Aha! Moments Exercise 4: Celebrate Your Strengths Exercise for Groups | by Marcy Nelson-Garrison

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Marcy Nelson-Garrison
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Strengths Exercise for Groups - Smiling people sharing their thoughts with each other

Focusing on strengths is empowering for ourselves and our clients. This Super Simple 3 Step Strengths Exercise for Groups is a wonderful opportunity for people to hear positive feedback and insights about themselves from others.

You will love this strengths activity for your groups from experiential educator Jennifer Stanchfield!

  • When to Use: As a warm-up exercise to build trust, to boost individual confidence when group coaching, to team-build.
  • Who for: Small groups and teams that know each other fairly well.
  • You will need: An image based card deck. You can also use postcard images for this activity.

Super Simple 3 Step Celebrate Your Strengths Exercise for Groups Instructions

1) Ask Each Group Member to Choose an Image

Start by asking group members to pick a card (image) that represents a personal strength, a positive quality or unique perspective they bring to the group. It could also be something they bring to their role in life or professional role.

2) Ask Group Members to Take Turns Holding up the Image they Chose

Next, ask each participant to take turns holding up their image while their colleagues/peers guess why they chose it. During this process, the participant holding up the card will hear lots of positive feedback and insights from their fellow group members.

Note: Jennifer Stanchfield, says that people regularly share thoughtful complements and insights during this exercise - that go beyond the reasons the participant chose the card.

3) Wrap-up

Celebration of personal strengths and contributions from fellow group members doesn't happen enough. Use this exercise to build appreciation and team spirit in a group, and to help people learn positive new things about themselves.

You could wrap-up this exercise by asking some powerful questions to deepen their learning. Some examples could include:

  • How was that exercise for you?
  • How do you feel about yourself after completing this exercise? What feels different? How?
  • What was your biggest learning from this exercise? What will you do with that?
  • What was your biggest learning as a group from this exercise? What will you do with that?
  • What surprises were there for you?
  • What change do you feel inspired to make after this exercise?
  • What do you notice about how you feel about being in this group, after completing this exercise?

©2016 Marcy Nelson-Garrison

Editor's Note: This beautiful exercise has so many applications! Imagine doing it with your family and children, with a volunteer group, with a group of friends, in the workplace to team-build, with your small business clients and their teams, a class of students - and that's just my thoughts for starters! You could also use it in a workshop, and if people don't know each other well, it could be a more "intuitive" exercise, and still leave the individual participants feeling great!

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Contributing Author:

Marcy Nelson-Garrison is a transformational product mentor, certified professional co-active coach, visual artist and the founder of the Coaching Toys online store. Coaching since 1999, Marcy has a passion for applying creative processes to personal development. She is the Author of Creating Aha Moments, Creative Right-Brain Coaching Exercises for Individual, Group and Team Breakthroughs, The card deck: Q? Basics, Open-Ended Questions For Coaching Mastery and the popular Card Deck Master Class. You can sign-up for Marcy's newsletter and download the eBooks Creating Aha Moments and 10 Ways To Profit From Creating a Card Deck free here >>

Learn more about Marcy & see all their articles here >>

Categories: Aha! Moments & Breakthroughs, Coaching Ideas & Inspiration, Coaching Tips, Coaching Tools for Workshops, Confidence, Group Coaching, Guest Author, Strengths & Weaknesses

Image of Strengths Exercise for Workshops - People in Group Sharing their Thoughts About Each Other by baranq via Shutterstock

4 Comments

    • mturcott

      Thank you, Christina! So glad you're finding our resources helpful! Warmly, Mary

      Reply

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