Will We Ever Be Done Melting the Ice?
Gwyn Wansbrough is an online facilitator, course creator, and the writer behind The Quest, a weekly newsletter for facilitators, trainers, coaches, and creators that has run past 200 editions. She spent 15 years facilitating and training in person all over the world with Partners for Youth Empowerment before going fully virtual during the pandemic, and has since worked with over 1,500 professionals through her Breakthrough Facilitation framework and her on-demand course, Live Session Magic.
This conversation keeps circling back to one question: when does connection actually happen in a session, and does it ever really stop? Gwyn walks through her eight-step Breakthrough Arc framework for designing online experiences, and she and Jan trade stories about reading the room without body language, debriefing for real “aha moments,” and bringing lessons learned online back into in-person facilitation.
- Why Gwyn stayed fully online even as other facilitators rushed back in person
- Her belief that online facilitation is still “at the edge of a frontier”
- The accessibility case for virtual: five continents in one room, no one paying for a flight
- Why “reading the room” is the hardest skill to carry over from in-person to virtual
- Her fix: checking in more often online — energy scales, chat emojis, pulse checks
- Her Breakthrough Arc’s eight steps: Preparation, Warm Welcome, Connection, Context, Activity, Reflection, Commitment, Closing
- Where connection sits in her framework: “connection before content,” but woven through the whole session
- Why the biggest risk, like the biggest log on a campfire, has to come last
- A teacher’s breakthrough moment triggered by nothing more than hearing music on Zoom
- Gwyn’s take on the “aha moment,” a term she traces to Oprah Winfrey
- Why “what, so what, now what” works without the facilitator knowing the answer in advance
- Jan’s clap-passing story, where a “failed” strategy taught more than the right answer
- Her tip to personalize the Zoom waiting room message so people arrive present
- A two-minute trick: have participants share their own way of cutting distractions
- Why she introduces herself after the first connection activity, not before
- What she’s testing now: more tech without overpacking the agenda
- Live Session Magic, her course, and her upcoming Online Engagement Scorecard
Connect with Gwyn:
- Website: gwynwansbrough.com
- Newsletter (The Quest): gwynwansbrough.com/newsletter
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gwynwansbrough
