Any group psychological training is doomed to end in complete failure if not enough attention is paid to establishing a positive relationship to each other between the participants. Therefore, any good first training begins with special exercises, games, the purpose of which is to entertain the group a little, set it up in a good-natured way and get to know each other.

In professional slang, these games are called " icebreakers", for obvious reasons - they allow you to split and melt the cold ice of the distance traditionally present between strangers. Of course, icebreakers can be carried out not only during the first training with a new group, but their main purpose is, first of all, acquaintance. variants of such games.

Snowball... A simple exercise that makes you turn on immediately brain and attention. This game is, perhaps, the most popular and simple one, it must be mentioned. Everyone is in a circle, and so does the curator. The curator says his name. Then, standing next to him (to the right or to the left, it does not matter, but usually clockwise), repeats his name, after which he calls his own. The task of the third becomes more difficult again, he needs to name the curator, the first participant, his own. The fourth is even more difficult, and so on until the end of the circle. It's pretty simple, so complications with gestures and adjectives are usually practiced for this game.

In this way, first circle includes only the repetition of names, the second requires the participants to remember the name and the "corporate gesture" (everyone chooses which one he wants), and the third also requires the addition of an adjective to the name (Alexander Luchezarny, Maria Lunolikaya, and so on), for whom it is desirable to be funny and you can choose them yourself, or perhaps they are determined by the curator, if the people in the group are still behaving constrained.

Nuts... A simple exercise to set everyone in a positive mood. Each participant is given an ordinary one with the requirement to memorize it as best as possible in one minute. It is also advisable to give it a name. Then all the nuts are put into one basket, mixed, and you need to find your own. Once everyone has dealt with this, the discussion ensues, which is the main part of the game.

During the discussion, everyone should explain exactly how he remembered his nut, by what signs he found it "in the crowd." The natural conclusion from this exercise is that all people seem to be the same at first glance, but if you look closely, you can see that each of them is unique, interesting, worthy of study. This should be announced.

Representative agent... The group is divided into pairs. Each pair is given a task - to compose an advertisement for each other. Quickly come up with qualities and virtues that will then need to be presented to the entire group.
Couples come out in front of the group in turn and first one advertises the other, then vice versa.

Exhibition of hatters... On Hatter Street, an exhibition and two long rival guilds (you can have three, depending on the size of the group) decided to put on an exhibition that will showcase the best hat of each team of craftsmen.

Each " hatter guilds"a set of colored paper, glue, Whatmanastepler, colored paper clips, scissors is issued. And in ten minutes they have to create from all this, after which each guild presents its own hat. One or more" barkers "talk about its merits. this time poses, with this very hat on his head.

Star... There are many ways to create a silhouette or symbol of a star using a group of people and an ordinary rope, but hardly anyone seriously thinks about it. Now is the time to do it, since this is the next task for the groups. Two or three groups should figure out in 4-5 minutes how to make a beautiful and believable star from a string. At the same time, everyone should keep the star, the non-participation of one of the team members is not allowed.

Active politician... In this game, everyone suddenly turns into active politicians who have arrived at an important meeting. In three minutes you need to have time to shake as many hands as possible, but at the same time the handshake should be sincere, warm, you need to look the person in the eyes and smile so that he does not think that you are being disdainful towards him.

After the end of time everyone writes down on the board your result is so many handshakes. Then everyone is given a piece of paper with a pen and you need to vote for the one whose handshake you liked the most. At the end, two winners are announced - the most "active", who shook the maximum number of hands, and the most honest, who won by voting. You can shake hands with the same person as many times as you like, but not in a row.

Mummy... In the absence of caretakers, the mummies in the tomb played cards and hounded jokes, but now they hear tourists approaching, and they (the mummies) are not in the parade! Standing quickly back to back, the three pairs of participants begin wrapping themselves in toilet paper. After three minutes, the "tourists" who have come estimate which pair of mummies was able to wind up better than all the others.

Robot... You are an engineer in a science laboratory and you need to bring a faulty robot to the repair department. But he is faulty, and sees nothing, and there are many obstacles on his way. Operating with a set of commands "step forward", "step back", "two steps forward / backward", as well as "turn left / right by N degrees", the operator must lead the participant blindfolded through the room. Tables and chairs are used as obstacles. Just make sure that no one falls in the process, it should not be any heavy and low angular objects that are easy to stumble over.

That's all, actually. You can also find quite a few other icebreaking games if you like, or even create your own custom exercise. The main thing is not to forget to mark the end of each exercise with applause.