095 - Workshop Your Life with Gabrielle Santa-Donato

When Gabrielle Santa-Donato said, “we need to be intentional about this transition”, she wasn’t talking about virtual workshops or exploring a workshop challenge.

She was talking about creating a post-pandemic world.

We’ve grown used to adjusting – to remote work, to lockdowns, to loss. What if we’ve become so adjusted to adjusting that we risk moving out of the pandemic without intention?

Gabrielle knows this better than most, having taken a role at Airbnb facilitating the adaptation to remote work. That alone is a worth a podcast episode, but so is her fascinating experience at the Stanford Life Design Lab.

This episode is a wonderful walk-through Gabrielle’s career, where we are now, and what we can all do to redesign our lives in trying times.

Find out about:

•  Why showing up as your authentic self isn’t always the best thing for your workshops
• What life design is and Gabrielle’s fascinating journey in the field
• Why reframing our constraints can open up a world of possibility
• How to know when to prototype beyond your comfort zone and when to take smaller steps
• How Gabrielle has shifted from teaching and facilitating life design to facilitating Airbnb’s managers
• How we could workshop our transition out of the pandemic

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Questions and Answers

 [01:35] When did you start calling yourself a facilitator?

[04:03] What’s the signal that says you guided a group successfully?

[07:15] How do we draw the line between being our authentic selves and being the facilitator participants need?

[08:42] Do you think you can bring more of yourself to a life design workshop than a managerial one?

[13:31] Can you explain more about what the Stanford Life Design Lab is?

[16:10] How much do you life design to your personal and professional life?

[19:19] How can you tell when the right moment is to step outside your comfort zone?

[22:52] Is there a perfect time to redesign your life?

[27:18] Life design asks us to be both facilitator and participant. Is this possible?

[38:07] Can facilitators actually facilitate their own life?

[42:47] What is your experience with co-facilitating meetings with managers?

[48:27] What is something you’ve learned from the life design process that you think can apply to managers right now?

[52:13] If we could workshop the worldwide transition out of the pandemic, what would it look like?

[57:42] What makes a workshop fail?

[59:16] What’s your favourite way to trigger transformations in a workshop?

[1:04:14] What is the one thing you would like listeners to take away from this conversation?

Links

Visit Gabrielle’s website

Listen to Gabrielle on “The Everyday Worker”

Watch Gabrielle’s life design webinar for the Harvard Alumni Association

Learn more about the Life Design Lab at Stanford

Watch Gabrielle’s

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👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈