by teaching them to learn how to learn. To do this, a facilitator needs to understand the learning process, the leadership process, and the facilitation process. Sometimes this requires polarities and opposite stances where energy must be exchanged to create a shift in the inner game of the person.
The Integral Semantic Facilitation training program was created by The Coaching Room to help others understand how we facilitate shifts and how this process can be used inside organisations to facilitate followership and engagement. The course is built on both an integral perspective and a neuro-semantic perspective. We analysed our own process in order to create new models and understandings that can be used in everything from parenting, to sales conversations, and coaching sports teams.
Polarity and Framing
Facilitating is an engaging awakening process that involves polarity based dialogue where learners ask questions to gain perspective. Integral semantics are facilitated by a transcendence that includes a metamodel of human language to bring about transformation. Through this model, we are able to show people the methodology behind their thinking. This fosters learning and growth, as participants gain an understanding of how the parts and the whole come into play and function as one.
Because we are NLP practitioners, one of the frames that we often open with is the difficulty of development. This immediately sets up a polarity for people who think development should be easy. Here we’ve created an opposition that can be shocking and surprising for those people that disagree. We push these polarities in order to bring belief structures forward. We present a front that creates resistance and energy for movement, where participants have no choice but to become engaged.
Polarity in our language is about two equal opposites such as win/lose or masculine/feminine. All of the programs on the spectrum of meta programs are polarities, that is, they have two equal opposite ends. As part of human nature, our superego likes to identify with a side, or polarity, often becoming righteous in that viewpoint. As facilitators, we need to hold the space, and not get caught in the polarity ourselves.
An essential part of integral semantics facilitation is the ability to observe the polarity and then elevate the conversation to the apex point. In doing this, you can guide the person to seeing the single-mindedness of siding with a single end of a polarity. Integral semantics is not only about managing, but leading polarities on purpose in order to facilitate engagement.
The Integral Facilitation Matrix
The Integral Facilitation Matrix starts at what we call ‘place’ which is simply being, not in relationship to anything. When something happens, and you choose a side, you are in ‘pole’. This leads to a ‘polarity’, where there are two opposing views. The ‘paradox’ component becomes the apex point when you can see that both perspectives are paradoxically two parts of a single argument. When you experience the shift in paradox, you realize that nothing needs to happen and suddenly ‘presence’ comes online. It is from presence you transcend your habituated thinking patterns and behaviours.
Awakening Potential
As integral semantic facilitators, we are able to hear the frames being set as the polarities develop. We’re able to not only manage and lead the frames, but we can lead the polarities to create the energy that creates understanding and facilitates growth and development. We awaken the potential in people by explaining how polarities and language work to facilitate energy movement across the quadrants. Facilitators can identify when a person is operating from their subjective opinion, but phrasing it as fact. We can hear this distinction, call it out, and bring awareness to it where no awareness existed before. This allows people to take responsibility for the language they use to communicate with clarity and effectiveness.
Integral Semantic Facilitation is an intensive program that addresses belief structures, value structures, and identity structures. Most people struggle in conversation with large groups compared to the ease of one on one conversation. What arises is a sense of self and fears that can create nervousness. Integral Semantics is understanding how to step back and free yourself so that despite the size of your audience, you can effectively move the group energetically from their present state to their desired state, giving them not just what they want, but what they need.
If you’re ready for a disturbance in the force of your self-structures and you want to lean in to look at yourself through the lens of an integral semantic facilitator to understand how you can use language to shift and grow, then we hope to see you at our next course.
