Persuasion Skills
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a powerful exercise that demonstrates why change should not be imposed. The likelihood of resistance is much higher when people are not consulted on change. This is why they should be involved in the decision-making process. It is a novel exercise since it can be shocking just as you tell them what they need to do which in turn makes delegates remember the exercise well. Hopefully, when it comes to imposing change in the future, they remember the exercise and refrain from doing it.

Before going through this exercise make sure you can use it with your specific delegate. You will need to handle this with care specially when it comes to the sensitive part as you will see. Only conduct this exercise when you have gained enough rapport and established your authority as a trainer so that in case there is some resistance, you can handle it with ease.

In this team building exercise, delegates work together to complete a task. It requires concentration, planning and fast execution. Here, the decisions made by one team can affect the performance of another so planning has to be as dynamic as the changing environment. This exercise is ideal to train people on quick decision making, leadership, persuasion skills and team work.

This exercise helps delegates to brainstorm how to cross sell products. It focuses on a random set of products so it is rather creative to see what marketing strategies delegates can come up with. The key point to make in this exercise is that any two products can be related to each other and this can be used as material for marketing and cross selling.

In this creative writing exercise delegates change a given instruction to a funny statement that is deemed more effective. The humour helps to increase the likelihood of the instruction being followed and also make it more memorable. It is a good exercise for writing short instructions/signs to be used in public places.

Being able to have an opinion about important subjects and defend that position is an incredibly important skill in life. Often, we come across such potentially heated debates during the course of a day, but the subjects are mainly to do with practical daily tasks rather than deeper philosophical issues. The solutions to such issues are usually non-obvious where many thinkers have been putting efforts in exploring them and providing insights.

This structured exercise provides an opportunity to practice debating on such topics in a controlled environment where the main focus is on the following:

• Practice presenting a viewpoint clearly, concisely and accurately
• Avoid exaggeration that can be used to derail a position by others
• Not getting emotional when others disagree and instead learning to see it from their point of view
• Have a conversation about a topic and learn something about it by listening to others

This is a team building exercise suitable for all ages and both the academic and professional world. The aim is to get a number of teams to work together on a common task and understand the importance of working towards a particular target. You can easily customise the exercise to explore a variety of concepts on management and teamwork.

The main task in this exercise involves creating a menu for a particular event. Groups get to create, share and defend their choices which allow you to explore topics such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving, goal setting, cooperation, negotiation and persuasion.

This exercise helps groups of people to work together on a common activity to solve a given problem. The exercise allows you to address a number of training areas such as inter-group communication, self-management, leadership, approach to problem solving, mapping visual data to logical data and cooperation.

The ability to persuade people is a useful skill both in personal and professional life. This exercise is ideal once you have covered persuasion skills in your training course and want to go through a more demanding exercise that requires people to persuade each other strongly. It is an entertaining exercise as it involves everyone in a simple yet powerful setting.

To truly get the best from this exercise, you can follow it with a review and discussion. You will need to take notes during the exercise as each can play differently. You will need to refer back to the strategies used by participants while persuading each other during discussions. You can then comment on the effectiveness of these techniques and get delegates to discuss them.

This is a fun and entertaining team training exercise that helps you cover many topics such as team coordination, self-organisation, leadership, teamwork and cooperative behaviour while achieving a given goal quickly and efficiently.

Teams are assigned to wear a bandana in a way that it is different from other groups. The first group that does this successfully wins. The pressure to wear the bandana uniquely but quickly leads to complexities similar to those found when engaged in real-life projects. The time pressure helps to increase tension and stress so teams can practice working under pressure while achieving a goal.

Imagine delivering a training course to delegates who are half sleep. Is there any point in carrying on? Sure enough, you still get paid for the current session; but surely that’s not your only aim when providing training.

Providing a training course is very much like playing a game. You want to win not just once, but repeatedly. When it comes to winning a particular game (say a board game such as Risk), your aim is not to win only once. Anyone can do that. You could get lucky, you could cheat or you could get away with other people’s mistakes, ignorance or simply lack of interest in the game.

The problem with this mentality is that soon, you will not have any more games to play. People will remember you as the dodgy, cheating player so they will stay away from you or will all gang up against you to make sure that you lose.