Trade Offs: Life Skills Training
Trade-Offs is a game of life. Your aim is to pursue life goals and at the same time keep your life in balance. This is a game that puts you between a rock and a hard place. Family or work? Money or spirit? Social life or self? The choices are endless. The thing is to Make Your Move!
The Life Areas
In many games a team or player is represented by one token. For instance, in Monopoly your token might be a car, a hat or a shoe. In Trade-Offs you get eight tokens, one for each Life Area.
Family: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your relationship with your family.
Financial: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve cash and what you do to get it or keep it.
Health: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your physical well-being.
Intellectual: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve how educated and stimulated your mind is.
Self: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your self-esteem and the things that you do for yourself.
Social: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your interpersonal relationships.
Spiritual: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your spiritual well being and beliefs.
Work: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your career in terms of success and satisfaction.
Trade-Off Cards describe real-life moves that result in either growth or struggle in these eight Life Areas. Each trade-off card asks you to make a choice between two desirable but incompatible options – a trade-off. You move your tokens up and down the Life Areas based on the outcomes of the trade-offs you make. Every decision comes at a cost. For instance, if you face a trade-off between Work and Family, and you decide in favour of Work, then you will move your Work token up, but this will be at the cost to your Family Life Area, where you will move your Family token down.
The aim of the game
The aim of the game is to keep your Life Areas in balance as you move your coloured token in each Life Area from the time of struggle to the time of growth. At the same time players must aim to achieve one or more Life Area goals during the course of the game. Goals can only be achieved when you have reached the Time of Growth in several related Life Areas. In this way, Trade-Offs mirrors life. It forces you to make tough choices as you work hard to make your move and achieve your goals.
The thinking behind the game
Every choice you make comes at a cost. Every choice that has a positive gain in one area of life usually comes at a cost in another area. The trouble is that we often make choices on the spur of the moment without thinking things through, without thinking beyond stage one and without thinking of the wider context. That's one of the reasons why many people struggle in life. They make choices without considering the costs. Playing Trade-offs builds the habit of making choices always by considering the costs in different life contexts. Once this habit has formed during the game players will begin to think of all their real life choices as trade-offs. Consider one simple example: the choice to drink and drive. Without the idea of trade-offs you can choose to drink and drive based on how you're feeling on the spur of the moment. But if you've built the habit of considering the trade-offs you will know that the potential costs of your decision include not just your own health and well-being, but the lives of other drivers, the cost of repairing your car after an accident, the loss to your friends and family, possibly the inability to hold your job or being mentally and physically disabled. The idea of trade-offs helps you to bring a wide context of issues to bear on every choice you make.
Trade-Offs is a game of life. Your aim is to pursue life goals and at the same time keep your life in balance. This is a game that puts you between a rock and a hard place. Family or work? Money or spirit? Social life or self? The choices are endless. The thing is to Make Your Move!
The Life Areas
In many games a team or player is represented by one token. For instance, in Monopoly your token might be a car, a hat or a shoe. In Trade-Offs you get eight tokens, one for each Life Area.
Family: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your relationship with your family.
Financial: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve cash and what you do to get it or keep it.
Health: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your physical well-being.
Intellectual: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve how educated and stimulated your mind is.
Self: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your self-esteem and the things that you do for yourself.
Social: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your interpersonal relationships.
Spiritual: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your spiritual well being and beliefs.
Work: Trade-offs in this Life Area involve your career in terms of success and satisfaction.
Trade-Off Cards describe real-life moves that result in either growth or struggle in these eight Life Areas. Each trade-off card asks you to make a choice between two desirable but incompatible options – a trade-off. You move your tokens up and down the Life Areas based on the outcomes of the trade-offs you make. Every decision comes at a cost. For instance, if you face a trade-off between Work and Family, and you decide in favour of Work, then you will move your Work token up, but this will be at the cost to your Family Life Area, where you will move your Family token down.
The aim of the game
The aim of the game is to keep your Life Areas in balance as you move your coloured token in each Life Area from the time of struggle to the time of growth. At the same time players must aim to achieve one or more Life Area goals during the course of the game. Goals can only be achieved when you have reached the Time of Growth in several related Life Areas. In this way, Trade-Offs mirrors life. It forces you to make tough choices as you work hard to make your move and achieve your goals.
The thinking behind the game
Every choice you make comes at a cost. Every choice that has a positive gain in one area of life usually comes at a cost in another area. The trouble is that we often make choices on the spur of the moment without thinking things through, without thinking beyond stage one and without thinking of the wider context. That's one of the reasons why many people struggle in life. They make choices without considering the costs. Playing Trade-offs builds the habit of making choices always by considering the costs in different life contexts. Once this habit has formed during the game players will begin to think of all their real life choices as trade-offs. Consider one simple example: the choice to drink and drive. Without the idea of trade-offs you can choose to drink and drive based on how you're feeling on the spur of the moment. But if you've built the habit of considering the trade-offs you will know that the potential costs of your decision include not just your own health and well-being, but the lives of other drivers, the cost of repairing your car after an accident, the loss to your friends and family, possibly the inability to hold your job or being mentally and physically disabled. The idea of trade-offs helps you to bring a wide context of issues to bear on every choice you make.