| Aim | The purpose of the exercise is to share the experience of expressing and discharging emotions. Emotions are a universal experience, each of us tries to master them but this can sometimes be difficult, especially with bad emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety or feelings of impotence. Increasing one’s own experience in this area is very valuable for every person. |
| Trainee profile | Any. People with special needs can participate as long as they are able to express themselves. |
| Learning Objectives | To create together an atmosphere of discussion on the importance of feeling emotions in our lives
To test ways to deal with our emotions To look for new ways to discharge emotions, especially violent or negative ones |
| n° participants | At least 10 people |
| Duration | 50 minutes |
| Materials | Chairs for all participants, flipchart and markers |
| Preparation | Explain what the exercise is supposed to be about, as mentioned in the “aim” section above. |
| Implementation | 1. Ask participants to help you make a list of emotions, both positive and negative. Write the identified emotions on the flipchart. Give max 5 minutes to the step.
2. Tell participants how important it is to be able to embrace and positively deal with our emotions (also the bad ones), since our daily life interactions and our presence in each context is inevitably influenced by emotions. 3. Ask everybody now to pick one emotion (either positive or negative), to embrace it, and to walk in the room meeting and greeting other people with that emotion in their body. They can exaggerate if they want to but respect towards others should always be ensured. 4. Have all participants walk in the room and see how our current emotions make us change the way we greet others. 5. After a couple of minutes, ask the participants to pick another emotion, embrace it, and repeat step 4. 6. Repeat this part with 2 or 3 more emotions. 7. Have all participants gather up and create a circle with chairs. You are part of the circle. 8. Start a brief debriefing on this part of the activity, how they felt when greeting others with a specific emotion, what emotions they have chosen, and how our emotions do change the way we perceive and are perceived by others. 9. Ask now the group how they deal with negative emotions that might hinder our social life or important interactions in a daily basis. They can answer questions like what emotion makes you feel, how you react to it, what techniques you use to proactively and positively deal with that emotion so that your personal and social life is not ruined. Allow volunteers to speak up and trigger the moment for sharing. 10. Once they have shared their ways of discharging negative emotion (e.g. breathing exercises), you may test them out and try that technique on their own. 11. If you have time, have two (or three) volunteers stand up to test the proposed technique to deal with the given emotion. 12. Ask for a big round of applause. |
| Added value | Exercise is not only an opportunity to talk about emotions and the ways we feel them, but also to look for new ways to deal with them. |
