Confidence-Building Games

By: Melanie Butler

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Developing confidence is an important part of growing up and establishing a healthy life and world view. As an adult, being placed in new situations or facing change can shake your confidence. To function at your best, your confidence needs to be strengthened. One way of doing this is by playing team-building games aimed at building confidence. This group activity is stimulating and fun and will resolve many confidence problems as well as promote a more positive work environment.

How Others Really See Me

In this game, everyone sits around the table and is given an index card with their name on it. They pass the cards around the table clockwise, and people must write a word or phrase on each card that describes the individual whose name is on the card.

This word or phrase must be positive, can't be about physical appearance and can't have already been written on the card. Once the card has been around the table, the owners can read the comments on the card.

This exercise helps build confidence by creating positive feelings in all team members. Whenever anyone is having a bad day, he just has to pull out the card to be reminded of all the positive things people wrote about him, and his confidence is boosted instantly.

Role Playing Readiness

Sometimes a lack of confidence can be caused by not knowing how to respond to everyday stresses and situations. Role playing games are a fun way to build confidence. Establish a set of scenarios that commonly occur in your work environment (unbalanced workload, different working styles, frequent tardiness, management styles, etc.). Also establish a set of characters for people to portray (such as Hardhead Holly, Sarcastic Sam, Mellow Melanie, Lazy Leo).

Break your workers into groups of three and have them role-play the scenarios to become comfortable and confident in how to handle each type of situation, regardless of the person or type of personality they encounter.

Attitude Adustment

Confidence relies on your attitude and on the perception of other's attitudes as well. It also relies on your ability to navigate through a negative attitude and not take that negativity into yourself.

This game is played like charades. Slips of paper with different kinds of negative attitudes written on them are placed in a basket or bucket. One player picks an attitude and thinks of the best scenario to discuss and display this attitude. Another player is the listener. The listener tries to make the person with the attitude change the negative attitude into a positive attitude. Her success at accomplishing this will build confidence in her ability to handle different attitudes in real life and not let it impact her negatively.