Quick & Easy Strategy to Get Group’s Attention
Facilitator Tips Episode 10

Try ‘Back To Back’ to Grab Your Group’s Attention

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode shares one of the most useful, quick-sharing strategies for grabbing the attention of a restless group of people.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Back to Back – short 3-minute video tutorial that demonstrates this useful, attention-grabbing strategy ( as a simple reflection tool) with a real group.
• Episode 11 – short video sharing even more simple & fun techniques you can use to grab your group’s attention without losing your voice.

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Video Transcript

Hi there and welcome to Episode 10 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard. I’m an experiential trainer and author and the founder of www.playmeo.com, and today I want to give you a quick sharing tip.

I’m going to call it number one, but I’m going to give you an exercise I call Back to Back which I find fantastic in a couple of situations and I’m sure you’ll find yourselves in these two, are those times when there’s lots of energy in the room and all you want to do is to be able to encourage people to quieten down quickly.

Or maybe you’re addressing your group, you might even have a large group and there’s always those couple of people in the back of the room who do the little side chatter. They figure that you’re probably not going to see them, you certainly can’t hear them, but I’m going to bet you it always distracts me.

This has been my go-to technique for those two situations and many others. It’s also a wonderful processing technique incidentally, but that is just simply ask people to find a quick partner. Now they’ll often find their friend but it won’t matter who it is, and to stand back to back. That is they’ll turn away from their partner.

Now already the magic starts to work because by virtue of the fact that they’re turned away from somebody, they kind of start to talk less and in fact, they might even stop talking altogether. Yes, they might be able to see or be facing somebody else, but it’s not their partner.

Almost, almost every single time on its own is enough to get my group to go a little bit quiet. And then of course once they’re in that position you can then talk to them. You might pose a question, you might invite them then to turn back towards you, but that technique alone has been a great way to be able to invite my group to stop, quieten down, and get ready and be attentive.

And that’s it, that’s Episode 10.

If you’d like to leave a comment or look for more information about this particular technique with even video tutorials of me using it with a group, go to www.playmeo.com Episode 10 and you can find more information.

Indeed, leave a comment. Maybe you’ve got one of your favourites you’d like to leave behind as well. Please leave a comment because one lucky commenter each episode receives a free playmeo subscription.

I hope this has been useful to you.

In the meantime have fun.