In communicating expectations, needs, and more, it helps to clarify and create common ground. Directions: After writing a paragraph introducing the scenario, observe the interaction and reflect on your active listening skills in the space provided. What factors sometimes prevent us from asking questions when they might actually be useful? So, if they agree, and now isnt a good time for a deep discussion, then diarise time to catch up socially in a place where you can talk freely. Finally, everybody removes their blindfolds, and its time for feedback. Typically, we dont freely share our internal beliefs with others. It helps us create more clarity, take in information more effectively, and develop our workplace relationships through empathetic engagement (Nikolova et al., 2013). paraphrase their message). This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Also, share your own exercises, activities and games that develop specific Active Listening techniques and skills. Examples include Omit the Obvious, Train of Words, and Blindfold Walk. To get started improving your (or your team's, or your student's) communication skills, give these 5 activities a try. Key communication skills and how to acquire them. Youll need a list of topics for people to act out, then invite players to break off into groups of two. Enjoyed it. How did you clarify what you were hearing? Writing helps with the cognitive reinforcement process. Active listening is not planning your response to what the person is saying. Start with groups (or sub-groups) of between four and ten players; in each of these, someone will need to volunteer as a facilitator. Have paper and pens available for the participants. Silence is not always a bad thing. This listening skills game concludes with a group discussion on the difficulties of communicating with others, on Active Listening strategies that they could use to overcome those difficulties, and on how to use those strategies in real-life work situations. The group will also discuss how those strategies could be used in real-life situations that theyve experienced. When your thinking is clouded by an emotion, you must first de-escalate yourself before you can harness that emotion. To practice active listening and assertive communication. And you may ask follow-up questions if desired. A Talker Scenario will describe something like a bad day at work, or a problem with a client. Clarify when you catch yourself jumping to conclusions. Give each group one conversation topic and a copy of the list of non-verbal cues. Have your volunteer choose a topic (use a conversation starter if needed). Storytelling is an engaging way to convey information; when its positive information, narratives are also highly effective means of motivating and inspiring others (Tomasulo & Pawelski, 2012). Talking is essentially a form of content delivery, and its not really communication unless we listen. It only takes three iterations to uncover some very personal beliefs. Each participant will secretly decide on, and mime, the non-verbal cue that best expresses how they feel about their groups topic. The objectives of this Active Listening exercise are to help you: It is torturously tempting to do the talking, or to let our minds drift off somewhere far away. Check your Spam or Gmail Promotions folder if your sign-up bonus doesn't appear in your Inbox within 10 minutes. The talker discusses their dream vacation for three minutes, describing what they would like best about it but without specifying where it should be. Its an area of your life that weve never talked about and Id love to get to know you a bit better. To try out personal storytelling, set aside a team-building afternoon, meeting, or workshop. Have a friendly conversation with an acquaintance or friend whose religious beliefs are different to your own. . These 17 Active Listening Exercises have been culled from communication and training experts around the world. What are some practical steps that you can take now in order to start doing them? Breaking into pairs, group participants take turns asking Active Listening questions about a simple drawing that they cannot see in order to draw it as accurately as possible. [1]. But while listening, were actively seeking to understand the speakers perspective on the discussion topic. Active listening involves attentively seeking to understand a speaker's message, rather than passively hearing the words that a speaker says. a family member, a friend, or a work colleague). How effective was this technique? If you hate pop-up ads, for instance, youve already got great material for your rant. This is a small group Active Listening game for adults. What are Communication Exercises and Games? Put even more simply, we make work a nicer place to be while avoiding unnecessary conflict. Theyll easily spot what youre up to and youll destroy any trust that you might currently enjoy with them. This is cognitive empathy, which is the goal of Active Listening. For example, Everyone seems very quiet. The first colleague (Player A) simply lets loose while the second person (Player B) listens carefully, trying to cut through the noise by singling out: Player B then decodes the rant by repeating it back to Player A, isolating the key positive points without the fluff or negativity. From him or her, they take another piece that someone else has written, and tries to act out that feeling to the rest of their groupusing only their facial expressions. Together or solo, they can create I statements about how the imaginary scenario makes them feel. How did communication look with a longer or shorter chain? Emotional intelligence. Once people get the gist of how to play with one item, the facilitator adds in the second by passing it to the left. Your sign-up bonus has been sent to your inbox. Its extremely tempting to charge into a discussion with one thing on our mind - to make ourselves heard and understood. Try out activities that are best suited to your organizational goals so they have the most relevance. Here are two activities that will help your team work together creatively to solve a problem, as well as one about the role of silence. What has worked in the past for your team? You will need about ten meters of rope and a safe place for employees to walk around blindfolded in. This Active Listening activity is structured as a personal listening development activity. Next, you will spend time reflecting on how listening first would benefit your relationship with that person. Was there any lack of clarity around the instructions? Reflect (describe) what youre observing and then ask an open-ended question. Your goal is to learn about them. Nonetheless, were often inclined to view it as awkwarda gap to be filled or avoidedrather than a chance to listen. What other thoughts and insights do you have about this technique? Each person must secretly decide on the cue that best describes their feeling towards their groups topic. Step-by-step instructions are provided. Active listening. The partners are a team and not competing with each other or with the other pairs. They use the goals as a guide for the conversation, while the watchers listen carefully and make notes. Drawing on empirical literature on communication skills in the workplace, we can look at Maguire and Pitcheathlys (2002) study of doctors for a good example. What do you do? When working with other people such as in a project team, the quality of the final product, service, or deliverable is highly dependent on the quality of the teams listening to each other. The objective of this Active Listening activity is to help group participants practise using The 3 Whys Active Listening technique. Describe a controversial opinion that you have. A third skill is reflecting (Robertson, 2005). Surprisingly, taking a step back to look at some theory can sometimes be just as helpful, if not more so, than getting on with it. To use this technique, students act out skills after discussing them. Is your colleague overwhelmed, perhaps? Maguire, P., & Pitceathly, C. (2002). If your mind was an island, what would it look like? 2023 Andrew Ward of The GLS Project -Designed by Thrive Themes The group then needs to play the game with only the instructions from the speaker. For example: Emotion - Offense. So, plush toys, tennis balls, or similarbut the more imaginative they are, the better. Talk your way through that perfect weekend. An Active Listening skills activity for pairs (or done with a volunteer). The job demands-resources model: State of the art. Active listening is a system of opening and maintaining communications through the use of empathy, listening and body language. Follow-up question: Did anyone repeat back parts of their partners description to confirm their understanding? Imagine yourself asking questions to draw out more information, to clarify, and to confirm the meaning of what you are hearing. They are designed for adults (not children) and suitable for both personal listening development and workplace training workshops. Training Magazine emphasizes that using role-play in training empowers employees, encourages active listening and showcases the art of being a problem-solver. What was memorable about it? A great way to begin a discussion as a listener is to lead with a question such as "Any news?" Doctors described empathy in terms of feedback and validation. zDevelop the action. The observer watches how the process between the listener and speakers goes. Tell them to let you know once theyve agreed that the job is done. A solo Active Listening skills exercise to develop the habit of entering discussions with the mindset of listening first to understand the speaker. Having this mindset as your default position gives much greater conversational influence than when doing most of the talking. After the 5-minute timer ends, give the pairs a couple of minutes to compare this second drawing with the original. [3]. Uncertainty reduction through everyday performative language work: the case of coaching. Just listen in silence and try to understand the speaker. Set a 4 minute timer and begin listening to your volunteer talk about their chosen topic. Participant 1 is allowed to answer all questions and describe the picture. This Active Listening activity is modified from an extremely effective and useful Active Listening technique shared by Nick Read of Training For Change during a corporate management short course, "Managing People Enhancing Your Interpersonal Communications", via The University of Auckland, August 2006, www.training4change.co.nz. Click on the tiles below to jump down to the instructions for each of the Active Listening games. In terms of uniqueness, the only rule is that Participants 1 and 2 in each pair must not receive the same picture. Prior to passing on the toy, ball, or what have you, players ask something about the object and answer a question about it. Thats provocative. What happened? There is no set time or place for storytelling, but it works best when a story is followed by an invitation to the group to give input. There is no limit to the group size for this game, which requires only enough pens and paper for everybody. Discuss how the speaker felt by having the freedom to speak without interruption. Tomasulo, D. J., & Pawelski, J. O. Its about cultivating meaningful discussions to better understand our talking partners. . Compared to profits, losses, and even risk, it is intangible. Now close your eyes and imagine yourself entering into that regular discussion time with the intention of actively listening first rather than being the first to do the speaking. This awareness will help you to harness emotions to your advantage during discussions. Excellent content and I cant wait to use some of this content as well. Active listening activities are ideas that will promote the ability to pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal communication cues. It also promotes collaboration. Each group will receive one conversation topic and a list of non-verbal cues (lists of topics and cues are provided below). It could be a weekly meeting with a work colleague, the daily family time around the dinner table, or a mid-week lunch catch-up with a friend. It works with any sized team and requires only a facilitator and some novel objects that can be passed between participants. When the words we speak convey one message and our body another, we risk confusion and potentially, we jeopardize our intended impact. What would be your perfect weekend? The mime reads the card, then attempts to act out whats on it (youll first need to decide on a theme, like weather, activities, or what have you). Otherwise, the idea is identicalinformation gets misinterpreted thanks to noise, but we can improve our verbal communication and listening skills to minimize this risk. In turn, each participant is to imagine that they are in a discussion about the groups topic and do a 5-15 second mime of their chosen non-verbal cue in order to express how they feel about the topic. Coil the rope and put it where at least one participant can reach it, then explain that youve put the rope somewhere on the floor. Each player writes down a feeling on a small piece of paper, folds it, then passes it to the volunteer facilitator. Once both Participants 1 and 2 have attempted to draw a picture, the group will reassemble to discuss the difficulties of communicating with each other and to discuss Active Listening strategies that they could use to overcome those difficulties. What was constructive about your partners instructions? The games and exercises in this section are about connecting on a human level so that we can communicate with more emotional intelligence in the workplace. C: Conflict How did you feel during the game? The group then lists the listening stoppers they noticed. Occasionally, a speaker will say how they feel. The Struggle might be something like geographical distance between team members, and the Goal would be just that: their objective or success. Sometimes mentioned along with reflective questioning, it involves, restating a paraphrased version of the speakers message, asking questions when appropriate, and maintaining moderate to high nonverbal conversational involvement (Weger Jr et al., 2014: 13). Used with permission from Time To Grow Global. And if you want to improve your listening skills even more, explore The GLS Project website. Mostly though, we hint at our feelings and attitudes using more indirect non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, abnormal silence, posture, tone of voice, volume, and rate of speech. What might have contributed to this confusion? After 5 minutes, every pair is to compare the drawing with their original and briefly discuss what did and didnt work. Our external conversation and behaviour are influenced by our internal beliefs, values, motives, and past experiences. The other participants try to guess that emotion and this should lead to a talk about the role of expressions. (20-30 min). Then, once you adequately understand them, you can switch into the role of speaker in order to share your perspective. Would that be okay?. Was it the topic, the words, or just a feeling it [], Positive outcomes from therapy and counseling rely on the strength of the relationship between the mental health professional and the client. Did anybody end up with both items at once? This facilitator simply keeps the game on track and gets the discussion going afterward. Happily ever after: The use of stories to promote positive interventions. They will need to make notes. Goulston, Mark, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, New York: American Management Association, 2010. The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions. A process guide for training workshops focused on working in groups, communication, conflict resolution, community organising and conversation frameworks. Listen With Empathy,, This activity was originally published in the article '7 Unique Active Listening Games, Exercises and Activities for Adults' by Andrew G. Ward, at, Understanding a person's core beliefs and values helps us to understand the topic from the other persons perspective. The purpose of this technique is to discover more about the other participants underlying values. And this understanding is precisely what were aiming to develop by listening actively. This exercise is done with another person. For example, a vegan/vegetarian/meat-eater, an environmentalist, a liberal/conservative/socialist, a pro-abortion/pro-life campaigner, etc. E: Empathize - Having empathy in business pays off in all relationshipspractice understanding and compassion when listening to your customer's grievances. Thank you so much for creating and sharing these tools. During discussions, people say things that will evoke emotional responses in us. Imagine attending a communication workshop, in purely lecture format. Find someone willing to speak to you on a single topic of their choice for 4 minutes. Give Participant 1 a simple picture. Follow-up question: What benefits did you get from it? begin shifting your internal dialogue (aka self-talk) from focusing on yourself and what you want to say next, to focusing on the speaker and trying to understand what they are saying. But they must not say how they feel. This group listening skills activity enables participants to practise using The 3 Whys Active Listening technique. As well as identifying key communication deficits and their root causes, these included several that relate to our knowledge of positive psychology and communication. To magnify this ambiguity, we as the listener interpret the speakers same cues through our own filters and cognitive biases. Edmondson, A. C., Kramer, R. M., & Cook, K. S. (2004). Let the participants go about it, taking care not to let any accidents occur. Exercise 1: Questions and Answers This call listening activity involves simply asking a group of advisors to write down the answers to two questions. And they are encouraged to continue. At the individual level, we can make conscious use of this EQ skill to gauge how others are feeling. Help put resources in the hands of change makers. They might be up to their ears in work, or their colleagues complaints might seem trivial. While the asker can pose questions, the mime can only act out their answers. To practice active listening and assertive communication. Identify someone who has a belief that is different to your own. Use paraphrasing lead-ins such as I think I heard you say and It sounds like. Succinctly, ambiguity contributes to stress, and clarity is empoweringsomething that is easy to overlook and which this game reminds us of. It is not a method for creating opportunities to talk about themselves. What is the most recent success youve had? Download a printer friendly PDF from the box at the bottom of this page. These interpersonal and team communication games cover topics such as misinterpreting information, awareness of our assumptions and engaging others. Active listening involves giving the other person time to explore their thoughts and feelings, they should be given adequate time for that. I might be able to add them to the article. Subscribe to the newsletter for new resources every month. Debrief with a chat about the communication that went on. Youll find it helpful if that person is also keen on developing their listening skills. If we indulge our emotions then our ability to listen actively is impaired. Each group will receive a copy of this list. Each pair will take turn-about. It involves listening closely, paraphrasing back to the speaker what you hear, clarifying what you think you hear, etc. As humans, were complex. Read out the following at a steady pace: You are the driver of the 147 bus route You started your shift at 6:30am this morning Listen With Empathy,. The listener uses effective listening and makes appropriate responses back to the speaker. If you have any great activities that we havent covered, do let us know! Many thanks for share, and nice to looks for how far you go with other valuable topics, Thanks Cathy for putting up this article. Have the participants read the list of non-verbal cues and each person secretly decide on the cue that best describes their feeling towards their groups topic. What was the impact and how is it affecting you today? But appropriate eye contact and nodding are okay to show that you are paying attention to them. zDevelop the character. You can further enhance the impact of role-play in . Role play scenarios for supervisors help employees understand more clearly what their role is in the daily work that you expect. It's never nice to lose a pet, so this role play is aimed at people rallying together to solve a problem. In a large group of participants or employees, particularly, we often need to cut through the noise with a clear and coherent messageand this game can be played with even a large group of people. Is now the best possible time to ask them for help on a task? What were some of the differences? For example, Gee! Our intended messages arent always interpreted as we mean them to be. Follow-up question: What kinds of clarifying questions did you ask? First, pick a game with enough instructions that the information is a challenge to memorize. So, flat and ideally with no walls or tripping hazards. Were not always ready to receive and learn from criticism, especially when its delivered insensitively. Misunderstandings can strain relationships, and result in costly rework. Different studies vary on exactly how much of our intended message (and credibility) is non-verbal, but its undoubtedly important (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998; Knapp et al., 2013). This worksheet provides role play exercises to help with practicing active listening advocacy skills. All humans have some things in common. A conversation of this kind can be quite absorbing. Clarify Understanding IV. G: Goal. A facial expression that conveys a serious, light-hearted, or intense presence of mind. Imagine that time freezes for everyone but you for one day. It doesnt take very long, either, and can be played in as little as ten to twenty minutesperfect for breaking up the day. One member takes on the role of a speaker, and the other plays the part of the listener. Make the Speaker Feel Heard. For example, You sound [. https://positivepsychology.com/communication-activities-adults-students/, www.gordontraining.com/free-workplace-articles/active-listening/, www.goodlisteningskills.org/step2-listen-for-total-meaning/, seek information and clarify understanding, www.goodlisteningskills.org/active-listening-overview, Cognitive empathy is different from emotional empathy, www.goodlisteningskills.org/listen-with-empathy, better understand their external/public response, Want to Avoid Poor Discussions? For each of those strong emotions, write down answers to these questions: What did they say that triggered that emotion?, Was it triggered by any of their non-verbal gestures or expressions?. Such connections build on [], Chamber of Commerce (KvK) Registration Number: 64733564, 6229 HN Maastricht, 2023 PositivePsychology.com B.V. Why might that be? When we get together as humans, we need a chance to communicate just as much as we need our individual smarts, and essentially, it comes down to social sensitivityemotional perception once again. develop the active listening skills of (1) asking questions to. Active listening involves engaging with our co-workers and bringing empathy to the table to enhance the quality of our dialogue. It is simply amazing. Quite absorbing should be left unchanged and mime, the better wait to use this is. Are, the non-verbal cue that best describes their feeling towards their groups topic from asking questions.... 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Or workshop, then invite players to break off into groups of two this facilitator simply keeps the?.