The document outlines a course on facilitation skills focused on overcoming blocks to growth in group settings. It emphasizes the importance of contention, creativity, and managing frustrations within groups to facilitate personal and collective growth. Various challenges such as confusion, conflict, and cultural baggage are addressed, highlighting the facilitator's role in guiding groups through their struggles toward achieving goals.

1. 1
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
FACILITATION SKILLS
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth

2. 2
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
The Course Topics series from Manage Train Learn is a large collection of topics that will help you as a learner
to quickly and easily master a range of skills in your everyday working life and life outside work. If you are a
trainer, they are perfect for adding to your classroom courses and online learning plans.
COURSE TOPICS FROM MTL
The written content in this Slide Topic belongs exclusively to Manage Train Learn and may only be reprinted
either by attribution to Manage Train Learn or with the express written permission of Manage Train Learn.
They are designed as a series of numbered
slides. As with all programmes on Slide
Topics, these slides are fully editable and
can be used in your own programmes,
royalty-free. Your only limitation is that
you may not re-publish or sell these slides
as your own.
Copyright Manage Train Learn 2020
onwards.
Attribution: All images are from sources
which do not require attribution and may
be used for commercial uses. Sources
include pixabay, unsplash, and freepik.
These images may also be those which are
in the public domain, out of copyright, for
fair use, or allowed under a Creative
Commons license.

3. 3
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
ARE YOU READY?
OK, LET’S START!

4. 4
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
INTRODUCTION
According to some group development theorists, groups
advance in a more or less straight line from formation
through a period of organisation and rule-making to
accomplishment. The truth is that, while groups do have a
tendency over time to move towards creative growth, this
process comes about only as a result of a period of striving
and straining. Group growth is not always comfortable but it
is in working through the pain of not getting it right that
groups eventually achieve their creative potential.

5. 5
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
THE NEED FOR CONTENTION
Many groups come together in the first place because of
problems that they need to work on. Group processes often
lay bare the deeper causes of workplace problems, for
example, poor understanding between colleagues, rivalries,
jealousies, poor learning, stagnation, lack of vision.
Facing up to problems and "striving and straining" to
overcome them is what contention is about. Contention
gives the group creative tension; without it, group life would
lack challenge, it would be too easy and comfortable, it
would have no reason to go on.
"Without problems, there can be no personal growth, no
group achievement and no progress for humanity. Without
difficulties, life would be like a stream without rocks or
curves, without torrents or dams, without still pools and
eddies." (Benjamin Hoff)

6. 6
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
CREATIVE GROUPWORK
The chief difference between a facilitated group and other
versions of groupwork, such as a discussion group or a
controlled group, is the opportunities for creative learning
and growth in a facilitated group.
The facilitative role then covers a range of helping options,
including:
1. developing intuitive and imaginative exercises
2. guiding the group to face up to what is happening in the
group rather than to focus on its tasks
3. helping the group to accept responsibility for its own
group processes
4. helping group members articulate their own values and
operating principles
5. facilitating learning by helping the group in its struggles
through frustration, pain, failure, confusion, stuckness,
risk and conflict.

7. 7
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
FRUSTRATION
Whenever we strive for something in life, we inevitably
come up against difficulties on the way, difficulties which
often stop us in our tracks. The feeling of not being able to
reach the goals we want is frustration and it is inevitable
when a group comes together to solve problems.
Frustration consists of three elements:
1. a deeply-desired goal that hitherto has been beyond our
reach
2. our efforts to attain it
3. the present barriers that prevent us reaching the goal,
which could be lack of insight, lack of skills, lack of resources
or lack of motivation.
Managing frustration is a necessary step in learning how to
reach our goals. Instead of giving up, we find strategies to
help us live through frustration and so progress.

8. 8
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
LIVING WITH FRUSTRATION
Group facilitators work with the frustration others
experience in a caring, knowing way. Often group members
will appeal to the facilitator to resolve their frustration for
them; they may even blame the facilitator for leading them
into their frustration in the first place. But group facilitators
know that personal growth lies in going through frustration
not avoiding it.
Here are some of the options a facilitator might suggest to
make living with frustration easier:
1. let go temporarily of attachment to the unreachable
goal: simply say "It isn't important anymore"
2. change the way you see the goal; replace it with a
reachable goal
3. look at alternative ways round the block
4. stick quietly with it
5. give yourself more time.

9. 9
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
PAIN
Letting the group experience their own difficulties is an
important step in group creativity. Often the group will turn
to the facilitator to ease their pain, like children turning to a
parent. The caring facilitator doesn't concede to a group's
pleas, but stays with them to help them find their own way
out.
"The group didn't seem to get anywhere. Students spoke at
random; proceedings seemed to lack continuity and
direction. The group was not prepared for such a totally
unstructured approach. In their perplexity and frustration,
they demanded that the teacher play the role assigned to
him by custom....that he set forth for us in authoritative
language what was right and wrong... But our instructor had
a "whim of steel". He didn't seem to understand and if he
did, he was obstinate and obdurate; he refused to come
around." (Samuel Tannenbaum on his first experience of
facilitation with Dr Carl Rogers)

10. 10
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
LIFE'S DIFFICULTIES
Ancient Chinese culture had two ways of looking at the
difficulties that life throws at us: the stoical approach of the
Confucianists and the accepting approach of the Taoists.
The Confucianists welcomed pain and difficulty as a test of
their strength and virtue. The more they grew used to pain,
the stronger they became. Taoists, on the other hand,
simply accepted life's problems as an integral part of life.
They believed that in time things would sort themselves out.
"There may be difficulty at the moment, but I will not lose
the Virtue that I possess. It is when the ice and snow are on
them that we see the strength of the cypress and the pine. I
am grateful for this trouble around me, because it gives me
the opportunity to realise how fortunate I am." (K'ung Fu-
tse or Confucius)

11. 11
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
FAILURE
For those engaged in personal growth, failure is the state we
are in until a goal is reached. Failure is a feature of any
group trying to achieve new goals but it should not be seen
as a cause for discouragement or giving up, but as a spur for
going on.
There are only two ways to "achieve" failure (ie never
reaching a goal):
1. by giving up and dropping out
2. by trying too hard and missing the target.
Giving up means leaving the race before it is finished. Trying
too hard means winning at all costs and then discovering
that the costs make the prize no longer worth winning.
"There is a moment just before success, when, if we stop or
hesitate or try too hard, we will fail." (Trevor Bentley)

12. 12
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
TRYING TOO HARD
One of the reasons for failing to achieve a goal in groupwork
as in individual work is that our mental attitude changes
when we get close to a target. Instead of concentrating on
how to do the job, which is what has brought us to this
point, we start instead to think about the meaning of
success and what it might bring us in the way of prizes.
These distracting thoughts divert us from the calm
equanimity that we need to finish the job. Instead we get
excited, fearful of what we might lose, and over-
compensate by trying too hard.
"An archer shooting for a clay vessel shoots effortlessly, his
skill and concentration unimpeded. If the prize is changed to
a brass ornament, his hands begin to shake. If it is changed
to gold, he squints as if he were going blind. His abilities do
not deteriorate, but his belief in them does, as he allows the
supposed value of an external reward to cloud his vision."
(Chuang Tzu)

13. 13
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
CONFUSION
We don't like confusion. It evokes thoughts of uncertainty,
danger, panic, lack of control, ignorance. It is like driving at
night through thick fog.
In groupwork, we like to make sense of things: we like order,
structure, simple solutions and neat endings. But these
things are finalities; they are not conducive to personal
growth. Being in confusion and being comfortable with
confusion are the spurs to our eventual emergence into the
light.
It is tempting for facilitators to offer people in groupwork a
helping hand out of confusion. But this fails them in two
ways: first, it offers them our solutions, which may not
necessarily be theirs; and secondly, it takes from them the
valuable prize of finding their own way into clarity.

14. 14
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
SEEKING CLARITY
Facilitators make living with pain "easier", without
anaesthetising the pain altogether.
When people who are working together feel confused, a
facilitator can help by...
1. explaining what is happening
2. suggesting people see confusion as part of the learning
process
3. encouraging people to accept confusion as a more real
experience than easy solutions
4. learning the positive value of staying in confusion
5. perversely encouraging more confusion so that the
earlier situations seem simpler by comparison.
"Being able to stay in a state of confusion until clarity arrives
is the height of intellectual ability. It is what we call
wisdom." (Trevor Bentley)

15. 15
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
GETTING STUCK
Getting stuck is a failure of the group to progress towards its
goals. Signs of getting stuck in groupwork include the
following...
1. silent, sullen behaviour
2. a refusal to join in
3. no interest in others in the group
4. a desire to criticise, blame or scapegoat others
5. dissatisfaction with what the group is achieving
6. no sharing of feelings
7. retreat into conventional excuses and repetitive
behaviour.
Negative behaviour and unpleasant feelings can be turned
to advantage if the group are encouraged to face up to
them. It is the psychological equivalent of the alchemist's
dream of turning base metal into gold.
"The bad is raw material for the good." (Lao Tzu)

16. 16
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
PEOPLE PROBLEMS
When the group has not worked sufficiently on its group
maintenance needs, it may not be able to deal with
difficulties in the group and will turn to the facilitator to take
the problems on instead.
These include:
1. dominant members who use and manipulate the group
for personal advancement
2. the cynic or sceptic who continually nit-picks, complains
and sneers
3. the emotional person who unaccountably breaks down
in floods of tears and rushes from the room.
Problem situations are best handled with calmness and
patience. The aim of a facilitator faced with people
problems in the group is to invite the rest of the group to
become aware of the problem and recognise it as a
communal issue for them to resolve.

17. 17
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
CULTURAL BAGGAGE
Groups that get stuck in their development may well be
carrying excess "cultural baggage" from the workplace. This
means that some of the aspects of a control, manipulative
or talking shop mentality may be being carried over into the
group.
You can tell when you have cultural baggage if...
1. there is a hierarchy of status in the group just as there is
in the workplace
2. people defer to the boss's opinion
3. seating arrangements reflect cliques and status
4. men are more important than women
5. the group feel they need to produce something
6. people watch what they do because it will be
remembered later
7. feelings aren't discussed.

18. 18
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
RISK
All moves towards personal growth involve some kind of
risk, since we can never be sure what will happen when we
abandon our comfort zones for unknown territory.
Facilitators can ease the risks of group learning by...
1. helping the group to move forward gently
2. helping the group to keep in touch with their comfort
zones
3. showing that the group aren't alone by taking risks in
the way you facilitate
4. providing nurturing support
5. letting things happen in their own time.
"If you play safe in life, you've decided that you don't want
to grow anymore." (Shirley Hufstedler)

19. 19
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
CONFLICT
Conflict is always at or near the surface of groupwork,
especially where groups are meeting to resolve problems
between different parties with different interests.
Some of the conflicts that can exist in a group are:
1. conflicts over how the group should work
2. conflicts over how to solve problems that the group has
been constituted to resolve
3. conflicts being carried over from outside
4. people in conflict with themselves
5. power conflicts between group members and between
group members and the facilitator
6. the natural conflict in every individual between the pull
towards the group and the pull towards remaining a
free individual.

20. 20
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
HANDLING CONFLICT
Facilitators should avoid the many trapdoors that can open
up when conflict comes to the surface in groupwork.
The facilitator should...
1. observe and be fully aware of what is happening in the
conflict
2. not deny its existence
3. not comment on the content of the conflict
4. focus on the opportunities for growth that conflict
offers
5. not protect either side
6. avoid acting as referee
7. avoid suggesting solutions that favour one side or the
other.
One of the most empowering things a facilitator can do
when conflict emerges is to point out to all sides the
consequences of not resolving the conflict.

21. 21
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
THAT’S
IT!
WELL DONE!

22. 22
|
Overcoming the Blocks to Growth
Facilitation Skills
MTL Course Topics
THANK YOU
This has been a Slide Topic from Manage Train Learn