Intended for:
This free icebreaker is useful to help break the ice at the beginning of a training session or meeting and ensure that participants identify shared experiences while beginning to demonstrate views and feelings.
Training course contents:
A set of instructions for the icebreaker, ‘Up and Down’ can be downloaded for free from the link at the bottom of this page, or you can follow the notes below.
After basic introductions, advise participants that you would like them to share their thoughts on varying topics. To do this, you will ask them to stand up if the statement you are going to make is true for them. After each inquiry, they should sit down again.
Start your statements in quite a mundane way. i.e. ‘Stand up if you drove yourself into work today.’
As you progress, provide statements that become increasingly challenging. i.e. ‘Stand up if you feel you already have a strong understanding of the topic we are going to discuss today’, or ‘Stand up if your work performance has ever been affected by another team member’, or ‘Stand up if you feel you can act on your own decisions in the organisation’.
You can adapt the questions to suit the training or the outputs you are hoping to achieve, but this icebreaker gives everyone a chance to feel involved and engaged without necessarily putting anyone on the spot.
Objectives:
This icebreaker helps introduce the participants to the topic and each other whilst starting to share experiences.
