Appreciative Happiness Exercise

Appreciative Happiness is a simple exercise in appreciative inquiry and helps participants make connections with each other.

Good teams know how to appreciate one another and share joyful, happy experiences. When a new team is getting to know each other, using an exercise that encourages the sharing of positive stories and experiences not only allows people to connect but also builds a positive atmosphere in the room.

Ask a people or colleague or a group to tell you stories about times when they were happy. Just listen and encourage everyone else to listen.

Then do the same about times when they and you made someone else happy. You will be astonished how interesting, inspiring and enjoyable this will be!

Just get people into small groups of four or five and proceed as above.

They will discover that the difficult thing is choosing which happy experience to share. They will also learn that making other people happy is a very good way to be happy yourself, which is encouraging.

At the end of the exercise, people will realize how much they had in common and this will help them build strong cooperation and mutual trust.

This exercise can be done online. We give you some tips to carry out this activity online

As long as you have everyone on webcam and present in your video conferencing tool, this will work like a live workshop!

When facilitating a group discussion, we recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate that they would like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s non-verbal feedback options, a reaction emoji, or simply have people raise their hands.

The topics of this publication: integration, interactions, disinhibition, distension, foster relationships, health, relaxation, wellbeing