Emotional Intelligence: A Training Game to Improve Emotional Awareness - My Colored Hat

Emotional Intelligence is a concept that takes some effort to explain. One of the first aspects in the concept is emotional awareness. While emotional awareness can be explained, it needs to be experienced. Here's an example of training games to help you experience emotional awareness.

Emotional Intelligence: A training game for emotional awareness - My Colored Hat.

Preparation: Make paper hats of different colours. There should be as many hats as there are participants. You can choose to have anywhere from four to six colours. So if you have chosen to have six colours and there are thirty participants. There will be five hats of the same colour in the stack of hats.

In this training game each colour is designated to represent a feeling. For instance, if you have decided to play with feelings, you can have white for peaceful/tranquil, blue for joyful, green for envy/jealousy, red for irritation/anger, purple for rich/plenteous, orange for creative.

Emotional Intelligence, Process of this training game: The participants have to be told the meaning of each colour. Then they pick up a hat of their choice and stand in a circle. Once each of the participants is wearing a hat, they are expected to describe their feeling.

If it is a positive feeling they express it and give themselves permission to enjoy it.

If it is a negative feeling, they acknowledge it, and decide to bag (bracket) it for the present. They also decide to pick it up after the sessions are over and do something positive to deal with it. The objective of this training game is to replace the negative feeling with a positive one.

Emotional Intelligence - Game 2 - My Emoticon: Project the following handout and ask participants to identify how they are feeling that day from the handout.

Then let them pair-up with their partner and make their face to look like the emoticon that they have chosen.

Debrief: 1. It is harder and more stressful to make a face resembling a negative emotion. It is easier, relaxing and much more fun to copy a happy face.

2. You usually feel the emotion that is expressed on your face.

3. You can control your emotions and so determine the manner in which you will spend your day - with ease or with stress, the choice is yours.

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