# 8 Communication Skills Activities That Actually Change How You Communicate Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-skills-activities/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-skills-activities.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Eight communication skills activities you can run alone, with one partner, or in a group - what each one trains, and the debrief that makes them stick. ## Key facts - Title: 8 Communication Skills Activities That Actually Change How You Communicate - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: communication skills activities - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-skills-activities/ ## What this page covers - Eight communication skills activities you can run alone, with one partner, or in a group - what each one trains, and the debrief that makes them stick. - Practical guidance for communication skills activities - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation There is a gap between knowing what good communication looks like and doing it under pressure, and reading more advice does not close it. Communication skills activities are short, structured exercises that isolate one part of communicating — listening accurately, giving clear instructions, [reading body language](/knowledge/communication/nonverbal-communication/) — and let you rehearse it somewhere mistakes cost nothing. Most take five to twenty minutes, and most need only one other person. The eight below are ordered by [how exposed they leave you](/knowledge/confidence/comfortable-being-uncomfortable/), starting with the ones you can do alone tonight. That ordering matters more than it sounds, because the reason most people never run any of these is not the activities themselves. ## 8 communication skills activities, ordered by how many people they need Nearly every list on this topic is written for someone running a room. Teambuilding.com's collection is built for teams, Symonds Research publishes its activities specifically for trainers, Edstellar frames its set as team exercises, and Indeed's version is aimed at high school teachers. The exercises are good ones. The framing assumes you already have eight people and an hour — which, if you are trying to get better on your own, is the entire obstacle. Pathwise's guide describes the way out of that: start with solo exercises like recording and writing, move to low-stakes group situations such as casual conversations and small meetings, then apply the skills in higher-stakes moments like presentations and negotiations. The activities are rungs. The order is the ladder. Each entry below also says what it actually trains, because treating communication as one undifferentiated ability is exactly why practicing it feels vague. ### 1. Record yourself and play it back Read a short email out loud into your phone, or spend two minutes explaining a current work task as if to a colleague. Then listen to it. Pathwise recommends this specifically for checking your speed, tone, and clarity — the three things you cannot assess from the inside while you are talking. What most people notice first is how long they take to arrive at the point. This trains brevity and leading with the main message. It is uncomfortable the first time, which is a poor reason to skip it and a decent indicator that it is doing something. ### 2. The one-sentence message Before you send an email or walk into a meeting, write a single sentence stating what you need. Pathwise puts a hard cap on it: under 20 words. The constraint is what makes this an exercise rather than a suggestion, because failure is unambiguous — if you cannot get the sentence written, the message is not ready to send. Run it for a week on everything you write. It trains being clear, being direct, and stating the main point first, which is the habit most visibly missing from other people's emails and least visible in your own. ### 3. The paraphrase check After a call or a meeting, write down in plain language what the other person actually wanted. Then compare your version against the email thread or the agreed action items. Pathwise describes this as a way to find where your listening dropped, and its distinguishing property is that it runs on live work rather than a simulated scenario — nobody in the room needs to know you are practicing. It trains [listening accuracy](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/), and it tends to expose a consistent pattern: most people lose the same category of detail every time, usually the one they were least interested in. ### 4. Back-to-back drawing The most widely reproduced activity of all, appearing as back-to-back drawing at Teambuilding.com, as listen and draw at Edstellar, and as description drawing at Indeed. Two people sit back to back, or join a call with cameras off. One describes an object or image without naming it; the other draws from words alone. Then you compare. A harder variant used by Indeed and Digital Enterprise forbids the listener from asking any questions, making the communication strictly one-directional. What makes this worth the fifteen minutes is the artifact: the finished drawing is objective evidence of how your instructions landed, not an opinion about it. ### 5. The telephone game, with a real work message A message is whispered down a line of people and the final version is read aloud against the original. Edstellar's protocol adds the detail that matters: start with a business-related message, not a nonsense phrase. Silly sentences produce laughter; a real message produces recognition, because you watch the specific way your own communication degrades when it is passed on. It trains brevity and front-loading the point, and it is the clearest available demonstration of why "I told them" and "they know" are different claims. ### 6. Guide the blindfolded One person is blindfolded while the others direct them along a path or through a task, within a set time and using words only, as Indeed describes it. Unlike most exercises here, the feedback is immediate rather than saved for the debrief — imprecision has a visible cost within seconds, and you learn very quickly that "over there" and "a bit more" are not instructions. It trains giving precise directions and adapting to what the receiver can actually work with. ### 7. Charades, telephone charades, and the mirror exercise Nonverbal practice comes in a loud form and a quiet one. Charades and telephone charades, covered by Teambuilding.com and Icebreaker Spot, remove speech entirely so that attention has to shift to gesture and body language. If performing in front of a group is precisely the thing you would rather avoid, MindOwl's mirror exercise is the same training without the audience: two people face each other and take turns mirroring each other's body language, which builds awareness of your own nonverbal habits and of how closely other people read them. ### 8. Feedback role-play, run in both directions Pairs or small groups act out a realistic workplace scenario — Edstellar's version has a manager delivering performance feedback — and then reverse the roles so the same person gives upward feedback to a manager. Teamland treats the discussion afterward as part of the exercise rather than an optional extra. The reversal is the substance here. It places you on the side of a conversation you normally never occupy, which is the fastest route into the genuinely tricky part of communicating: disagreeing, [giving feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/constructive-feedback/), and apologizing without either flinching or overcorrecting. ### Two things that decide whether any of this works The first is the debrief. Almost every source describes how to run an activity and stops there, but the exercise is only the event that generates the material — the value is in what you and your partner say afterward about what went wrong and where. Skip that conversation and you have played a game. The second is picking the right one. There is no useful data on which of these activities works best; the sources are uniformly descriptive, and none of them attaches a measured outcome to any claim. What that leaves you with is targeting: running the drawing exercise when your actual weak point is handling disagreement is a pleasant way to waste an evening. If you are not sure which part of your communication is the weak one, it is worth [pinpointing where you stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first — that takes a few minutes and saves you from practicing the wrong thing for a month. ## What you are really practicing Read back across the eight and the same few capabilities keep resurfacing, which is a hint that none of this is really about drawing or charades. **Communication** is the obvious one, but the useful version of it is granular. Being clear and direct, being brief, leading with the main point, adapting to the person in front of you, reading body language, and handling the tricky moments are separate capabilities that improve separately. That is why back-to-back drawing and a feedback role-play feel so unalike to do — they are working different muscles. Naming which one you are training is what turns a game into practice. **Building Confidence** explains why any of this works. Confidence in a specific situation is not a mood you generate beforehand; it comes from accumulating evidence that you can handle the thing, built by doing it in steps small enough to survive and getting used to a bit of discomfort at each level before moving up. It also names the real failure point, which is not choosing the wrong activity — it is reading twenty of them and running none. Deciding in advance exactly when, where, and with whom you will do the first one beats finding a better twenty-first. **Building Self-Awareness** is what the debrief is for. When your partner's drawing looks nothing like the object, that is feedback: specific, hard to argue with, and about something you could not otherwise see. Taking it well is its own skill — understand what is being said before you respond, add your own view second, reflect on it afterward. Asking one specific, forward-looking question at the end, along the lines of what you should have said differently, converts an awkward five minutes into the most useful part of the exercise. None of those three is unique to communication. They sit inside the **twelve work skills** that the free Job Skills Test measures, and getting a read on [which of them need work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is quicker than testing them one at a time — useful if it turns out communication is not actually your weakest link. You may already recognize some of this in how you work. If you have ever rewritten an email because the first draft buried the point, or replayed a conversation afterward wondering how it landed, you have been running an informal version of these exercises — just without the debrief that would have made it count. The distance between how you communicate now and how you would like to is not a fact about your personality. It is a set of behaviors you have not practiced yet, and behaviors are the changeable kind of thing. You can get considerably better at leading with the point and still be someone who prefers to think before speaking. What is worth noting is that the more your work depends on other people, the more these small habits compound — which is an argument for practicing them while the stakes are low and the fixes are cheap. Reading this far, instead of bookmarking another list, is the part most people skip. What is left is choosing where to start. ## Find out which part to practice first You have the activities; the only thing left is knowing which two or three are worth your time. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills — you answer a set of questions and get a read on where you stand across all twelve, communication included, so you can pick the exercises above that target your actual gaps rather than working down the list from the top. It takes about 7 minutes, and it is a reasonable thing to do with a colleague who wants to practice alongside you. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about 7 minutes from start to results.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Eight communication skills activities you can run alone, with one partner, or in a group - what each one trains, and the debrief that makes them stick. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Confidence, Building Self-Awareness. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/communication-skills-activities/ Preferred summary: "Eight communication skills activities you can run alone, with one partner, or in a group - what each one trains, and the debrief that makes them stick." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.