Blog post week: 10/5/21-10/12/21


This past Saturday afternoon was an especially hard floor shift. Staff was spread pretty thin due to event prep for the wedding that night, on top of all the usual weekend crowds. Amidst the chaos, we had an especially long Code Orange (right when I was thinking “wow, this afternoon has been hectic, can you imagine if we ALSO had a Code Orange today?”). With all the palpable stress in the air, it was hard for me to find the energy to enthusiastically facilitate, and I often ended up defaulting to more maintenance tasks like taking apart cars, pulling parachutes down from the rafters, and sweeping up the gravel in Quiet Quest. 


I’ve mentioned quite a few times that open-ended floor facilitation is pretty far outside my comfort zone. I can often get stuck on doing something “the right way” the first time, and on numerous occasions I’ll find myself running through possible ways to engage a group of guests in my head, only for them to move onto the next thing before I can even start talking to them. Or I’ll actually manage to start talking to them, only to realize several minutes into our interaction that I probably should have started by introducing myself. As someone who doesn’t often make small talk with strangers outside work, even chatting with guests casually feels like I have to be “on” sometimes.


On some days, especially quieter days, none of this feels quite as hard. I already feel more comfortable on the floor now than I did a month ago, and I’ve had some really great interactions with guests in the past several weeks (just today, I had a blast facilitating White Water with a few groups that came through). On days like last Saturday, however, I find it really hard to dig up the reserves to be the best, most engaging version of myself. 


All of this is to say that on some days, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of something that really isn’t easy for me, and on others, I feel like I’m back at square one with floor facilitation. But even on the harder days, I’d still rather be doing this than work another day at my old lab job. I’m trying my best to welcome the challenges as they come.

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