Things can get tough sometimes, it will happen, we are human. Life is full of contrast, good/bad, light/dark, happy/sad, with/without - so we need some processes/tools/methods for facilitating ourselves to a better place. Also, when things are on the up & up, it’s still useful to curate your own toolbox to build up yourself and to support others.
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.
While it is admirable to share our gratitude and good feelings with others, we rarely stop to think about what giving others our gratitude can do for us. As it turns out, it does quite a lot for our brains, resilience, and mental well-being.
This is a simple tool to help you create a habit that actually sticks! It's a research-backed technique that works very well, and it's called “Habit Reflection.” It’s powerful because it's customized to your personal history and experiences. Habit Reflection is all about using the lessons of your past in the present.
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.
Used as a post-session follow up or multiple session activity, participants share their action plan or project success. Results can be posted and discussed on a shared network or brought to a later live session (such as a review session or informal group catch up).
Individual reflection helps to pick apart complex experiences so that the successes of the experience can be repeated and the failures can be avoided in the future. The format is flexible, taking you through key stages of the reflection process, and ending with key action points.
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.
The key to such procedures as need analysis, market research, and evaluation is the ability to find patterns in available information, collect additional information, and come to logical conclusions. We devised a game with a pocket calculator to teach this type of logical thinking.
The Feedback Mingle is an exercise in which every member in a group gives feedback to every other member in the group. Often used as a closing activity, it aims to facilitate feedback, generate positive energy and create a sense of team.
You can quickly and effectively share several innovations or useful programs that may lie hidden within a group, organization, or community. Shift & Share gets rid of long large-group presentations and replaces them with several concise descriptions made simultaneously to multiple small groups. A few individuals set up “stations” where they share in ten minutes the essence of their innovations that may be of value to others. As small groups move from one innovator’s station to another, their size makes it easy for people to connect with the innovator. They can quickly learn where and how new ideas are being used and how they might be adapted to their own situations. Innovators learn from the repetition, and groups can easily spot opportunities for creative mash-ups of ideas.