Negativity is contagious. It’s all too easy to complain about everything that goes wrong and this can quickly spread to others. Fortunately there is a simple trick that can be used to eliminate negativity; simply don’t say negative words. Aiming for positive remarks helps people to get energised. Rather than looking for blame, seek opportunities to improve and progress forward.

Here are some examples of negative statements that people commonly use:

• Don’t do that
• We can’t do it
• It can’t be done
• We don’t do such thing
• It is against our policy
• We have never done this before
• It has never been done
• No one knows how to do this
• You don’t know how this works
• The management is clueless
• The staff are clueless
• They sit there all day and do nothing
• No one cares

These statements do not help and are sometime stated as a reflex reaction rather than with an appropriate thought. Sometimes they become a habit and it is important to eliminate them as bad habits.

This simple two stage exercise helps to increase the awareness of delegates about this issue and helps them to address it. It is ideal for delegates who work closely together or are part of the same team.

This exercise is ideal for sales staff in a particular organisation. Rather than telling staff what to do, the aim is to get them to come up with the general goal of their department and its role. The idea is that if they formulate a goal for their department, they are more committed to follow it than if a manager tells them. They can also understand the goal better since they make it themselves.

This is an entertaining exercise encouraging delegates to think on the spot, make decisions and self-organise to complete a task. It is ideal for teambuilding and leadership courses to show the value of communication from all members and how a leader can coordinate the activities and information exchange to significantly increase the performance of the group as a whole.

This exercise is ideal for team building and negotiation where delegates learn to share their resources and also negotiate with each other in a competitive environment. They will learn that cooperation can be much more effective than direct competition or being difficult.

This exercise helps delegates to practice communicating assertively. Assertive communication as opposed to passive or aggressive communication is usually the best way to handle aggressive communication. The focus of this exercise is on learning how to constantly use assertive communication and not necessarily only at the beginning of a conversation.

In this exercise, delegates practice working together towards a common goal; making the tallest free standing tower given simple materials. The exercise is competitive and requires creativity as well as good leadership, division of task, resource management and decision making.

This exercise helps participants to practice acting in front of a small audience. The ideal acting is one that conveys information as quickly and efficiently as possible. It is designed to be competitive, so participants are pushed to act better.

Many countries around the world regularly broadcast soap operas on TV; social programs which usually contain a lot of angry and emotional discussions between various extreme characters.

This exercise helps delegates to use the scenarios on such programs and turn them around with assertive communication.

Research carried out on many teams in large corporations show that they use suboptimal solutions when dealing with conflicts in teams. Every time there is a conflict in the team, they respond in a way that comes to undermine the team rather than empower it. This article provides guidance on how to avoid bad responses to conflicts and instead use better a better approach known as Constructive Collaboration.

This exercise helps delegates to better understand each other and also gives them an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback. It is a rather simple exercise though can be quite revealing as people get to understand what others think of them. The exercise works best when a lot of people are involved (for better anonymity) and who know each other well (for better feedback).

You can use this exercise to explore teamwork, leadership and the ability to work under pressure and cooperatively to solve a problem.

This is a simple yet challenging exercise which puts pressure on a group to solve a problem as the clock is ticking. To successfully survive the task, the group must learn to work together quickly and efficiently.

This is a physical exercise that encourages self-organisation within a team when confronted with a challenge. You can test the group to see how quickly they can come up with a self-assigned leader who would then go on to coordinate the group’s activity to increase their efficiency.