Non-Verbal Awareness Exercise: Use Your Senses

Purpose

The purpose of this activity is to help delegates examine their non-verbal and non-visual senses and build their confidence in sensing and reading others. It demonstrates the power of people's conscious and unconscious ability to read others even when their eyes are closed. This exercise is great in increasing people's ability to sense their environment without looking and instead employing all other senses to maximise information transfer. 

Objective

Guess the identity of the person who touches you.

What You Need

• A room with space to move around freely.
• A blindfold

Setup

• Ask a volunteer to come forward and stand facing a wall.
• Ask the volunteer to wear the blindfold.
• Ask the rest of the group to approach the volunteer one by one, touch his shoulder and say their own name.
• The volunteer must not look around or see who has approached him.
• Next, repeat the process again though this time ask the group to approach the volunteer in a different order, touch the volunteer but without saying their own name.
• The volunteer has to use his various senses to identify the person who has touched him and state his name. Usually various senses are used to do this such as feel of the touch, smell, sound of the approach and so on.
• If you have time, you can repeat the exercise with other volunteers.
• Optionally you can run this as a competition by keeping the count of successful guesses for each person so the person with the highest score can get a prize.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 10 minutes

Group Feedback: 5 minutes

Discussion

How easy was it to identify the person who was touching you, if you were the volunteer? What helped you guess the identity of others? What does this exercise suggest about our non-verbal abilities?