That’s what happened with ‘warm up’ find a word in one of my workshops for small and family business recently and it reflected some insights and things to ponder.
While this is not a ground breaking activity, it is a demonstration of how the engagement, interaction and what happens in the moment can highlight concepts, behaviours and provide some self reflection.
This isnt your normal find a word, I structure it as a process, where first participants don’t know what they are looking for.
After a couple more steps, and when its time to move on – I offer a sheet with all the answers and in this instance it was a big no thank you!
I wondered why would someone not want a short cut, a way to complete the ‘task’ more easily and receive some assistance.
In their mind, they had to do it themselves, to work hard on it and feel the achievement of completing it themselves. They were invested.
It got me thinking about…
The balance between offering help with I have the answers attitude and the opportunity to learn by doing for yourself.
Why we feel like we have achieved more when its challenging, complicated and we have done the hard work ourselves.
Did we even need the solutions at all?
How we can feel have to do it alone when there is a way to work with others for it to be a better process or when we do things as a group and could be more easily divided to work on individually.
This is a bit of fun to engage with content so its not really ‘important’ in the big scheme of life but the communication, interaction, the way its being done says a lot – this micro activity will show up in the macro world.
There is no judgement on the way that this process is received (and I may or may not have had the same response!), it certainly got me thinking about empowerment, learning, connection and how we interact.
It also reminded me of Susan David, Ph.D. concepts that we need to go to the edge, to learn, grow and aim for not being overwhelmed of underwhelmed – to strive for whelmed.
I would love your thoughts on this – would you have wanted the answers? How would this process speak to you?
Imagine being given the answers and rejecting it
