• Stimulating participants’ creativity
• Helping them envisioning what they would like to happen, and defining strategies to tends towards the realization of their dream.

Duration : 1 hour 30 minutes

For R.B.Dilts, to stimulate creativity, 3 perception angles are essential: 1/ the dreamer, 2/ the realistic, and 3/ the critic. The dreamer without the realistic can’t achieve his/her ideas: the dreamer is focused on the “What”, on the vision, on the long term. The realistic is focused on the “How”, on the action, on the short term. The critic is focused on the “Why”, on the logic, on both short and long term.

To achieve something you need all the 3 because:
- The critic and the realistic won’t be very creative and/or innovative without the dreamer
- The critic and the dreamer in the same boat, without realistic, will give endless conflicts
- The dreamer and the realistic can accomplish things together, but without the quality they could have had with a critic on board.

The issue is that these 3 aspects of our personality coexist inside us, with different degrees and different ways of expression depending on our personal history. We tend to put them in conflict to know which one will dominate, instead of accepting them and live with them in synergy.

The exercise “The Dreamer, the Critic and the Realistic” is about trying to reconcile these 3 aspects of our personality.

Ask first the participants to gather by pair. For 40 minutes, one will facilitate to guide the other through the process, following the steps of guidance below. He/she will take notes of what his/her mate is saying to help him/her remember the process and what emerged from it.
They will then alternate roles, so that both of them can experience guiding and being guided.
At the end of the exercise, gather all participants for a short collective debriefing (10 minutes).

• 4 A4 per pair + markers
• 2 A4 per pair + pencils to take notes.
• Big space.

——

As the “guide”, put 4 papers on the ground with the following words (one per paper): “Realistic”, “Dreamer”, “Critic”, and “Project”. Leave a physical space of 2 steps between each paper.

Invite the person you are guiding to stand near the paper “project”, to give it a name, and close his/her eyes.
Ask then the person to go to the “dreamer” circle; help him/her to visualize an experience where he/she was particularly a dreamer. Likewise, invite him/her to go to the “realistic” circle, and to visualize an experience where he/she was particularly a realistic. To close the loop, ask him/her to go to the “critic” circle, and to visualize then an experience where he/she was particularly a critic.
You can help the person to remember these experiences by asking questions like: “How do you feel?”, “How do you see yourself?”, “What is going on?”, etc.

Ask the person to go back next to the “project” paper, and think about his/her personal project and start walking again. First, he/she will go to “dreamer”. Ask him/her to activate the creative side by reconnecting with the feeling of when he/she was a dreamer in the past and with this feeling to think about the project. To help the person, you can invite him/her to close the eyes and ask the following questions:

• What is the objective?
• What is the goal of this project?
• How does it motivate you?
• What will it bring to you?
• Activate your senses, for example: “What will I see when I achieve my project?“, ”How will I feel?”, etc.

Ask the person to go now to the “realistic” circle and feel what the “dreamer” revealed. Ask the realistic side to plan step by step the achievement of this dream.

• What do you have to do to execute this vision?
• What resources do you need?
• Who do you need? Which people? To do what?
• What obstacles may you encounter?
• How could you overcome them?

Invite then the person to go to the next step, to enter the “critic” circle, and with this critic perspective, to observe rigorously what the realistic just revealed, globally and in details:

• What are the pros? What are the cons?
• What are the costs?
• What does not depend on you?
• What could improve the project?

Ask the person to go back to the “project” circle and try to summarize what came out from the previous steps. Help him/her feel that he/she will achieve the project and to imagine its implementation step by step.