Icebreaker: Is That Really You!?

Purpose

This exercise helps delegates to understand more about each other’s interests, past experiences and share them with the group. This is also useful for delegates who may somewhat know each other and want to take their understanding to the next level. This exercise is best suited to participants from the same team or company who already know each other to some degree.

Objective

Delegates to guess to whom each quality, experience or interest belongs to.

What You Need

• Cards where delegates can easily write a couple of sentences on them.
• Similar coloured pens

Setup

• Ask delegates to pick 3 cards from the pile and then fill them in with the following.
• On each card they should state something about themselves. These can be their interests, their experiences in the past, their aspirations and so on. Examples are:
  • “I used to be a parking warden”
  • “I am a professionally-trained actor”
  • “I play piano”
  • “I have 120 shoes in my closet. I just love shoes!”
  • “I am an avid shoot-em-up computer gamer”
  • “I want to sail to the Mediterranean sea and back to home at least once in my life”
• Ask them to write in capitals so it is easy to read and also to make it more difficult to detect the handwriting.
• When they have finished writing their cards, get them to place the cards face-down on the centre of the table. When all have finished, shuffle the cards and then place them back on the table.
• Now, ask each delegate to pick one card at a time, read it aloud and guess whom the card belongs to.
• If they couldn’t guess correctly, others should suggest until the real person is found.
• If they picked their own card, they can pretend that they don’t know and assign it to someone else. Of course, other delegates should eventually find out who it belongs to.

Timing

Explaining the Test: 2 minutes.

Activity: 5 minutes for filling cards + 15 minutes guesswork (depends on the number of delegates)

Group Feedback: 5 minutes.

Discussion

Follow the exercise with a quick discussion on how delegates felt about this exercise and how well did they know others in their group.

Variations

You can ask the delegates to write these before they come to the training. Give them forms and ask them to type the statements in the forms. This saves time and you can also use the printed forms in place of cards to reduce the chance of hand writing recognition.

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