Coaching
Training Exercises and Resources

It is easy to think that a different life would have been easier or better. It is easy to think that somebody else’s life is vastly better than yours and to fantasise being in someone else’s position.

This brings us to envy. Why do we feel envious? Every day we make hundreds of decisions. These decisions have good or bad consequences. No one makes good decisions all the time. This means that at some point in life you feel envious of someone who made better decisions. You may feel envious for those who had a better beginning in life, better opportunities or better luck.

Envy, if unchecked, can be debilitating. Here, we provide a series of self-reflection exercises that will help you examine this important topic. The exercises can be used by you personally or be given to delegates attending your course, followed by coaching and discussions.

These days, we want to multitask everything and all at once. Sometimes, when the work is routine, multitasking improves performance; for example, when you are cooking something you already know. Most often though, it tends to reduce performance.

This exercise elegantly demonstrates how multitasking can be detrimental. It is a simple exercise with two rounds where one round is designed with multitasking where delegates have to switch between different tasks. In the other round, task are approached in sequence. Delegates can then compare their performance across the two rounds.

This exercise is ideal for teams, teaching productivity and time management. It is also useful for project management, agile methods and task management.

This is a powerful exercise that can help managers to understand what their team thinks of the organisation’s structure. Such structures are used by companies in order to communicate their vision with staff on how the company is managed so the whole company can work together as a well-functioning team.

Any such structures may be subject to change. This could be because of market change, new products, new competitors, new vision, new management and so on. It is important to educate the team about the new organisational structure and this is when this exercise comes in handy.

The aim of this exercise is to find out what the team thinks of the company or organisation as a whole. It is simple to execute and if carried out well, it can be quite powerful. It is the kind of exercise that delegates remember for quite some time to come.

This exercise is ideal for change management, team building and understanding how various parts of an organisation communicate and interact with each other. You can customise the exercise to explore how the organisation already works or how it should work.

This exercise is ideal for delegates who work together or are part of the same organisation. Ideally someone from the management team should also be present during this exercise to listen in and take notes on what delegates share.

This exercise is designed to make the coachee think about potential liming views and beliefs. Through a systematic step by step process, you first help the coachee see what these beliefs are and then gradually lead them to see how they can be limiting. Often, such limiting beliefs are the root cause of many unwanted behaviours. They manifest themselves in thoughts and in actions. This exercise helps to go back to the root cause of issues and aim to address them.

It is best to run this exercise on an individual basis such as in a coaching or mentoring session. Before embarking on this exercise, create a safe and trusting environment where the coachee feels comfortable sharing their weaknesses with you.

Resentment can consume people. Constantly thinking negatively about others can make an individual sad, angry and ultimately depressed. This strong emotion should be addressed before it becomes chronic or habitual.

The technique presented here borrows from NLP with a strong emphasis on visualisation. It is also useful to address self-resentment and self-loathing.

The power of this technique is in repetition. You can conduct this in a class, though it is best if it is carried out on an individual basis. The instructions should be provided once, and individuals should then go through the exercise without interruption or disturbance. They can then repeat this over a period of time to get its full effect.

One of the primary reasons behind lack of motivation is regretting the past. When you are down, it is easy to question your past decisions and how they have let you down. Sounds kind of logical to look back and examine the past, right? May be somehow there is a clue there that would help. It is a tempting approach, except that this backward looking action can be quite damaging to current life.

This article offers insights on how to eliminate strong feelings created by regret, while exploring some significant findings over the past three decades. This is followed by a very effective exercise that consists of five primary actions helping to systematically manage the strong emotion of regret.

Examining regret is rather personal and this exercise is designed to be carried out in private. Hence, as a trainer, you don’t need to run this exercise in a group or during a course. To run as an exercise, do the following:

• First, brief the delegates about regret and how it can be handled. Let them know about the research presented here and lead them to question assumptions.
• Walk through the systematic 5-Action exercise and help delegates see what they need to do during each step. They can then complete the exercise in private to achieve best results.

This 5-Action exercise on regret is ideal for courses on emotional intelligence, motivating people, stress management, performance management and appraisal.

A woman massages dummy ears with embedded super sensitive binaural microphones. Another presenter uses her nails on a wooden box to create a tapping sound. Someone squeezes shaving foam between her fingers and captures the sound effects. Another has discovered a jelly like toy in some toy store and is experimenting with it to see what sounds in generates.

This is ASMR and it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Search for “ASMR” online and especially on YouTube and you will be given thousands of videos offering you one form or another of stress-free relaxation. Video creators are hard at work churning one video after another and the world doesn’t seem to get enough of them. Many viewers tend to watch a favourite video over and over again or ask for specific variations and expect the creators to respond. What is going on?

The answer is simple; because watching these videos or listening to them makes people “happy”, “relaxed”, “euphoric” and “destressed.” The term ASMR was coined as early as 2010 but it has become ubiquitous thanks to the internet and how sub-cultures and societies form around common needs.

The mainstream media is now picking up on the phenomenon. It is not always sound either. There are videos where presenters move their fingers in front of the camera, effectively in front of your face and this leads to a hypnotic and mesmerising effect. Why people watch such videos?

This activity can be used for coaching skills or making conversations. The basic principle behind the activity is simple and the aim is to provide an easy structure to follow. Use this activity where you need to get delegates to talk to each other about a given topic or a topic of their choice. It is also useful for mentoring or life coaching. You can also use it to get the delegate practice questioning and listening skills.

This exercise is ideal to explore role models and the importance and significant of having one. Instead of trying to explain directly how useful role models are, the exercise takes an indirect approach by simply getting delegates feel excited about their role models or feel the excitement of others when they talk about theirs. Such discussions can inspire the participants to look more closely at role models and if they have not thought of one so far, choose one during the exercise.

This is a simple yet powerful exercise that helps delegates discover something positive in every experience. The structure of the exercise is actually quite simple yet the power resides in asking a simple question that leads to positive thinking as opposed to asking questions that lead to self-blame and reduction of self-esteem.