What I love about you
Appreciation is the highest form of prayer, for it acknowledges the presence of good wherever you shine the light of your thankful thoughts. ―Alan Cohen
👥 Serves: 10-20 people
🎚 Difficulty: Easy
⏳ Total time: 45 minutes
🥣 Ingredients: Sheets of paper (1 per participant), pens (1 per participant), chairs (1 per participant, in a circle), cymbals or Tibetan singing bowl (or an alarm)
💪 Nutritional values: Gratitude, Appreciation, Team-building, Connection, Joy
What I love about you
📝 Description
A group activity to celebrate each other and foster gratefulness.
In general, the only way team members receive feedback (if any at all) is during the annual appraisal, but this occasion usually focuses on offering constructive feedback, which can cause great amounts of stress and anxiety in the people awaiting the feedback. Acknowledging the importance of appraisals, the following activity offers an additional opportunity to share a different type of feedback, centred around appreciation.
The following activity works well for teams (e.g. during team retreats) but also at the end of a residential summit where participants have spent a few days together and bonded to a fairly deep level.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Preparing (10’)
Place the chairs in a circle and have a sheet of paper and a pen on each chair. Ask participants to find a spot where they will be sitting for the next 20 minutes or so.
Step 2 – Leaving a blank space (2’)
Ask participants to write their name somewhere at the top of the paper and draw a shape (e.g. square, rectangle, circle) somewhere on the paper that will be left blank for the time being.
Step 3 – Sharing appreciation (1’)
Ask participants to pass their sheet of paper to the person to their left or right (choose a direction that everyone will follow for the entire activity). Once they receive a sheet of paper from one of their peers, they have one minute to complete this sentence: “What I love about you is…” where they can celebrate that person. Variations can include: “What I admire / appreciate / adore / cherish / treasure / value about you is…” but they should stick to the given sentence to complete.
Step 4 – Going in a circle
When the minute is up, signal this using the cymbals or Tibetan singing bowl (or an alarm with a gentler ping). The participants will then pass the paper to the next person, and they keep going like this until the circle is complete and everyone has received everyone’s sheet of paper.
Step 5 – Sharing appreciation to oneself (1’)
At this point, everyone has received their sheet of paper back. Ask them to refrain from reading it (for now) and give them one minute to fill out the blank space left at the beginning with their own words of gratitude. “What I love about myself is…”
Step 6 – Reading (1’)
Give people a few minutes to read the messages from their peers, in silence.
Step 7 – Debriefing (10’)
If appropriate (you’ll realise by the group energy), you may wish to open up the circle for a little bit of sharing, where you invite participants to read one of the statements they received from the others. Like always, sharing is optional and when it feels right, close the circle and give participants a bit of free time to process the activity by themselves.