aibu regarding icebreakers

[ovaryhill]

When you've to stand up and tell a bunch of strangers all about yourself and your background, oh and and tell a funny fact about yourself on a training course
Would I be unreasonable to say 'it's none of your bloody business, '?

No - making loads of out there shit up and your interesting fact can be that your a compulsive liar is fab.

I'll agree with the mixing of activities. I don't have a PhD either though. :o

I'd advise OP to make stuff up.

I can only ever remember what the people after my turn said as I am eaten up with stress and nerves up until my turn and can't even concentrate to listen.

OP, if it's a course with other people in the same company, there's lots of evidence to say there's a benefit in getting to know people at a more human level in terms of workin relationships, collaboration, engagement etc. Agree it's not necessary if it's with strangers you won't see again. Someone is working hard to give you a good training experience, and trying to meet the different needs of a diverse group of people. Would it kill you to meet them half way and participate graciously?

mrsTP - agree, good facilitation is exhausting!

You would be breaking cultural taboos. No business can take place in the UK without sharing a joke. Tis the rules.

Once I went to a team building thing where we had to sit cross-legged in a circle and take it in turns to tell the group about our childhood and significant events that made us who we are.
It was awful. People were crying and being all melodramatic etc.
I was six months pregnant and really nauseous and as it got closer and closer to me I felt unbelievably anxious and hot and sick.
In the end I just excused myself to go to the bathroom and didn't go back in.
Apparently this was really frowned upon as I didn't demonstrate my commitment to the team and my leadership capabilities. WTF.

I guess icebreakers are good for forming a first impression of who seems ok and who is an arse. Who might be up for escaping to the pub in the lunch break instead of risking the buffet.

I love the left-field answers so make up some shit if you want to. I teach financial literacy sometimes and got the group to tell me why they chose their bank. One bright spark said, "because I like red". He was my favorite. Or be this bloke

I would have done the same tak1ng. I would not have been sitting cross-legged in a circle for nobody.

I can only ever remember what the people after my turn said as I am eaten up with stress and nerves up until my turn and can't even concentrate to listen. sad

same here Sparkling :(

I promise to never, ever make anyone sit cross-legged and talk about their childhood. Sweet Baby Poopy. I would have walked out as the facilitator.

After the 'word' session we've been known to say each other's most / least favourite word in team meetings, like a secret code - it's a challenge to drop them into the conversation without the managers noticing. And the course was last August.

MrsPratchett don't you think it's just wildly inappropriate? It was more like a bloody therapy session than anything vaguely related to business or leadership or team-building

Mumsnet does teach me something new every day! Just make shit up, why have I never thought of this before?!? [facepalm emoticon]

Wildly inappropriate. We know which bits of our material might trigger people and are very careful about it. Never, ever in the first session should anything even remotely as personal be brought up. Certainly not by the bloody facilitator.

I have actually cried in a training session but that was training that was designed to evoke empathy about the First Nations history of Residential schools, imprisonment and genocide. We were warned about the content, warned it would be very triggering, there were trained people outside the room and you were encouraged to do whatever you needed during the session (including leaving if you needed to), you didn't have to participate and we were warned the week before so people could not attend if they had any worries.

You don't open cans of worms if you don't ask consent and then intend to deal with the consequences.

MrsTerryPratchett are particular groups of people more obstructive than others, do you find? Any particular sector?

I wouldn't call what's being described here a icebreaker. To me an icebreaker is a little game or team exercise or something funny that will actually, you know, break the ice, rather than make people feel uncomfortable. The whole introduce yourself thing is stupid because no-one's listening, they're all too worried about what they're going to say themselves.

I was once asked to do one where everyone had to give two facts about themselves, one true and one not. I was Miss Silver Jubilee at Pontins and played Netball for England ....

Another one made us skip round the room. Most uncomfortable to begin with but impossible to do without laughing.

I appreciate your comments Mrs Terry, but I still can't see how these kind of things are remotely helpful or relevant to what I am learning, my background is no-one else's business and I don't want anyone knowing anything about me unless I choose to tell them, its people doing the same job I will be with but who I will never see again
I'll be there for a week, deep joy!

In a previous life I was a trainer in the Civil Service.
I can see the point of ice-breakers - to an extent, but also know that most staff saw them a waste of time and just wanted to get on with the course.
A friend of mine managed to totally wreck what the person running the course was an innovative exercise...

the group was told to think of a ship and then to say what part of the ship they were. So, you got people saying they were the engine, and they got the ship moving, another was the steering wheel, making sure they were going in the right direction etc. Oh, and they had to do actions as well.

Friend told the trainer quietly that he really didn't feel comfortable with this, but no, trainer insisted he join in. So, friend got up, walked into the middle of the room and stood there, head slightly tilted to one side and with an enquiring look on his face. Of course, they asked him what he was doing.

"I'm in the bar of this bloody ship, trying to get a drink." It was at this point the icebreaker broke up with the equivalent impact of the Titanic hitting that iceberg.

Moral: keep icebreakers short and sweet and for the benefit of the trainees, not the trainer. A short exercise with some interaction is fine. Anything more complex is going to piss at least one member of the group off and that's the last thing you want to do as a trainer. If it doesn't add anything to the group dynamics or to the course as a whole, then ditch it.

There have been awful ones. In one we were given a list of items (gun, compass, matches etc) and told we were on an island & had to prioritise the items in order of usefulness & why.

My line manager said 'We should use the gun to shoot iklboo & eat her. We won't need food for ages then'. With a huge 'I'm so clever' grin on her face.

Admittedly I was overweight at the time but I was crushed by the comment. Luckily most of the team thought she was out of order, but I applied for a transfer out of her team not long after that.

As a trainer what would you do if someone refused? Would you keep at them to do it or move swiftly on

Not all participants are aware that they don't need to go into great detail about personal things, or that they can make things up or be very light hearted - or may not immediately know how to - gaming these things in a way you feel comfortable with is a skill in itself. I think things like this should be as impersonal as possible. I get what you are saying MrsTerry but you are also kind of saying something that might be heard as "I don't care how uncomfortable this makes some people when it serves a purpose for me". I know you aren't saying that as you have written sensitive stuff that says the opposite, but...

A lot of people don't go on courses often and don't have touchy feely jobs, so this sort of thing is way out of their comfort zone and I think facilitators can forget this as they do it all day, every day.

I went on a course the other day where the trainer had us all shaking hands and introducing ourselves (fine) then linking elbows and twirling instead of shaking hands (erm, ok) and finally doing big demonstrative hugs and kisses (ew). I hated it. I would have hated it even more if I had had any insecurity about BO that day for any reason; if I were wearing a hair piece; if I was from a culture where you don't touch strange men; etc. I thought it was shockingly badly judged and the irony is that the day was about learning to be a facilitator!

We had a training day after a particularly horrible restructure (lots of redundancies on one hand whilst they recruited like mad in another area) - we were all invited to write the name of a song on a whiteboard that summed up how we felt about the new structure.

I did "you've lost that loving feeling" someone else put "Toxic"

I hate icebreakers, they bring me out in a cold sweat and leave me incredibly uneasy. I don't recall any of the training sessions that have involved them because my anxiety gets out of control waiting for my turn, while I'm suppressing my instinct to escape and then afterwards I'm desperately trying to calm down. I can cry just thinking about them tbh.

I'm actually quite confident in many areas and I like learning/training but these, much like games of Charades, make me so unhappy.

If it's that useful then I guess it's worth it but for me it means that the whole thing might as well have not happened.

I have always hated and detested icebreakers, finding them intrusive and complete nonsense. Fine to introduce yourself and your role, all other rubbish is not fine. It got to the point where I refused to participate anymore. I thought that I'd got to the point in my life where noone can make me do anything that feels uncomfortable. I didn't do any for 3 years, then I left to be a SAHM