My colleagues and I held our first board meeting of the year and as part of the meeting, we had a short session on hopes for 2021. I would like to share an exercise that my colleague Helen introduced which I founds short, sharp and powerful called focused writing.
We each had pen and paper. We had 5 minutes to complete this sentence with the following 3 rules:
- No editing
- Don’t stop writing. Even if cant think of something, you might write blah, blah
- Pen stays on the paper.
The statement is: In 2021, I hope for…
Each of us took our 5 minutes and then we had to re-read what we wrote and highlight the 3 things that struck us and then share.
As you can imagine there were themes along the lines of not losing what we have cherished about 2020 –ie more time to think, no commute but also the things we want back for example time with friends, holidays and hugs.
There were also some little nuggets of insight that came through that might not have come alive without the time to think. For example, some of us want to do something that gets our heart racing and this leads to a different discussion.
If you want to engage your team in something that might feel a bit more interesting, a bit deeper and more insightful, then I would thoroughly recommend.
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