Attitude activities

When coaching or conducting discussions, it's important to use activities that drive positive change. One approach is to ask employees to write down three specific things they will do to successfully engage with others. Another idea is to pair people up and have them list out three or four actions they can take to engage with another department. A leader can also present a situation and have team members write down their positive reactions on a whiteboard, passing the pen to each other. Using videos can also be effective, like the motivational rowing video, where team members write down how it relates to their work and what actions they will take. These activities help foster positivity and engagement. Now, when we get to activities, especially when we're coaching, these are things typically done inside of the room, inside of the coaching session, inside of the framework of discussion. And we have to think about activities that drive positive change. So a lot of times when we use questions, especially when it comes to attitude, it can lead into an activity. So one of the things you could do is sit down with an employee and say, so what are you going to do to successfully engage with a person? And you might give them 10 minutes and say, look, why don't we take a break? Take 10 minutes. And I want you to write down three specific things you're going to do. So the question can easily be combined with the activities. Now, you can also coach a team's collective attitude. Pair people up in groups of two and present a situation and say, what are we going to do to successfully engage with that other department as it relates to this project? In groups of two, everybody lists out three or four things we could do. You get the idea. The fact of the matter is when it comes to attitude is to frame out positive reactions, to have them write down things they will do positively. One time, we actually had a leader, a really good coach. He would present a situation on a whiteboard. And you got to have rotating pens. And you can do this virtually as well. And the rotating pens was you had to write one thing you were going to do in reaction to a situation to react positively or to engage positively. So when you went up on the whiteboard and you wrote down the thing you were going to do, you put your name behind it. Then you got to pass a pen to somebody else in the group. And they had to do the same thing. And it became a little bit of a game but fun. And the activity started to drive positivity. Most people don't practice positivity. Now, another thing that you could do as an activity is to use video. Play a positive motivational scene, two to three minutes. Let me just share with you one of my favorite videos is if you look up on YouTube, motivational rowing, R-O-W-I-N-G. And it's about a rowing team. It's about a 2 and 1⁄2 minute video. And I think they have about seven or eight concepts, text layovers. There's no sound except music. There's nobody talking. And we had a leader who plays that almost at every meeting that he leads. And he has, at the start of each meeting, I want you to write down the one thing as it relates to our present day work. Where in this video did it resonate with you? And he gets people attentive to the video. And he said, ever since I started doing that, my whole team is a lot more positive when we start our meetings. And he said, and we're going through challenging times. So you think about an activity where you present a video and ask people, what did it mean to you? What are you going to do to positively embrace this video message? What part of the video resonated with you? And how will you put that into action?