Feedback Exercise: Positive Affirmations

Purpose

This uplifting and extremely positive exercise is suitable for a group of people who know each other well. The exercise helps delegates appreciate and reinforce each other’s positive traits. It is known that some people get quite positively affected by this exercise and tend not to forget the results they get; sometimes for years.

This is a great exercise for a team that has been working together for a while and you want to bring them even closer and make them appreciate each other’s inputs.

This exercise is also ideal for kids as they get to reinforce each other’s qualities. Often kids are unaware of their traits or don’t yet know the significance on others. The exercise brings this out and helps them become more experienced on what people consider as positive traits and what other see or don’t see in them.

Objective

Write a list of positive traits about a person you know on a piece of paper.

What You Need

• Papers

Setup

• Get the group to from a circle.
• Distribute one paper to each person and ask them to write their names on the top.
• Ask each person to give their paper to the person on their left.
• Each person should now write one or more positive traits for the person named on the paper. Examples of positive traits and qualities are:
  • Honest
  • Resourceful
  • Problem solver
  • Good leader
  • Fantastic badminton player
  • Trustable
• Allow about 30 seconds for this.
• Ask delegates to pass their papers again to the person on their left.
• They now have 30 seconds to write about the new person’s positive traits.
• Continue until the papers go back to the original person.
• Note that for this exercise to work, it is important that delegates only write positive and appropriate qualities.
• Next, ask each person to read out the qualities written on their paper for everyone. People can get very emotional at this point and they are confronted with a lot of positive affirmations from their friends or colleagues.
• Continue one by one until everyone has read through their lists.
• Some people like to keep their sheet as a reminder and hang it on their walls so they can see it often. Encourage them to laminate and preserve the list as it is useful to come back to in the future when they may feel down and need a positive boost.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: (30 sec * N) + 10 min sharing = 14 minutes for 8 delegates

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

Were you positively surprised by what you found in your list? What trait stood out the most? What did you think of this exercise?

Comments

By john @ Wednesday, June 27, 2018 3:06 AM

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