Facilitators

04/09/2026

10/08/2026

❓25/26 S2W10 Session: Interesting Others In You: Asking Good Questions

🤔 Some skills are such an art that they cannot be automated. “What should I ask?” is something that we are rediscovering in an age of artificial intelligence 🤖.
Like prompts, questions influence how we communicate.

🎯Social Pe*******on Theory: We explored how self-disclosure and reciprocity carry conversations. Often, it becomes difficult to respond when the questions become too personal, even if one wants to share – too soon, buddy!
With these insights, we checked in with each other. 💬

🫧 Asking the right questions is also vital! From 5W1H to open/closed ones, each prompts a different answer.
Using various types of questions, we teased out useful responses that helped us piece fragments of a disjointed story. 🕵️

👏 Keeping these frameworks and techniques in mind, let’s have better conversations and form more long-lasting, meaningful relationships!

A question for you, dear reader: What do you want to do in the new school year?

07/08/2026

🎯 25/26 S2W8 Session: Experiential Learning Cycle and Debriefing

🦁 What do big cats hunting prey and entrepreneurs have in common? They fail most of the time ❌. There is no teacher for guaranteeing success when it comes to teamwork or capturing a greater market share. ⛳ Those wanting have to be out there and experience things from themselves.

🔄️ This is where David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (ELC) comes in. It provides a structure for processing past wins and losses into improvements. ✨

People might have different strengths that make them especially excellent at one or more parts of this process. For example, some might be better at 📊 making sense of data, while others’ strengths can lie in 🪄 implementing plans.

🤯 If the ELC feels abstract, let us focus on debriefing, a method of getting feedback at the end of an activity. Together, teams reflect on what they did through debrief questions, which are structured to take people through the ELC, from initial observations to finding patterns, then addressing gaps through future actions. 🎯

🔭 It is crucial to base part of what we say on facts so that we can focus on what we can control and prevent group politics from preventing constructive measures for improvements. 🌉 If handled well, debriefs can help us build bridges with teammates, while also bridging the gap between expectations and reality.

07/08/2026

✨ 25/26 S2W4 Session: Initiative: The Spark That Brings You to Life

😫 “The beginning is always the hardest.” Many of us know this proverb, but how often do we get to the bottom of this observation? Why do we find it difficult to start on new things and develop plans? 🤔

🔎 To find out where initiative comes from, this workshop starts with it - by making a map of Yusof Ishak House (YIH), which has no existing maps online, to show important safety locations for our participants. With the help of Google’s 🍌✨ Nano Banana Pro, a 3-dimensional map of YIH (Level 1) is generated based on a photo of its floor plan.

📖 Joshua Spodek’s book on initiative explains some hurdles that prevent many of us from bringing our passions to life. He identified taking initiative as a task that resembles art more a science, so we can only get better at it through experiencing it, rather than getting to the knowledge of shortcuts to paths toward success which provide us with more hurdles instead:

🚧 Assuming that ‘solving a problem = success’ may distract us from the root cause of an issue.
🚧 Developing solutions without checking whether our assumptions are aligned with those affected by problems/solutions tend to result in poorly designed fixes.
🚧 Having passions means making ourselves vulnerable, and taking on risks. Progress will be difficult otherwise.

🍇 For initiatives to bear fruit, other than having something testable, it is essential to closely interact with people who are linked to the problem and/or potential solutions. Therefore, what we need is not tools, resources, or ideas, but specific problems and people (real humans) to work with you. 👥

👏 This calls for facilitation skills such as practising less oppressive leadership styles so that work feels less like a chore, and more like the fun of participating in a bustling ecosystem where everyone has the power to make a difference to each other’s lives!

06/08/2026

👾 25/26 S1W9 Session: Games Leadership

🎮 Facilitation isn’t just fun and games, but it needs them! In this session, we:
(1) Explored games — what types exist, what they do, and how they complement facilitation; 🎯
(2) Studied the "Situational Leadership" model - How can we adapt to the needs of our teammates? 🧭

🧊 Ice-breakers! A familiar name to games that breaks the ice between players. There are many more categories of games: De-inhibitisers loosen up the group, energizers perk up waning energy levels, and more!⚡

🧠 Hersey Blanchard's Situational Leadership model explains how various leadership styles should be utilized, depending on a participant's competence and commitment / confidence levels.
The styles a leader can adopt are classified along the axes of low / high supportive behaviour (encouraging) and low / high directive behaviour (instructing).

🔍 We put the different leadership styles to the test, instructing our peers to flip a tarp they are standing on, while standing on it. (Tricky!)

06/07/2026

🎭 AY24/25 S2W11 - Emotion Management

☺️ Maya Angelou said it best, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So what does it mean to feel - in a way that is constructive?

📑 For starters, we learnt about best practices for having awareness of our own and others’ emotions. 💬 The DEAR MAN assertive communication technique was useful for facilitating difficult conversations. 🎴 We also had fun sharing stories about different kind of emotions through the medium of colourful UNO cards.

🎚 Next, a plethora of techniques for emotion regulation. ☯️ One takeaway is that there is no ‘kill switch’ for any emotion, and we need to learn to live with whatever emotions are going through us. 🙆 TIP skills provide a quick fix, while there are many other strategies such as cognitive reframing, faking it till we make it with facial expressions, and breathing exercises to intervene with uneasy or overwhelming sensations that our emotions bring us.

27/06/2026

Reflecting on AY24/25 S2W10's session!

🏢 One type of questions usually come up in interviews: those that ask about an experience of you dealing with a challenge. Here we aimed to learn more about strategies for combating challenges. But what is a ‘challenge’? Definitely not choking on your own saliva when you got nervous before a presentation 🤧, because challenges involve great physical or mental effort to overcome.

🌵 The first thing we need to handle challenges is to build resilience. There are many ways to do so, ranging from 🧘 mindfulness techniques that can be done individually to 🆘 finding support from trusted people. Now that we can live with the problem, let us start seeking solutions. There are a few options available:

🤷 This brings us to our session's two actvities: Charade Chaos and Stress Farm (with Legos!). For short-term issues like guessing what one is trying to express, the SOAR framework guides us in considering our options. Meanwhile, for the proverbial tough nut to crack, such as massive projects that can look like building structures with materials 🧱, there is the ADAPT framework that goes in depth on how to manage complexity.

12/08/2025

Hi Everyone! We'll be at SLF! 🥳🥳 Come down and visit our booth at UTown Sports Hall 2 to know more about Facilitators@NUS! We hope to see you there! 🙂‍↕️🫶