The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. | Page 17

It can also be useful to appoint 3 ‘Keepers’:

A Keeper of the Time: whose role is to keep the meeting to time, to allocate times to different items and to make sure everything finishes on time

A Keeper of the Record: who keeps a record of the meeting, whether as minutes, a mindmap, or in whatever format the group feels would be useful

A Keeper of the Heart: whose role is to pay attention to the group’s energy and dynamics, to point out when any intervention might be needed due to low energy levels, underlying tensions or other issues that might emerge and affect the smooth running of the group

The body of the meeting:

You could do all sorts of things during the meeting itself:

• Get to know each other, find out more about why each person is here and their hopes for the Transition group

• Develop a shared understanding of Transition

• Decide what area you want your Initiative to cover

• Find out what skills people have and other groups they may be linked to

• Understand each other’s ways of dealing with stress: see our activity at

https://transitionnetwork.org/resources/become-stress-busting-experts-inner-transition-activity/

• If you have a programme of events planned, involve people in helping with these – it’s good to do some things together to find out how you work as a team

• Actively develop the group, its relationships, understanding and ways of working

Take time to get to know each other. It is the relationships that you form that are a key part of what is going to keep you going through the rough patches, when there are disagreement and things maybe aren’t going very well.

Our activity sheet 'Inner Transition activities for meetings' has some great practical exercises for bringing depth and energy to your meetings you can find it here:

https://transitionnetwork.org/resources/inner-transition-activities-meetings/

Closing: Make time to reflect on the meeting

It is good to get into the habit of making time at the end of your meeting to reflect on how it went and what worked, as well as what didn’t work? What could be done better next time? Without it, there is no way to pick up if people are feeling excluded, frustrated or confused. It also creates a space to thank those whose good work made the meeting go well (see ‘Stages of Group Life’ above).

You might also need:

Tea, biscuits/cake, flipchart paper and pens, a laptop for taking notes, some way of

keeping time.

ACTIVITY

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