The facilitator of a leadership retreat I attended today started off by adding a wrinkle to a traditional task.

First he asked us to report on what we were planning to work on at the start of the school year; second — and here comes the interesting wrinkle — he asked us to verbalize something that we were worried about or that was keeping us up at night.

He asked us to talk about the latter because he said it would be a good way to get it out on the table so that we wouldn’t have to keep worrying about it while we were supposed to be together and concentrating.

Though this move didn’t completely reduce all of our worries, it did help us to work hard at being together, face-to-face, and doing work that we could only do because we were in a room together.  He gave us permission, in other words, to untether . . . to be present . . . to come close to being the best team we could be.