Life Skills & Leadership: Unit 2, Session 7: Looking at Conflict | Page 105 of 127Instructional Sequence
I. Motivation (5 minutes)
Materials:
(None)
A. Palm to Palm
Participants experience the innate human characteristic to resist pressure.- Invite participants to participate in an opening activity. Say:
“Please listen to these instructions and follow along:
Place your hands in front of your chest, palm to palm.
First, I am going to count to three. When I say ‘Three,’ I want you to push your right palm
forcefully against your left palm.
Are you ready? Here we go: One, two, three ... push.
(Pause for five seconds.)
Thanks. You may relax now.”- Ask the participants whether their palms ended up on the left side of their bodies or remained in
the middle of their bodies. (Most participants will say their palms remained in the middle.) Say:
“If your palms remained in the middle, it must mean that your left palm pushed back. Why do you
think this happened when it was not part of the instructions?”- Listen to a few answers, then explain:
“This activity is really about what happened with your left palm. Notice that most of you
automatically resist when you felt you were being pushed or pressured. This type of resistance
occurs in many other situations. When you can’t get what you want, other people may push back.
When other people ask you to do things you don’t want to do, you probably push back. If people are
bargaining in the market or trying to agree on a complicated problem, they often get to a point
where they are ‘pushing’ against each other to try and get more of what they want.”B. Summary
Invite participants to give other examples of situations when people push against each other.
Summarize:“Today we are going to talk about situations when people are pushing against each other and they
might be in conflict. We’ll identify some new ways of responding in these situations so that
everyone can get more of what they want and need.”