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Team Bio

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Michaud Garneau

Facilitator & coach
Michaud is an experiential facilitator who leverages a wide range of skills and abilities to create unique experiences for his audiences. Michaud is the founder of Weird is Nrml (a leadership company), a podcast host, and course creator with Coursera and LinkedIn Learning. In his spare time, you can find him rock climbing and creating crossword puzzles.

Michaud’s Insights:

More than just a facilitator, here are some fun facts:
I’ve done a TEDx Talk on the surprising connection between clowns and vulnerability.
I studied improv with Second City and was surprised at how I was immediately able to apply the skills I learned to both work and life.
I love route-setting at my rock-climbing gym---designing climbs for people and figuring out how to make them just hard enough to balance effort and fun.
I have always been critical of authority, including not finishing university because I didn’t want to submit work for approval.
I started my entrepreneurial journey in high school making and selling clothing.

Michaud’s Facilitator Story:

I grew up spending time with very different groups of people, which led to a deeper understanding, compassion, and comfort with people who are different from me.

I studied philosophy at the University of Guelph and loved learning about critical thinking, existentialism, and formal logic. I later studied improv, as well as clown and bouffon, which not surprisingly, is an ideal background for facilitation. It gave me an incredible foundation of personal exploration, development, listening, and capacity to relate to others, as well as how to best use physical space to create meaning and presence.

My work today ranges from performing on stages for hundreds of people to having difficult conversations with CEOs as an executive coach. I also work as a content partner for Coursera and LinkedIn Learning. I use a unique combination of yoga, meditation, improv, clown, and puppetry, as well as community activism and negotiation skills to bring a holistic and experiential approach to facilitation.

My goal is to help my audience and participants stretch their comfort zones in fun, supportive, and thoughtful ways. I believe my role as a facilitator isn’t to “teach;” I work to shape micro cultures that allow participants to lead themselves towards what they need to learn.

One of my greatest joys is seeing something “click” for someone and facilitation helps create the environment that allows things to click for everyone present.

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