How Do I Know When to Stop an Activity?
Facilitator Tips Episode 09

Top Tip: Know When To Stop An Activity

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode shares some useful insights to help you know when to stop an activity before it’s too late.

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Useful Links & Resources

• GRABBSS – a terrific self-assessment tool (made up of seven critical elements you can observe about your group) that will help you use the right activity at the right time, including when to stop an activity.

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Video Transcript

Hi and welcome to Episode 9 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 talk to you about when to stop an activity.

Now I’m not being silly. I’m not saying at what point do you choose to stop an activity because you know it always comes to the end. I’m talking more about that judgment, that expertise to know just exactly when do you move your group on when you’ve reached a particular point.

Now there are many reasons why you might have to stop an activity. It could be related to an injury or maybe some form of dysfunction you need to step in for or the bus arrives early, lots of reasons for stopping but I’m talking more about at that point of the momentum and the energy that builds, in my experience just before you reach the peak, just as it starts to reach that crescendo, that’s the time to stop. If you go too much later you’re going to lose energy, momentum, and attention of your group.

And so when you’re looking at that, that’s the time you want to capture. There are lots of programmatic reasons for using that point to be able to move on. Not only do you have your group’s attention, but their energy is high and they’re ready to move on. And so that’s a key element.

And I always think when I think about this topic, my guru, my friend, my mentor Karl Rohnke. He said that if you’re waning more often than you’re waxing, it’s time to get another job. And that’s really really true is that you always are looking to continue to always wax, wax, wax and try to avoid that waning. You want to stop the activity at that critical point before you lose them. And it’s always better to have complaints that you moved on too soon than no complaints because everyone left on account of boredom.

So that’s it for this episode but I am going to encourage you as my last-minute tip, see if you can think of ways in which you can actually encourage your group to think back over what they’ve just done. Pick up those really humorous moments in an activity that might be a wonderful segue from what you’ve just done into the next experience and that could be a wonderful tip that I found very useful on occasions.

Do you have a comment? Please go to my show notes, that’s at www.playmeo.com Episode 9.

There will be more links, more information, and of course, you can leave a comment as well. In fact, every episode we give away one free subscription to a lucky commenter.

In the meantime, I hope you found this useful.

Have fun.