b a team blog

The Face Game

(body language, non-verbal communications, ice-breakers)

This is a great, quick & easy energizer to try before weekly/monthly meetings.

For groups of four to twelve people. Split larger groups into teams with leaders who can facilitate the exercise.

Equipment required: paper and pens/pencils. Time: 5-25 minutes depending on group size and review discussion.

Introduction: Facial expressions are an important part of communications. There are many different emotions and corresponding facial expressions. Some are easier to interpret than others. This exercise helps illustrate different expressions and how some are more obvious and easy to ‘read’ than others.

Task: Each team member must think of one emotion (or two or three emotions, for a longer exercise), which they should then write separately on a slip of paper. Fold the slips of paper and put it into a cup or glass in the centre of the table, to enable ‘blind’ selection. Each person must then in turn take one of the folded slips and show the emotion on their face to the team, who must guess the emotion.

Review points, for example:

• How significant are facial expressions in conveying feelings? • In what situations are facial expressions especially crucial to communications and understanding? • What emotions are easiest to ‘read’ and why? • What emotions are less easy to interpret? • What facial expressions are easiest to misread or fake? • What effect do facial expressions have on us? • What emotions are probably universal across all cultures? • To what extent are we aware of our own facial expressions? • To what extent do we ‘read’ facial expressions and respond to them unconsciously? • And importantly - how can we manage our communications methods given the significance facial expressions in certain types of communications?