I sent the quiz to the delegates prior to my session, and asked them to complete this as pre-course work and bring it to the training. This saved me a bit of time and allowed delegates to think about why they were attending the session in the first place. Then at the start of the training, I invited comments and we discussed some examples. Following this activity, I used ‘Yes but, No but!’ and that seemed to flow really well.

The questionnaire worked well to elicit what people felt. Positioned this as “be as honest as possible to gain the most from the exercise” – might be worth annotating to the exercise. Also try not to think too much into the questions – you are trying to gauge your immediate reactions to a particular situation as some dwelt unduly on certain areas (perhaps setting a time limit would help e.g. max 1 minute).

I used the notes and the briefing as a positioning tool and it worked quite well. The inference on the general use of the “prey” and “predator” approaches, I would not use again as it created a bit of controversy over their validity (some challenged the basic premise) which detracted from the key message for a time. Whereas the ‘fight or flight’ I would use again as this met with general approval and it made a lot more sense against the “submissive \ aggressive” banner and why we might react the way we do to certain situations.