What It Means To Keep People Safe
Facilitator Tips Episode 51

What It Means To Keep People Safe

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode will expand your understanding of what it means to keep your group safe.

<< Go to Episode 50   Go to Episode 52 >>

Most group leaders attend to the physical safety needs of their group, but in my experience, often fail to nourish and nurture their emotional and mental health adequately.

Click the play button above to learn what keeping your group safe means.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Powerful Philosophical Framework – click one or more of these links to explore how you can nourish and nurture the emotional and mental well-being of your group – Episode 6 Honouring Challenge by Choice, Episode 14 Framing Is Key, Episode 22 How To Engage Unwilling Participations and Episode 38 Connections Are Key.
• Positive Education – there is so much to learn about this powerful approach to education, which steams from the field of positive psychology. Here are a couple of links to get you started – Institute of Positive Education (Geelong Grammar School) and Positive Psychology.

…EE

Video Transcript

Hi and welcome to Episode 51 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard, I’m an experiential trainer and author, and this episode I’m going to focus on keeping people safe. Any program leader would always say that’s one of their most important priorities. But in this episode, I want to explore what safety means.

Typically we think of safety in physical terms, broken arms, scratches, bruises, things of that nature, and naturally we want to avoid that with any group that we’re working with. But I want to expand your understanding of safety to also include beyond the physicality the emotional safety of your group and the mental safety of your group, and some groups would even argue the spiritual safety of a group as well. But that’s what safety means. It’s not just the physical safety.

Now in my experience and I’ve been working in this field for over 30 years professionally, generally speaking, program leaders are pretty good at looking after the physical safety of a group. We wear helmets where we’re supposed to, we do up the warm-up exercises before we do something quite physical, and so forth and so forth. We do a pretty good job nurturing the physical safety of a group.

In my experience, we don’t do a particularly good job at nurturing and nourishing the mental and the emotional safety of a group. And there are two particular things that have really helped me do that in my work.

The first part is understanding a strong and powerful philosophical framework. Elements such as challenge by choice, full value contract, having fun, setting appropriate goals for your group, all of those things help create that wonderful emotional and mental safety… if you need to safety net framework for your group.

And the last part is well-being. If the well-being of the individuals, the well-being of your group is at the heart of your program, you’re going to go a long way towards actually creating that emotional and mental safety for your group. For example educational approaches such as positive education, absolutely keep well-being at the heart of their work.

Now in our next episode, Episode 52, I’m going to look at how do we keep people safe, what is too safe. That’ll be in our next episode. So what are you doing in your program to keep your group safe, not just the physical but the emotional and mental safety as well?

Naturally, please leave a comment or if you found value in any of these episodes please share them with your networks as well.

Until next time I’ll look forward to seeing you soon. Bye for now.