h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having taken teenagers away on overnight retreats many times, I know that ice-breaking and building self esteem within the group is essential to enabling each person to see themselves as part of a whole as well as individual growth. Each person is different yet the same at the same time.

One of the exercises which works well toward this end is sometimes called a "trust walk." One individual leads another around for a short period of time. No talking is permitted and the person being led must either keep his or her eyes closed or be blindfolded. All communication must be non-verbal. After about five to ten minutes the positions are reversed.

This is a very hard thing to do especially if you are simply asked to keep your eyes close. It's hard to trust that the person leading you is not going to lead you into a pond or over a tree root, if you are out in nature. It's just as hard if you hear traffic speeding by in the city. But the name of the game is "trust walk." So when a person finishes this, they naturally feel good about having trusted another.

Upon coming back to the whole group a carefully guided discussion ensues concerning trust, similarities, differences, and how they felt about themselves. This exercise than leads into deeper sharing.

If it works right, each young man or woman enters into the rest of the retreat with a better view of his or herself as well as a fuller respect of the group. Each persons self esteem is raised.

An excellent contribution.

It makes me wonder how much of this sort of exercise could be built into the normal school curriculum.

We used to do those sort of trust exercises when I was a teenager. The problem is that when they go wrong you lose all trust. In a school drama lesson we had to fall backwards and be caught by our friend behind. I caught my friend but somehow she missed me and I hit the floor rather heavily, as we were supposed to let ourselves drop rather than ease ourselves back. Looking back on it now it's making me laugh but I wouldn't try it again. If one of your teenagers is accidently led into a tree or trips on a rock, the exercise will have done more harm than good, they'll be left with less trust than they started with.

"It makes me wonder how much of this sort of exercise could be built into the normal school curriculum."

That /would/ be a good idea. Only problem is, if it's dome by a school, teenagers (I should know, I am one) tend to think it sucks .

Yep I got taught a bunch of these 'icebreakers' on a course. The advice then was to be careful with the physical 'trust' ones as they can go horribly wrong!

This can work, although each icebreaker has to be tailored to the group/conditions :

This is me
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Ask each person to take a piece of paper and a pen (preferably each to use the same colour)

Ask them to write four things about themselves on the paper, one of which is untrue.

Each piece should then be stuck on the walls around the room.

Each person should then wander around the room looking at the information. Based on their first impressions of the other delegates, they should write on each flip the name of the delegate to whom they think the information relates.

NB: this should be used at the beginning when people do not know each other, as an informal way of introducing themselves, and making the point that first impressions are not always necessarily correct!

I recall mummifying someone with toilet paper in a teambuilding exercise, that was good fun. I've never personally found these exercises useful but I guess different things work for different people. It took my academic group about 9 months to gel despite all organised teambuilding events. It was watching a World Cup match and going for a drink at the pub that finally did it, instead of team building we just chatted and had a laugh. It worked like a dream.

What a great idea. A lot of peoples low self esteem and confidence is shattered by experiences within school, or when they are younger. If you can have sessions in schools..it would be a great way building up a childs confidence whilst they are young...and may be ( just maybe) this would reduce or even hinder the depression in later life.

yep, i never though of it that way, but alot of low esteem and lack of confidence is connected to the feeling of trust.

Unfortuneately, your accessment is far to often right. In a place where we would hope to find lots of trust, we often find only mistrust and fear. If we are looking to build self esteem, though, there must be a little self disclosure and a little risk taking - not a lot to start - just a little.

Maybe, in this type situation, a few volunteers might show how it works, first. Perhaps this type of ice breaker could be done on a "course" set up in a gym to be safe. Regardless of what is done, the individuals involved will need to be risk takers and trust one another.

Other ice breakers, like the three truths and one lie are also available. This was suggested in another message in this discussion and it's a good exercise.

In your school, is there one person students might trust? That's all it takes. One person to take a risk with and make that first step.

This, and any ice breaker exercise like it, needs to be supervised. Someone or someones should know the participants, work with the group, and of course carefully watch the actual "trust walk." If, as suggested in another piece of this conversation, a participant might tend to be frivolous or even dangerous, than maybe he or she should only observe, or not even participate. Like anything else, "trust walks" and the like are not for everyone.

My experience of these 'courses' designed to built trust, self esteem etc, it that one man's panacea is another man's cancer. I was once on a outward bound course with a colleague of great self esteem (perhaps too much). By crassly exposing this infront of his peers, his self esteem (and credability and eventually his job) were crushed.

In the end of the day, self esteem comes from knowing what you can do well and then doing it well. And then realising that everyone has their weaknesses, even those with inflated egos.

If you started early, even in preschool, you could build trust and self-esteem. Little kids actually do it all the time when they let someone else play with their toys. If it's turned into a game, then, that could be the beginning. Say, everyone sits in a circle. You pass your toy around the circle and everyone gets to play with it for a certain period of time. Small, well supervised groups, will work best. Afterwards, even young children can express how good it was to let someone else play with their toy. They'll feel good about themselves for taking the risk. Using toys from the general toy box would work best until you saw how the children played.