Emotional Intelligence Exercise: Visualise Your Ideal Team

Purpose

This is a simple yet powerful exercise on emotional intelligence which helps delegates to engage all their senses while thinking about what they or others around them experience emotionally.

Objective

Picture emotions visually by constructing a composite image of an ideal team.

What You Need

• Magazines and magazine cut outs
• Glue
• Flipchart papers
• Scissors

Setup

• Divide the delegates into groups of 3.
• Ask each group to construct a composite image of an ideal team in an ideal environment using magazine cut outs. They need to pay particular attention to the emotions present in such a setup and should use appropriate images to visualise those emotions.
• Ask delegates to create the composite images on the flipchart paper provided.
• Allocate 20 minutes for this exercise.
• At the end of the allocated time, ask one group at a time, to stick their flipchart in a place where everyone can see. They should not explain anything at this point.
• Other groups should provide feedback on this composite image, in particular they should pick up the fundamental emotions that the original group had in mind.
• It is quite likely that the other groups suggest emotions that the original group did not consider, though they can be derived from the composite image or its individual components. These emotions can be quite revealing to the original group who might have missed them.
• Repeat this process for all groups. Allocate 7 minutes for each group’s presentation and analysis.
• Follow with a general discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 5 minutes.

Activity: 20 min creation of composites + 7 min * number of groups = 40 minutes for 3 groups.

Group Feedback: 10 minutes.

Discussion

What new emotions did other groups discover in your composite image? What concepts did other groups consider when designing their composite that you did not? Did you miss them, or did you leave them out? What did you learn from other group’s efforts? What do you think of an ideal team and its environment now that you have gone through this exercise? Now that you can visualise this ideal better, how achievable does it look like? How far away are you from reaching this ideal?