Motivation
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.

This classic game was popularised in 80s. It is fun to play and helps to generate a lot of positives and negatives for a given topic. Delegates go through a series of statements that start with ‘fortunately’ or ‘unfortunately’ while alternating between them.

Use this exercise for creativity, building narrative and storytelling. It is a great exercise to highlight that there is always a flipside to a negative or positive.

This exercise is also useful for analysing the development of a project over time, especially one that is troubled. The beauty of this exercise is that positive and negative statements are always balanced against each other; you can never say too many good things or bad things about a topic and hence it encourages participants to focus on improving it or creating a balanced narrative.

Certain behaviours in a team can affect the trust between the team members and if not addressed properly will have dire consequences. It is essential for a team to self-reflect and to evaluate its own performance systematically and without friction. Examples of trust reducing behaviours are:

• Withholding or hiding information for competitive advantage
• Rushing ahead and jumping to conclusions without listening to others
• Not taking responsibility for actions
• Finger pointing and blaming
• Being more self-centred than team-centred
• Bringing down an idea proposed by another team member just because it’s not yours
• Stealing a clever idea presented by a team member and pretending that you came up with it on your own, sometimes even in front of the other team member
• Not accepting that you didn’t know something and pretending that you know it all
• Sabotaging somebody else’s performance so that they don’t look good, by not being present, withholding support and by being negative
• Constantly moaning about things not being good or right, but not doing anything about it

The following exercise helps the team to see what it thinks of itself in a safe environment. The beauty of this exercise is that team members can voice their concerns anonymously.

This exercise is ideal for a group of people who know and have worked with each other.

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.

We are what we repeatedly do. We are also what we repeatedly think. If you think about something 200 times a day, you come to believe it to be true. If you think you are poor, unhealthy, socially unskilled or out of shape and repeatedly tell yourself this, then you come to strongly believe in them, irrespective of whether they are true or not.

The power of positivity is well known, so much so that it has become a large field as Positive Psychology. Nevertheless, most people don’t think enough of what they are good at or have and instead are focused much more on lack of stuff, problems, negativity, shortfalls and inadequacies.

This negativity seems to have been exaggerated by the culture of comparison which has been fuelled by social media. Awareness of an idealistic and exaggerated lifestyle of others consumed through social media can make us feel average at best or a lost cause.

We need to fight back. For this, we can use a powerful technique known as positive affirmations. The aim is to turn something negative into positive and consciously reinforce it in your mind until it becomes a thought habit. Gradually you get to eliminate the negative language altogether.

This exercise is ideal for courses covering emotional intelligence and motivation.

We sent a questionnaire to the training community on the use of icebreakers and energiser. We asked questions such as, “Are they useful?”, “How do they help?”, “How long should they be?”, and so on. We have now got the results back and would like to share them with you.

There was a total of 103 respondents from around the world. As always, the results are fascinating and educational. They are then followed by what the training community thinks of them in their own words and how these tools are best used.

The results are presented first using graphs and our analysis is then followed.

Just to be clear to all readers, here is a brief intro to each training tool:

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.

The following exercise will help you manage envy. It borrows from the philosophy and science of positive psychology and will put you on the right path on dealing with envy. Strong emotional thoughts such as envy cannot be cured with a quick 10-minute exercise, but you do need to start somewhere, and this exercise provides the right structure to start with. You can make it into a habit and slowly chip away at envy.

Envy can come to blur the vision. If unchecked, it grows in your mind. You start feeling that you don’t actually mind if something bad happens to the person you envy, that somehow your life is second-rate and possibly not really exciting to go through. What follows is depression, lethargy and a sense of being a failure—all unhealthy stuff.

To address envy, you must first understand what it is about. By gaining perspective, you can take steps to turn it around and benefit from this emotion. The powerful 6-step formula provided here helps to achieve that.

Even admitting that you are envious of someone isn’t easy. This exercise is not something that should be carried out in a group. If you are a trainer and running a course, provide this exercise as a handout and ask delegates to go through it after the course in their own time. It would not take too much time; they should go through the exercise in a way that won’t make them feel judged for their answers.

Here is a simple yet powerful exercise to make you feel happy. It is a weekly diary where each day you get to follow specific instructions and write down your thoughts. It is well-known that journaling can do wonders for motivation. This exercise makes journaling systematic based on established research. It really delivers.

Research shows that if you follow this routine, you will quickly feel the difference it brings in your mood and happiness (Seligman et al. 2005).

The exercise also relies on research that writing down your thoughts can be more powerful in boosting your happiness than sharing them with friends or family. The process of writing down is more structured and systematic than talking which is why the diary technique is so much more effective.

The routine is suggested by Prof. Richard Wiseman and a variation of this is provided here (Wiseman 2009).

“Everything is easier than you think. If you believe otherwise, you are setting yourself up for a hard life.”

Learning should not be as hard as you think. There is a method to the art and just like any skill, learning to learn needs practice and mastery. It is much like speed reading. If you know how to read faster, you can end up reading more books in a given time. Similarly, if you learn how to learn efficiently you can spend less time doing the learning and more time enjoying what you have learned.

As a trainer, the topic of learning to learn is even more important since it is not only beneficial to you, but it also helps you to improve your training. As such, it is worth investing time in.

In this article, you will be introduced to seven highly effective techniques that help you maximise learning in a given time. The following methods are presented as if you are applying them to yourself, but you should consider how you can take advantage of them for your learners in a training environment.