Training Resources and Articles on
Communication Skills

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.

In this team building exercise, the group must work together to handle toxic waste symbolised by an object. Many areas can be explored in this exercise including leadership, problem solving, teamwork, communication skills and attention to detail. You can easily adjust the difficulty level of this exercise by varying the type of equipment used or changing a number of parameters as described in the Variations section below.

This exercise helps to define the company brand more clearly by using associations. It can be used for marketing and sales, but is also useful for management and staff. The exercise is a good opportunity to illustrate what the company is and is not and which values are more important than others.

This exercise is most ideal for delegates from the same organisation.

This exercise combines crisis management and brainstorming. You can use it as a template for a series of exercises on problem solving using different methods depending on what you are covering in your course.

Use this body language exercise at the beginning of a session before covering non-verbal communication. The aim is to find out how much delegates already know about this topic and effectively prepare them for what is followed. They can also learn from each other in the process. This activity will also help you understand which areas to focus on most as you go through the body language training.

Positive feedback can have a dramatic effect. In this exercise, delegates will learn to appreciate the power of positive feedback, however small, when it is provided repeatedly during the course of a conversation. The aim of the exercise is to be thought provoking so you can then continue with a session on giving appropriate positive feedback. As a result it is ideal to go through this exercise at the beginning of a session on giving feedback.

This training exercise helps to emphasise the importance of giving open-ended instructions. Research shows that when the instructions are limiting or force a person or a group to consider only a subset of solutions, they are likely to produce less creative results.

In this exercise, delegates will go through a creative problem solving process and see the comparison between limiting and open-ended instructions for themselves.

Many team building exercises focus on getting participants to interact with each other in solving a problem or becoming better at communication. The problems are usually solvable by teamwork, creativity and persistence.

This exercise has a twist on traditional team building exercises. The task is simply too difficult, maybe even impossible. The aim of this exercise is to test the participants on a critical skill; the ability to realise their limitations, ask for help and think out of the box and possibly break traditional rules.

Our culture often demands that people must follow rules, sometimes even blindly. As a result an individual requires a strong self-esteem and confidence to challenge the status-quo or even lead others in a particular cause against the established norm. This exercise is ideal for improving this particular skill.