MORE IMPACTFUL FINAL DEBRIEF
WRITTEN BY: DEAN MARTIN
Clients to FOCUS Adventure come from all walks of life, ranging from those with serious objectives for their programs to those who just want their employees to have fun and enjoy the day away from the office. Facilitators spend a bulk of their time trying to master the art of the debrief and actually provide clients with a program which will not only impact them physically but mentally and emotionally as well.
In my experience, the time in which people can actually be impacted most is during the final debrief. However, most of us tend to focus on the activities and regularly cut the final debrief to one which is very short and, in my opinion, may not create the impact we set out to achieve. This is one of my biggest challenges as well and thus, I took up an initiative to find a better way of finding such a debriefing strategy and came across one which seems very promising in the book ‘Awaken the Giant within’.
The biggest message we try to put across to clients in the final debrief is that they need to remember all of the things they speak about and experienced during the program when they go back to the office. The best way to ensure it is that they move away from the program with a firm conviction that in order to improve, they need to change the very way they communicate and deal with each other. Many of us believe that changes take time, however, a book written by Anthony Robbins – a very successful individual in the field of turning people’s lives around – basically claims that change can occur in an instant. This can be done using a framework with 3 basic steps:
The first thing that the client needs to believe is that in order for things to improve, something must change. What could this change be? It could perhaps be the application of the lessons learnt during the activities back at the workplace. The second step is to believe that change starts with me. This can be linked to the morning portion in which we inform the clients that the people who are responsible for achieving the expectations they set is themselves, and drill into them the fact that the change needs to start somewhere and the best place to begin is oneself. The third step is to believe that I can make the change. We could stand around talking all day about how well the activities went and how much fun we had along the way, but the essence of the entire program comes with the knowledge in each client that they can change the way they have been functioning all this time and experiment something new which could boost their efficiency much more. The final question to ask after everyone has absorbed all 3 steps is “Are we willing to make the change?” |
Give the clients a short while to ponder on the point and then, move into the video and closing segment of the program. I think this is something that truly impacted me and inspired me to write this as soon as I read it. I hope it has the same impact on all of you and I am very sure I will try it to see if it works in one of my programs which involve a lot of learning soon. Combined with the concept of making the client figure out the purpose behind all the activities we do, I think it has the potential to have an unforgettable impact if executed well.
