Difficult People
Training Exercises and Resources

This exercise helps delegates to practice communicating assertively. Assertive communication as opposed to passive or aggressive communication is usually the best way to handle aggressive communication. The focus of this exercise is on learning how to constantly use assertive communication and not necessarily only at the beginning of a conversation.

Many countries around the world regularly broadcast soap operas on TV; social programs which usually contain a lot of angry and emotional discussions between various extreme characters.

This exercise helps delegates to use the scenarios on such programs and turn them around with assertive communication.

Being assertive is not just about expressing your rights; it is also about increasing the efficiency of your communication with others. There are a number of ways you can express yourself to achieve this aim. This article suggests a few useful sentence formulations to help you express yourself assertively and increase your confidence in dealing with potentially aggressive people.

We all have different levels of trust in different situations. Sometimes the variation is not much and sometimes it is too high. We seem to be defensive and on guard while others feel comfortable. This is usually to do with our previous experiences as we derive our grand rules from our life experience. It pays to know how others feel in certain situations, so you can become aware of your trust level and how you compare with others.

This exercise allows participants to use others’ knowledge or experience in solving their problems. The activity also encourages asking for help from colleagues and team mates in solving problems and coming up with a variety of solutions.

The aim of this exercise is to draw attention to the number of conflicts and similar stressful situations experienced by delegates in one week and use others in the group to come up with reasonable solutions for each conflict.

When working in a team or a group we may start to develop dislikes or simply become sensitive to certain behaviours. As in any relationship, we originally look at the similarities between ourselves and others and are happy to make friends and bond with them as we find more similar features or behaviours. However, over time as we learn more about each other, differences become more obvious and they may cause irritation and separation between us and other team members. Famous psychological studies show that the more we know about someone, the more likely that we start to dislike them (apart from very special people such as our partners).

To reverse this trend or stop it from growing we need to overcome our dislikes either by putting them in perspective with all the other ‘annoyances’ out there or simply let them know how uncomfortable it is and encourage them to correct their behaviour. This exercise helps the delegates to identify and quantify their dislikes.

This is a fun exercise to be used in team leading courses, project management courses or even communication skills training. This activity helps delegate to gain a better understanding of unhelpful traits in a leader and the reason behind theses unwanted behaviours.