Workshop On Developing Self Awareness: Professional Activities

Activity name

Description

Time needed

Expected Outcomes

Things to consider (instructions)

Expected barriers

1. Adjective game 

This activity is about giving an adjective to own self and to others and then to see whether self given adjectives and the adjectives chosen by others are the same or different.

10 minutes

The motto of this activity is facilitate one’s self realization about own self. Two main aspects of self awareness include self knowledge about the self and the knowledge of how others see the self. Thus, this game can be beneficial to understand both of the above mentioned aspects about the self. Moreover, this activity can be used to see whether a person is aware about own self or not and that will be judged on the basis of the similarity or dissimilarity between self given adjectives and adjectives given by others.

In this group activity, each individual in a group of four people needs to pick two positive and two negative adjectives about own self. Then each one of them will do the same but this time they will write about others in the group. Finally, adjectives written by the self and by others about one individual will be compared.

It is easier to describe others by observing them for a certain time than describing one’s own self.  From that perspective, this activity can be a tough task to do. On the other hand, it can also be assumed that many individuals may fail to describe themselves in the right way due to lack of self awareness. This issue can be overcome after seeing what others have to say about the self. However, any personal bias or prejudice on the part of any individual can hamper the success of the game.  

2. Identification game

This activity is about identifying three ways to find how self awareness can help building work performance.

Half an hour

Self awareness not only helps in understanding about one’s own self but it also facilitates own performance and abilities such as problem solving ability, ability to judge, successful negotiations with others and more. Thus, this activity can help in realizing that self awareness is one of the vital things to achieve the above mentioned skills. When an individual will be asked to jot down how self awareness can help them achieving these, they will be able to bridge a connection between these two and thus will take the applicability of self awareness seriously.

This is a group activity where four participants will be there in each group. Four working outcomes will be given to each of them randomly. Then each one of them will have to think and come up with three ways by which their self awareness can be helpful in achieving the particular outcome chosen for that person. Finally, all their sheets will be collected to see how rational they are in their understanding of the practicability of self awareness.  

Time is one of the barriers for this activity. This is so because the task of recognizing valuable ways of achieving working skills through self awareness needs a lot of time. On the other hand, allocating more time can make the activity monotonous. Thus, scheduling of time can be one barrier in this activity. Apart from that, coming up with three ways of achieving working skills can be difficult for some individuals who are poor in expressing themselves freely.

3. PANAS

This activity is about identifying amount of inclination either towards positive affects or negative affects while in a working atmosphere.

10 minutes

This activity can be helpful in understanding whether an individual is surrounded by positive affects such as contentment, interest, enjoyment, satisfaction at work or by negative affects such as disgust, burnout, nervousness and anger at work. This is important because the identification of one’s inclination towards a any one of them can make the individual understand the reason behind their good or bad performances. In this regard, people, who characterize themselves with more positive affects, will be able to see a connection between these affects and their good working performance. Moreover, this will help people with less positive affects to work on them in order to enhance their performances as well.  

This is an individual task where every individual will be given a set of options (for example- nervous, alert, satisfied, active, isolated) to fill with either yes or no. number of yes and number of no will be counted at the end of the activity in order to how many positive and negative affect options have been selected by the participants.

One barrier of this activity is that there is no scope for the participants to express their reasons to select any of the given options. This can restrict the evaluator to judge their self awareness and this can also be a problem for the individuals to understand the underlying reasons especially behind their chosen negative affects. On the other hand, this activity has a prefixed set of options for the participants. Thus, it can happen that participants identify themselves with other types of positive or negative affects. In that case, the motto of this activity cannot be achieved totally.

4.  Deep acting game

This activity is about convincing other participants in a group that one person is capable of appearing happy while doing the given work. For that reason, the participants try to converse with other fellow workers following deep acting so that that person cannot guess it.

2 days

This activity is connected with emotional labour that is one significant part of self awareness. This is because emotional labour helps an employee to manage own emotional up-downs while at work. For example, a salesman has to sell products to the customers by manipulating them to buy them. For that reason, the worker needs to appear fresh and active in front of the customers that can only be done by adopting the technique of emotional acting. This activity gives them the opportunity to deal with their own emotional feelings and to maintain a happy face not just superficially but from within.

This is a group activity. Here, each participant will be given a work such as dealing with customer complaints. Then each one of them will have to perform their task while others in the group will pretend to be customers. Now, the participants will use the skill of deep acting to deal with own customers. For doing so, each participants will be given some time to settle down themselves and to be calm. In the given time, the participants can do what they like such as they can listen to music or think about how to deal with diverse customers but they have to write down what they are doing to calm themselves down. At the end of the activity, they will see whether they have been successful in convince others that they are internally active and happy to deal with their problems or not.  

One of the expected barriers in this activity is that workers, who will be pretending to be customers, may not be able to act like real customers. As a result, the success of this activity can be hampered.