The first is from something Shannon said at training last week, and she's said before, and it's the idea that you learn the most when you're pushed outside your comfort zone. Her example is that during the square rope activity (your group is blindfolded, and everyone has to grab a rope tied in a loop, and then form a square), she grew frustrated with the group/communications/etc, and literally quit - dropping the rope and leaving the room. I think the general idea behind this is right, but instead of being uncomfortable, I'd say the importance is being challenged. I forget the exact wording she was using, but I was thinking that with the way Shannon was phrasing it, the idea expressed was implying that discomfort was good, but if you really do make someone uncomfortable, odds are they'll shut down, and not learn anything at all. The idea came up again when we were discussing an acitivty that dealt with gender roles that some of our participants had expressed discomfort with. A few people mentioned the discomfort issue, and in those conversations it was apparent to me that they hadn't learned what the activity meant to learn, but were rather focused upon the task itself. While we kept trying to stress that all our activities were metaphors, and that the ice-breaker style activities we were working on weren't the end goal. The training was focused on facilitating - i.e. how do you get a group to process/learn from things they've done. For my members, a possible application might be a post-fundraiser meeting, where the group/committee is going through what worked, what didn't work, etc. Yes, activities like square-rope can teach some valuable lessons about communication, trust, or whatever, but in our case, this was ancillary.