Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Motivation Games

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was disappointed with this one. The Big Book of... series tends to be hit-and-miss. This one's a miss. There seems to be a shortage of actual games, and a lot more ideas for how to get a good healthy discussion about Topic X. If that's all you need, this may be a good one. I was looking for actual games and activities...found a lot of them in Miller's Quick Teambuilding Activites for Busy Managers. But all the activities in that book are short, so if you need anything to last more than 15-20 minutes, try Ukens' All Together Now--some of them are longer (for retreats and other long meetings).

I utilize this book quite often to kick off sales meetings and have found the exercises to be fun and always with a point. My groups seem to enjoy them as well. This is a great book for people who needs ideas, but tend to run out of them.

The book contains nothing that will be of value to our organization. In fact, most aren't really games at all. I was looking for some fun activites to motivate the staff and I should have spent the money from this book on cookies instead!

I bought this book after reading "The Big Book of Humorous Training Games" (an excellent handbook). It was way below my expectations. It is not really a book for a trainer. Perhaps it never claimed to be one, but I was left with that impression, because these "Big Books" are something of a series, right?
About this one - there is a nice short presentation of motivation and a useful interpretation of it as a set of skills. You can make some training exercises for those skills. But not with this book. After the intro, the games are almost useless. Evidently Dr. Epstein is not a trainer - he doesn't have our approach to make an experience out of an idea/theory. He just mechanistically turned some ideas into short (really short) activities, most of them verbal or mental, without much interaction or immersion. The ideas themselves are not astounding or attitude-shifting - they are good old wise ideas about motivation that everybody knows but forgets to use. I also don't think these ideas grow out of a wide base of psychological research and knowledge. It's mainly from Behaviorism, and a tiny vein of it.
So, the book might be good for self-monitoring. For training - well - depending on your own experience and current problem, you can come up with a few ideas reading the book. But all in all, it is not worth the money (not the time, because you can read it in an hour).

Nice ideas, but I couldn't find any game that would possibly motivate my audience.

I was expecting something a little different. I did enjoy browsing the games and saw where they may be a good fit at some of the things that I have to lead. I'm glad to know that there is a book like this around.

After skinmming thru this reference book, I am excited that it has several activities that I will use in my trainings.