Continuing from last week’s motivation theme; we split into 2 groups and played a game of boggle. This illustrated how competition can be a form of motivation, and one that we can artificially add.
We had a QA session and drew a mindmap that collected our ideas about motivation. We considered last week’s question about building motivation in areas where we are not naturally attracted to. This grew into a discussion about being motivated in school, the use of praise and rewards.
We then moved on to the communication part of the workshop. We started by playing a game where blindfolded people were led to a part of the room and had to be guided back to a chair by their sighted partners. The aim of the game was to get people into the space of really listening and being guided to a destination. In communication we can often assume we know what the other person means, and we may miss their real message.
We had a QA session on ‘what is good communication like’ and had some interesting answers, including some great metaphors like airport control towers and airline pilots. I introduced the idea of the listener summarising the communication back to the talker to check that the communication was on target.
To practice this, we split into 3s and each 3 rotated around the roles of coach, talker and listener. It was the listener’s job to clearly summarise what the talker’s issue was.
The homework question this week was “Where would better communications be useful in your life?”