On 27th April, Facilitators Network Singapore and Singapore Cancer Society jointly organised a Six Bricks Lego Workshop event to commemorate the 20th Anniversary celebrations of FNS, and the 60th birthday of Singapore Cancer Society. Here’s what happened.
Brickbump! Lego! 6 bricks!
You would be forgiven if you thought these words were heard in a classroom full of noisy children, rather than a roomful of cancer survivors.
But that Saturday afternoon, as cancer survivors came together for their monthly gathering, they were gladly surprised at the sudden playfulness in the roomful of Lego.
Indeed, you would not normally associate cancer with fun or play.
Think of cancer, and what do you think of?
Perhaps pain, suffering and hardship.
Possibly a loss of hair because of chemotherapy.
Yes, it is all of that, and yet, so much more.
What does cancer have to do with process facilitation?
A survivor’s struggle through cancer can often seem like a reflection of the process of facilitation too.
Cancer often brings patients through chaos. You are met with bad news, and your life is torn into shreds.
Along the way, the doctor suddenly asks,
hey, would you like to join a support group?
TJ, is an 81-year-old survivor of prostate cancer and one of the pioneers of Walnut Warriors, a support group for those suffering with prostate cancer.
He laughs when he recounts his own journey.
Can you imagine?
You were given such bad news, and suddenly your doctor asked you, “hey do you want to join a support group?”
It was like asking you to do something social when all you want to do is curl in a ball and cry in a corner.
But you need a support group to help you understand how to choose what treatment to have, and what side effects you will face.
Coming together makes it easier to solve the problems faced in the course of cancer recovery.
It is akin to process facilitation.
In a typical process facilitation, the client comes with a set of problems that they hope can be solved by bringing stakeholders together to discuss the problem.
The facilitator moves the group from the initial chaos, to achieve a set of outcomes, that everyone aligns on, and eventually moves forward with.
It is like the work done in the cancer support groups, where members support each other through the initial pain of diagnosis, come together to discuss the problems they face, and come away with better ways of managing the pain.
Tina, a cancer survivor who went through her own journey battling cancer, facilitated the Six-Bricks workshop that afternoon.
Going through the workshop was a celebration of the hope found in the recovery of these survivors, and a reflection of the skills found in process facilitation.
Mindfully present
As a participant myself, I found it interesting how the session started.
Tina first led participants through a time whereby they centred themselves using the bricks.
I was asked to hold the block of 6 bricks, feel it in my hands, and gently breathe in.
Looking back at my own facilitation journey, I was reminded of the many times when circumstances around me forced me to be emotionally absent from the group.
Just 3 weeks ago, during a focus group discussion I was facilitating, I found myself focused on one particular participant, and how quiet she seemed to be.
Rather than trying to improve the experiences of the group, I quickly started questioning myself.
Am I not interesting enough? Not funny enough? What was happening?
Slowly, the group began to detach from me too.
Often as facilitators, we find ourselves faced with internal and external circumstances that disturb our inner locus of calm.
As facilitators, we all have our own ways of returning back to the present moment.
But Tina’s use of the bricks, and the breath, reminds us that when things are turbulent, we always have the breath.
Just return to the breath, and things will slowly settle.
You will never be ready, but you just have to take the next step
When things begin to settle, we then need to be willing to take the next step.
The next portion of the workshop involved some fancy Lego acrobatics.
Ready?
Here’s what to do.
- Place one block on the upper portion of your hand. Using the other hand, place another block on the other hand.
- Clench your fists.
- Walk around.
- Fist bump others as you walk.
If you balked at the difficulty, you would have been surprised to see just what happened that afternoon.
There was hardly a drop of the blocks as the participants, now a little more mindful of their movements, started walking gingerly.
They gently fist-bumped each other, before walking to the next person.
Again, it seems like an analogy for recovery. You never know when you are going to be ready.
You will just need to be willing to walk out, with your fists gritted, and heart pumping.
You will be scared.
But you will have to try.
As facilitators, you would never be sure of what might happen during the session, however well-planned your proposal might be.
You simply have to trust the process, and trust yourself, the person facilitating.
Of course, this is cliche, and common knowledge.
What is uncommon is the boldness to proceed, even when you might not be 100% sure whether you have made the right decision.
In another facilitation I was part of, I saw how the facilitator quickly cancelled a segment due to the lack of time. When I asked him about why he did that, he said,
Looking back, I am still not sure if that was the correct call.
But I do know that doing nothing, was definitely not an option.
Facilitation calls for decisiveness, even when you might not be 100% sure whether your decision might work out for the best.
It calls for the faith to walk out, even when things might be on a fine balance, or even teetering on the edge of chaos.
Just like cancer recovery.
To boldly continue to live the most of one’s life, even when cancer threatens to ravage one’s body.
Watch, listen, and learn
This process of living, amidst the circumstances one might be in, asks that we watch, listen and learn, with our senses.
Tina led the participants on a journey where they had to listen clearly, and quickly to every instruction.
Amidst cries of ‘not enough time, too fast, too difficult!’, participants persevered to put themselves through the process of tapping on their senses to build the Lego in the order described.
Take this activity for example.
Imagine you were in a coffeeshop, and now you are the coffeeshop uncle taking the orders.
Ever wondered how they remember your 6 orders?
That afternoon, Tina tested the powers of our memory.
Matching every coffee and tea order to a specific brick color helped participants to see how visual and auditory use was often detached.
You might listen, without seeing; or see without listening.
Remember the last time your spouse scolded you for not listening, because you were not looking at her as she shared about the horrid day at work?
But when we combine the use of both senses, our understanding begins to grow exponentially.
We might not be able to remember 6 coffee orders, but we would definitely be able to remember easily if each order was matched to a color.
Instead of remembering kopi, kopi o, and teh, you just had to remember ‘blue, green, red’.
Facilitation demands that combination of senses too. It needs us to use every sense, in its own unique combination, as we take a group from chaos to order.
This was made most clear to me when I saw the power of letting participants vote on the ideas that they wanted. I used to question why it was important to let participants to personally go up and mark their votes, when the facilitator could quickly count the votes if participants raised their hands.
But you would often see them engage more fervently when there is that tactile feedback to their ideas, in being able to draw, touch, and eventually vote on what they thought was important.
Again, it seems like a small point.
But in the world of facilitation, we often see that whilst the big things count, it is the small things, slowly added up, that make the world of difference.
We build it up, to push it down
As the session wound down to a close, Tina had participants line up the tiles so that someone could push it down like a stack of dominoes.
Every participant brought their stack of six bricks, and gently placed them upright on the table.
They tried placing them close together, so that they would eventually fall, in harmony.
Martha, the staff from Singapore Cancer Society, stepped up to push the dominoes down.
She explained “I am not destroying what you created, we ARE moving forward” and then gave a careful shove, and the room waited with bated breath, to see if the push would topple the whole snake of bricks.
Cancer survivors have a spirit of moving forward.
Brick by brick, the dominoes wound through the table, until it stopped, somewhere near the end.
It did not reach the end!
Someone shouted.
Everyone laughed.
Recovery, and facilitation, often is not a straightforward path.
There are ups and downs, successes and failures.
This, we all know.
What we often do not think about is what this means for each of us.
Would our approach be to sigh, and slink away?
Or would it be to step up, and give life another faithful shove, and get on with making the most of what life has to offer?
Ask Lego that question, and its answer, is to always, always, be building.
Footnote
Are you or your loved ones going for regular cancer screening?
Certain cancers are preventable, and many cancers are treatable and curable, especially with effective treatment in the early stages.
Screening helps to detect early signs of cancer or pre-cancerous conditions before any symptoms appear. By the time symptoms appear, the disease is often at an advanced stage.
https://www.singaporecancersociety.org.sg/get-screened/why-go-for-regular-cancer-screening.html
Bio
John is the founder of content agency Media Lede, which creates evergreen content for business to scale their sales for the long-term.
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