Personal Development Quest

Purpose: To reflect on facilitation skills they'd like to develop and get concrete ideas on how to improve that skill and further their personal development.

Set-up: 

• Download the Workshops & Wizards deck. For this exercise, you'll be using all of the cards and will need as many as you have participants.
• Place all the cards in the deck into the suits (hand, hearts, head) and place in the three separate locations that encourages folks to move between them. 
• If you're using the digital version of Wizards & Workshops, you can set these out in the provided market stalls.

Step 1 

• Ask the group “What is a quest?” and take responses from the group.

Step 2

• After hearing some responses, share with them the idea of the heroes journey often being a quest for knowledge or an elixir that the hero will eventually return home with, having changed. 
  • If you have time, you can briefly share an overview of the heroes journey. This can be helpful if you want to encourage folks to move out of their comfort zone in their personal development or you want to fire up the imagination further.

Step 3

• Let participants know that now, we’re going to start thinking about a quest of personal development we’d like to go on by selecting magical items representing skill we'd like to improve.

Step 4

• Ask participants to move between the three locations and select 1 card from that represents something they’d like to get better at. Use a 5-minute timer so folks can browse and consider.
• Once they've picked 3 cards, participants should return to their seats. 

Step 5

• For a few minutes in silence have participants reflect on the following questions:
  1. Which one of these cards represents the skill you most want to improve?
  2. What opportunities do you have to practice this skill?

Step 6

• Next, put people in groups of three to four.
• One person starts by saying “I am going on a quest to find [The Wand of Many Questions]" and briefly explains why they want to go on this quest and ideas they have for practicing and improving this skill.
• The other participants in the group play the role of companions on the quest. They are the Samwise Gamgee to your Frodo, the Donkey to your Shrek. Their role is to offer support and any ideas for other ways the person going on a quest might practice and improve this skill.
• After 5 minutes of sharing, swap roles so that each person has shared their quest with the group.

Step 7 

• Finally, remind people that quests can be long and have many steps, but the rewards – be it saving the world or returning with knowledge or self fulfilment – are worth it. It might be daunting but every quest starts with just a single step.
  • In silence, ask participants to think about the first step of their quest. What’s the next thing they should do to begin their quest?
  • Invite participants to briefly share the quest they are going on and the first step they’ll take on that quest with the full group.