Toolbox for Thriving With Humans
An Expanding Collection of My Top Energizers, Exercises & Sources for Meaningful Collaboration & Personal Growth
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Silent Eye Gazing
This is a paired presence exercise that strips interaction down to its essentials. By removing words and roles, participants practice staying present with another person — without performing, fixing, or withdrawing.
Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is a reflective storytelling exercise that helps people make sense of challenge, change, and growth. By mapping real experiences onto a simple narrative structure, participants uncover meaning, clarify purpose, and see how struggle often precedes insight.
Friend vs. Self
A short reflection exercise that reveals the gap between how we treat others in difficulty and how we treat ourselves. It helps participants develop a more effective inner coach without lowering standards.
Deep Listening
Deep Listening is a structured partner exercise that separates speaking from listening to train attention, presence, and empathy. It builds trust and psychological safety by letting people experience what it feels like to be truly heard.
Whose Bag?
What can you learn about a person without asking them a single question? This exercise trains empathy and collective sense-making by turning everyday objects into clues about identity, values, and meaning.
Coke Bottle Ideation
Creativity often stalls not because of a lack of ideas, but because of self-censorship. This fast-paced exercise breaks functional fixedness and helps groups practice speaking before ideas feel finished.
Love Questions
Love Questions uses carefully sequenced questions to help people connect beyond roles and titles. It builds trust, empathy, and psychological safety by pairing self-disclosure with deep, uninterrupted listening.
Your Living Funeral
Your Living Funeral is a reflective exercise that invites leaders to step back and consider the legacy they want to leave behind. By imagining how they would like to be remembered, it helps clarify what truly matters—and how to live and lead accordingly.
Values Exploration
Values Exploration is a reflective exercise that helps leaders clarify and prioritize what truly matters to them. It supports calmer decision-making, reduces defensiveness under pressure, and anchors leadership behavior in personal integrity.
Visualization as a Leadership Tool
Visualization helps leaders rehearse how they want to show up before high-stakes moments unfold. It strengthens presence, emotional regulation, and intentional action when pressure would otherwise take over.
Songs & Pics of the Real You
A reflective learning exercise using music, images, and journaling to reconnect people with their authentic self. Ideal for leaders and teams navigating change, identity shifts, or disconnection from meaning.
Journaling as a Leadership Tool
A simple but powerful way to externalize mental noise, reduce reactivity, and regain clarity before decisions or conversations. Journaling turns unexamined thoughts into conscious choice.
Brain Writing
Brain Writing creates psychological safety by removing performance pressure from ideation. Ideas compound through written “yes, and” contributions instead of competition or persuasion.
Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping is a visual thinking practice built around non-linear, associative idea generation. Ideas are captured radially, allowing thoughts to branch, connect, and coexist on the page.
Candle Transport Challenge
The Candle Transport Challenge is a hands-on, time-bound team exercise built around a deceptively simple physical challenge. Teams design, test, and adapt a solution in real time using limited materials and live feedback from reality.