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Developing your facilitation style

Every good organizer or facilitator develops a unique style. In fact, one of the worst mistakes made by beginning organizers is to copy someone else's style. Doing that is like wearing your grandfather's or daughter's clothes. Even if they fit pretty well, they just don't work very well after a while.

Given this fact, understanding your self or personality can help you develop into an effective facilitator.

How do we start to know ourself, to know our personality? Some people like to give tests, add up how people respond and based on those sums, assign everyone a personality type.

This seems to have started with one of the first psychologists.

Carl Gustav Jung observed a personality dimension: introversion-extraversion, which has since been developed into a popular personality type test. This pen and pencil test (called the Myers-Briggs test after it's authors) has helped many people understand themselves. More importantly, the test has helped people appreciate the differences between people. One size does not fit all.

Myers-Briggs personality test

Beyond static personality

Carl Jung said late in life that he was glad he did not have to be a Jungian. The limitations of a static approach to personality embodied in Myers-Briggs are not present in Carl Jung's writings.

His concepts of archetype (universal structures of the unconscious) and individuation (the process by which archetypes are given unique expression in a specific human life) argue against making static his concept of introversion-extraversion.

Those who find value in Myers-Briggs approach, might realize deeper insights by exploring the original:

E.g., Jung, C.G., 1912 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious).

There you'll find gems such as:

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Or try his book: Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. [p. 326]

Archetype

Jung's concept of archetype is a powerful explanation, predictor and extremely controversial.

Synchronicity

When we begin to explore the unconscious we encounter another of Jung's observations which is even more controversial to reductionistic science: synchronicity.