Hello everyone! As we continue to wait to fly to Dublin from Charlotte, our group decided to participate in some teambuilding. Chris and Liz found an escape room called Breakout at Carolina Place, a local shopping mall in Charlotte. We divided up into three teams of five people and entered the different themed rooms. Our goal was to escape before the other two teams. My group consisted of Jordan, Hannah, Mike, and Erin and the theme of our room was a hostage situation after our airplane was hijacked.
As we entered the room, we were blindfolded and handcuffed to a bench. Our first goal was to find the key to unlock us from our chains. I found a magnet on the wall and we used it to solve a numeric code on the bench which released a key for the handcuffs. Next, we needed to break into a workbench that was sealed with a lock. We found the code in a window that lit up with the flip of a light switch. In the workbench, we discovered a crank and a bunch of boarding passes. We used these passes to calculate different codes which helped us unlock a closet door. Upon opening the door, we were greeted with, guess what, more locks. We continued to work together to solve the puzzle and even though we were unfortunately unsuccessful, it was a fun team building experience.
As I reflect on the exercise, I have been tasked with relating this experience to mine and my group’s StrengthFinder themes. Starting with myself, my top five themes are: individualization, restorative, arranger, developer, and relator. My first strength that came to play was restorative. This means I am good at dealing with problems, finding out what is wrong, and resolving it. During our time in the escape room, I noticed the magnet on the wall that released us from our chains, and I used the crank we found in the workbench to create light after it was attached to the workbench. Another strength of mine that relates to this experience is as an arranger. This theme means I can efficiently determine how all the resources can be arranged for maximum productivity. In the escape room, I tried to make sure all the clues were accounted for and kept them in the place where we found them. This ensured that if we missed something, we could go back and try again.
In addition to my own strengths, I also want to analyze some strengths of my teammates that came to play in the escape room. Starting with Jordan, her theme that I noticed in the escape room was consistency. One of Jordan’s responsibilities was to calculate some equations to help us unlock the codes. She was the main person to write out the equations and solve simple calculations. Hannah’s main strength I noted was competition. Hannah wanted to win. Also, she was very quick to ask for help and clues from the game master. If she had questions, she did not hesitate to ask. The strength I noticed for Mike was analytical. Since Mike has done escape rooms in the past, he knew that when we discovered clues, not to move them and remember how they were originally placed. This helped us avoid the scenario mixing up clues and making the puzzle unsolvable. The last group member in our room was Erin and her main strength was discipline. She was excellent at ensuring our actions were routine and structured. This gave us a foundation to succeed and get as far as we did.
Overall, this experience was extremely fun. It was a great teambuilding exercise and I cannot wait to participate in more in the future. Thanks for reading my latest blog post!