Taking chances

Anne Pattillo and I have started a new business together. It’s called Facilitating with Confidence and we have a web site. I haven’t linked to it because there’s been a few stumbles in getting it up. This experience of adding to our already existing individual businesses with a new joint venture is exciting, nerve wracking, frustrating, risky and plain exhausting. Why are we doing it then? Neither of us need the business per se, but we like working together, and we reckon we work together well, each complementing the other. And it’s fun to create something new.

We’ll have a significant on-line component – which means we’ve had to learn a whole stack of new skills. This is good. Well, it is for me. I’m reminded of the Curse of Knowledge in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick. It’s easy to become too comfortable with what we know. It’s humbling to start afresh – learning new skills. It’s a reminder of what it’s like to be learning something new.

Patti Digh mentioned something like this at last year’s improv conference in Banff too. She used the metaphor of having climbed to the top of a mountain and then encouraging others to come on up. From the top, the journey looks easy; from the bottom, or even part-way, the journey may look daunting. This is a good thing to remember when training others. It’s a good thing for me to remember. It’s relevant to our new business.

I was just chatting to my friend Andrea who is now living in San Antonio, Texas. Andrea knows more about how groups work and the roles people take on in groups than I can ever hope to know – and yet she patiently and with great good humour walks beside me on my journey as I try and learn. She quite correctly guessed that our new faciltation training would be full of improvisation, and creativity, and humour, and innovation. We hope so too! We want to invite people like Andrea to be a part of the on-line world of Facilitating with Confidence.

So if you too cross your fingers and we keep working behind the scenes, soon, real soon you’ll be able to visit and find out what it’s all about. Stay tuned!