Personal Impact
Training Exercises and Resources

You have just finished delivering a course. Most trainers tend to be relieved that it is now out of the way, that there were no major technical issues, and, hopefully, most learners liked the course. They then tend to archive the material, move on to something else and forget about the course until they have to deliver it again the next time.

What have they missed doing?

In this exercise delegates put themselves in the medieval era and try to look at the world from a new point of view. Their view is then compared to modern times. In the medieval era, people didn’t know what laser or a computer or a humble can opener was. When a modern person mentions them, a medieval person should get confused. As you can imagine, this is a very fun exercise.

Through this contrast of era many topics can be explored and scrutinised. This exercise helps us, the modern people, to appreciate what the medieval people didn’t have. Here are some examples for comparison:

• Technologies
• Discoveries
• Philosophical understanding
• Social issues
• Attitudes towards religion such as believing without questioning
• Attitudes towards justice
• Racial, gender and equality issues
• Political correctness
• Meritocracy versus class-based society
• Attitude towards the ruling class

This can be a fun way to explore some very serious topics, though the main benefit of this exercise is to practice listening skills. The exercise is designed to make people focus on what the other person is saying. It is also great for roleplaying, acting, storytelling and learning history.

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.

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).

One of the biggest and perhaps saddest trends in our era is that attention spans are shrinking. It is primarily fuelled by the explosion of online content, rise of social media and the ever-increasing range of things to obtain and experience. It is great to be living is such a rich world, the like of which we have never had in the entire history of mankind. However, there is a price to pay for anything good and in this case, it seems to be our shrinking attention spans, increased stress and the feeling that there is so much to do in so little time.

To learn how to manage attention, there are several exercises you can go through to reverse the trend and gain more control. In this article, you will be introduced to a series of attention management and concentration exercises that will help you achieve this.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of acknowledging the view of a person they are having a conversation with irrespective of whether they agree with it or not. The exercise helps to create a vivid example which can then be discussed and explored further.

The main aims are:

• Develop rapport through having a friendly conversation as opposed to being antagonistic with opposing views
• Improve listening skills
• Learn to listen and show that you are listening

As we deal with a complex world, we make assumptions. This is an inbuilt function of our brain that helps us quickly make sense of the world around us. The problem with this is that sometimes these assumptions turn out to be wrong and misleading to the point that they can actually hinder our judgment.

An area where this is most prevalent is stereotyping. For example, you may see a homeless person. The straight forward assumption is that this person is poor and is poor as a result of making bad decisions in life. In reality, it could just be that he has experienced misfortune—a simple back luck that can happen to anyone at any time. Holding him responsible for this misfortune can be unfair.

The purpose of this exercise is to get the delegates share information with each other on counter-examples and to see stereotyping with a new perspective.

This exercise increases self-awareness of making assumptions about other people. Making assumptions is part of everyday life as we aim to simplify the complex world around us. However, it is important to be aware of making such snap judgements and don’t get carried away and suffer from the negative consequences of this behaviour.

Is there such a thing as a good career or a bad career? Is there such a thing as a good hobby or a bad hobby? Such choices are often very personal so can we really say what is good for people and what is bad? Probably not, but we all know that these days a lot of people desire “success”. It seems that with success comes a lot of happiness affecting all areas of life. It is not the only way to gain happiness but it certainly can lead to it. Success is not always about careers or jobs; it can be about anything in a person’s life; it could be success in raising good children, success in gardening, success in being a likable person, success in being the first to achieve a feat, success in being good at a given skill, success in being useful to society or simply success in being happy and getting the most from life.

With the concept of success and happiness comes options and choices. We all need to make decisions about what careers to get into, what hobbies to engage in and what to spend our finite time on. The decision means that, yes there is such a thing as a good or bad choice that can in the long run influence your happiness.

Some people seem to excel at this. They make all the right choices and it seems that the world goes out of its way to accommodate their desires. How come they succeed so well? Perhaps on further examination we can discover the underlying principles that help one make good choices.

As an example, let’s consider an episode in the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. No one can dispute that he had an extraordinary life so far and with his universality and fame, it is certainly worth examining his life to see how his decisions and interests has shaped his life.