Intended for:
This free energiser is useful to demonstrate that often we create barriers in our own mind and things that we thought might cause us problems, actually are not issues at all.
The energiser can be useful for training courses related to leadership, team building, conflict handling and customer care. It can also be effective for sales training and specifically overcoming reluctance to cold calling.
Training course contents:
A set of instructions for the energiser, ‘Obstacles’ can be downloaded as a Word document for free from the link below, or you can use the notes provided here…
Resources Needed – a collection of chairs spread haphazardly around a large space in a room. Some blindfolds.
Instructions
1. Ask for several volunteers and advise them that you are going to ask them to walk from one side of the room to the other whilst avoiding the chairs. The winner is the first person across without hitting a chair.
2. Give them a good opportunity to assess where the chairs are in the room prior to blindfolding them.
3. Once they are blindfolded, silently remove all of the chairs and place them out of the way of the participants (i.e. at the side of the room) so that there are no chairs in their way.
4. Inform the participants that they can now start walking to the other slide of the room. Watch with humour while they carefully try to negotiate an empty room.
5. Once the first person has made it across the room, ask everyone to remove their blindfolds.
6. The participants will of course be surprised to find that there were no chairs in the way.
7. Hold a review discussion around how the participants felt, what they were looking out for and what this meant. Then go on to discuss their feelings once they realised the obstacles were no longer there.
Discuss what barriers we set up in our mind (relating to the training) and what this means in real life situations. How often do we put obstacles in the way that are perhaps not even there?
Continue with the discussion all the time linking it back to the training.
Objectives:
Use this energiser to help participants overcome their personal barriers.
