Drawing Monsters

Drawing Monsters enables a safe space to surface and frees up options for conversations around our fears. It helps us to be aware and visible of our fears.

It reveals incredible insights about issues that are difficult to talk about, and the environment of vulnerability brings a world of opportunity to people in this space.

Drawing Monsters is an ideal exercise to uncover potential fears at the beginning and during any project implementation.

It is suitable for adults and children, especially our children, which makes it ideal for the educational environment.

Here is the Bonus of the exercise: When you listen to a Fear situation, you do not know what to do, hear or say, defend a position, or even worse, compare your Fears or give unwelcome advice.

Do this because it works (highly recommended for teachers and parents)

Place a "Critical Question" to build trust and improve your relationship with the students.

Would you like to vent, or would you like some advice?

The question is so essential and not just for the students.

It allows the other person to feel SEEN. So often, kids feel like parents lecture them with every chance they are given, and they don't love that.

You die for giving advice, but they want to vent, so let them vent.

Letting them Vent to you will open up more opportunities for them to hear and accept your advice down the road, as you intentionally created that safe space!

Tiny demons or monsters are a metaphor for the fears we carry on in many different situations of our lives.

The FEAR is not more than a projection of the future of a past personal experience or something someone told us, and that includes not only your family and friends but also Netflix, HBO, and Prime Video.

When we face our fears, we can find ways to work with them alone or with others.

Playful, generative conversation unfolds.

Structuring Invitation to play

1. What do we fear?
2. How can we use that fear to discover what to do next?
3. To engage the ideas/skills/energy of those around us in those next steps?
4. What is it you fear about _ (the focus of interaction at hand)

loliness, wrong decision making, not achieving my goals

not having emotional stability, failure, leaving the comfort zone, exposure

afraid of losing my family, pet lost in the night, fear of getting lost, narrow spaces,

lightening, height, uncertainties, ocean, cockroaches, dogs, insects

fear to be disgraced, do not understand, keep my friends, unsuccessful education

get very sick, claustrophobia,

1. Ask them to list the fears, worries, concerns, and uncertainties if you are addressing a project. If you are handling the students, FEARS would work best for you.

2. Ask them to prioritize the first four of the list.

3. Now, you ask them to draw, dividing the white page into four quadrants.

4. To help them visualize their monsters, guide them by saying in the first right quadrant, draw two parallel lines in the upper right, draw whatever you like, and draw a squiggle in the lower left.

5. Ask them to add horns, eyes, teeth, wings, whatever their imagination can provide to create the Monsters.

After the Monsters are drawn, ask them to connect with the four fears and provide a name to the Monster.

Now they are ready to share with others their fears. Allow them to talk and exchange conversations.

• Move away from blockage, negativism, and powerlessness
• Have people discover their individual and collective power
• Reveal bottom-up solutions
• Share actionable ideas and help one another
• Build trust
• Remember unused capacity and resources (15 per cent is always there for the taking)
• Reduce waste
• Close the knowing-doing gap

Create the Monster Gallery so they are exposed to everyone.

As the final step, ask each participant what 15% contribution they could implement to overcome the Fear. Please write it down in a post-it closer to the Monster.

You made them all aware of the FEAR atmosphere, and by summing up the 15%, you re-energize the teams, students, or yourself.

Drawing Monster is one of the Liberating Structures used in organisations to align teams. We adapted to the educational environment.

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein