Post-Group Facilitation Reflection #1

On February 12, Lauren Leiser and I led a group called "Pursuing Positivity". We followed our written plan closely and managed to stay on time with our outlined timeline. We began our group by introducing ourselves and stating the topic of the group. During our group, we wanted to facilitate group members positive attitudes toward themselves to identify ways to cope with negative thoughts. Our goal was to provide an engaging activity that encouraged social interaction and feelings of positive personal outlook. Group members were able to provide positive attributes of one another to promote self-esteem of. When sharing everyone's responses in the warm up activity, I think the most important part was to listen to each group member as they dug a little deeper than usual to talk about their emotions. I thought it was interesting how similar many of the group members responses were (i.e. being unorganized made them sad, or their dogs, family, friends made them happy). When sharing the building self-esteem/flower exercise, I think it was important to encourage everyone to share the compliments they received from the other group members in order to facilitate positive interactions and self worth.
After co-leading my first group, I think it was a little harder than I expected. Usually, everyone in our group is more than happy to participate, but there was a lot going on today resulting in everyone being a little less focused. I learned that you always need to be prepared to share and give personal examples of things we are talking about in group in case I were to have a group that is less open to sharing.
I think that our overall group plan was well thought out and organized. In our introduction, we had a great warm up activity that went over really well, however, we did not give an overall time frame/structure of the group. For our activity, we planned out all supplies needed and had it ready for group members upon arrival to provide an appropriate environment. Upon starting the activity, everyone seemed to have easily understood the directions. Throughout the activity, each member was asked or volunteered to share multiple times. I think Lauren and I both displayed appropriate verbal and nonverbal responses as well empathized when appropriate. For processing, I think members appropriately elicited feelings about one another in completing the 'building a flower' activity, but just briefly touched on their overall experience at the end. I think I could have done a better job at tying in the activity with topic of the group. Throughout our entire group, we were constantly referring to the similarity in group member's responses as well as encouraging real life scenarios in discussion. We talked about why we liked being positive, but I think we should have included more backbone to our group. For instance, talking about the physiological effects of being happy vs. sad. Like I stated previously, our group was a little more distracted today than usual, but I think Lauren and I did a good job of encouraging everyone to participate and stay on task. Because everyone did not talk as much today, we did not have to put a limit on anyone sharing in group. We related the group's experience to everyday's life and were able to relate to real life experiences of different group members. I enjoyed leading the group and look forward to implementing my next one!