attention

Facilitation, rapt attention, and love

Monday, August 15th, 2016 by Adrian Segar

facilitation rapt attention and love: photograph of two men wearing name badges sitting and talking indoorsPerhaps you’re wondering: What’s the connection between facilitation, rapt attention, and love?

Why am I drawn to facilitation? I’ve often heard an uneasy inner voice that wonders if it’s about a desire or need for control and/or power. And yet I know through experience that when I am facilitating well, I have influence but no real control or power.

Then I read this:

“Freud said that psychoanalysis is a ‘cure through love,’ and I think that is essentially correct. The love is conveyed not so much in the content as in the form: the rapt attention of someone who cares enough to interrogate you. The love stows away in the conversation.”
—Psychotherapist and writer Gary Greenberg, interviewed in “Who Are You Calling Crazy?”, The Sun, July 2016

Facilitation is not psychotherapy (though sometimes it may have similar results.) But they both have something in common when performed with skill: the gift of listening closely. And that gift of rapt attention is given out of love—not of the content but through the form.

Though I sometimes want to be in (illusory) control, I am drawn to facilitation out of love.

Facilitation, rapt attention, and love.

Why are you drawn (if, indeed, you are) to facilitation?

Photo attribution: Flickr user alphachimpstudio

Tags: , , , , , | Posted in Connection | 3 Comments »

There are 213 comments in your spam queue right now

Thursday, July 24th, 2014 by Adrian Segar

screenshot of four examples of typical comments in the spam queue for my blog

Comments in your spam queue

It’s usually nice for people to notice you. But when the attention comes from blog content spammers, you may feel a little differently. The growth of pageviews of this blog (currently about five million per year) has coincided with an ever-increasing volume of comment spam, those irritating blog comments that promise you $79/hour working from home!, Dior fashions at low prices!, and the best lawyer in Podunk!

Currently, I’m receiving over 250 comments like these a day. So, I’m happy to pay Akismet for their Pro Blogger service, which almost perfectly throws them into a spam folder. I say “almost perfectly”, because Akismet doesn’t handle a rarer form of comment spam, trackback spam. Trackback spam adds links to your content onto a page spammers want people to visit. Trackbacks can be useful to see who is linking to your content, so I don’t want to ignore every trackback link. Unfortunately, this means that you have to look at every trackback and manually move spam comments to the spam queue, an irritating multi-step procedure in WordPress. I started seeing increasing quantities of trackback spam over the last few months, so I’ve added a plugin Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker that seems to be doing a good job automatically moving trackback spam to the spam queue.

One more observation. Bloggers like me have to spend time and money keeping this crud off their posts. But there’s another victim of these sleazy attempts to plaster low-quality SEO slime over the internet. I notice lots of spam links to small, obscure businesses. I wonder how many of them are being fleeced by jerks who promise to increase traffic to their website. And the business owners never know that the fleecer is spraying comment spam to make those stats rise.

Tags: , , , , , , | Posted in Social media | 1 Comment »

Moving attendees from no where to now here

Monday, September 24th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

an illustration of a rainbow parachute dangling the words: Nowhere. Now hereFrom attending to attention

How can we move attendees from nowhere to now here?

These days, when someone decides to attend an event we have organized we should be grateful. We live in a world with a myriad of viable options for spending our time and attention.

To pick our event from all of these possible choices is an honor.

But often we squander the gift of attention we have been given. In return, we offer a passive experience of listening to a few people speaking for a long period of time.

This is a mistake.

Our brains and bodies are not equipped to maintain full attention to any speaker for more than a few minutes. The inevitable happens, and people tune out. Their attention on what is being presented becomes fragmented and weak. They are nowhere.

But we can move our attendees from nowhere to now here.

Presence and presents

Yet we know how to increase attention. Here are a few ways:

  • Ban uninterrupted talking by any one person for more than a few minutes.
  • Supply frequent, continual opportunities for every attendee to participate and contribute.
  • Use participant-driven learning formats so that attendees get to learn what they want to learn.
  • Don’t let anyone sit still for more than twenty minutes.

These are presents of presence for the people at our events.

They guide our attendees out of the routine of attending and gift them back into attention.

They move our attendees from nowhere to now here.

This is a powerful gift.

Give this gift at all your events!

Image attribution: ~chassence

Tags: , , , , , | Posted in Event design | No Comments »