Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.
This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.
Ever heard the cliché, “It's not what you say, but how you say it”? The Seven Words jolt dramatically demonstrates this principle. You demonstrate how the meaning of a sentence changes as you emphasize different words. Later, you invite pairs of participants to explore this concept.
An extract from Rudyard Kipling’s poem in “The Elephant’s Child” literally OPENS up opportunities to practice a key skill as part of a communication skills course as well as allied skills in active listening and observation.
Hopeful, joyful, peaceful, playful, thankful—these five words are written on the faces of different envelopes to create the five “-ful” envelopes.
According to Barbara Frederickson (and other positive psychologists), these five emotions are among those that contribute to happiness, subjective well-being, and flourishing.
This structured sharing activity helps participants discover how to increase the frequency and intensity of these emotions. This is the first step to increase one's happiness.
This is a feedback exercise to support participants to deliver feedback that is clear and specific, especially after working in multiple project teams over a longer period of time. The team maps the connections between individuals, then uses specific points of interaction to prompt feedback.
You might be familiar with Thirty-Five as a structured-sharing activity. Thirty-Five can also be used as an effective debriefing game.
In this version, participants reflect on an earlier experience and identify important lessons they learned. They write one of these lessons as a brief item. The winner in this activity is not the best player, but the best lesson learned.
This is a good game to begin a workshop. It sets everyone on the mood to learn, share, and participate.
The Fishbowl game is an effective way to activate attention—to prime our natural listening and observing skills so that a more substantive conversation can take place.
Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be led with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics.
Asking the participants to summarize the key points from a lecture is an effective way to strengthen their understanding and recall.
A critical thinking mindset supports people to reflect by using critical thinking questions when they discover and discuss new information. Critical thinking involves the evaluation of sources such as data, facts, media, stories, observable phenomenon, and research findings. Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve a problem or to make a decision. Critical thinking skills are key to making better, and well-informed decisions.