Years ago I was at a fascinating workshop exploring the drama triangle. That’s an idea from transactional analysis that sees people playing one of three postions when in conflict: persecutor victim or rescuer.
The trainer asked us to play out little scenes in which we tried out the various roles. She offered this sidecoach: see if you can persecute someone with just your eyes.
This is fun to try. I have such a hopelessly mobile face that I find it almost impossible. When I try to change the nature of my eye-contact, all sorts of other bits of my body move as well.
Still, it did teach me that even very slight shifts can have major emotional impact.
More recently, I was in Helsinki running a workshop with Viv and Simo. He was showing us some status games and I shared this training exercise with him. He loved it (Simo is one of the world’s most enthusiastic people) and we played with it a lot. His enthusiasm got me excited.
Later that day, the three of us were doing some problem-solving type work with people. (This was a workshop for facilitators). We came up with what we laughingly called The Helsinki Method, but which we’re now calling Action Storming.
