Creative Workshop Exercises: Easy and Engaging Activities #7 Tactile Coaching Cubes for Impact and Engagement
Impact: Engaging, Dynamic, Impactful Coaching
Materials needed: Set of Coaching Cubes (Remember, if you decide to buy a pack you get 10% discount with a newsletter subscription)
Professional Use: Workplace, Executive, Wellbeing and Life-style Coaches
Who is this exercise for?
This exercise is designed to pro-actively engage clients in the coaching process. With six different ways to use the cubes it brings a tactile, pro-active, soothing and self-directed element to the coaching conversation. It’s particularly suitable for young adults, neuro-diverse clients and shy or anxious clients.
How does it help with achieving engagement and impact?
The dice hold questions based on appreciative inquiry, positive psychology and systemic consulting as effective personal growth and change methodologies. By encouraging clients to handle the dice, choose the questions to be addressed and be pro-active the process enhances interest, involvement and ownership. The elements of spontaneity and randomness pique curiosity and engagement.
Additionally, handling, squeezing or playing with the dice in other ways has a calming effect through the tactile sensation in hands and particularly fingertips. This can be particularly helpful for anxious clients, while the focus on the dice breaks direct person-to-person eye contact, giving relief to clients who find such intense eye contact overwhelming. In our experience though, everyone enjoys handling the dice!
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How to conduct a Tactile Coaching Cubes Session
Introduction
The box consists of six dice that follow a process called the PRISMM coaching process. To coach to this model work through the dice in the colour coded sequence below.
Below are six different ways of making the most of the tactile nature of the coaching cubes, whether or not you follow the PRISMM sequence.
1. Random Question Generator
Pick one of the dice and just roll it, like a dice. Ask your client the question on the top of the dice. Adapt it to better fit the client’s context if that seems helpful. Or, if you don’t like that question, roll again. There are six questions on each dice
This process generates client interest as there is an unknown outcome to the activity.
- It’s not me asking the question, it’s the dice
Once a question has been selected, prop the dice up where you can both see it. Be sure to actually articulate the question, that is, don’t just both sit there quietly reading it, to open the conversation. Encourage your client to address their answer to the dice.
This puts you both in a different position vis-à-vis each other and the question. Very particularly it can put you in a joint or partnership position as you engage with the question. Naturally as the coach your main ambition to help them expand and explore their responses. People report finding this a powerful process that shifts the dynamic in the conversation in an interesting and liberating way.
- Holding the question in their hand
Instead of putting the selected dice at a viewing distance, they can hold on to it while you have the coaching conversation that the dice question has stimulated. This creates a very physical connection to the question. Their handling of the dice can also give additional non-verbal information about how they are feeling about what they are saying.
What tends to happen here is that they ‘play’ with the dice while they are engaged with the question. This might involve keeping it in their hand, squeezing occasionally. Or it might involve regularly putting it down and picking it up again. Either way, it can be ‘put away’ when the discussion stimulated by that question seems completed.
- Get your client to actively choose the question they want to answer
To do this, roll all six dice at once and then ask your client which question they feel most drawn to, feel would be most useful to, or are most compelled to answer. It could be interesting to explore what led to that choice before actually engaging with the question.
Choice is another engaging activity. By giving the client choice in where to take the conversation next you are encouraging them to be pro-active in the process of their own growth and development.
- Hand over control of the dice
Hand the dice over to the client, let them decide which dice to roll, either following the PRISMM model or as they please.
This gives them more opportunity to handle the dice directly, and so reap the benefits of the calming effect of the tactile stimulation.
- Create a considered choice of question
Handover the next dice you want to work with. Invite you client to read all the questions on that particular dice, to select which they would like to engage with. If the answer is ‘none of these’, this is a perfect opening for asking ‘what would be a useful question I could ask right now?’ When they tell you, be sure to repeat it back to them, as a question.
This activity encourages a more considered, reflective selection of a question to engage with.
The product used here is the Coaching Cubes
Remember, if you decide to buy a pack you get 10% discount with a newsletter subscription