I'm a recovering academic who uses her insights from behavioural economics to develop methods that facilitate collaboration. In my weekly newsletter, I share the summary of my latest interview on the "workshops work" podcast along with an application of facilitation as a life and leadership skill.
Inclusion means Courage || 🎙️ Episode 345 : From Borders to Bridges: A Chaplain’s Journey
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Dear Reader, I thought my podcast was diverse… until I actually looked at the guest list: Most of them looked like me, spoke like me, came from the same cultural bubble. What a confronting realisation! Not because I’d done something wrong, but because I hadn’t even noticed. If I’m perfectly honest, I wasn’t aware of the reason behind my unconscious bias until an upcoming guest asked whether I’d hosted other Indigenous facilitators. I surprised both of us with my very honest: I may have avoided these conversations because I worried about saying the wrong thing, revealing ignorance, exposing what I didn’t know. So here I am after 350 episodes, realising that my default image of a “professional facilitator” might have been narrower than I realised. It’s uncomfortable to admit this here. And I trust I'm not the only one. Inclusion sounds like a moral stance, but we forget that it starts with something as simple as curiosity. The willingness to ask questions when we notice something is different from what we are used to. The courage to risk a clumsy first draft of a conversation. Inclusion begins by noticing the edges of our bubble and choosing curiosity over comfort. And now, I am excited to bring new perspectives and voices onto workshops work and even more so on Unprofessionalism. As I've started being more vulnerable about my insecurities, I've been met with generosity. Everyone I speak with is willing to take me along, forgive naïve questions, and help me learn. And that's why Unprofessionalism feels so timely. The more I explore it, the more I see how our ideas of “(un)professionalism” are shaped by culture — and how much gets lost when we treat one version as the standard. What does professionalism look like across continents, histories, and generations? From January, I’ll be exploring these questions on the podcast. For now, I have more questions than answers. Lucky me — I chose to be a podcaster and a facilitator 🤷♀️ 🎙 Meanwhile, on the podcast…Reverend Deb Hansen received a metaphorical message in a bottle, urging her to go to the US-Mexico border – a life calling that she followed all the way to El Paso. As a facilitator-chaplain and quilter of the human experience, Deb has been there for people at the most painful and tender times of their lives – helping to understand their stories, and stitch back together the fragments of a broken, polarised world. She brings beautiful stories about migration, spirituality, identity, and historical trauma with life-affirming reverence, she reads us a passage from her book Borderlands, and shows us all how to navigate vulnerability with grace. A rich and important conversation about what it means to be human. Find out about:
🎧 Click here to listen to the interview📥 Check out my 1-page summary 👀 Watch the unedited interview on Youtube 💖 Smells like Community....As workshops work moves toward retirement, I realised it would be a shame to let the episodes gather dust in the basement — that’s the mental image that comes up. Isn’t this, instead, a great opportunity to remove the constant fear of missing out on new episodes piling up on the “to-be-listened-to-sometime-maybe” list… and create a podcast-listening community around what already exists? A space where we can follow each other’s suggestions, share reflections, and maybe even meet once in a while to discuss podcast-related ideas. Well, that’s what I’m currently experimenting with. I’ve moved all 350+ episodes to Substack — a platform that feels closest to what I’ve always dreamed of: a true podcast-listening community. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can join me on Substack — I’ll keep you posted as this next chapter unfolds. *** That’s it from my side! I hope you enjoy the content and find inspiration in the stories and the podcast. I wish you the curiosity to stay open when comfort tempts you to close. I’ll see you next week! Myriam
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How can we facilitate collaboration?
I'm a recovering academic who uses her insights from behavioural economics to develop methods that facilitate collaboration. In my weekly newsletter, I share the summary of my latest interview on the "workshops work" podcast along with an application of facilitation as a life and leadership skill.
Dear Reader, What tells you that you’ve done a good job? Pause for a second before you answer. Is it a number, a feeling, a comment from someone else, or the simple relief of being done? Most of us have a metric, even if we’ve never named it. And once it’s there, it starts steering far more than we realise. I noticed this recently, in the most unlikely of places: on my meditation cushion. Before my last Vipassana retreat, a “good” meditation was easy to define. It was a sit where my mind...
Dear Reader, I came back from ten days of silence on Sunday. No phone. No writing. No reading. No podcasts. Just long hours of sitting, scanning sensations, and noticing how quickly the mind wants things to be different. Less pain. More comfort. A way out. Vipassana calls the practice equanimity. The capacity to stay with sensation as it is, without craving when it’s pleasant and without aversion when it’s unpleasant. Not suppressing. Not indulging. Simply noticing. When we stop feeding our...
Dear Reader, By the time you read this, I’ll be sitting in silence. Today will be day six out of ten. Ten hours of meditation a day. No phone, no notebook, no book, no calendar. Just me, my breath, and whatever Goenka has to say about observing sensations without reacting to them. It’s my sixth Vipassana (listen to my insights after the last), which means I should know by now that the first two days feel excruciating. My mind throws a tantrum like a toddler whose iPad has been taken away....