self awareness Activities

The speaker discusses the importance of self-awareness and suggests a game called the intent perception game to improve it. They explain how to dissect conversations by writing down phrases, determining the intent behind them, and considering the perception they create. The goal is to increase self-awareness as coaches, communicators, or teammates. The speaker gives an example of someone feeling disrespected and how their intent may not align with the perception they create. The game helps individuals become more aware of the impact of their words on others. Now, when you get to activities around self-awareness, certainly questions can be their own activity unique to itself. Let us share with you something that we call the intent perception game. You know, one of the greatest things we can do to coach greater self-awareness is to dissect conversations. Now, not dissect and rip apart, but dissect and really analyze from a surface view to really understand ourselves better as coaches, communicators, teammates or whatever the situation calls for. Now, let's go back to our earlier example where, let's say we have to approach someone who we're having a difficult conversation with and you're coaching somebody and the person is saying, yeah, I said this to Tom and then he said this and here's what I tried to do. Write those things down and put it up on a whiteboard and you're going to have three columns. You're going to itemize the phrases. So column one is the phrases or comments and you want to get those as accurately as you can. Now, remember if somebody says, well, I told Tom I felt very disrespected. So let's just use that, I felt disrespected. Someone says that, right? And then you're going to go to the second column and you say, when you said that to Tom, what was your intent? You write those things down. Now, when Tom heard the words felt disrespected, what perception do you think he did or could have honestly? Here's the funny thing. If you go up to somebody and say, you know what, Tom, you know what, Joanne, I just felt really disrespected and the way I said that obviously had a little emotion behind it. Does that calm the other person down? Now my intent is to let him know how I felt, but do feelings create rationalization and logic or do they create or trigger feelings in response? And I just had this conversation and I remember asking this person, I said, so when you said that, what perception did you create? She said three times, I just felt so angry and I felt, and I said, do you know the question I'm asking you? She said, yeah, you wanted to know how I felt. I said, no, I'm wanting to know the perception you potentially left that person with. And all of a sudden the person goes, oh, I would imagine they were pretty angry. I said, so was your intent to anger them? And she said, no, isn't that interesting? And we smiled and she said, oh, I did not handle that well. I said, look, we all don't. So think about phrases, column one, what was said factually, number two, ask the person what was your intent, and then number three, what's the perception you created or potentially could have created? And that will heighten someone's self-awareness.