Day 1

Who are you?
You have three minutes to tell your group who you are, but without telling them about what you do and who your surround yourself with.
This challenging task was the first of many, this beautiful February day in Laguna de Cameros. We’re here on this 6-day training course to learn about “Decision making and self-reprocessing” (DMSR). The group consists of participants from Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Ireland and Spain, which is where we are and whose group is facilitating this event. The shared objective is to get to know ourselves better and to build connections with other innovative groups all over Europe.
Today was the first full day and we started by playing some games to warm up our body and mind and to get-to-know each other.

“It was difficult to play the games but it was a nice way of breaking the ice.”
Dimitrios, Greece

One special activity we did was supposed to build trust between the participants and to bring the group closer together. This outcome was important to us because we needed the group to trust each other to be able to enjoy and learn and fully experience all activities of the next week. We achieved this, by giving instructions to the whole group, while they were walking in silence around the room. The instructions were for example, to stop when making eye contact and to just look the person in front of you in the eyes and feel the sensations within yourself. That simple form of contact later evolved into letting yourself fall down, trusting for the group to catch you.

“Our deepest feelings are inside and I really loved this exercise because it helped us build trust.”
Nour, Italy

Next was lunch. The food this week will be vegetarian, much to the dislike of some participants. But this disappointment moves into the background when you look at the beautiful hotel we’re staying in and the nice people working here.
During the afternoon we focused on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. The topic was easily understandable due to the activities and games connected to them, which immediately transformed the presentation into practice.

“The games combined theory and action and that was really nice.”
Dimitrios, Greece

The funniest moment of the day took place during a game we played to explore the “kinaesthetic intelligence”. It involved the group splitting into pairs where we had to build sculptures of our partners according to a certain topic. This ended up in one of the participants laying on his stomach with his butt stuck up into the air for 10 minutes.