This exercise helps delegates work together to create a sculpture out of clay. It is ideal for classes on ceramics hand building with clay but it can also be used for a fun team building activity.

This is also a very useful exercise for creativity as it is relatively fast paced. Delegates have little time to get carried away with too much detail on any specific work and so are forced to express their creativity in a focused and meaningful way.

You can use this at the beginning of a multi-day class on making sculptures to break the ice and get people to become more comfortable with each other.

In this exercise, delegates contribute to each other’s design sequentially and everyone participates in the creation of all sculptures.

Good diction is about the art of speaking clearly so that you are understood to the fullest. Good diction is more about the tone of voice, the distinctiveness of speech and the pronunciation as opposed to choice of words or sentences.

Many problems can contribute to poor diction such as low level of voice, repeating words and phrases, using filler phrases such as “you know what I mean” and strong accents.

However, research shows that one of the most common causes of having poor diction is the use of filling words such as “um”, “uh”, “so” and similar. English speakers are particularly keen users of these filler words and the equivalents in other languages are also used regularly.

This exercise helps delegates practice reducing the frequency of saying “um” and thereby helps them to improve their diction.

The ability to persuade people is a useful skill both in personal and professional life. This exercise is ideal once you have covered persuasion skills in your training course and want to go through a more demanding exercise that requires people to persuade each other strongly. It is an entertaining exercise as it involves everyone in a simple yet powerful setting.

To truly get the best from this exercise, you can follow it with a review and discussion. You will need to take notes during the exercise as each can play differently. You will need to refer back to the strategies used by participants while persuading each other during discussions. You can then comment on the effectiveness of these techniques and get delegates to discuss them.

Knowing how to communicate well with others is an essential skill.

Here, you will be introduced to several communication skills exercises suitable for kids and young adults. The way you run these exercises highly depends on the age of your audience so you will need to adjust them as necessary.

Active listening is a critical communication skill and it is important to know how to do it. This exercise has been designed in such a way that encourages delegates to pay their utmost attention while engaged in a conversation. The exercise forces delegates to stay focused throughout the activity and be ready to contribute when necessary.

Research has long shown that visualisation can lead to better recall and learning. As a trainer, you can exploit visualisation to your advantage. One area where visualisation is useful is when recapping on content already covered or at the end of a course. This exercise helps you to take advantage of the power of visualisation.

The visualisation produced in this exercise can also act as a reminder for the delegates and will help to reinforce associations and memory.

Humans have evolved to focus their attention on what matters most. To navigate a complex environment, we have ended up with a kind of brain that vigorously filters out unnecessary information. This filtering mechanism is always active and is essential in managing information overload.

For example, after entering a new environment, you start to pay attention to different things to find what is interesting. You notice the unusual architecture, the odd furniture, the people, the smell and the feel of being in this new place.

If you come back to this environment the second time, you may not scan it as intensely as the first time since your brain “thinks” it already knows about it. Instead, your brain tries to focus on other things, freeing up the processing resources for whatever else you need to do with your brain.

This filtering has its great advantages as it allows us to navigate complex environments without feeling overwhelmed by them. Once we get used to a complex environment, we can start to concentrate on something more focused and demanding.

There is however a downside to this filtering. We are susceptible to miss the obvious even if it is right in front of us. Once familiar, the brain can become lazy in processing new information and attention is simply lost.

To remain focused it is essential to practice paying attention and consciously reverse the filtering process. Several methods are presented here that allow you as a trainer to increase the attention of your delegates especially if they are attending a multi-day course where they are returning to the same training environment.

Children love stories. It is well-known that they learn a lot by listening to well-crafted stories. They can easily associate with various characters and follow the interactions in the story. To boost their creativity you can get children to make stories too. However, starting from a blank page can be daunting. If you just tell a child that it is now his turn to tell you a story, he is unlikely to be able to come up with one.

You will first need to set up the scene and warm the children up. Here is how you can do this.

First you need to get the children excited before getting them to think of making a story. You can also give them visual content so they don’t have to start from a blank page and have something to fall back to. This exercise helps you to do both of these.

This is a fun and entertaining team training exercise that helps you cover many topics such as team coordination, self-organisation, leadership, teamwork and cooperative behaviour while achieving a given goal quickly and efficiently.

Teams are assigned to wear a bandana in a way that it is different from other groups. The first group that does this successfully wins. The pressure to wear the bandana uniquely but quickly leads to complexities similar to those found when engaged in real-life projects. The time pressure helps to increase tension and stress so teams can practice working under pressure while achieving a goal.

While communicating with others, it is important to use active listening skills. Listening attentively can significantly improve relationships and minimise misunderstandings. The best way to learn active listening is by practicing it while communicating with others in a realistic setting. This exercise helps delegates practice active listening in various contexts depending on your choice and training needs.