Sentence Completion

This is a really good exercise for an orientation or onboarding context where you are tight on time and the audience is a bit hesitant to engage.

Frame It

“A choice of words is often a choice of worlds. To further shape our world at this moment, I’m going to invite you to add some words to this space. I’m going to read off a sentence stem. Then I’ll ask you to consider how you’d like to complete the sentence. For example, ‘right now I’m thinking a lot about ________.’”

Objective

Simply consider an honest word or phrase to complete the sentence stem and get ready to share it with the group.

Guidelines

✓ You’ll have 10 seconds to consider your response.

✓ Clearly state whether you would like to collect responses “off mute”, in the chat, via sticky notes or just shouted out into the room.

Leadership Tips

✓ Create a sentence stem that will help connect your audience to each other and to the purpose for your gathering. Ideally the prompt should allow for “real” or truthful answers to create space for authenticity and vulnerability.

✓ The best sentence stems are really the ones that you come up with that fit your context. But here are a few examples:

• Right now, I’m curious about _______.
• If you really knew me, you would know _______.
• My friends/family say that I am _______.

✓ You can make this exercise deeper by stacking a follow-up sentence stem that builds off their responses to the first. For example, if you invite people to respond to “I’m thinking a lot about ______”, and the theme in responses relates to work stress. You might consider saying, “to build on that, fill in this sentence off mute: I wind down after a stressful day by _______.”