…That is the question!

I am especially curious to hear your thoughts on how you schedule breaks for participants. My fear is always that once people have a chance to float away to the restroom, snacks, or their cell phones, they will struggle to regain the focus and energy that they had before the break. My tendency is to simply tell people to take a break whenever they need one during the engagement, rather than scheduling it in. In fact, instead of offering an official break, I aim to vary the activities we do during our time together so that there are natural inbreaths and outbreaths. So that people are getting up and moving around periodically. So that there is a balance between quiet reflection time and noisy discussion time, between laser focus and big sky dreaming.

But I also know that at a certain point, people tend to get tired. If you haven’t let them out for some fresh air, if they have a burning nag to check their email, if there’s a quick call they have to make, then a break really is essential. So my rule of thumb is that if the engagement is more than 2 hours long, schedule a break.

In order to curb some of my nervousness around the loss of focus that can occur during a break, I like to give a little to-do during the break time. As in, “Go ahead and take a 10-minute break, and when you come back, be ready to share out your thoughts on the topic you were just discussing at your tables.” Or, “Take 15 minutes for a break, and while you are out, think about what questions you still have about our last activity.”

As I write this I imagine some of you groaning, “But people need to really just have a full on break!” And I believe you. They do. But what I’d like to encourage you to think about here is what they need a break from. Have you been making them think too hard for too long? Sit too long? Listen too long? Have you covered so much information or made so much noise that they need a chance to be alone? Because I actually believe that if you’ve crafted your agenda with this in mind, you can prevent people from feeling overwhelmed and fatigued. In fact, the time will absolutely fly.

So this is the challenge for this post: As you plan your agendas, think about how you can create enough of an ebb and flow that a short break, with a little “homework” assigned within that break, will be enough for everyone, so that they can still feel at ease to use the restroom and check their phones without the fear of missing something, but will also still be quietly attached to the content you’ve been covering.

As always, if you need ideas, check out some of my earlier post, for example, this one on using quotes, or this one on making interactive handouts. I have seen these fun methods keep people engaged and energized, and mitigate the necessity for extensive breaks.

Try it out and let me know what happens!