Reading Someone Loud and Clear

There are times when we misunderstand what someone is feeling. This morning, I had everyone do an exercise to help pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues, as well as to adapt to others' feelings.

I split everyone into two groups and had each group pick different "actors" for each turn. The actor/actress picked from a bag an adjective to act out while the situation was meeting up for lunch. At the end of the 45 second skit, their group had to guess what their adjective was. We had Happy vs Macho, Cultured vs Busy, Nasty vs Content, and Suspicious vs Charming. People had different perspective on Cultured. One thing that became very evident was Happy, Content and Charming stayed positive and tried to calm Macho, Nasty, and Suspicious. They didn't let the negativity phase them and keeping a cool head in difficult situations is important!

Afterwards, we discussed how the actors portrayed their emotions and how they could have displayed that feeling better. The reflection was to help everyone identify effective cues and to better understand how they displayed their own cues.