Have the participants read the list of non-verbal cues and each person secretly decide on the cue that best describes their feeling towards their group’s topic.Allow 10 minutes for participants to do the following within their groups.Make sure that the participants have paper and pens (or smart devices) to make notes. Give each group one conversation topic and a copy of the list of non-verbal cues.Split the participants into groups of 5.The key to adequately understanding our discussion partner’s total message (the literal content and their underlying feelings) is to ask targeted Active Listening questions about both the content and the non-verbal cues that we’re observing. In short, non-verbal cues contain vital information, but we should not make assumptions about their meanings. Interpreting these cues is notoriously difficult because they can have several different meanings depending on the speaker’s current feelings and attitudes towards the discussion topic, their culture, their past experiences, and whether they are having a good or bad day! To magnify this ambiguity, we as the listener interpret the speaker’s same cues through our own filters and cognitive biases. Mostly though, we hint at our feelings and attitudes using more indirect non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, abnormal silence, posture, tone of voice, volume, and rate of speech. Occasionally, a speaker will say how they feel. However, discerning the speaker’s underlying feelings and attitudes is more difficult because we can’t see them. Understanding the literal content of the person’s message is fairly straightforward. “Any message a person tries to get across usually has two components: the content of the message and the feeling or attitude underlying this content.” That is, it's not what they say. We need to actively listen with both our ears and our eyes. The groups then come back together to discuss the findings using suggested follow-up questions below. Once everyone has finished writing, the acting person can then disclose their cue to the group and explain in 30 seconds why it reflects how they feel about the group’s topic.Īfter everyone in the group has acted out their non-verbal cue, the group should compare notes as to how accurately they managed to interpret each other’s cues. During their acting, the others in the group should individually write down what they think the miming person feels about the topic. In turn, each participant is to imagine that they are in a discussion about the group‘s topic and do a 5-15 second mime of their chosen non-verbal cue in order to express how they feel about the topic. Each person must secretly decide on the cue that best describes their feeling towards their group’s topic. Įach group will receive one conversation topic and a list of non-verbal cues (lists of topics and cues are provided below).
The participants are divided into groups of 5. This is a small group Active Listening game for adults.
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