Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

In any content area, one difference between a beginner and an expert is the latter's ability to come up with different examples that belong to the same category. This activity strengthens your ability to come up with examples of communication concepts.

The ET acronym stands for “Effective Trainer”. We use this activity in our train-the-trainer sessions.

Participants work individually, with a partner, and in teams to prepare a list of suitable techniques for providing effective training. Eventually, each participant selects a technique that he or she wants to use immediately.

Understanding and analyzing a piece of advice are important activities. Here is a game that requires the participants to analyze the features associated with different pieces of advice.

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.

When does perseverance become foolhardiness? Here's a jolt that explores this question.

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.

Asking the participants to summarize the key points from a lecture is an effective way to strengthen their understanding and recall.

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.

This is a modification of an interactive lecture activity that is transformed into a textra game. This activity can be inserted after participants finish reading a handout. It involves a poster preparation contest that taps into the listeners' linguistic and visual intelligences.