Challenge: Ask 10 random people to take a photo with you.
Reflection: Ok…now this was the hardest one yet!
So for this challenge you needed to get 10 total people to take a group photo with you. 10 PEOPLE!!! These challenges were already tough trying to get 3 people, so 10 was a huge jump! Initially, the challenge was: “Stand on a chair in a crowded area and ask 10 people to take a picture with you”. So of course I tried that, but miserably failed. I had only gotten 5 people to band together for the picture (which you can see right here). After reviewing this one with the guys we came to the conclusion that there were a few psychological triggers that were possible causes of failure.
First of all, standing on a chair was a bad idea. It put me in a higher physical location, which probably came across as me feeling like I’m in a high up position of authority compared to everyone else in the room. The other thing that could’ve caused my failure was the fact that I asked people to come to me. I had said “I need 10 people to take a picture with me, who will come help me?” I left it as an open invitation, and my initial thought to correct this would’ve been to ask people directly. But after talking with the guys a little more we came to the conclusion that the best course of action would’ve been to tell people that they are about to help me and say “you guys, I need your help, come take a picture with me.” Rather than asking them to take the picture with me, I should’ve basically told them they are going to do it and that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal or take that much time.
Now here is where the most interesting question was brought up in our reflection session. Alex asked me: “what were your hand gestures?” I wasn’t sure what he meant so I asked him to expand on his question. We talked about different hand gestures for a while and came up with the following and what it may convey to people:
- Open handed palm facing down: BAD; has the connotation that you are pushing down on someone and that you are higher up than them
- Pointing at people and locations: BAD; very directing and very confrontational
- Open handed palm facing up: GOOD; very welcoming and inviting
I really found these points interesting and noticed that I had done the “upward palm” gesture, but we decided that standing on the chair negated that. However, the next thing we noticed was that actually going up to each table and using proper gestures/tone and personally inviting each group to take the picture worked much better. Alex and Edward had both done that instead of standing on a chair. So I attempted the challenge again in a different location and tried to personally invite each group to take a picture with me. It took a while to convince people, but it definitely worked out better.