Working with Resistance | for Facilitators
What do you do when someone in the room pushes back, checks out, or walks away?
Every facilitator meets this moment. Everything in you wants to fix it, push through it, or win them back. That's exactly when facilitation gets real.
This two-hour live session is a real piece of our Liberation of Facilitation programme, not a preview of it. In it we explore resistance: how to read it, and how to turn it from a threat into your most valuable information. About what a team protects, what they've stopped believing in, and what they need before they can move.
We'll draw on real cases, including the surprising discovery that the most difficult participant is sometimes the facilitator. What happens in you when a group resists? Where do you tighten, please, perform, or retreat? Expect to be confronted, kindly but truly, with how you do what you do.
You'll leave steadier: able to stay grounded and curious when tension rises, instead of freezing, defending, or pushing through.
What we'll do
A balanced mix of teaching and live work:
Reframe resistance: what it actually is, and why "handling" it usually makes it worse
Read the signals: the forms resistance takes in teams, from open pushback to polite compliance
Turn the mirror: a guided self-inquiry into your own patterns when a room resists you
Practice live: breakout work, meeting resistance from presence rather than technique
Integrate: what you take into your very next session
Who this is for
Facilitators, team coaches, and consultants who want to deepen their work with teams. Practitioners who sense that the next level of their craft isn't another tool, but a different relationship with themselves in the room.
It's not an introduction to facilitation basics. We'll assume you've stood in front of a difficult group before.
Practical
Format: Live online (Zoom), 2 hours
Price: €3. Essentially free, but we ask a symbolic price. What you commit to, you show up for. And showing up is what this session is about.
Group: Interactive: camera on, breakout rooms, real work.
Bring: A real moment where a team's resistance got under your skin.
Recording: This is a participation-based session. No replay, so plan to be there live.
Limited capacity, so get your spot early.
Your hosts
Françoise and Beatrijs. Between them they've trained 500+ facilitators and facilitated 1000+ teams. Liberation of Facilitation develops facilitators from the inside out, guiding leaders and teams through transformation not from a bag of tricks, but from who you are in essence.
Where this comes from
Liberation of Facilitation is built on three pillars: Wezen (Being), who you are in essence, your presence as the instrument; Weten (Knowing), the frameworks that give your facilitation direction; and Werken (Doing), the craft of interventions, timing, and reading the group.
This session lives at the heart of Wezen. Resistance is exactly where technique runs out and being begins, where your inner state becomes the intervention.
Our Facilitator Development Programme starts in November. This session isn't a pitch for it; it's two hours of the actual work. If the way we work resonates, we'll tell you more at the end, and you'll already know whether it's your next step.
Learn to facilitate from your whole being.