On Wednesday I talked to a friend and I told her: “What my goals for Q4 are? No clue yet. I will decide tonight.”
I knew that in the evening there would be a call in a membership group I joined, or rather a Q4 opening ceremony. Much better name. I had already joined the one before for Q3 and miraculously I archieved 2 of the 3 goals I had set there. Huge win for a person who embarrassingly forgets her own ideas and goals. (And with the third goal I saw my flaw with the wrong focus & wording; so I am correcting that this time.) So I knew this is gonna be good.
What I like about this style of call/workshop/webinar: It gives you space for journaling, and therefore space for some deep thinking. It’s not that I never think about goals or projects, but I often do that in the moment (e.g. cooking) or in an inspired mood (e.g. listening to a podcast).
So by putting the call opening ceremony on my calendar, and by getting the structure for Q3 review and Q4 planning from the host, I actually am present to actively decide on the goals.
(Did you see the STRUCTURE & SPACE thing again?? There’s a reason why I chose this name for my publication…)
In one of my other lives I am a workshop facilitator. To create a lively and effective workshop of course you need to make the people *do* something. From giving their opinion in the chat, to solving some kind of exercise, to holding group discussions in breakout rooms and later summarize the results – there are a lot of activities that people are used to when they sign up for a workshop. But what about journaling?
Because I love it so much when people force to give me space to journal in workshops, I wanted to try that with my participants too. And I chose the hard mode: Boomers.
At the beginning of the year I had a communication consulting project with people from literary clubs. Lovely people, but very boomer-esque. For the final webinar, I wanted to alchemise my findings from the consultations into an exercise to identify their communication talking points. It was a gamble: Would they be open to try the journaling exercise, because readers are probably writers, too? Or would they reject this experiment because they expected something different from a webinar?
I set the stage with the metaphor of a spider building its net; and us filling the different parts of the net with our content. Then I whipped out my questions, set a timer (2 mins per question) and… surprisingly, it worked. I saw in the webcam overview that some questions hit better than others and some didn’t make them write for full two minutes; but the majority participated in the exercise and liked it. Yay!
For me, this shows that I am not the only one who is happy to be lowkey forced to put thoughts to paper. I will experiment more with how to include these kind of activities into my workshop; and how to word the questions and journaling prompts so that both beginners and more advanced people will get inspired by them. Maybe co-journaling will become the next co-working?
Thanks for reading.
Bye for now, Kato
I love the idea of co-journaling!